Revere is clueless about home-based day care
Reliable and affordable access to child care is both a workforce and an economic development issue.
Ana Rodriguez Santos understands that intimately. An immigrant from El Salvador, she has been working with children for the past 12 years — first as a teacher at a private school in Lexington and then as a child-care provider when she opened her own day care out of her home in Revere nearly a decade ago.
But she ran into some local obstacles, Rodriguez told me in an interview in Spanish. She obtained a state-issued license to operate a home-based day care with space for 10 children — which is a process that involves mandatory trainings and a background check, among other requirements.
Then Rodriguez realized she also needed a city permit. That’s when she learned that Revere’s regulations for family day cares are more restrictive than the state’s standards. For instance, Revere requires that home-based childcare providers not have more than four children enrolled, whereas the state issues family day-care licenses for up to 10 children.
“That’s a local barrier for establishing family day care that doesn’t exist in Malden, East Boston, Lynn, or Chelsea,” Rodriguez said. “But I’m licensed by the state and that’s what matters.” So Rodriguez has been running her day care, with 10 enrollees and two additional employees, without the city permit.
And so are many other providers, according to Olga Tacure, executive director of Women Encouraging Empowerment, based in Revere. Tacure said there are roughly 80 family day-care providers licensed by the state, the majority of whom are immigrant women. Their centers often have long wait lists, she told me. A state document using 2019 data classified Revere as a child-care desert in Massachusetts because of its high gap between child-care capacity and demand.
“The Revere requirements are intimidating,” Tacure said. “The reality is that the city has not been enforcing those outdated regulations in a consistent manner, otherwise no family child-care provider would exist in the city. It’s not possible for a business to survive with an enrollment of four children.”
Tacure’s organization has been working with the SEIU Local 509 (which represents close to 3,000 family child-care providers across the state that serve at least one child with a subsidy, according to Alejandra Tejeda, the union’s family child-care coordinator), the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, and some local child-care providers to push the Revere City Council to align the city’s regulations to the state standards. They worked together on a proposed ordinance and asked City Councilor At Large Steven Morabito to introduce it, but the effort went nowhere. According to Tejeda, the union has done some research and “we haven’t found any other cities [in Massachusetts] that restrict [family day cares] in the same way that Revere does.”
Revere interim Mayor Patrick Keefe Jr. supports most of the changes proposed to update the city’s regulations, which include amending the maximum number of children allowed for family day cares. Keefe and at least one councilor, Anthony Zambuto — the chair of the council’s zoning subcommittee, where the ordinance was last debated — oppose a single aspect of the proposal: to allow swimming pools at family child-care homes, which, according to advocates, is a common policy in other cities and towns (the state licensing process establishes water safety standards should the family day care have a pool).
Keefe also said that enforcement of current local regulations is challenging and done on a case-by-case basis. “The city certainly doesn’t want to hurt child-care providers,” he told me. It’s ultimately up to the City Council to enact the proposal. Zambuto told me he welcomes “any eligible person to resubmit the zoning ordinance amendment to the City Council.”
All current members of the Revere City Council are white and all but one are male. But there are elections for all city offices this year. A little over half of the city’s population is non-Hispanic white, while more than a third is Hispanic or Latino. Two of the candidates for City Council, Danielle Osterman and Juan Jaramillo, support the family childcare ordinance. “It fits under the broader umbrella of equity and social justice for working-class families,” Osterman told me.
Tacure and other stakeholders are holding a rally at 6 p.m. July 31 in front of Revere City Hall to bring attention to the ordinance in the context of the November elections.
At an April City Council hearing about the proposed ordinance, Rodriguez’s teenage son, Justin Santos, testified in favor of it. “He said something to the effect of, ‘I was a beneficiary of my mom’s child-care business,’ ” Rodriguez told me. “His message was, ‘My mom needed the income of her home-based childcare program so she could afford my education.’ ”
Indeed, Santos embodies the promise of increasing child-care opportunities in Revere. The proposal to change Revere’s anachronistic regulations is a great place to start and must be a priority for the incoming City Council.