Early Childhood: Five reasons re-opening will not be enough to save many child care centers

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By Jackie Mader and Lillian Mongeau

America’s child care providers, who care for roughly12 million children under age 5 every day, have been devastated by the coronavirus crisis. Called on simultaneously to serve the children of essential workers and prohibited from serving other children, many centers saw their income plummet. Nearly half of child care facilities were closed in early April, according to a survey by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). In late April, an analysis by Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, predicted that nearly half of child care slots could be lost permanently due to the strain of the initial closures. But child care center directors and employees say many more child care facilities may end up closing because of problems created by living with the virus, a situation that could go on indefinitely. Whether families choose to return to child care programs or are able to afford to do so will be one major hurdle. The second and perhaps larger hurdle will be that rules created by states to allow for a safe reopening of child care don’t currently come with any funding. Child care providers, many of whom are already stretched thin financially, will need to figure out how to raise the extra money needed to sustain their business with the burden of added compliance-related costs.

Here are five problems brought on by the pandemic that child care providers are likely to face for months or even years to come:

1. Reduced group sizes

As part of re-opening their economies, some states have issued new rules about how many children may interact with each other and their teacher in child care programs each day.

Although this limit is meant to reduce the spread of coronavirus, it could be especially devastating to center-based programs that carefully balance how many children in various age groups they can serve in order to make a profit. Centers typically earn most of their revenue by charging parents less for larger preschool classrooms with lower student-to-teacher ratios. With those rooms now reduced in some counties from serving a recommended 20 or 24 students to 10, many center directors worry they simply will not be allowed to serve enough children to survive financially.

“Now we’re open but we aren’t serving at capacity,” said Enola Garland, a preschool teacher at the Teaching Tree Early Childhood Learning Center in Colorado during a webinar hosted by the Center for American Progress. “You can’t sustain a business on having 10 children in a classroom, especially preschool classrooms.”

2. Fearful families

Some families, especially in hard hit areas of the country, will likely be reluctant to send their children back to child care programs despite the extra precautions. And while some of these families have continued to pay for their child’s spot, it is unlikely they will be interested in or able to do so indefinitely, leaving providers scrambling.

"The truth is that this month’s tuition is pretty much next month’s payroll,” said Raissa Lee, head of the ABC Mom Learning Center & Child Care in Irvine, California. Lee said the contract parents sign includes a requirement that families give one month’s notice before pulling their child out, to give the center time to enroll a new child, but some of her families have not honored that contract.

After spring break, Lee said by email, “The majority of families decided not to return. Since the pandemic I have lost 75 percent of my families and have had to lay off my entire teaching team.”

There is little data available to clarify the scope of this problem. Most child care providers interviewed for this story mentioned one of the challenges they face is families keeping kids (and payments) home due to health concerns.

Another challenge is families who are not fearful enough, center directors say. Center employees can follow every safety protocol in the book, but they can still be at risk of spreading infection if families ignore health and safety guidelines outside of the centers.

“It is disheartening to put so much effort into something — like keeping kids distanced, and then you see parents letting their kids run and pick each other up in the parking lot and breathe on each other without masks,” said Cori Berg, the executive director of the Hope Day School in Dallas. “Or to be very detailed about hand sanitizer before picking up a pen at the sign-in table, but then a parent comes up without a mask on and breathes all over everything. It’s intense.”

3. Staffing

Between March and April, 335,000 child care workers lost their jobs, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. It is unclear how many will be hired back. New rules on the number of children allowed per classroom in some states will also affect staffing.

Tiffany Pearsall, who runs the Play Frontier child care center in Carson, Washington, said she still needs to pay four teachers even though she’s currently serving just 11 students. Guidance from the state’s health department directs child care programs to keep group sizes small and separate from each other, which requires multiple rooms. And in Pearsall’s center, since the bathroom and the kitchen are down the hall from the classrooms, Pearsall needs a second teacher in each room to accompany children to the bathroom, and to prepare lunch and cover for the other teacher’s breaks, among other daily tasks.

Washington state recommends that teachers work with just one group of children from day to day but that means Pearsall can’t have a morning and afternoon shift. She also needs to build time into the schedule to accommodate the two to three hours a day it takes her staff to clean every toy and launder every cloth item. If she stuck to her regular timetable, she would have to keep the staff on for 60 hours a week to accomplish everything. For these and other reasons, including the loss of students, Pearsall has reduced her center’s hours from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. five days a week to 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. three days a week.

Trying to follow all the rules can feel impossible, she said. “You have to choose whether you’re going to follow the Department of Health recommendations, the labor laws or the best practices for child care,” Pearsall said. “You can’t do all three at once. You have to choose two. And it just sucks.”

More about child care and coronavirus

This piece by Georgia Goldburn, the executive director of a nonprofit child care centers, for NBC News, looks at what may happen to child care centers that have managed to reopen or stay open, as funding dries up.

This piece by Aliyya Swaby for The Texas Tribune looks at how Texas has reinstated safety rules as Covid-19 cases rise in the state.

This piece by Sarah Jones for New York Magazine asks if the pandemic will reshape child care for good and dives into the plight of child care workers and parents.

Research Quick Takes

Using enrollment in the federal Free or Reduced-Price Lunch (FRPL) program to measure poverty is inaccurate and falls short of seeing the true extent of child poverty at a given school, according to a new report by the Learning Policy Institute. The report’s author found that for many reasons, including the fact that data are generally self-reported and do not capture fluctuations in family income, FRPL should not be used to generate an accurate count of students from low-income families. The report recommends policymakers use other factors, like family enrollment in the Affordable Care Act Health Insurance Marketplace, Medicare and Medicaid and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children to create a more reliable picture.

Bonus: Screen time usage is indeed up for children between the ages of 2 and 11 years old, according to a new report by Lingokids, an app that teaches English to young children. The survey found 31 percent of 4,500 parents surveyed in six countries and territories reported this increase is due to schoolwork and 26 percent said this increase is due to the use of educational apps. Forty-four percent of parents say they fear their children could struggle to learn in the real world due to this increase in screen time.