changing the datepicker date format

I got everything working just great using a few different tables except the datepicker in the data entry screen. This is not a sorting problem but I did look those many of those discussions. I'm using mysql database, I have the dates as Y-m-d (example 2010-10-15). The date pick has defaulted to d-m-y. So it doesn't give the right date. I tried changing the default using the following and a few others I found but it doesn't have any effect. I also searched throughout the code to find where it might be initialized but didn't see anything. It's probably simple but simple things are hard to find.

<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">
$('#formatdate').change(function(){
$('#datpicker').datepicker("option","dateFormat","yy-mm-dd");
});
</script>