Child care centers taking major hits.

Study finds that many providers’ are having tough time financially

When Claudia Hernandez decided to reopen her Spanish immersion preschools and day care programs after the coronavirus pandemic forced her to close for two months, it was really a matter of survival.

“I figured that if we didn’t, we were not going to make it,” said Hernandez, the owner of Centro Armonia Preschools in Los Altos and San Jose.

But as parents slowly have brought their children back in hopes of returning to an uninterrupted workday, Hernandez still doesn’t yet see a way out. With new social distancing mandates that she’s required to meet, the number of children she serves across her two schools has dropped by nearly half — from 76 to just 44.

Hernandez has been unable to hire many of her employees back after the initial closure; she soon will need to renegotiate the rent with her landlords for a second time since March; and she’s continuously looking for ways to cut her expenses.

“Between our high rents and the new limits on group sizes, we’re in trouble at this point,” she said.

Hernandez’s struggles to keep her child care business afloat are not unique. Some Bay Area in-home care providers have decided to stop offering their services entirely for fear of exposing their family members to COVID-19. Other day care providers have gone into credit card debt just to pay rent.

A new report from the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Child Care Employment found that the pressure to reopen California has placed a significant burden on the state’s child care system, exposing providers to health risks and leading to the potential collapse of programs.

The report, released Wednesday, surveyed 953 preschools and inhome day care services throughout

the state in late June and found the child care industry in financial distress — with many providers facing an uncertain future.

About a quarter of the programs surveyed remain closed, and the vast majority of those open have done so despite fears of exposing themselves and others to COVID-19 because they lack financial resources to survive a closure, the report found. Some 77% of the programs open have lost income from the families they serve, and 80% have incurred higher expenses because of personal protective equipment and sanitation supplies.

“We understand now as a society how critical child care is to support other industries and to get other people back to work,” said Lea Austin, CSCCE executive director. “But I don’t think that has translated into support and resources for the child care programs and the people working in those programs in a substantial way.”

Beatriz Leyva-Cutler, executive director of Bay Area Hispano Institute for Advancement Inc. — a bilingual child development center in West Berkeley, has been weighing the potential health concerns of reopening her facility with the financial burden of keeping it closed for about four months now. Leyva-Cutler had plans to reopen her programs for in-person services earlier this month but pushed back the reopening date after two employees tested positive for the virus.

“Child care programs are a stabilizing influence because it’s what allows you to go to work, to go to school, to find a job, and for many families right now that lifeline is very shaky,” she said. “We’re doing everything we can to provide the vital services we’ve always known is crucial to our families, but this has put a whole new lens on how we do this work.”

State-ordered social distancing requirements have restricted most programs to just a portion of the number of children they served before the pandemic — adding to the financial bind that providers find themselves in and exacerbating a child care shortage that was present well before COVID-19.

“These conditions were not created by the pandemic, they were exacerbated by it,” Austin said. “This is a system in California and the country as a whole that has been underresourced and has not worked for a long time for children, their families and their workers, which in California is mostly women of color.”

For at-home day care providers that remain closed, the report found that threequarters of them were worried about putting their family’s health at risk.

Devora Pinsky, the owner of the at-home day care program Peek-a-Book in San Jose, decided not to take on any new families when she reopened after a two-month closure for that reason.

“I have a 21/2-year-old daughter at home, and I want to shelter in place, too,” she said. “I don’t want to expose myself or my family, either.”

Because of that decision, however, only one of Pinsky’s clients returned over the past two months, and because of the lack in demand, she has decided to temporarily close again at the end of the month.