Daycare facilities struggle to stay open as COVID-19 offers challenges
Early childhood centers are reopening after the initial COVID-19 outbreak, which means strict safety measures for staff members and a place for parents working at home to leave their kids while they work.
The COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to heavy losses of child enrollment and revenue for daycare providers, according to ABC News. Now, as COVID-19 cases decrease in Florida and Palm Beach County moves to Phase 3, daycares are reopening with strict rules to keep staff and students safe.
“We asked an older teacher to stop kissing the baby’s cheeks,” said Aaliyah Fisher, an Assistant Teacher at La Petite Academy in Boynton Beach.
Fisher says her job since the reopening has been extra difficult for two reasons: Some teachers have contracted COVID and her hours have gotten longer. Fisher goes to work at 7 a.m., gets a break at 9 a.m., and then works by herself with four infants from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m..
Many daycare institutions have struggled to adjust to the restrictions of the pandemic. One example, says Lila Andrews, an Assistant Teacher at La Petite Academy, is the face masks that are now required for students and staff. While Andrews understands that the masks are for everyone’s safety, she says that the face coverings can be hard to breathe in since the masks are required all day long.
Andrews also says she tends to notice that the kids at La Petite are not as engaged with one another as before the pandemic. Her guess is that this has to do with the masks. She describes how the kids cannot read her emotions, so they do not know whether she is smiling or if she is upset which makes them not want to listen.
Andrews says that the children do not take her as seriously as before the pandemic and the resulting safety protocols, and she also mentions how they get sad when she has to tell them to spread out from their friends.
Just like Fisher, Andrews feels that added stress has been put on her shoulders. She highlights how it has become harder to do her job because of how extremely short-staffed La Petite Academy is.
Andrews said that a new pick up policy was implemented, but she feels the policy did not last as long as it should have. At the beginning of the pandemic, parents were not allowed to go inside and pick up their kids. Instead the teachers would bring the kids to them.
Fisher said that even before the pandemic, the teachers kept the students separated indoors. “The kids made a mess if they sit too close together,” Fisher said.
According to Fisher, La Petite already had a disinfecting regime in place before the pandemic. Now, the school has added the extra step of using a bleach and water spray to make sure everything gets clean.
Anthony Leonardo, a parent at Plantation KinderCare on West Sunrise Boulevard, says he feels safe putting his one-year-old son back in daycare. “Cases in Broward are much lower,” Leonardo said.
In addition to requiring masks at all times, KinderCare only allows one parent inside at a time to limit contact between customers.
Leonardo said that he was strongly affected by the shutdown of his local daycare. Since Leonardo works from home, he is not able to give his one-year-old the constant full attention that he requires. He stressed how important having a safe place to leave his son for the day.
He expressed how cardinal his child’s routine is. Leonardo said that the low attention he would be able to pay to his son while working would have been disruptive, which is why daycare was a better alternative.
Leonardo described that the children are too young to comprehend what exactly is going on at the moment. The older children may have a little bit of a clue what is happening, but, Leonardo said, “they are just doing what their parents are doing.”
Leonardo would describe the events of the COVID outbreak as “frustrating.” For daycares across the state and country, that word may not even begin to sum up the struggles they have faced.
