County of Los Angeles - Chief Executive Office

Office of Child Care

Connecting Families to Subsidized Child Care: Outreach Materials

Overview

Beginning in 2002, the Child Care Planning Committee was responsible for establishing a centralized eligibility list in Los Angeles County for low-income families seeking subsidized child care and development services. The Los Angeles Centralized Eligibility List (LACEL) is funded through a contract with the California Department of Education/Child Development Division (CDE/CDD).

The LACEL is a web-based system which provides:

Low-income eligible families with a one-stop mechanism to access the full-range of subsidized child care and development services funded by CDE and Head Start LACEL calculates eligibility and assigns admission priority to each family.
Streamlined identification of eligible children by CDE/CDD child care and development contractors and Head Start programs; and
Unduplicated information on the numbers of families who qualify for subsidized child care and development services, but remain unserved.

The system is housed in two secure servers at Internal Services Department (ISD) of the County of Los Angeles. The servers are maintained by ISD; the LACEL system is maintained through a contract with the vendor, Controltec. LACEL is managed and administered by the Office of Child Care, Service Integration Branch/Chief Executive Office.

Currently there are 159 organizations that contract with CDE/CDD to provide subsidized child care services. Each organization had maintained its own eligibility list of families in need of subsidized care. This means that families may have to register on more than one wait list in order to maximize their chances of receiving subsidized assistance with their child care and development needs. Once all CDE contractors are registered to use LACEL, families can register once, on the LACEL, and know that many organizations will have the ability to contact them about openings in subsidized programs.

There are approximately 25,000 family records and 33,000 child records stored in the CEL database. The ultimate goal of the CEL project is 100 percent participation of local CDE/CDD contractors. In addition, LACEL can be used by other programs that offer free or partially subsidized child care and development services such as LAUP.

Any organization contracting with California Department of Education to provide child care and development services can request to participate as a CEL user agency. Contact Laura Escobedo, lescobedo@ceo.lacounty.gov.

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Connecting Families to LACEL: Outreach Materials

LACEL Brochure

LACEL Fact Sheet

LACEL Registration Form

To download the materials, you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader, which is available as a plug-in on most browsers. Read the instructions on how to install Adobe Acrobat Reader.

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Office of Child Care, within the Service Integration Branch
of the Chief Executive Office
222 S. Hill St., 5th Floor, Los Angeles, CA 90012
(213) 974-4103 Phone – (213) 217-5106 Fax

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