Eight weeks into the shutdown, Celina Gomes surveyed the empty child care she runs from an in-law unit in Daly City.
The blocks were neatly stacked, the stuffed animals and Mr. Potato Head doll sat untouched. Outside, a breeze swept the silent patio where she’d served minestrone soup or macaroni and cheese for lunch.
With her stomach in knots, Gomes sent a text message to a close friend.
“I don’t know if I’m ever going to reopen,” she wrote.
Around the Bay Area, scores of home day care centers and preschools are facing the same anguished decision. In San Francisco alone, more than 800 facilities remain closed out of 1,000 that operated before the shelter-in-place orders. Many may shut their doors permanently, hobbled by dwindling income and complicated social distancing rules.
Parents eager to return to work now face a grim reality: They may have no one to watch the kids.
The crisis might keep families stuck at home, even as federal and state governments ramp up emergency funding for child care. Gov. Gavin Newsom set aside $100 million for the sector in April, designating half the money for cleaning supplies and the other half for short-term vouchers to serve essential workers. Congress directed $3.5 billion to child care, $350 million of which goes to California, but providers won’t see that money until at least mid-July.
By then it might be too late for businesses that survive month to month on razor-thin margins. Some applied for small business loans or disaster unemployment, but were denied. Many postponed their fall enrollment, so they don’t have any income to carry forward.
For Gomes, there are other complications. She lives with her 8-year-old daughter, 10-year-old son and 68-year-old mother, all of whom could be exposed to the coronavirus if young children constantly come in and out of the house. Gomes’ 87-year-old grandmother, who lives next door and often helps with the day care, is even more vulnerable.
“I’ve got four generations in my house, plus all these day care kids, and I have to keep all of them safe,” she said.
With the threat of a second coronavirus wave looming later in the year, the idea of reopening seemed untenable.
Families are sitting on the sidelines, growing weary of round-the-clock working and parenting.
Brendan Havenar-Daughton and his wife, Alice, of El Sobrante, have tried to stay upbeat. Their son Liam’s preschool closed in March and they asked their daughter Leila’s nanny to stay home, wary of spreading the virus.
With no other options, Havenar-Daughton arranged tables and hung bedsheets to form an office in the family’s garage. He worked remotely as an administrator at Oakland Unified School District, staggering shifts with Alice, who works in clean energy. They often typed at laptops with children in their laps and reluctantly took Zoom meetings during family meals.
All the while, they continued paying $2,800 a month for child care they couldn’t use — both the nanny, whom they wanted to support, and the preschool they wanted to keep afloat.
“All things being equal, we still have that income,” Havenar-Daughton said. “We have more time with the kids, and we’re not facing impossible expectations at work.”
Still, he and Alice acknowledge that this arrangement won’t work forever.
The governor is allowing more child care centers and preschools to reopen during the second phase of his recovery plan, which began this week. But as kids trickle in, they’ll encounter more tightly controlled scenes than what existed before March.
Although it’s not recommended that young children wear masks, they may be expected to stand 6 feet apart, sleep 6 feet apart during nap time and eat snacks alone or separated by long tables. Caretakers will have to meticulously wash toys, scrub floors and disinfect mats.
Day care centers in general tend to be incubators for colds, flu, pink eye and other common ailments — Gomes said that when her business was open, she kept a “yuck bucket” for any toy that wound up inside a child’s mouth. Yet the threat of COVID-19 has forced providers to be extra vigilant.
State and local guidelines have reduced most preschools and child care centers to half their capacity, while stipulating that the group of children can’t change from day to day. Many centers ask parents to stay at the door when dropping their kids off and require children to remove their shoes before they come in. Charlotte Guinn, who runs Rose’s Day Care in Oakland, said she takes kids’ temperature when they arrive. She’s traded all her dishes for disposable paper plates and cups.
To Gomes, a socially distanced day care seems almost unfathomable.
“In kindergarten and beyond, kids are closer to the age of reason and understanding,” she said. “But for infants and toddlers, their main way of developing and learning is by touch. There is no way to explain to 2-year-olds why they can’t play in the same kitchen or give their friend a hug when she falls down.”
On top of that, she and other providers would have to start enrolling from scratch. Before the pandemic, Gomes had families on a waiting list who were scheduled to start in March or April, but now their plans are up in the air.
Even programs that intend to stay open are grappling with an unpredictable future. Angelica Guerrero serves 12 families at her Spanish immersion child care in the Excelsior. Half of them hope to stay, she said, but several have lost jobs or income. She has received three contracts for the fall and no deposits.
Some fear that the coronavirus could have a more ruinous effect than the recession of 2009, when the Bay Area lost from 10% to 40% of its child care businesses.
A recent survey of 2,000 providers by UC Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Child Care Employment found that 63% of programs that are open would not survive another month of sheltering-in-place, absent financial assistance from the government. Twenty-three percent would need stimulus money if they have to close for any length of time, and 14% of the ones that are already closed said that if they don’t get significant emergency relief, they would have to shut their doors permanently after May 30.
Such dire figures trouble Gina Fromer, executive director of the San Francisco Children’s Council, a nonprofit that links families to child care and preschool. Like others in her field, Fromer sees child care as the overlooked connective tissue of the regional economy.
“Child care is the bridge to getting everyone back to work,” she said.
Gomes shares that sentiment, and said she dreads the thought of boxing up her toys and books. Over the past few weeks, she’s hosted virtual circle times over Facebook. She sits in a green armchair for most of the videos, singing songs, reading stories or using the Mr. Potato Head doll to teach children about their five senses. In one video, she lays out corn starch, water and food coloring on a table and makes play dough with her son and daughter.
“I miss my day care kids terribly,” Gomes says in a video posted early in April. “I’m sad that we aren’t spending our days together, pretending, and playing, and learning, and reading, and going on field trips together. I’m very hopeful that one day all of that will be available to us again.”
Rachel Swan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rswan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rachelswan
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Who will watch the kids? Bay Area child care programs shutting down, leaving working parents with a dilemma - San Francisco Chronicle
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