Post-Gazette: Expect more cleaning, temperature-taking, and some masks when child care centers reopen
May 14, 2020 By: Kate Giammarise
Closed child care centers will be able to reopen Friday, when the region moves from “red” into the “yellow” partial reopening phase of pandemic mitigation.
Whether they all will choose to reopen, or have enough youngsters to reopen, is another matter.
Many providers are not planning to reopen on Friday, though they are planning on reopening within the next two weeks or so, said Wendy Etheridge Smith, director of the Early Learning Resource Center in Allegheny County. That’s due to both child care centers still ramping up to get ready and some parent hesitancy about safety, she said.
Most child care providers in Pennsylvania have been closed since mid-March, though some have been operating with a waiver and serving the children of “essential” workers such as first responders, or those who work in healthcare or grocery stores. Home-based child care providers, who generally care for a much smaller number of children at a time, have been able to operate uninterrupted.
Child care is “crucial to the daily functioning of our commonwealth,” said Teresa Miller, Pennsylvania secretary of Human Services, speaking on a call with reporters earlier this week.
“Child care is an essential infrastructure to our economy’s recovery. If we don’t have that, our economy doesn’t recover,” said Cara Ciminillo, executive director of advocacy group Trying Together.
About 20% of child care programs remained open in Allegheny County, with many of those being home-based providers, said Ms. Ciminillo.
For programs that do plan to welcome children back on Friday, state officials have been referring them to safety guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Among the CDC recommendations — intense cleaning, modified drop-off procedures that allow for children to wash their hands as soon as they enter, and screening children upon arrival for fevers.
Read the full article here.
Unionville Times: LTE: Childcare Centers Will Need Help to Reopen Safely
May 14, 2020
To the editor:
I am the Area Manager of Warwick Child Care Center, Inc. in Pottstown, PA. I have been working in the field since 1992. I started in the field to gain experience with working with children. I fell in love with the field and understood how the first five years are the most important to build a foundation for children and their learning. Warwick Child Care Center, Inc, has been serving the community children for over 30 years and is very dedicated to helping children learn the skills that are needed to succeed in school.
At the time of the state wide closure we cared for over 550 children throughout Chester County and employed over 110 teachers. During the Covid-19 health crisis, we had to close our centers abruptly. We did not collect tuition from our private pay families or Child Care Works co-payments after the first week of closure. This meant we had to furlough about 95% of teachers. The extensive shut down has caused many financial concerns not limited to the upkeep on 5 buildings and supporting our families in various ways.
We are anxiously looking forward to reopening the centers when the county moves to the Yellow phase, however, there are many barriers to this process.
As we begin to prepare for reopening, we have had to consider all the changes needed to provide a safe environment free from COVID-19 and how to make these things happen while still staying true to the philosophy of a play-based early learning program where parents are our partners.
Obtaining the proper cleaning supplies and other suggested materials by the CDC has been a challenge, both in being able to obtain the items and the cost of these extra materials. At this time we believe we have most of what we need to reopen but our supply will only last a couple of weeks. Many, many items are backordered so there is concern as to being able to open and stay open without the access and funds for the supplies.
Our next biggest hurdle is staffing. The Early Childhood Education field was already facing an extreme staffing shortage. Now, we will need to not only have qualified employees to work with the children but we will also need to have additional teachers to assist with the added social distancing expectations, new drop off and pick up procedures, and enhanced disinfecting and sanitizing procedures. We also have employees who may not be able to return due to underlying health issues or simply concern for their families health and well being.
This puts us in a precarious position, to not only ensure that we maintain the Department of Human Services child to teacher ratios but also the CDC’s recommendations of smaller group sizes. All without having fully enrolled buildings. We know parents who are not yet returning to work or who are unsure of group care during this pandemic may not return to care right away and we want to make sure they know that we will welcome their children back as soon as they are ready. Financially the centers are going to be operating at a deficit much larger than we normally see.
We are ready to help over 400 families return to work and to help boost the economy however we need assistance to do this. One in three child care centers will not survive this closure and be able to reopen. Child care in PA and across this country is integral for recovery after COVID-19 but everyone of us need help to do it and do it well! We need the state and federal government to assist us, place value in child care, and help us find ways to pay the teachers what they are truly worth, find supplies we need, and financial assistance to allow us to open with lower enrollment (as is suggested) right now.
We have been working hard during the closure to ensure that we will be able to open safely and still provide the high quality that we have always provided for our community. However, this is not easy or simple and we are still very uncertain what the future holds for us during and after this pandemic. Our number one priority has always been to keep the children, families, and teachers safe and that is even more in the forefront during these times. We are dedicated to serving our community, but really need support from the state and federal government to do this. Without a safe, high quality Early Learning Center for children to attend, there will be no true economic recovery. Parents need to feel that their children are safe and child care centers need to feel that they are being supported in providing such a place for families during this time.
Tana Rinehart-Ullman
Pottstown
Read the Letter to the Editor here.
University City Review: OpEd: Early childhood providers navigate this crisis
May 6, 2020 by Traci Childress, MA, MEd, Executive Director, Saint Mary’s Nursery School, West Philadelphia
I have the privilege to work as the Executive Director of West Philadelphia’s Saint Mary’s Nursery School. As a nonprofit childcare center, we serve 138 children ages 18 months – 12 years. Since mid-March, we have been closed. We rely on 95% private pay tuition and 5% subsidy to fund operations. We have been fortunate to have received a couple of grants, and to have raised some funds from our community, allowing us to keep paying staff while we waited on federal support.
We operate on a very narrow financial margin, maximizing all of our resources and leaving little room for buffer beyond a small savings reserve. Making our capacity to stay afloat and support our staff’s payroll all the more precarious. We did not get the initial round of federal funding through the Payroll Protection program, and without our community’s donations, we would not have been able to keep everyone on payroll while we waited to learn that we did get round two of the PPP Loan. And yet, even as we breathe a sigh of relief for a moment, we are facing the reality of what the future will look like operating in a COVID-19 world and what implications it will have for our viability as a business, given the growing costs associated with achieving a safe learning environment.
As we’ve navigated this crisis, we’ve been meeting virtually every week as a staff community. We check in — talk about the struggles navigating regulations, loans and safety, share how our zoom offerings for families are going, what can we create for our YouTube channel, what has been giving us hope, and what visions do we have for the future.
The governor included childcare providers in thesecond phase of reopening(the yellow phase) – Philadelphia has yet to announce its reopening timeline. Despite the fact that K-12 schools will not be returning this year and will look very different when they do return, childcare will be invited to return to work before the rest of the workforce. This sector is essential to the rest of the city’s workforce. We will have to return in order for everyone else to return. And while young children are not at high risk for getting this virus, they can carry it, and many of us have families and homes where grownups live and where members of our families may have compromised immune systems. We have elementary age children who won’t have care when we return to work.
Our early childhood workforce is already grossly underpaid. Although childcare is expensive, the cost of services barely covers the cost to run childcare operations and pay our staff. Our teachers should make so much more than they do already, given the impact of early education on early learners (ages 0-5) and our economy’s dependence on our work.
The extended closure of early childhood centers is pushing many centers out of business forever, and those of us who manage to weather this closure with the help of donations, the Paycheck protection program, or state support, are afraid that the cost of reopening with new requirements and decreased enrollment will put us out of business. If we manage to get through this extended closure, we also know that we will need support, innovation, and a whole new way of working to reopen again. As we watch the changing CDC guidelines for childcare centers open right now and listen to our peers operating to serve the essential workforce, it is very clear that reopening will be another crisis for us to navigate.
Reopening will bring a host of new requirements to our work. The current CDC guidelines mention masks, no contact drop offs and pickups, temperature taking, and smaller group sizes (currently 10 people in a room including staff) just to name a few. We will need support to finance this.
Childcare, whether for profit or non-profit is already a no profitsector. The new requirements will make childcare more expensive for providers to offer, and it will decrease income capacity by requiring fewer children. And yet families cannot pay more. As we face this reopening, we will need state and federal funding to ensure we make it through the year ahead when we will be working with new practices, more needs and more intermittent closures. We’ve always needed this as a sector; but now it is so apparent that childcare is a public good like public school is, and that it needs the support of a system that ensures it can continue to operate, provide quality care to children and support for the workforce in getting back to work.
Read the full op-ed
here.
Lehigh Valley: LTE: Reopening child care centers will be difficult for owners
April 28, 2020
As a child care center owner who survived the 2009 budget crisis, I thought the worst years were behind me. When Pennsylvania lawmakers took six months to pass a budget, I was forced to tap into my 401(k). This allowed me to keep my early learning center doors open for the 56 families and 10 staffers who relied on me. Now, more than a decade later, being able to reopen after this health crisis hinges on my 15 employees and the parents of 85 children feeling comfortable returning to work in a post-COVID-19 world.
As a small business owner I’m once again bearing the brunt of a fiscal crisis. New health and safety practices will have to be put into place and small business owners will have to absorb the cost. The federal loans offered don’t take into account the state’s phased regional openings. And having to adhere to the loans’ strict timetable doesn’t factor into the limited staff I might initially need as parents slowly return to their workplaces.
Child care centers are essential infrastructure in communities large and small. Moving forward, we’ll need support from the business community, whose reliance on centers to care for their employees’ children will allow their businesses to once again be productive and profitable. I call on business leaders to help make sure legislators understand that it’s centers like mine that need adequate funding so that we can help support Pennsylvania’s economic revival. We don’t have time to waste.
Anabela Araujo
Nazareth
Read the LTE here.
Lehigh Valley Live: LTE: Gov. Wolf’s ‘pay them more’ comment insensitive to small business owners
April 23, 2020
Being a small business owner right now is so frustrating. With the additional weekly unemployment benefits my child care staff is receiving, they are making more than I could ever pay them. Don’t get me wrong, I am happy that my staff is being taken care of financially. They deserve it.
The frustration comes when Gov. Wolf says, “If you want your staff to come back, just pay them more.” I would love to, governor, but where are we supposed to get that money when subsidy reimbursement rates are not increased for child care centers? Or when private-pay families would have to be charged more, yet many of them are now unemployed, and therefore do not need child care?
To top it off, the Paycheck Protection Plan — a loan designed to provide a direct incentive for small businesses like mine to keep workers on the payroll — has Herculean requirements for the loan to become a grant that doesn’t need to be fully paid back.
Child care centers and small businesses are in a complete Catch 22. We need state and federal policies to help us , not hinder our efforts. Policy makers must realize many businesses, mine included, employ low-income wage earners as well as care for the children of low-income workers. Some of these are the essential workers that people are relying on each day. When businesses reopen, they’ll be relying on child care. Let’s get fiscal strategies in place to make sure this can happen.
Sophia Estrella
Executive director, Elevation Community Center
Allentown
Read the LTE here.
