So far, so good.
That’s the word from those on the frontlines trying to provide child care for workers considered “essential” during the coronavirus pandemic.
In most regions, supply is meeting demand.
For now.
The state has received requests to care for nearly 1,200 children so far, Ken Schatz, the commissioner of the Department for Children and Families, told lawmakers Tuesday. A little over 2,000 spots are available.
The effort is being staffed on an entirely volunteer basis.
“At this point we have a total number of slots that allows us to meet the need. But also to be straightforward, there are pockets around the state where it’s a little bit uneven,” Schatz said to House Human Services committee members via webconference this week.
Melissa Riegel-Garrett, policy director for DCF’s child development division, added the state had found mismatch between demand and provider capacity in Franklin, Essex, and particularly Addison counties. And in the Burlington area, DCF is struggling to find enough care for children under 2.
In his original order directing child care facilities to close, Gov. Phil Scott mandated schools offer onsite care to students K-8 if their parents worked “essential” jobs. Of particular concern was the impact on the health care sector’s capacity to handle a surge in patients as the virus spreads if health care workers needed to stay home with their children. But the list of essential workers also includes first responders, utility workers, law enforcement personnel, and grocery store workers, among others.
The governor quickly backtracked from his child care mandate after many district leaders balked, saying they lacked both the staff and the necessary cleaning supplies to do the work safely. Scott formally relaxed the child care mandate last week, when he extended his order closing schools.
Child care providers, which had been initially allowed to stay open to provide care to essential personnel, have since been offered financial incentives to do so. Private programs who offer such care will get an extra $125 per child, per week, the state announced late last week.
The financial incentive was a “big deal” for private providers, Sonja Raymond, the executive director for Vermont Association for the Education for Young Children, told the House Human Services committee.
“It’s actually what allowed me to feel OK about this for my staff. Because I was losing my staff every day, that had agreed to do this initially,” said Raymond, who runs the Apple Tree Learning Center in Stowe. “They were getting scared. They make like $15 an hour. If they don’t have health care, what happens if they get sick?”
But many providers remain nervous about joining the effort. Floyd Nease, the executive director of the Lamoille Family Center, told the committee that while some of the state’s parent child centers had child care facilities, no staff were available to provide the care to essential workers. And he argued providing child care in group settings flew in the face of strict social distancing directives coming from the governor’s own administration.
“It’s an unsustainable and unsafe model, with serious liability should anything go wrong,” he said. “We can’t put kids in a congregate setting, and put them at risk in this way.”
A handful of school districts, including Burlington, the state’s largest, have volunteered to continue offering child care for the time being, despite the governor relaxing his mandate to do so.
“We’ve decided that we want to make an effort to do that,” Burlington Superintendent Yaw Obeng said last week. “We think that it’s part of our role to stay this curve and deal with this pandemic.”
Obeng said he was using those paraprofessionals, after-school employees, and nurses who had volunteered to staff the program. Staff would be assigned to the children of only one family at a time. The district has created online surveys for interested families.
Right now, the district is able to meet demand, which Obeng noted had been unexpectedly low as families found alternate arrangements. But he acknowledged that that could change.
“Our capacity is going to be based on the volunteers on our staff,” he said.
And because many families requested in-home care, Obeng said, the district is giving families cash assistance to pay for providers to come to them.
At least one other school district is also subsidizing in-home child care. Montpelier-Roxbury Superintendent Libby Bonesteel told lawmakers Friday that her school district realized quickly that providing care onsite “was never possible.”
“I simply don’t have the staff to do that. I don’t have the staff and I don’t have the cleaning supplies,” Bonesteel said to members of the House Education Committee via webconference.
Nearly all the essential workers contacted by the district also expressed deep apprehension about putting their children in group settings, Bonesteel said. So the district decided to simply help its neediest families by helping to pay for babysitters.
“That’s a considerable cost to our district. We’re using our fund balance to do that. Luckily we have one,” she said.
Bonesteel also noted that the current system required her to triage requests from families, which put her in the uncomfortable position of telling certain parents the district wouldn’t help them.
“I think the child care piece is going to continue to be a major stressor,” she said. “And what happens when my babysitters get sick?”
Essential workers seeking child care can get matched with a provider using DCF’s online questionnaire. They can also call 2-1-1 ext. 6.
