Child care centers to reopen with more cleaning, temperature-taking, masks

Closed child care centers can reopen Friday, when the region moves from “red” into the “yellow” partial reopening phase of pandemic mitigation.

Whether they all will choose to reopen, or have enough youngsters to reopen, is another matter.

Many providers are not planning to reopen on Friday, though they are planning on reopening within the next two weeks or so, said Wendy Etheridge Smith, director of the Early Learning Resource Center in Allegheny County. That’s due to both child care centers still ramping up to get ready and some parent hesitancy about safety, she said.

Most child care providers in Pennsylvania have been closed since mid-March, though some have been operating with a waiver and serving the children of “essential” workers such as first responders, or those who work in health care or grocery stores. Home-based child care providers, who generally care for a much smaller number of children at a time, have been able to operate uninterrupted.

Child care is “crucial to the daily functioning of our commonwealth,” said Teresa Miller,

Pennsylvania secretary of human services, speaking on a call with reporters earlier this week.

“Child care is an essential infrastructure to our economy’s recovery. If we don’t have that, our economy doesn’t recover,” said Cara Ciminillo, executive director of advocacy group Trying Together.

About 20% of child care programs remained open in Allegheny County, with many of those being homebased providers, said Ms. Ciminillo.

For programs that plan to welcome children back on Friday, state officials have been referring them to safety guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Among the CDC recommendations — intense cleaning, modified drop-off procedures that allow for children to wash their hands as soon as they enter, and screening children upon arrival for fevers.

For older children, masks are recommended.

“When feasible, staff members and older children should wear face coverings within the facility,” CDC guidance notes. “Cloth face coverings should NOT be put on babies and children under age 2 because of the danger of suffocation.”

What does social distancing look like for young children, who normally hug,

touch, share toys and play in a very hands-on way?

The CDC “recognize[s] that the 6 feet of social distancing is not always appropriate or applicable in child care,” said Tracey Campanini, who heads Pennsylvania’s Office of Child Development and Early Learning.

If possible, the CDC says, child care classes should include the same group of kids each day, and the same teachers should remain with the same group of children. This would reduce the potential for any cross-contamination, Ms. Campanini explained.

That could be tough for programs that move children and teachers among different classrooms at various times during the day.

Child care providers must balance their existing capacity and staff, how many families wish to return their children to care, and if they can safely serve those children given constraints on staffing around maintaining social distance, Ms. Ciminillo said.

“They’re at a point where they are really trying to figure out from a

capacity and a cost perspective, what can they do?”

Child care organizations have raised concerns some providers will not be able to reopen because of the loss of parent tuition payments during the months of closure, or if they cannot operate at full capacity after reopening.

Advocacy groups have pushed for state funds to make up for the loss of these payments.

Ms. Miller, the state’s human services secretary, would only say her office is “working very closely with the governor’s office and the Legislature” about how to best distribute federal funds when asked about the issue several times on Monday.

Pennsylvania received about $100 million from federal CARES Act funding to aid child care.

Other states have primarily used this funding to provide child care subsidies for essential workers and have given direct funding to child care centers, even ones that are closed, to help pay fixed costs such as rent so they can smoothly reopen when the time comes, said Dan Wuori, director of early learning at The Hunt Institute, an organization focused on education issues.

States recognize child care is expensive to provide and child care businesses run on very narrow margins, he said. They are offsetting the lost income “to make sure we don’t end up with a real lack of child care at the end of this process,” Mr. Wuori said.

States have also given payments to providers to aid with their increased cleaning, sanitation and staffing costs, or to pay bonuses to normally low-paid child care workers.

Only one state completely closed its child care programs to stop the spread of COVID-19, according to advocacy group Child Care Aware of America.

Several states closed child care except for children of essential workers, and a few states are currently reopening child care facilities.

The majority of states did not close child care centers but changed their guidelines, according to a spokesman for the group.

To find a child care provider in Allegheny County, call the Early Learning Resource Center at 412-3503577.

“Child care is an essential infrastructure to our economy’s recovery. If we don’t have that, our economy doesn’t recover.”

Cara Ciminillo, executive director of advocacy group Trying Together