Child Care in the Time of Covid-19: Lessons for the City’s Re-opening
This week, New York City begins the reopening of its early education system after months of closure due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Understandably, both child care providers and families are feeling anxious about returning. The City must get the details of reopening child care right if they are to alleviate those anxieties. Child care will not only play a critical role in the City’s economic recovery process, as it allows parents to return to work, it will also play an important role in supporting the positive development of young children, many of whom have undergone serious trauma because of the pandemic. As the City looks towards reopening child care centers, it is important to gather lessons learned from the experiences of emergency child care centers that have been operating during this pandemic. That was the goal of the Day Care Council of New York’s recently published report, “Child Care in a Pandemic.”
In late March, soon after the Covid-19 outbreak closed New York City’s public schools and Pre-K for All programs, the City opened emergency child care centers for “essential workers” in fields including health care and mass transit. These include 93 “regional enrichment centers” (RECs) set up in public school buildings and also nearly 120 “emergency child care centers” (ECCs) operated either by community-based organizations (CBOs) or by family child care (FCC) providers working out of their homes. Unlike the RECs, the ECCs primarily serve children under age 5.
For the report, we conducted email or videoconference interviews with providers in nine community-based centers and four family child care providers. We covered such topics as cleaning practices, mask-wearing, playtime, and staff and child morale – all in the context of preventing the spread of Covid-19. We then synthesized the interviews into a set of key findings and recommendations.
To summarize our findings: Providers serving the children of frontline workers all felt a sense of pride and purpose in being able to serve essential workers during this time of crisis, but there was also considerable anxiety around issues of safety and financial viability.
In these programs, increased health and safety measures, including thorough end-of-the day cleanings and constant sterilization of toys throughout the day, has helped to ease some of the anxiety around safety. Centers also conduct a daily temperature checks of children at their morning drop-offs and ask parents to engage in social distancing at drop-off and pick-up times. Classroom sizes have been reduced and lunches are no longer served family-style.
While staff encourage the 3- and 4-year-olds to comply with mask-wearing, the reality is that even the older children often tug on, remove, or play with their masks. (Children under the age of 2 aren’t required to wear masks, which pose a suffocation hazard for them.) Such difficulties notwithstanding, all the providers we spoke to reported that no children or staff have been diagnosed with Covid-19.
But providers also noted that the very measures they are taking to protect the health of their staff and families—for instance, reducing the number of children served— pose a threat to their financial viability. Many providers say that lost tuition from reduced enrollment coupled with fixed expenses, such as rent, puts them at risk for closing.
Non-essential workers are starting to return to work and will need community-based child care programs. To ease this transition while protecting both the safety of staff and families, as well as the financial viability of the child care sector, we recommend that City policymakers:
Start the reopening planning process by surveying families to determine what policies would make parents feel safe about returning to child care programs.
Ensure families know their options when determining whether they want a center or family child care provider. It is important to support the sustainability of home-based businesses as well as center-based child care providers. Both provide safe and educational spaces for children.
Provide all community-based organizations with the same access to nurses, weekly professional cleanings, and training around new cleaning and health protocols as public schools.
Do not adopt a blended model of half-days, where one cohort of children attends in the morning and a second cohort attends in the afternoon. Half-days will require more people, more cleanings, and a complex schedule of staggered arrival and pick-up times. The ECC providers interviewed preferred a model where different cohorts of children attend for a full day on alternating schedules, either every other day or every other week (although they acknowledged this might be very difficult to align with parents’ work schedules).
Address the financial concerns of FCC providers to preserve child care for the very youngest and most vulnerable children, especially for infants and toddlers which are most commonly served in family child care.
Establish a subsidy program that does not penalize providers for complying with any public health recommendations for instituting smaller classroom sizes. Enrollment will fluctuate throughout the next year as families adjust to returning to work, but fixed expenses like rent will not change. Subsidy dollars could also cover other fixed expenses, like payroll, to help providers during the economic recovery.
Sustain the city’s child care capacity by supporting private-pay tuition slots for community-based child care programs. If families do not return and CDC guidelines have to be implemented, these centers, which also provide 50% of Pre-K for All slots, will be forced to close.
Provide mental health consultants and trainings to both center-based and FCC providers so they can better support the mental health and well-being of the children they care for and the families they serve. Providers feel the pandemic has been traumatic for families and want more guidance on how to support the mental health of children and families. These resources could begin immediately so that all providers are prepared before many of their families return.
The reopening of the early education system offers an opportunity to provide child care providers with the supports they need to operate safely, as well as an opportunity to support parents as they make their decisions about what child care options are right for them, and children as they adjust to the new normal. Efforts to support providers must offer financial assistance to providers, both center- and home-based. Reopening too soon without the right supports would put child care providers in a dangerous position, both to their health and the viability of their programs. This would have immediate and serious implications for parents’ ability to stay employed, especially for working women and families who are unable to afford private care in their own homes.
Finally, it is critical to remember the role that community-based organizations and family child care providers have played during this pandemic, placing themselves and their staff at risk to ensure that essential workers have a safe place for their children. The discussions on reopening New York City’s early education system must incorporate the voices of these providers and the families they serve.