Parents Angry Over Closing of Church Day-Care Center : El Segundo: They say no explanation was given for the shutdown. A nearby church will open a facility to accommodate some of the youngsters.

A 16-year-old El Segundo day-care center has been forced to find a new home, leaving some children displaced and parents angry.

“They kicked us out,” parent Patricia Green said of a decision last spring by First Baptist Church to close its day-care center by the end of August.

Another El Segundo church a few blocks away, the Church of Christ, has stepped in to fill part of the void. It is remodeling its Sunday school facilities to accommodate the center, largely through the efforts of volunteers.

The new facility, which like First Baptist’s will operate on a nonprofit basis, will open next month with room for 70 children--about 10 fewer than the current center.

Unlike the Baptist center, which took children as young as 6 weeks, the new center will not accept infants and toddlers. That annoys parents such as Luke Lohnes, whose family is among 15 that had to find alternative day care for children under 2.

“They’re throwing their own community’s children out on the street,” Lohnes said.

First Baptist Church decided last spring to close its day-care program. The pastor, Rev. John Svendsen, declined to discuss the matter.

“We believe that this issue has been in the public arena long enough and, therefore, are not going to give a comment,” he said.

Susan Grant, who is director of the Baptist center and will head the new facility, attributes the church’s decision to the age of its parishioners. Said Grant: “They’re all an older congregation and their children are grown.”

Grant calls day care “a necessity, not an option” in El Segundo, pointing out that the community of 15,000--home to several major aerospace employers--is filled with families in which both parents work.

Parent Beth Hood, a librarian at UCLA, agrees. “We actually moved to El Segundo for this day-care center,” she said. Hood and her husband, aerospace worker Johnathan Gayek, had two children in the center, Sophia, 5, and David, who at 2 just makes the new center’s cutoff age. *

School-age children such as Sophia are bused to the day-care center after school, Hood said. “It’s what every working parent needs.”

Green, a librarian at the Aerospace Corp. in El Segundo, remembers how grateful she was to find a center that would take her son, Gavin, now 26 months.

“With him being so close,” Green said, “I could go over on my lunch hour and breast-feed him.”

She and other parents--asserting that the move was made suddenly and without explanation--said they were stunned when the Baptist congregation announced its decision in the spring.

“The people in the church don’t care. They really turned a deaf ear,” said Green, who called the congregation “closed-minded.”

Donald W. Chisholm, minister of the Church of Christ, said that after First Baptist Church decided to close its center, he was struck by the outpouring of concern from parents. He said they valued the center’s staff and questioned whether their children would receive the same quality of care elsewhere.

Because infant care will not be offered, the center’s 17-member staff will be reduced to 10. Parents will pay the same tuition--$380 a month for preschoolers and $275 a month for school-age children. Chisholm said that after the remodeling loans are repaid, he wants some tuition money put into a fund to build facilities for infants and toddlers.

He said his church, made up largely of families with young children, had long been thinking about creating a day-care center. The decision to close First Baptist Church’s center, he said, helped set his church’s plan in motion.

Said Chisholm, who had a 3-year-old daughter of his own at the Baptist center: “We’re a community-oriented church, and we saw this as a way we can offer a ministry to the community.”