The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Libraries are being used as day care centers
Residents in some areas not happy with decision.
As the school year begins entirely online for millions of students across the country, local leaders are facing a child care crisis for their employees.
In some places, a controversial solution has emerged: repurposing public libraries as day care centers for the children of essential workers.
Beginning this week, parks and recreation staff in Loudoun County, Virginia, are offering supervision for as many as 1,000 to 1,200 school-age children of county employees, public school teachers and other members of the public. They’d planned to offer the child care in community centers, 11 elementary schools, leased buildings and two public libraries.
But the decision by the county’s Board of Supervisors to close two libraries — the Rust and Ashburn branches — to convert them into child care facilities, has angered some library staff and local parents, and it culminated in the resignation last week of the chair of the library’s Board of Trustees. Now, because of lower enrollment than expected, the program will be revisited by the supervisors this week, a county spokesman said.
If the libraries remain closed for child care, it will cut off access to more than 6,000 people who use them on a weekly basis, library officials said, although they would still offer curbside services.
“It didn’t seem to me that they took into consideration the tens of thousands of citizens whose access to a range of library services will be severely limited, especially in a pandemic,” said Marc Leepson, a longtime library advocate who previously served on the Loudoun County Library Board of Trustees and the Virginia State Library Board.
Most troubling, Leepson and others said, is the Board of Supervisors decided to close the libraries without first consulting the library director or its Board of Trustees.
Across the country since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, cities such as San Francisco and New York have provided emergency child care at libraries, along with community centers and empty school buildings. But a recent proposal in another county, in North Carolina, stirred similar outrage after an anonymous letter appeared on the blog Ask a Manager.
The writer, described as a youth services employee at a public library in North Carolina, said library staff were being expected to provide a “virtual learning camp” for children of county workers, while still providing curbside services to library customers. Reached by The Washington Post, the writer confirmed the library system is in Cumberland County, N.C., but asked not to be named for fear of losing her job.
“Library staff are not licensed child care providers, for one thing . ... We do not have safe, enclosed outdoor spaces for the kids to take recess or breaks,” the anonymous library employee wrote. “This is an absolutely-unheard-of workload for us. We are not getting pay increases or official changes in our job duties, of course. We were told that if we did not ‘buy in’ to this plan, we should consider a career change.”
Duane Holder, a deputy county manager for Cumberland County, said the county is in the early stages of proposing a child care program in its libraries, which had been closed to the public amid the pandemic.
The library proposal is a response to a child care crisis so dire it is affecting essential services in the county, Holder said. Unable to find supervision for their children, some social workers, child-protective services staff, Medicaid employees and other essential workers have stopped showing up to work. Some have been taking the paid leave provided to them by the Families First Coronavirus Response Act. Others, including some public-health nurses, have been resigning.
“We’ve had to actually cancel child-support court, and that really hurts,” Holder said. “I don’t think that we were able to fully anticipate the impact that 100% virtual learning would have on our workforce.”
Nationwide, millions of working parents, especially working mothers, are dealing with the same dilemma. Remote-learning plans require full-time working parents to find care for an average of 43.5 hours a week, roughly triple the amount of child care time they needed before the pandemic, according to a report from the Urban Institute.
But in Loudoun, residents took to online parenting forums and library Facebook pages to express outrage at the decision to close the two libraries.
“If they need a facility for childcare, use the empty schools!” wrote one Loudoun County resident, Sondra Eklund. “Libraries are not designed to keep children occupied for 8 hours a day, and it’s not safe in a pandemic.”
Phyllis Randall, chair of the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors, said several school buildings are not available because teachers are offering virtual lessons from their classrooms, and some schools are still offering in-person classes to students with special needs and with English as a second language. More important, she said, the district is aiming to transition to a hybrid model of learning that provides some classroom time for all students as soon as possible.
Still, the county located 11 elementary schools with hundreds of seats available, along with several community centers. The two libraries helped the county meet the goal of 1,000 to 1,200 slots, which should allow for enough space for county staff children, Loudoun County Public Schools staff children, children who qualify for free and reduced lunch, as well as some additional space for the general public through a lottery system.
But on the first day of the program Tuesday, enrollment was lower than expected, with only 600 children, leading county officials to consolidate the child care sites in only schools and leased buildings for the time being. If enrollment increases, they plan to use the two libraries and other centers.
Chang Liu, the director of the Loudoun County Library, declined to comment on the decision to close the two libraries for child care purposes. But she confirmed the resignation of the chair of the library’s Board of Trustees, Denis Cotter, on Wednesday. Cotter did not respond to requests for comment, but told WTOP earlier in the week library staff and trustees “were not informed or consulted during the development of the proposal.”