Kentucky’s child care system was in decline. Faced with COVID-19, it’s collapsing.
When the kids left Central Baptist Church Childcare Center on Friday, the doors closed for a long, indefinite period — at least through next spring — after 50 years of service.
The day care survived only four weeks after reopening from the March 20 shutdown ordered by Gov. Andy Beshear to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus.
Several problems made it impossible to stay open without hemorrhaging money, including the cost of new health mandates imposed by the state, such as smaller classes, additional staff and continual cleaning. Just as expenses rose, enrollment plunged. Fearing the virus, many parents kept their children home. There were 82 children at the center in March but just 54 by the end.
“It’s been a mix of things that kept us down and not let us get back to our full potential. But it all comes back to COVID,” said Jessica Osborne, Central Baptist’s director.
Across Kentucky, a patchwork child care system that has been in decline for years because of inadequate funding is now collapsing in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The number of state-regulated child care providers in Kentucky steadily fell from 4,460 in 2013 to 2,442 in 2019, leaving rural families in particular with few options, according to a recent analysis by The Prichard Committee, a Lexington-based nonprofit that lobbies for better education in Kentucky.
This summer, following a three-month shutdown and a rocky reopening period, only 1,743 state-regulated child care providers remain, according to the Kentucky Division of Child Care.
Of those remaining licensed or certified providers, 328 — one in five — are classified by the state as “temporarily closed” because they have not reopened. Many places are expected to go permanently dark in coming months.
Each time a daycare closes, dozens of families scramble to find a replacement among the few choices left. Waiting lists can stretch for months.
Otherwise, parents must somehow perform their jobs while caring for young children at home. Mothers usually shoulder most of that burden, said Cindy McGaha, professor of child development at Berea College.
“It’s very, very sad. We live in a country where the responsibility of child-rearing most frequently falls on women, so when that has to happen in the home, when outside care is not available, women have to put their careers on hold,” McGaha said.
That’s what happened in Lexington with Lillian Sims, who was working to finish her Ph.D. in higher education at the University of Kentucky.
It took Sims two years to get a full-time day care slot for her daughter, now 3. Unfortunately, that slot was at the now-shuttered Central Baptist.
With a second child on the way, Sims and her husband debated last week if they should join other Central Baptist parents in the mad rush for a new day care. Ultimately, they decided against it. Instead, she will quit her studies for at least a year and stay home with their children.
“Obviously, I would prefer to have child care and finish my degree sooner and go full-time in the workforce,” Sims said.
“But we knew there was nothing guaranteed,” she said. “So the sacrifice for now is going to be my professional life. It just wasn’t worth the stress of applying to all these other places where, right now, you can’t tour them, you can’t meet the teachers, so you have no idea what you’re putting your kid into.”
‘Not confident at all’
Another Lexington mother, Glendover Elementary School teacher Nicki Koch, is about to start her two children at their third day care in six months.
The first, Our House at the Pinnacle, never reopened after the shutdown. The second was Central Baptist, which closed this week. After “a scramble,” she found space at Crestwood Childcare Center, where her kids finally can get some much-needed stability in their lives — fingers crossed.
“The hard part for us in selecting a new day care is that, because of the new COVID rules, we can’t go inside the buildings,” said Koch, whose children are 5 and 19 months.
“So we can’t take a tour of the facilities,” she said. “We can’t meet the staff. I’m sure it’s going to be fine, but in the morning, I’m sending my kids into this building where I’m trusting blindly that the people will love my children and take care of them. You know, that’s tough.”
Koch is far from alone in her child care worries.
In June, when Kentucky day cares were allowed to reopen, The Prichard Committee and several other groups surveyed more than 1,500 families across the state.
More than one in four families reported a struggle to find child care in their communities. One in three said they worried whether it was safe to send their children back to day care for fear of having them exposed to COVID-19.
Indeed, Beshear this week reported that 110 Kentucky child care centers have had at least one known case of the coronavirus, involving a total of 84 staff members and 75 children. Each time the virus is detected in a class, the local health department is notified. The children in those classes, as well as their families, are told to quarantine in their homes for 14 days. Even if nobody else gets sick, the quarantine can be hugely disruptive for working parents.
Faith Lutheran Learning Center in Lexington has delayed its reopening until Aug. 24, more than two months after the state approved it, in large part because its managers wanted to see how others were adapting to the threat of the coronavirus.
Following the new state mandates, Faith Lutheran is requiring masks and health screening for its staff; capping its class size at 10 to contain a possible outbreak; assigning individual teachers to stay with the same class throughout the day to reduce contamination between rooms; ending field trips; limiting what children can bring in with them to make it easier to repeatedly sanitize; and barring parents and other visitors, such as music and dance instructors.
Despite these precautions, Faith Lutheran assistant director Lindsay Scott fears that COVID-19 is lying in wait.
“I’m not confident at all,” Scott said. “But I feel like we need to do our best to try for the community.”
“There are parents that need to go back to work, and the kids need to have their teachers and their structure and their education back,” she said. “So we’re hoping that it works out, but we — well, I say ‘we,’ but I’m definitely very nervous about it. Not just a mandated shutdown but about the virus taking over. I don’t want our teachers and our kids and our families getting sick. It’s a lot of pressure to know that it might come from our school.”
No child care, no economy
Child care advocates are urging Congress to provide $50 billion in federal aid to keep the industry alive through the COVID-19 pandemic. Kentucky day cares would get nearly $1 billion, said Brigitte Blom Ramsey, executive director of The Prichard Committee.
“If this money doesn’t come, then we’re going to see even more centers closing, and there is going to be a very serious problem as parents try to go back to work,” Ramsey said. “Without safe and adequate child care, it will be difficult for economies — nationally and at the state level — to open back up.”
As of this week, the House Democratic pandemic relief plan offers that $50 billion, but the Senate Republican plan includes only $15 billion in mixed grant funding. Congress has been unable to reach a compromise on this and other related issues, including jobless benefits and aid to schools and state and local governments.
On a much smaller scale, the CARES Act that Congress passed in March did allow Kentucky to disperse $67 million in assistance to the state’s day cares.
But advocates say the bigger — and mostly ignored — problem is that private child care was becoming unsustainable even before COVID-19 kicked the legs out from under it.
Costing more than $10,000 a year per child in some instances, day care is paid for by young parents at the start of their careers, with only shrinking public subsidies to make it available to poor families. Unlike the K-12 schools, which are supported by taxpayers, day cares for children up to age 5 are left to fend for themselves, advocates say.
“It is absolutely a fragile eco-system,” Ramsey said. “The business model for child care simply does not work when you have so many poor families who depend on state subsidies, and the subsidy either does not come through or it is too low to allow a child care provider to maintain any real level of quality.”
McGaha, the Berea College professor, said day care costs also are subsidized by employees’ low pay. Kentucky child care workers earn a mean hourly wage of $11.42, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Preschool teachers, who have more training, earn a mean hourly wage of $16.66.
Not enough money flows into child care given its vital role in society, McGaha said.
“With most centers, it’s always been a struggle to break even, let alone make a profit,” she said.
“So when we start doing things like restricting the number of children that we can care for and the number of adults that can be with the children during the day, that increases the costs dramatically,” she said. “So you’ve got these centers that always struggled, and now they’re in the red and they just cannot provide that care. They cannot stay open any longer.”
This story was originally published August 7, 2020 at 2:19 PM.
