EAST COUNTY CLASSROOMS OPEN FOR CHILD CARE
Cajon Valley Union district is one of few offering free service to essential workers
A San Diego County school district is one of the first in California to start bringing students back to campus — not for fulltime school, but for child care.
Cajon Valley Union School District has been offering free child care to families with essential workers since April 27 at Chase Avenue Elementary School.
Each weekday, from 6:30 a.m. to 6 p.m., staff enforce physical distancing for students, do health and temperature checks for staff and students and give students masks to wear every day.
Students are fed snacks and lunch, play outside and work on their distance learning using school-provided laptops, at desks spaced several feet apart from each other.
The child care program is a model of what schools may look like when they finally reopen, as well as proof — albeit on a small scale — that school can operate with physical distancing and safety measures in place, officials said.
Cajon Valley Union, in east San Diego County, usually serves about 16,400 mostly lowincome students. The district will use lessons learned from the child care program to plan for its official reopening later this year, said Cajon Valley Superintendent David Miyashiro.
Santee School District also has been providing child care to
essential worker families since March 30; it charges fees to keep the program going.
Many private child care providers also remain open. Essential workers can apply for state-funded child care payment vouchers, but there is a waiting list.
Two of Cajon Valley’s extended day program supervisors, Nicolle Starr and Amanda Owen, built their emergency child care program after collaborating with other departments in the district and spending a lot of time reading public health guidelines.
They started small, with about 30 students. Enrollment will rise to about 50 students next week, they said, and they plan to gradually scale up as parents increasingly trust them to watch their children safely.
‘It put me at ease’
The child care program has been a blessing to Pauline Lucatero, a registered nurse, and her husband, a law enforcement officer. They have no family living nearby who could watch their 9-year-old daughter, Emily, and 7-year-old son, Max, while they work.
When the pandemic came, they took time off from their jobs to stay home with their kids because they didn’t know what else to do for child care.
“When we heard of this program, it really got me emotional because I just didn’t think help like this would come,” Lucatero said. “In our line of duty, we do what we do ... but we never expected something like this in return to be done for us.”
As a nurse who reviews safety protocols at her own workplace, Lucatero said she is impressed with Cajon Valley’s safety measures. Lucatero said her kids told her they wash their hands every hour.
“It put me at ease to know they were doing everything,” Lucatero said. “It feels like they’ve taken all protocols from stores … and of course health care organizations and just really blended it together.”
Her kids were hesitant to go to school at first, she said, but at the end of their first day they told her they loved it.
How it works
To make the child care program safe, there is a long list of rules and procedures dictating how kids and staff can move on campus.
“We try to think of everything,” Owen said.
Parents are not allowed on campus and must stay in the car when they drop off their kids. Parents wait while a staff member takes their child’s temperature and checks for symptoms before allowing the child into the school. Staff keep a daily log of every child’s health and temperature checks.
All staff also get a temperature check when they arrive, and those who work with children wear masks and gloves. They also receive hazard pay of one and a half times their regular pay.
Parents wave goodbye to their kids from the car while staff welcome them to school, standing several feet away.
“It’s so hard not to give them a hug,” Owen said.
Daily schedules include time for working on Cajon Valley’s distance learning program, outdoor play and “free choice” activities that students choose from, such as coloring and word searches.
As part of their distance learning, every day students log how they’re feeling by choosing an emoji character. Teachers then know to check in remotely with students who indicate they’re not feeling well.
Students don’t share anything. Each student is assigned their own laptop, headphone set, box of school supplies, activity bag, hula hoop, chalk and jump rope, which are labeled with their names. Classrooms are cleaned every hour.
Students aren’t allowed to bring anything from home
— no backpacks, water bottles or lunch boxes.
Every child is given a mask they must wear at least whenever they come within 6 feet of another person.
Each student stays in an assigned classroom, supervised by the same staff member all day. There are no more than 10 children per classroom, based on state COVID-19 guidelines for child care.
During outside time, it’s strangely quiet on the playground.
Children eat snacks while sitting apart from each other in assigned seats at the lunch tables. They do more solitary activities like jumping rope, walking around the school field and drawing with chalk.
On Tuesday one staff member played a couple of games with her class but had to keep reminding them to pull their masks over their noses and stay 6 feet apart.
“We try to change it up the best we can so they’re still having fun, they’re still interacting — they’re just distanced,” Starr said.
Red circle markers on the ground indicate where students should stand while waiting in line for the bathroom or going into the classroom.
Students are asked to wash their hands before and after every outdoor break. As an extra precaution, every kid uses hand sanitizer before going into the classroom.
The safety of the program relies largely on students following the rules. The kids in the child care program, most of whom are second- and third-graders, have shown they can, Miyashiro said.
“The one thing you can’t anticipate is will students follow directions? And they are,” he said.
Starr said staff emphasized to students the importance of not spreading germs. Staff sent home packets about health and safety to families, so parents can help reinforce the need for safety.
“We try to maintain it as best we can,” Starr said of the safety protocol. “We just try to keep reinforcing it.”
Looking ahead
Cajon Valley’s child care program doesn’t have all the answers for how the district can reopen. Bringing 16,400 students back to more than two dozen schools will be more difficult than bringing a few dozen students back to one school.
But the program is providing valuable insight to help the district plan for reopening school, Miyashiro said.
The district doesn’t know yet when it will reopen. And Gov. Gavin Newsom’s recent announcement suggesting that next school year could start as early as July adds to the uncertainty, Miyashiro said.
The district is paying for the emergency child care program largely out of its own pocket and using funding from a state after-school program that’s geared toward low-income children. It hopes to get reimbursed for some of the program’s cost through the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
It doesn’t anticipate using federal stimulus money to pay for the program; that will likely be needed to shore up the district’s overall budget, Miyashiro said.
On Thursday, state officials announced that K-12 schools could face up to a 20 percent decline in funding next year due to the recession caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
kristen.taketa@sduniontribune.com