Tricia Cruz, a certified medical assistant, refilled prescriptions from home with her toddler until her husband got off his 2am shift with UPS. Then, after a full day’s work, he bore the brunt of child care responsibilities as she looked after patients amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The “stressful” and “tiresome” cycle took a toll, all because Sprouting Star Children’s Academy in Pflugerville, Texas, temporarily shuttered a pre-school classroom in response to another parent catching Covid-19. “I don’t think they should have closed because that’s not really a direct contact with somebody, you know, that has Covid,” Cruz said.
But the situation still raised serious concerns: a sick adult who had shown symptoms for days sent their child in anyway, exploiting an oversight in Sprouting Star’s protections against the deadly virus.
“That was a little unsettling, I have to say,” said John Russo, the daycare’s president. “If we can’t trust people to be prudent with their behaviors, it could potentially expose the rest of us.”
In Texas, 752 children and 1,577 staff members at more than 1,400 childcare facilities have tested positive for Covid-19 so far, according to the state’s Health and Human Services Commission. Following an early and abrupt end to lockdown months ago, Texas as a whole has spun out of control; last week, it reported more than 10,000 new infections and a hundred fatalities every day for four consecutive days.
But as long as businesses remain open, working parents still need somewhere for their kids to go while they’re on the clock. Child care centers, in turn, rely on revenue from those families to stay afloat.
It’s a self-sustaining loop, overseen and regulated by state agencies that, according to a 2018 analysis by the Bipartisan Policy Center, run the least integrated early care and education programs in the country.
“That lack of coordination really revealed itself during this crisis,” said Cathy McHorse, vice president of Success by 6 at the United Way for Greater Austin.
Once the pandemic reached the United States, Texas’ government rallied to provide resources for child care facilities and families. But those uncharacteristically promising efforts quickly devolved soon after the state began relaxing its stay-at-home measures in early May, McHorse explained.
Emergency rules around screening and other precautions at child care facilities were repealed, then reinstated and expanded in a flurry of frenetic decisions. Costly “minimum standard health protocols” published by the governor’s office were actually just “recommended guidelines”, officials later clarified, though some of those suggestions have been incorporated into the emergency rules that are enforceable. And advice from local, state and federal sources has been “conflicting”, “confusing” and “inadequate”, child care administrators told the Guardian, a trend that continues even as the state’s Covid-19 troubles creep toward a breaking point.
“I can’t get any guidance that there is a level where they would tell us it was unsafe to operate,” said Russo.
A spokesperson for the Texas Health and Human Services Commission said its “top priority remains the health and safety of all staff and children”.
McHorse, however, shuddered in June when she heard an official from the state’s child care licensing body tell providers they should “make the decision that’s in the best interest of your business”. By that point, Texas’ governor Greg Abbott had already greenlit the unphased reopening of child care services to all kids, a dramatic and unexpected shift away from only serving essential workers’ children and those in protective daycare.
“The message on a federal level – and a state level here in Texas – has been almost entirely around reopening businesses and the economy,” said Jason Gindele, executive director of Mainspring Schools in Austin. “Ultimately, every child care provider, every business, has to weigh what’s important to them.”
Back in May, survey respondents who were primarily owners, directors and CEOs from licensed childcare centers and family homes in Austin or its suburbs ranked “concerns about health and safety” as their number one barrier to reopening. But staying closed has consequences as well.
During early childhood education, “development happens at a pace that far exceeds any other age”, said Gindele. Meanwhile, blue-collar families who have already been clobbered by the economic fallout from Covid-19 desperately need access to safe and reliable child care to get their finances and careers back on track.
“We have a labor market that values long hours and uninterrupted careers,” said Ayşegül Şahin, the Richard J. Gonzalez regents chair in economics at the University of Texas at Austin. “We all know how this works.”
More than 12,200 Texas child care operations were open last week; others, such as Mainspring, remain closed for the time being. Hope Bell, an assistant teacher at Mainspring, knows it’s not the same for kids to interact with her over the computer. But going back to school right now wouldn’t be the same, either, she said, and “it just seems hard to know with certainty that we’re not going to be doing harm if we open”.
The prevailing narrative around Covid-19 is that young people fare better than the old or sick, but children can still suffer or even die after contracting the illness, though it is rare. In Texas’ Nueces county, where 85 kids under the age of two have already been diagnosed with the virus, a six-week-old baby who tested positive died earlier this month.
At Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, some kids are asymptomatic carriers. Others are mildly or moderately ill, though “we’ve had some very sick children under our care in the last few weeks”, said Lara Shekerdemian, chief of critical care. Dire cases have required “very advanced levels of intensive care support”, and the hospital has seen a “steady stream” of patients with multisystem inflammatory syndrome, a life-threatening condition associated with Covid-19, for months.
“I’m not pretending for a moment that kids are as susceptible as adults,” said Shekerdemian. “But I don’t think there is a single category or age of child that is not at risk.”
As Texas faces a barrage of new infections, child care facilities are juggling erratic closures, low enrollment, new homeschooling responsibilities, restrictive safety measures and parents with wildly different perspectives on the virus.
“Child care centers have had to rise to the occasion. And we have done it, and we have done it well,” said Cynthia Pearson, president and CEO of Day Nursery of Abilene. “I think frankly, without a lot of appreciation.”
The essential industry has been walloped by Covid-19; when the University of Houston recently surveyed 94 child care operations in the Austin area, three in 10 responded that they or their staff had been furloughed, and 15% said there had been layoffs.
Federal, state and local assistance have provided some financial cushion, but child care facilities in Texas are still struggling. LaQuetha Ford, director of First English Lutheran Child Development Center in Austin, anticipates a lot of facilities will close because of the current emergency, she said.
Months ago, a Center for American Progress analysis estimated that Texas could lose more than half of its child care supply “without adequate federal support” during the pandemic.
“When people do want to go back to more group-based care,” McHorse warned, “it’s not gonna exist.”