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The frustration is so thick in Aleks Fentress’ voice, it seems to be dripping through the phone as she describes her family’s options this fall.
A mother of three, Fentress has been scrambling to figure out what to do with her kids since the announcement that Chesapeake would be starting school fully virtual.
In the end, she said she has no good choices. She’s anxious about her kids getting services — two of her children have special needs — and about the impact on their finances.
Fentress and her police officer husband made do while schools were closed in the spring. Neither can work from home, so a nanny came in some days while her in-laws looked after the kids on others.
But now, with education set to resume through a computer screen, she wants to ensure her kids — ages 8, 5 and 2 — get the direction, help and care they need full-time.
Fentress has explored several options. Day care would cost at least $2,000 a month. Private schools, a little more.
Her youngest has a condition in which his motor skills struggle to keep up with his brain, rendering him physically unable to speak. Typically, he’d be in line for preschool programs through the public schools. Now she’s planning for private speech therapy — close to $300 a week. That cost will get lumped on top of whatever they spend for daily care.
“I’m literally picking which one of my kids’ issues to put to the side,” she said. “How do you make priority here?”
Fentress said basically every dime she makes from her job as a behavioral therapist for children with autism will end up going to child care. That leaves them with a policeman’s salary to cover everything else for a family of five.
“I will find a way, because that’s my job as a parent,” she said. “It’s heartbreaking.”
Thousands of families across Hampton Roads and the state will be facing the same tough choices this fall, as schools restart virtually in an effort to fight the spread of COVID-19.
The coronavirus pandemic has tipped an already-fragile child care system into crisis territory.
With mass closure of day cares for younger kids — and virtual learning meaning older ones won’t be in school — parents have been left reeling. There’s been a sharp increase in competition for the slots that remain.
Before the pandemic, Virginia had just over 6,000 licensed child care providers, with space for about 392,000 kids.
By Aug. 10, more than a third of those providers — nearly 2,200 — had closed, eliminating 168,000 slots for kids, the state Department of Social Services said. That was almost 43% of the seats available pre-pandemic.
The fallout: Some parents can’t find child care at all. Some can’t afford it when they do. Some have had to quit jobs to look after their kids. And with so few options available, some are opening their own ad hoc day cares in their homes.
Fentress’ frustration and desperation has become the default for many, and some are critical of the seeming lack of consideration for child care in the schools’ reopening decisions.
“‘You figure it out’ is what they tell parents,” Fentress said. “Nobody is saying how, other than spend $3,000 for multiple kids to go to day care and hope the day cares do it.”
A fragile system cracks
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Advocates say the child care system already was broken before the pandemic.
It’s pricey for parents, even though pay for workers is low and margins for operators are thin, and competition already was stiff to find a spot in a good program.
“Even for middle and upper income folks, child care is expensive and hard to find,” said Kathy Glazer, the president of the Virginia Early Childhood Foundation. “For families who can’t afford the high cost, it’s a real bind for them. The public subsidies for low-income families ... are not generous. They don’t cover the full cost and only a fraction of eligible families.”
In Virginia, the average cost of a year of infant care at a daycare center is more than $14,500, and care for a 4-year-old is around $11,500, according to Child Care Aware of America. A study by the Economic Policy institute found a year of child care in Virginia is about as expensive as a year of college or housing — two other areas with their own affordability crises.
But pandemic-related closures and public health mandates limiting numbers in those that remain open have further cut the available spots for kids.
Early in the pandemic, when Gov. Ralph Northam announced schools would close, officials pleaded for day cares to stay open. They said that with enhanced health guidelines, programs could safely stay open to look after kids of those critical to keep the country running — medical professionals, first responders, supply chain workers.
But health concerns and financial pressures ― from increased costs due to new cleaning requirements and lost income from being able to care for fewer children in a given space — led many to close their doors. In particular, larger day care centers with more overhead struggled.
“It’s taking something that’s already really squeezed and turning the vise even tighter,” Glazer said. Plenty closed for health reasons, she said, noting that many adults working in child care are older. “Many also realized the math just wasn’t going to work.”
While some grants and other money were doled out via federal stimulus for child care, it was hardly enough, Glazer said. Still, some 80% of home-based providers continued to operate throughout the spring and summer.
Though spots were scarce to start with, that initial wave of closures didn’t overwhelm the child care system, according to Sarah Vaughn of Child Care Aware of Virginia, which helps connect parents in need of child care with available programs.
“It kind of balanced out, with parents who were working from home and not really needing care. That’s the silver lining, at least in the beginning, where we didn’t see a huge need that was unmet,” Vaughn said.
But that’s shifted as more businesses are reopening, more parents are expected to return to work and schools are restarting virtually.
Some of those centers that closed are slowly reopening, but many are gone for good, taking significant capacity with them.
“We’ve heard from parents who say there’s nothing open in my area,” Vaughn said.
And filling the looming gap is not going to be easy. Glazer said the hope is that small, in-home care centers will open to help ease the pain. Parents are gravitating toward those programs because they view them as a safer environment with fewer children amid the pandemic.
“It’s hard to prop those things up overnight, and working with regulatory agencies, but they’re happening,” she said. “The reality is we need all hands on deck. There aren’t enough slots in safe, quality, affordable child care right now.”
Filling the gap
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Imani Chapman always wanted to open her own day care. She just didn’t expect to do it this quickly.
Chapman has spent nearly six years working in a day care center and is now on maternity leave, with a 2-month-old baby.
Her boyfriend has a 4-year-old, and she has a brother getting ready for fifth grade. Her boyfriend’s son needed additional help and her little brother didn’t have anywhere to go. The boy’s mother asked Chapman if she would be able to watch him and help him with his virtual learning.
So Chapman decided she’d extend her maternity leave for at least the first nine weeks of the school year — that’s when Chesapeake says they’ll reassess the possibility of in-person learning.
She’ll be looking after her infant daughter, her boyfriend’s son, her kid brother and is willing to take on another couple of children from outside the family.
Since she posted her plans on Facebook a few weeks ago, Chapman said she’s gotten calls every day from parents needing child care. They tell her they can’t find anyone, or can’t afford established day cares.
Chapman said she’s made it a point to charge less than centers in the area, because she knows so many working families can’t afford it.
At the same time, Chapman is planning to attend online courses through Tidewater Community College for a business and marketing degree. She planned to finish in the spring and open her own full day care center next summer.
“This is what I’ve wanted to do for my entire life,” she said.
But the demand has been so overwhelming, Chapman said she may seek a license and a building within the next few weeks so she can take on even more kids.
Others are having to give up their dream jobs, at least temporarily.
Tonya Rivers, a preschool teacher at Bayside Presbyterian in Virginia Beach, said she had to quit the job she loved “in order to deal with the volatile nature of the school year.”
Rivers has two children, ages 6 and 8, and said she wasn’t comfortable putting them in child care where they could be exposed to the coronavirus through kids and adults from other households.
She’ll be staying home to care for them and help them with virtual learning. Even though she’s had to give up her beloved job, Rivers said she’s lucky to even be in a position to do that.
“My husband works, we have to tighten our financial belts some, but he’s able to support the family so I can be home with the kids, and I know a lot of families aren’t about to do that.”
Rivers is sharply critical of the Virginia Beach Public Schools reopening plan, which leaves working parents with few options and a lot of unknowns. The plan was the subject of hours of debate at the most recent school board meeting, but ultimately went unchanged.
She’s not the only one who takes issue with the position parents are in because school buildings will be closed.
Glazer, the Virginia Early Childhood Foundation president, said she doesn’t want to be too critical of the schools, given the unprecedented challenges they face, but said she wished there had been more community inclusion in that decision-making process to highlight the dominoes that would fall as a result.
“I don’t know that there was complete recognition of the profound downstream impact on working families, on vulnerable children, on child care providers, employers. It’s chaotic, trying to figure out what you’re going to do now,” she said.
At least some districts seem to be recognizing the issue. At a Norfolk School Board meeting last week, members asked Superintendent Sharon Byrdsong how they could lobby the city for help with the school year.
Her No. 1 answer: reopen rec centers for child care. Some have reopened for general recreation but the child care programs many offered before- and after-school haven’t. School officials are meeting with city staff next week to discuss options, NPS spokeswoman Madeline Curott said
In the short term, people like Chapman are helping alleviate some issues. And other, larger providers are also expanding programs to provide care during the first nine weeks of school. The YMCA of South Hampton Roads, one of the largest providers in the region, has set up a new full-day e-learning program for school-aged children. Alongside other programs like Champions and the Boys and Girls Club, the YMCA will also be helping to stand up full-day day care in several Norfolk Public Schools buildings.
Long term, Glazer said things need to change.
“We need to rebuild the system, but we don’t want to rebuild the same broken system we had before, so we’re looking at this disruption as a way to reimagine early childhood education,” Glazer said.
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The Virginia Early Childhood Foundation set up a task force in March that is expected to publicly release recommendations in October to remake the child care system in a way that works for families.
The pandemic has made the challenges of child care painfully obvious to many who were unaware, Glazer said.
“People are hurting over this. Employers who want to get their workers back and who are calling me saying, ‘Child care is a big problem,’” Glazer said. “Child care is just part of a functioning society and we need to fix it.”
But those are big-picture future reforms. For parents like Fentress, the problems and frustrations are happening in real time.
“It was easy for it to be an invisible problem. And now it’s visible,” Glazer said. “Hopefully change is coming.”
Staff writer Sara Gregory contributed to this report.
Ryan Murphy, 757-739-8582, ryan.murphy@pilotonline.com