The headline here in MD: Prince George's Loses Almost Half of Licensed Child Care Providers
That should catch all of our attention.
Almost half of all day care slots — gone.
For Prince Georges County that means it is down over 10,000 day care slots. That means 5-10 thousand families no longer have a space for their child(ren).
In response, Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks announced a program offering $2 million in grant money for day cares. I applaud her for putting Prince George’s families first in providing coronavirus relief. This money will ensure more of these day cares do not go under during this pandemic, and provide families with continuous child care without disruption.
In some places, Covid-19 cases in children and staff causes centers to re-close, while in other places it is reduced head count due to parents losing jobs and being financially unable to send their children to day care. Other daycare centers are finding themselves financially unable to continue with the revenue slashed due to distancing guidelines limiting their enrollments.
“We just basically drained our bank accounts to keep the business open,” Maria Heredia, administrator of Little Hands Bilingual Montessori Daycare, told Alaska Public Media. “We just became very disappointed with all of the programs and all of these systems because we’re one of those small businesses that fall through the cracks and didn’t qualify for a lot of that stuff.”
Guidelines are also constantly changing as regulators struggle to craft practical policies for the child care industry, Alaska Public Media reported. Debra Rodriguez, the executive director of Bright Beginnings Early Learning Center, says at first, guidelines suggested facilities use cleaning products that are unsafe for kids or suggested employees keep toddlers 6 feet apart, which have been revised, according to Alaska Public Media.
“The child care industry has really struggled to even gain recognition as a legitimate industry,” Rodriguez told Alaska Public Media. “A lot of people have this view of us just being babysitters. And it’s so opposite of the truth.”
And unfortunately, many times it is the women in the workforce who have to give up their jobs when there are not enough daycare options available or resort to other options.
Disruption in child care will disproportionately affect women, who make up 90% of child care workers, and who bear most of the burden of child rearing. Beth Humberd, professor at the Center for Women and Work at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, said that without child care, women will lose the professional gains they’ve made. And, rather than leave the workforce, women may resort to other options.
“A lot of these smaller, in-home daycares may just start accepting children unregulated,” Humberd said. “And so that’s going to start a whole other child care crisis.”
And many involved in the day care industry are women of color who are trying to care for their own children as well. States are simply not doing enough to help these businesses that are in crisis.
As summer lurches toward fall, many families have reached the breaking point. And for single parents, especially those working low-wage jobs, the consequences of an ongoing lack of child care could be devastating. Yet the United States has not done the work of viral suppression necessary to safely open schools and child care centers in many parts of the country. In some cases, restaurants and bars have been prioritized over schools. The idea, it seems, is to swiftly get people back to work and boost economic growth above all else.
But throughout all this, there has been little acknowledgment of the real economic impact a broken school and child care systemhason families and child care workers — many of whom are also caring for their own kids.Maybe that’s because, historically, the work of taking care of other people, often performed by women and especially by women of color, has been devalued and largely ignored.
“This crisis has laid bare the ways in which caring for the well-being of society has a huge value, and that value has not been accounted for in our economic statistics and economic policy priorities,” Kate Bahn, the director of labor market policy at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, told Vox.
Look at this statistic— it shows how crushing this problem is for families in the US:
More than 41 million workers have kids under 18. Almost all of them lost child care as a result of the pandemic.
And this one:
In normal times, inadequate child careis the equivalent of a 5 percent pay cut for parents. Now it’s much worse.
If you thought 2008 was hard on millennials, this may prove even tougher. These parents who no longer have day care options or schools for their children are having to cut back their hours or choose to quit their jobs. They are having to choose one parent’s job over the other, having the second parent stay home with the children, dramatically changing a family’s economic situation.
Single parents don’t even have the option of having one parent stay home.
Congress is taking up the issue as it is clear this country cannot not economically recover without adequate day care options for America families.
The child care industry in this country wasn’t in great shape before the pandemic. Advocates and child care workers say COVID-19 has pushed it to the brink of collapse, as centers have been forced to close or operate with greatly-reduced enrollment.
About 350,000 child care workers are currently out of a job. On Tuesday, the House Worker and Family Support Subcommittee held a hearing on the crisis.
However, they may be addressing the problem in a way that will not help families or day cares
Congressional leaders have managed to set aside their usual partisan divisions to agree on a keystone measure for rebuilding the economy: repairing America’s broken child-care network.
Unfortunately, they’re going about it the wrong way. House and Senate leaders are focusing on pre-K funding, rather than school-age children, and would funnel dollars through convoluted state bureaucracies rather than sending direct aid to parents.
….
Both Democratic and Republican proposals currently employ a byzantine administrative maze for channeling dollars to child-care centers: first sending funds to governors, who distribute out to municipal agencies, which finally make awards to neighborhood organizations. At this glacial pace, weary parents will still be searching for care as the Covid-19 vaccine arrives. It would be much easier, smarter and more effective, to just put the money directly into parents’ hands.
Another article on the topic addresses the bills up for consideration.
Included in the Health, Economic Assistance, Liability Protection and Schools (HEALS) Act is a bill that would provide $15 billion to child care services. The U.S. House of Representatives has even broader ambitions, with multiple bills offering more than $60 billion in aid that received bipartisan support this week
….Funding for child care services is included in the Coronavirus Response Additional Supplemental Appropriations Act. The bill would provide $10 billion in “back to work child care grants” to pay for fixed costs and increased operating expenses due to COVID-19, as well as to aid in creating a safe environment for children attending day cares. An additional $5 billion would go to child care providers who lost enrollment or had to close due to the coronavirus pandemic.
“The pressures of working full-time and educating multiple kids at home all at once are simply unsustainable over the long term,” Senate Committee on Appropriations Chairman Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) said in a statement. “We need to step it up for them.”
Meanwhile, the House this week passed two bills to provide over $60 billion in funding for the child care industry. The Child Care Is Essential Act creates a $50 billion fund to provide grants to pay for costs associated with opening and running child care facilities during the pandemic. The Child Care for Economic Recovery Act provides $10 billion in funding to help child-care providers reopen and improve their safety.
As Republicans, Democrats and the White House continue to negotiate the next stimulus package, all are intent on funding child care efforts, meaning we can likely expect to see aid make it into the final bill.
Democrats need to make child care a priority as the pandemic continues to challenge the economic stability of families with young children. We need to see these young families as the future and invest in them. What happens when families lose not only their child care, but also their jobs and their homes? Are we prepared to see massive homelessness in families with young children in this country?
This is truly a serious issue we all need to pay attention to...more so than the Veep intrigue or the latest blather Trump is sending out over Twitter.