Andrea Pekarek has to pull out of her driveway in Ann Arbor just before 8 a.m. to make it to work at a medical practice in Brownstown Township by 8:30 a.m.
Her husband, Will, has a 40-minute commute to his desk job in finance for a food distributor in Detroit. He needs to be on the road before 7 a.m. and back in Ann Arbor by midafternoon to pick up their children after school.
Assuming school is in person this fall, the Ann Arbor couple's three children are going into fourth grade, second grade and preschool. And they have no idea how it's going to work.
That's because Ann Arbor Public Schools has canceled before- and after-school care for the 2021-2022 school year, citing fears about COVID-19 spread and a shortage in child care workers.
"I don't even know what we're going to do," said Andrea Pekarek, a nurse practitioner who has been on the front lines of the pandemic caring for oncology patients.
Ann Arbor parents — be it single parents or two working adults — are justifiably incensed right now after the school district abruptly canceled the child care program that lets parents drop off children up to an hour before the school day begins and pick them up two hours after school lets out.
For any working parent, before-and-after school child care — often referred to as latchkey — is a lifesaver. It's the difference between keeping your head above water each day with work and figuratively sinking to the bottom of the Huron River.
And the Ann Arbor school board just yanked away the life preserver for hundreds of its taxpayers.
"It just doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me," Andrea Pekarek said.
Virtually no one in Ann Arbor understands the rationale, which seems to ignore the fact that this city of 120,000 residents with higher-than-average median household income is built on a foundation of families with two working parents.
AAPS Superintendent Jeanice Swift initially said the decision was driven by concerns that mixing kids from different classrooms at the end of the day in a large group would spread COVID-19 inside schools.
But state-mandated COVID restrictions inside Michigan schools have all been lifted as cases plummet and vaccines do their job preventing death and disease in the more vulnerable adult population.
Some school officials suggested parents have their kids bused to private child care. But that, too, would still involve mixing kids from different pandemic bubbles.
It also would require more movement of children on buses as parents drop off their kids at a child care center early so they can wait 15-20 minutes before riding a bus across town to their school.
Ann Arbor's schools chief has since said a shortage of child care workers is the real culprit. After laying off part-time child care workers in March 2020, the school district found most have either moved on to other jobs or decided not to return to work, Swift said.
"What we're finding is a hestitancy about returning to an environment where there may be some perceived risk —elementary students may not be vaccinated," Swift said in an interview.
The end of school-based child care in Ann Arbor is almost par for the course these days in one of Michigan's most educated and wealthiest communities, which has been deeply divided throughout the pandemic about the school district's extended closure of in-person learning.
Only in the final two months of the year did Ann Arbor schools start holding in-person instruction — two days a week.
That's been stressful enough for parents with jobs that simply can't be performed at home forever.
Will Pekarek has repeatedly been stuck in conference calls while picking up his children from school; Andrea Pekarek has had to take one of her two boys to work and had him sit in her office all day with a tablet "getting way more screen time than is reasonable" while she works.
"We're doing the best we can like everyone else," Andrea Pekarek said.
For some parents, the morning routine of getting kids off to school and making it to work on time depends on everything going smoothly — right down to the minute. The before-school care of 15 minutes is sometimes all that's needed to make the trains of a household run on time.
Ann Arbor parent Emily Deedler has a 10-year-old son going into fifth grade who was diagnosed with epilepsy last fall.
Deedler is a marketing brand manager at UM's Ross School of Business and she has to start work at 9 a.m., the same time her son's school typically starts.
In order to make it to work on time, Deedler needs to leave at 8:30 a.m. The bus doesn't arrive until 8:45. So she would normally just drop off her son for before-school care.
"In a normal year, a fifth-grader, you might be able to say, 'Stay home, get on the bus yourself, I'm going to work, you can do this,'" Deedler said. Because of his epilepsy, "I can't leave him alone for five minutes."
Deedler and Andrea Pekarek — both balancing motherhood with their careers — expressed hesitancy about asking their employers for more flexibility.
"I feel like employers have been through so much during the pandemic that for Ann Arbor (schools) to say, 'You know, go ask your employer for one more thing,' it just feels like one more too many," Deedler said.
"You can't abuse it," Pekarek said. "You can only expect leniency for so long."
The Ann Arbor district's decision to end before and after care also is confounding in that these are just the types of services people pay top dollar to live in Ann Arbor for.
After weeks of backlash, AAPS said last week it will offer enrichment programs before and after school in five of its 19 elementary school buildings for just 180 children, MLive reported.
District officials believe there's more a labor pool from UM's faculty, staff and students who may be interested in teaching an after-school course than what amounts to babysitting in the eyes of some hourly workers.
"Our innovation to do a Rec & Ed model is around trying to match the workforce that we think we can scale up," Swift told Crain's. "And I don't know if that scaling up is a few month thing or if it's a couple of years thing."
While the district may want to focus on the delivery of education during regular school hours, the underlying property tax base that supports the school district and its facilities very much depends on the higher household incomes of two working parents.
In the case of Ann Arbor, the schedules of parents are not all 9-5. The University of Michigan attracts many graduate students in the humanities, law and medical schools who are balancing pursuit of advanced degrees with raising young families and making ends meet.
David Suell is a fourth-year doctoral student in political science at UM and a graduate student instructor. His wife, Meg, is a nurse in pediatric oncology and works nights at UM Hospital.
The couple also juggles the care of three children ages 2, 4 and 7.
Before COVID, David Suell used morning care for their oldest daughter for 15 to 45 minutes each morning in order to teach a class on campus (in person) at 9 a.m. He would first drop off the younger children at day care.
"In winter, you can't just throw them out on the playground to wait out that morning part of the day," Suell said.
But that's essentially what the Ann Arbor school district is doing — leaving families like the Suells out in the cold.
If AAPS needs to charge more for these care programs, parents like David Suell, Emily Deedler and Andrea Pekarek said they're willing to pay more. It begs the question as to whether AAPS has looked to private child care centers to operate in-school programs.
"You'll pay a lot for stability," Suell said.
The Suells live in a two-bedroom apartment and are working class by Ann Arbor's standards. Their options beyond paying the school district a few more bucks per day for in-school care are limited.
"No, you can't just take them to a different place. No, you can't just get an au pair or a nanny or whatever," Suell said. "Ann Arbor is a very wealthy town, but not all of us are. We make the town run."
The public upheaval in Ann Arbor over the cancellation of after-school child care may be a sign of trouble ahead for other school districts.
If Ann Arbor can't make it work, one has to wonder how communities with fewer resources will keep these lifelines for working parents intact.
"care" - Google News
June 27, 2021 at 11:13AM
https://ift.tt/3hcqUSS
Livengood: School care out of balance in Ann Arbor - Crain's Detroit Business
"care" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2N6arSB
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Livengood: School care out of balance in Ann Arbor - Crain's Detroit Business"
Post a Comment