Beshear: Child care centers can raise class sizes from 10 to 15 and resume ‘limited’ tours
Gov. Andy Beshear on Monday said he is offering Kentucky’s collapsing child care industry several relief measures, including a loosening of two state restrictions enacted in June to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
Under newly filed emergency regulations, the maximum class size at licensed child care providers will increase from 10 to 15 children, which should reduce staff costs. Also, parents who are interested in enrolling children at providers will begin to get “limited” opportunities to tour the facilities, which currently are closed to all outside visitors.
The number of state-regulated child care providers in Kentucky already was plummeting because of the erosion in public funds for low-income families, dropping from 4,460 in 2013 to 2,442 in 2019. But the coronavirus pandemic has added new expenses and scared away some families, reducing the count to only about 1,740 providers this summer.
Each time a daycare shuts down, dozens of working parents must scramble to find an available slot at one of the few providers remaining in their communities — if there are any. In much of rural Kentucky, quality child care is becoming especially rare. And with outside visitors banned, parents have been unable to tour new providers.
As of Monday, 168 child care centers had reported at least one COVID-19 infection among children or staff, often requiring entire classes to be quarantined, Beshear said. While children seldom fall ill, he said, there is a risk they will spread the virus to more vulnerable parents and grandparents once COVID-19 has entered their daycare.
“Balancing the societal needs is our challenge here,” Beshear said at his daily news update on the coronavirus. “Making sure that the kids are in a safe place, but also making sure that we are preventing as many deaths as we can.”
Beshear said he also hopes to create more daycare options by encouraging families who have started “learning pods” to supplement online schooling to apply for a state license and officially become child care providers.
There will be small sums — perhaps $2,500 per pod — and an accelerated registration process to encourage applicants, Health and Family Services Secretary Eric Friedlander said.
Some businesses on their own initiative have been advertising their available space for use as paid child care, often to supplement online schooling, Friedlander said. For example, Wild Thyme Cooking, a Lexington caterer, advertises $1,300 monthly slots to enroll children in a “learning center and cooking pod.”
If someone advertises or charges money for child care, they should be licensed with the state as a child care provider, Friedlander said.
“If they are operating illegally, we are going to ask them to close,” he said.
However, parents who run a learning pod without “money changing hands” are encouraged to seek licensing, but they don’t have to, the secretary said.
“We now understand the importance of child care — how important it is for parents to have a place so they can go back to work,” Friedlander said. “We know that capacity problems and child care deserts existed before the pandemic. And what COVID has done is exacerbated those very deserts.”
Child care providers are struggling with new expenses during the pandemic, including additional staff to cover the smaller classes, extra cleaning and — in some cases — the construction necessary to divide existing space into more classrooms.
At the same time, some parents have been wary about sending their kids back to daycare, and mandatory quarantines after positive COVID-19 tests send classes home for 14 days, slashing the revenue from tuition.
Kentucky child care providers have lobbied the state for looser rules since their reopening in June, warning that many of them will close without relief.
In a statewide survey of 642 child care providers that was presented to lawmakers last week, 43 percent said they expected to shut down in coming months if the state’s class size restrictions are not removed. More than 300 of the providers reported a weekly income loss, with an average weekly loss of $3,605 each.
“A lot of facilities, they’re running out of money,” Bradley Stevenson of the Child Care Council of Kentucky told the legislature’s Interim Joint Committee on Health, Welfare and Family Services. “Any money they had saved, they are literally running out of money.”
Lawmakers at the hearing told Stevenson they are sympathetic.
The collapse of the child care industry leaves working parents without a support network and young children without a place to thrive, said state Sen. Danny Carroll, R-Paducah, who oversees a child care center in his own district. It also makes it less likely that child abuse and neglect will be detected, Carroll said.
“We are getting to the point where the solution is causing more damage than the problem,” Carroll said.
This story was originally published August 31, 2020 at 6:00 PM.
