Child Care Providers Fight To Stay Open

As centers close in droves nationwide, New Haven childcare providers are staying alive during the Covid-19 pandemic with a mixture of grit, commitment, government assistance — and hope for a new round of federal aid.

Both the threats to childcare centers’ survival, and the difference aid can make, were on display during visits to New Haven centers that have managed to keep the lights on and children of essential workers, among others, cared for.

The stakes were also highlighted in a recent press call involving local providers, state officials, and U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal and U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro.

They spoke of how only 18 percent of child care programs across the country are expected to survive through to June of 2021, according to a new study by the National Association for the Education of Young Children.

“The numbers are absolutely chilling,” Blumenthal said at the press conference (shown in above video), calling the issue a ​“national disgrace and scandal.”

He then joined four established child-care providers, among other community leaders and advocates, in voicing support for U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro’s Child Care is Essential Act. The bill would appropriate $50 billion for the Child Care Stabilization Fund to award grants to providers.

This money would help cover operating expenses by giving providers the ability to pay their staff, provide tuition and copayment relief for working families, and promote health and safety. DeLauro also urged that the grants be distributed equitably and prioritize providers who support underserved communities.

Merrill Gay, executive director of the CT Early Childhood Alliance, said the bill would allot $330 million to Connecticut. That represents less than half a year of revenue for the child care industry.

On the other hand, the HEROES Act, the House’s second proposed stimulus bill which has yet to pass the Senate, promises only $7 billion to the industry nationally. 

Georgia Goldburn, executive director of the child care center Hope for New Haven and a community-wide organizer of childcare providers, said that she believes action will be taken. However, she fears that whatever action is taken will not be enough.

“Fifty billion is a safety net,” she asserted. ​“It’s a beginning. Our old economy will not even have recovered by the time those six months are over.”

The looming effects of the pandemic are hard to deal with, but the reality is that the child care industry has long been, in Goldburn’s words, ​“fundamentally broken.” Experienced child care providers describe mass closures as unprecedented … and predictable.

“We were always teetering on the edge. Covid pushed us off the cliff,” said Goldburn. She noted that during the pandemic providers have been incentivized to lay off staff because many of them would make more money on unemployment than they would by actively working.

Essential Work

If the current moment is exposing the ways in which the industry is grossly overlooked, it is doing so by simultaneously highlighting the essential nature of child care.

The Connecticut child care industry created 26,069 jobs and $1.39 billion in revenue in 2016. Those statistics do not take into account the fact that providers allow parents, especially essential workers, to go to their jobs and further contribute to the economy.

That said, only 47 percent of the state’s early child care programs are currently open. Those 1,641 programs are on average operating at only 41 percent of their capacity.

Eighteen programs in Connecticut have permanently shut down, two of which were located in New Haven: The United Community Nursery School and Cathy’s Club House, the latter of which also has a location in East Haven that plans to reopen in August.

Just Keep Swimming

Tennille Smalls is the founder and owner of one family child care home that has stayed open throughout the pandemic. Her business, Gentle Hands, operates out of her house on Revere Street in New Haven.

On April 1, she had signed the lease on the newly vacated Cathy’s Club House space to expand her business.

She had not heard that 82 percent of programs were expected to close in the next year until she attended last week’s press conference as a speaker.

“A friend suggested I watch Finding Nemo to calm down,” she recalled after the meeting. ​“I kept saying to myself, ​‘Just keep swimming, Tennille. Just keep swimming!’”

Smalls is certainly practiced in perseverance.

In 2015, Smalls was experiencing burnout after years of working two jobs as a family advocate, studying to complete her master’s degree, and raising three children (ages 10, 15, and 20) as a single mother. She also found herself facing foreclosure on her home.

One night, Smalls had a dream in which she saw two colorless palms reaching out to her, she recalled. The next day, she told her kids she was going to start a child care program called ​“Gentle Hands.”

With the last $2,000 she had in her bank account, Smalls hired a contractor to uncover and polish the hardwood floors in her home.

The contractor instructed her to leave the house for 24 hours while the fumes cleared out. With no place to go and her children unaware that she could not afford a hotel room for the night, Smalls grabbed a can of Febreze and told her children they’d be camping out in the kitchen.

“I have sacrificed everything in order to share my home with families in dire need,” Smalls remarked after recalling those memories.

Working out of her house during the pandemic poses unique hardships. When she made the decision to keep her doors open, she also chose to send her youngest child, who is fifteen years old, to live with his cousins in order to lower his risk of exposure.

Smalls works with the kids Monday through Friday for 12 hours each day: from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. With new cleaning protocols in place, Smalls also spends about two hours cleaning every evening, meaning the day unofficially ends at 8 p.m.

Her expansive hours are all in line with her efforts to accommodate the diverse schedules of every parent she serves. She and her assistant program director, Marthina Goncalves, are currently licensed to take care of six children, two of whose parents are essential workers.

In the earliest stages of planning her business, Smalls reached out to All Our Kin, a nonprofit that supports child care providers who work out of residential properties. With their help and guidance, she quickly became a licensed provider.

In February of this year, Smalls was selected as the first child care provider from Connecticut to serve on All Our Kin’s board of leaders.

Now she is the CEO of a business she created, an educator, and an advocate for parents and children within New Haven.

Throughout the past few months, Smalls has relied on funding from a variety of sources in order to sustain her business. She raved about the work of Beth Bye, the commissioner of the Connecticut Office of Early Childhood, who launched the CTCARES for Child Care Program. Among other things, the initiative offered $200 in funding per week for licensed family child care homes serving children of essential workers. Smalls also noted that all compensation for essential workers indirectly supported her work, as those funds allow frontline parents to pay for child care.

The most important source of financial and emotional support that Smalls said she has received has come from Cercle, a nonprofit network founded by Georgia Goldburn herself.

“There have been days when I just want to throw in the towel, and Georgia gets me out of that place,” Smalls said. ​“She’s my icon.”

Providing Hope

A child care provider herself with a background in teaching, Goldburn (pictured) is also a nationally recognized advocate for early childhood education as a tool for social justice.

In 2015 in response to data regarding implicit bias in schools and disproportionate representation of children of color in disciplinary programming, Goldburn co-founded Cercle, a network for providers of color throughout New Haven.

The organization provides multiple crucial services, including an apprenticeship program. It also pools resources to distribute across its community of about 20 child care providers.

As Goldburn said during the press conference, providers of color largely serve parents and children of color. To support providers of color is to ensure greater care, education, and wealth for entire communities of color.

“The whole industry is starved for resources, so you know systems of color are at a greater disadvantage,” Goldburn remarked.

Child care subsidies make up 40 percent of the revenue for Goldburn’s own nonprofit child care center on Olive Street. Goldburn, like Smalls, expressed gratitude for the work of Gov. Ned Lamont and Commissioner Bye. Connecticut leaders took measures to ensure that all subsidies would stay stable through June regardless of attendance.

Through Cercle, Goldburn helped local providers obtain $250,000 in federal Paycheck Protection Program funding to distribute across their network. For context, only 479 programs, around 30 percent of all the programs currently operating in Connecticut, received PPP funding up to $150,000. Nationally, 75 percent of programs did not get any PPP funding at all.

Goldburn has used some of this money to supply her collaborators with necessary cleaning products: an entire room in her center is full of paper towels. Smalls said that she had yet to run out of her first box of Cercle materials, including gloves, masks, wipes, and toilet paper, by the time a second box had been delivered at the door.

However, it is now July, and Golburn’s business is only operating at about 50 percent compared to usual. During the summer, she typically serves 87 children. There are currently 45 children in her care, and half of their parents are essential workers.

Goldburn recalled a recent situation in which a mother called the school and pleaded ​“desperately” for child support.

The best Goldburn said she could do was ​“loan” the parent a space until more providers reopened. What available space she has still belongs to families who are enrolled at the daycare though they have been keeping their children at home. Many of those families plan to return in August.

Smalls described Goldburn’s center, Hope for New Haven, as similar to Disney Land. The center originally lived, from 2001 to 2005, in the basement of Christ Presbyterian Church on Whitney. Its most recent previous home was in the 1 Long Wharf office building. Now the full-day program has its own building with eight shiny classrooms, an impressive playground, and advanced safety equipment, like thermal temperature checkers and a sanitizing machine.

Goldburn has clearly made the most out of minimal resources.

The philosophy of the center was inspired by Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount: to provide ​“justice for the vulnerable” through recognizing their ​“spiritual, physical, and economic needs.”

“The idea behind the name of the center is that we can’t fix New Haven, but we can at least cast a vision of hope. And hope is most embodied in our children,” said Goldburn.

Like Smalls, Hope has stayed open throughout the entirety of the pandemic (with the exception of two weeks in April, when cases were projected to surge). They are currently working out of four of their eight classrooms. While additional space could help with social distancing, Goldburn said, the intense amount of cleaning required within each classroom means an additional staff person must be hired within each used space. The center does not have the budget to afford that.

The center’s heightened focus on strict cleaning is one reason Goldburn said everyone at the center has so far remained Covid-free.

“People should learn a lesson from child care programs,” Goldburn said. ​“We already clean all the time; we were prepared for something like this. Kids are very efficient spreaders. But we’ve been operating throughout the height of the pandemic and so far have kept everyone safe from the virus.”

She also said she could not take all the credit. ​“God covered us,” she said.

The Brink of Disaster

The funding crisis is also being felt in wealthier communities around Connecticut. Julie Clark (pictured), the founder of Creative Arts Studio Preschool and Child Care Center in Woodbury, framed the problem of whether or not to close down her center as a catch-22. CAST, which is private, tuition-based, and receives zero subsidies, made the decision to close in March after only seven children showed up to the center one morning. Her center’s usual capacity is 120 children. And 14 teachers expecting pay checks also came into work that day.

“The governor said, ​‘Stay home,’ and at the same time he told us to ​‘stay open.’ Parents listened to the governor and started keeping their children at home.”

She also noted that Woodbury does not have as many essential workers and families that depend on child care as do cities like New Haven. More families had the luxury of staying home.

Just the same, Clark said her business, alongside the rest of the child care industry, has ​“always been on the brink of disaster.”

“I charge parents just enough to pay my payroll, my mortgage, utilities, and to get some supplies. At the end of the month, I don’t have much left over.”

Clark, whose background is in visual arts and music, moved from Manhattan to Connecticut in the ​‘80s with her ex-husband and two small children. In 1987, when she suddenly found herself to be a single mother with few options for work, Clark and a close friend, who had a master’s in special education, started taking care of children. They began by educating five children within her home, but quickly became licensed and moved the business into a separate building. This year, 200 children were enrolled at her center.

Despite the massive loss of business, Clark plans to reopen in August and is hopeful that her business will be able to survive next year.

“I’m lucky,” she said. ​“I’ve been in business a long time, I have an established relationship with the bank and with an accountant. I have a reputation. Woodbury is wealthy; people have the income to afford a good childhood education.”

They Need to Push Each Other!

“Even if you care nothing for children, even if you are so unhearted and unhumanitarian that you have non feeling about the importance of early childhood education or care, think about the economic impact.,” Sen. Blumenthal (pictured), said during the press conference.

The economic loss that is accompanying the collapse of early childhood programming is definite, but the role that quality child care plays in the cognitive development of children should be recognized as equally essential in its own right.

Goldburn described early child care as her ​“strategy in derailing the school to prison pipeline.”

“So much more is known about brain architecture than ever before: 90% of the brain develops by age five,” said Goldburn. ​“We are closing the achievement gap because of our work with children between zero and five.”

At Thursday’s meeting she also said the following: ​“I would contend that black lives cannot just matter when it’s about to be snuffed out at the hands of a police officer. The sentiment and principle of the Black Lives Matter movement has to be enshrined and operationalized in a high quality early care system so that we can change the trajectory of those black and brown boys and men.”

She further asserted that child care providers are disproportionately women, specifically women of color. ​“It’s very easy to ignore the system because of the makeup of the system,” she said.

Providers like Smalls and Goldburn and their staff are willing to sacrifice their own safety in order to provide secure spaces for the kids. While the aim of maximizing health, safety, financial solvency, and quality right now is, according to Goldburn, ​“unworkable,” Smalls and Golburn have struck similar balances.

Both agree that maintaining routines in the children’s lives is a priority. Goldburn specified that consistency is especially crucial for children experiencing trauma. ​“And by the way, we are all experiencing trauma right now,” she noted.

New cleaning schedules, constant hand washing, temperature checks, and new tactics for minimizing cross-contamination and limiting parental entry indoors make it possible for children to go maskless and cuddle with their teachers.

“This is their space. This is their world,” Smalls said of her enrolled kids. ​“They have no worries when they’re here. Any anxiety they pick up from their families disappears when they walk through the door.”

“Every city official should consistently put child care and children on top of their agendas,” Smalls added. ​“The way our current system works, it’s almost as though children don’t exist until they enter kindergarten.”

Julie Clark noted that children who are being taken out of their programs due to shut downs and parental concerns are losing out on important opportunities for socialization.

“Small children need to play with each other; it’s how they learn to speak. They don’t want to talk to you, they want to talk to their friends,” she said. ​“It’s just impossible to social distance with three years olds. They need to hug and push each other… in order to learn that they shouldn’t push each other. They’ll catch up on other things they’ve missed, but they’ve now missed out on months of social interaction.”

All the providers agreed that in order to cause real change in the industry, the way the public perceives early child care must change.

“We’re seen as glorified babysitters,” remarked Clark. ​“We’re educators and business owners,” she asserted. ​“We should be paid what we’re worth.”

Connecticut and the country should be coming to terms with the fact that child care providers and workers are worth a lot.

At the press conference, DeLauro (pictured) spoke to the supreme significance of child care, stating that ​“this is the most important crisis that we have and that we should be acting on.”

“Essential workers are women; child care workers are women. We’ve heard from Merrill, from Blumenthal. .. but the stories being told are by women.”

“We need to trust the women who are dealing with this issue every single day,” she said.

DeLauro will speak on the floor of the house within the next two weeks regarding the Child Care is Essential Act.

In the meantime, she demanded that everyone ​“get on the phone and email. You have to overwhelm them [the Senate] in the same way that the hedge fund managers do, the airline industry does, and that the restaurant association does.”

“Nothing focuses the mind like a death sentence,” she said grimly.

Tennille Smalls offered an acronym to guide all those fighting for change. ​“TFAR!” she exclaimed. ​“Your thoughts drive your feelings, your feelings lead to actions, and your actions cause results.”

As devastating as the new numbers are, Smalls also offered another way of considering the issue: ​“There is more meaning and success in the resiliency of working families than there ever could be in the numbers.”