With just one week to go before the start of the school year, the state has made “significant progress” in building a new system of child care hubs to serve school-age children on remote learning days, Human Services Secretary Mike Smith said Tuesday.
But Smith called the effort to get a new child care system to serve thousands up and running in a matter of weeks “a herculean task,” and acknowledged, as he has before, that not all hubs would be online by the first day of school.
Vermont After School, a nonprofit which is heading up the effort, alongside the Department for Children and Families, “has done a great job in a remarkable short amount of time,” Smith said.
“But I want to be realistic,” he added.
The state is in the final stages of approving 12 hub sites in eight different counties – three in Addison and Chittenden each, and one in Franklin, Lamoille, Rutland, Washington, Windham, and Windsor each, according to Smith. Another 20 applications for hubs are close behind in the pipeline.
The initial 12 sites will offer 2,300 child care slots, which should serve about 4,600 students, since children are attending school on alternating days, according to Smith.
The state announced a plan in mid-August to put $12 million in federal Covid-19 relief toward building out child care capacity for children in grades K-6, after it became clear that the hybrid reopening plans most school districts had settled on would leave parents, including many teachers themselves, scrambling for child care. The state’s plan ultimately hopes to find care for some 10,000 child care slots using the hubs and expanded capacity within existing providers.
The child care sector, which pays notoriously low wages, was already suffering from a workforce shortage before the pandemic, and the state has acknowledged that staffing the hubs could be tricky. Existing child care providers have also expressed concerns the hubs could draw staff away from their own limited pool of employees.
Smith called staffing “our biggest challenge,” but also expressed optimism Tuesday that the state would be able to recruit the people it needed.
“We have 40,000 unemployed in Vermont right now,” Gov. Phil Scott added. “If you have an interest in early childhood care and learning – reach out to us. Because we could use the help right now.”
The federal funding the state is putting toward the effort will cover start-up costs, but many, if not all, hubs are expected to charge parents tuition.
The state provides subsidies to low-income families for child care, and parents will be able to tap into the program to help offset the cost of sending their children to the new hubs. But it is widely acknowledged that the existing subsidies are too meager to make child care affordable for most families, and Smith acknowledged that the hubs could still lead to inequities in access.
“This initiative, frankly, is not intended to solve the pre-existing challenges that the system is facing. Rather it’s just intended right now to provide additional capacity around the state based on the need we’re seeing,” he said.
The Agency of Education and Health Department are also working on a new system for reporting Covid-19 cases in schools. Education Secretary Dan French said in order to protect student privacy, the state’s “initial thinking” was to report cases by combining student and employee cases together.
The state would also not report case numbers in schools with fewer than 25 people in them, including employees and students. That would exempt 15 schools.
“Twenty-five is the number we arrived at after reviewing the size of our small schools and applying our best professional judgement relative to privacy restrictions and our current data practices,” French said.
