Some parents are thrilled, but others have safety worries as do operators & teachers

After four months of juggling home learning with two young kids and a full-time job — and feeling like she was failing at both — Brooklyn mom Nora Zelevansky was thrilled to learn last week her son’s preschool was reopening.

“It would be a huge relief for us to send our son to school,” both to jump-start the 3-year-old’s learning and give his parents some muchneeded breathing room, Zelevansky said.

Zelevansky’s Brooklyn day care is one of roughly 3,000 city preschools that got the green light from the city Health Department to reopen as soon as Monday. The preschools will be limited to a maximum class size of 15 and masks will be mandatory for staff, among other measures.

City officials touted the move as a welcome step for overburdened parents, contact-starved kids and financially strapped day care centers, which operate on thin margins even in normal times.

“Everyone is really eager to get back into at least a little bit of normalcy,” said Ashley Sobel, the executive director of the Olive Treehouse group, which operates the private Brooklyn day care where Zelevansky sends her son.

“We’ve been planning for this for months,” added Sobel, who stopped taking a salary, furloughed employees and applied for a federal loan to keep her business from folding during the pandemic.

But some operators say they were taken aback by the sudden Health Department announcement last week, and need more time and logistical and financial support to get up and running.

“There is no way” to open this summer, said Medina

Khalil, the director of Brooklyn Free Space, a private day care in Park Slope that typically runs through the year.

“We don’t have the staff, don’t have the training, we don’t have the materials,” she said. “We need lead time. We’re not just independent shop owners that can open at any time.”

Day care operators say they got little guidance from the Health Department in the past few months about when a reopening decision would be made or how to prepare.

“What they said was ‘Be ready,’ but no timetable,” Khalil recalled. “Without a timetable, it’s almost impossible to operate systematically … all our families made plans, and our teachers as well.”

A Health Department spokesman said the agency told providers in June about state guidance and reminded them they’d need to create a reopening plan. Department officials plan another meeting this week to answer questions about meeting the safety requirements, the spokesman said.

State guidelines offer some sense of what reopened day cares will look like. Students can congregate in groups of up to 15 as long as they don’t