TIPPING POINT
Faced with massive drops in enrollment, day cares are ‘teetering’ on the edge
Kristina Franco was sitting at her desk at her Kingwood day care when she heard a small voice yell out: “Don’t stand too close to me, you’re gonna give me the virus!”
The little boy was only 5 or 6 years old, Franco thought. But his fears are valid. It was four months into the pandemic, right before Houston would see a brutal summer surge in COVID-19 cases and deaths that would lead to Texas becoming one of the hardest-hit states in the country.
The soundtrack of children laughing and playing carefree had become a distant memory for Franco; shrieks of excitement were replaced with worrisome cries.
“It breaks my heart,” Franco, 44, said. “I understand having to explain to these kids what is going on, but I felt like we were completely robbing them of their innocence.”
For the past four years, Franco has served as the owner and director of Spanish Schoolhouse in Kingwood, a private language immersion school and day care for children and toddlers. Her day care
“The situation is dire for child care providers — the ones that are still open.”
Rhian Evans Allvin, CEO of National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC)
caters to a diverse range of families, and her staff is largely Latina.
“Because we are Latinas, we hug the kids multiple times a day,” Franco said. “To go from doing that to not being able to touch a child is very sobering.”
The pandemic’s emotional toll on day care workers is just one piece of the puzzle they have been tasked with overcoming. For the past year, Houston-area day cares have been grappling with dramatic drops in enrollment — some as much as 80 to 90 percent — and increased operating costs, netting virtually no income and leaving many teetering on the edge of having to close for good.
Financial strain
Pre-pandemic, Franco’s day care had an enrollment of 99 students. The first week of April, when day cares were allowed to reopen to care for children of essential workers, only six returned. Her enrollment has slowly crept back up to around 80 students, but the financial hit from the initial drop has had a lasting effect.
Franco is losing money every day by remaining open — and she is not alone. According to a December study from the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), 59 percent of child care centers in Texas say they are currently losing money by remaining open. The financial strain has led to day care closures across the state and country, which experts say could lead to a national child care crisis.
“The situation is dire for child care providers — the ones that are still open,” NAEYC CEO Rhian Evans Allvin wrote in the study. “Add to that the thousands of providers that have already closed and the magnitude of this national crisis is much, much greater.”
There were 17,279 child care operations in the state in February 2020, according to Texas Health and Human Services. A little more than one year later, that number has dropped to 14,493, although 768 of those are considered “temporarily closed” and are not currently caring for children. The number of day cares still in operation does not include Listed Family Homes. The state does not track closures due to COVID-19 but is reaching out to those operations to “clarify their intent to
reopen,” according to Danielle Pestrikoff, assistant press officer for DSHS.
Franco, in Kingwood, applied for several Paycheck Protection Program loans that helped keep her staff intact, but she said her financial situation is still tighter than ever. She went nearly 12 months without raising tuition but was forced to raise it by 1.5 percent, a change that will go into effect in June.
She estimates if she can hang on until August, she might be able to avoid closing the business she has sunk her life savings into.
The state’s now-retired stringent COVID protocols have added to the overwhelming financial strain placed on day cares. For the better part of a year, Franco’s school required masks, temperature checks and oxygen level checks; she invested in a fogging machine that disinfects the building every day; she spent thousands on HVAC units that she was told would help prevent viral spread.
“You can only float so many things … I am spending all of this money on everything I am supposed to do,” Franco said. “I just need people to come in the door.”
Her day care will continue following all of the same COVID protocols despite the state’s decision to lift the mandates and mask order, unless she receives new guidance from DSHS and her day care’s corporate offices.
Kingwood native Jean Perucca has owned 1st
Step University Child Care for nearly 15 years. She worries she may have to close her business and turn away families if things do not pick back up.
Her enrollment dropped from its pre-pandemic peak of 75 children to 10 children in a week when they first returned. As of early March, that number has climbed back up to 30.
Her financial situation is dire enough to make her thoughts turn to closing.
“We are teetering on it right now,” Perucca said. “We are probably at the lowest (point financially) we have ever been.”
She and others have also had to face tough decisions, like whether to let staff go. Robin Williams, executive director of the Primrose School at the Galleria, said at the start of the pandemic her staff dropped from 27 teachers to 13, as enrollment declined from 165 to 27 students.
“It takes on a whole other meaning when you have to let staff go under these situations; (staff ) that haven’t done anything to deserve to be let go other than being a victim of this pandemic,” Williams said.
Losing staff puts another barrier on day cares that rely on fostering relationships to keep enrollments steady.
“Then that’s where your school culture suffers a little bit, you almost have to start from ground zero and rebuild a school,” Williams said.
‘Pandemic overload’
While some studies have shown that children in child care settings do
not pose an increased risk for transmission to providers if safety guidelines are followed, the virus’ choke hold on the world is hard to ignore when caring for multiple, maskless toddlers for upward of 10
hours a day.
“You don’t know what is going on in their homes and what decisions their families are making, so it is a very, very scary and difficult place to be in,” said Huma Hosain, who has worked as the director of her parents’ two Houston day cares, Teeter Toddler Daycare, for nearly 11 years. She said her family’s day cares saw a 75 percent drop in enrollment at the start of the pandemic.
Hosain said workers like herself felt shortchanged for risking their lives to work in a society that often undervalues their industry. The child care industry in Texas has an estimated impact of $8.7 billion on the Texas economy, according to a 2019 report from the nonprofit policy think tank the Committee for Economic Development (CED).
“There is no recognition,” Hosain said. “We are not just babysitters. We are watching your children, we are teaching them, we are building a foundation for them.”
Hosain added the state was slow to issue guidance for initial reopenings, leaving many day care workers to “figure it out on our own.” Child care workers only recently received priority access to the vaccine — after 12 months of uncertainty and chaos.
Day care owner Pamela Seale Humphries has been in the business since the 1980s; she and her husband, Gordon, co-own three centers across Houston. At the start of the pandemic, Humphries’ day care centers experienced an 80 percent drop in enrollment. Her husband has not taken a paycheck for a year.
Thanks to her frugal money management, she is optimistic she can keep her centers open, but she worries about her staff ’s mental health.
“Pandemic overload, that’s the best way that I can describe it,” Humphries said. Her employees are “fearful for their grandparents, fearful for the parents of their students, they are fearful for their own family. It’s just wrapped all around them, and it feels like it’s squeezing in on them.”
Child care deserts
The virus could cripple the nation’s day care infrastructure and lead to an increase in child care deserts, further threatening working parents’ abilities to keep their jobs.
Nearly two thirds of the nation’s working families are already having trouble finding child care, according to the research and advocacy organization Children at Risk. And upward of 4 million child care slots could be permanently lost if more is not done to stabilize the industry.
The U.S. House of Representatives in July approved two bills that would address child care funding shortfalls: the Child Care for Economic Recovery Act, which would provide additional funding and infrastructure grants to improve child care; and the Child Care Is Essential Act, which would provide $50 billion in grant funding for child care providers hit hard by the pandemic. Neither have passed the Senate.
For Houston-area day care workers, more assistance could not come soon enough.
“It’s just kind of like, when is it going to end, really?” Perucca said. “When is it going to get back to normal — if there is a normal?”