The Challenge of Keeping a Bronx Day Care Open During the Pandemic
Maria Capellan’s day care, which is situated inside her apartment on the fourth floor of a nondescript high-rise in the Bronx, is marked by paper decorations that change with the season—apples and school buses for the start of the school year, a wrapped present for Christmas, hearts for Valentine’s Day. During a recent visit, Capellan put on classical music while her children napped in cribs and on cots laid out on the padded floor of the main bedroom. Wooden letters of the alphabet were framed on a wall; pool-noodle horses and other toys were corralled in a corner. In the hallway, shelved folders keep track of each child—their curriculum, their needs, their progress. In the course of her work, Capellan helps families with potty training and temper tantrums. She gets up early when parents have to work early; when they work late, so does Capellan. She has been doing this for nearly two decades. She has no savings and sleeps in her living room.
Capellan, who has long black hair and carefully tended nails, looks much younger than her fifty-two years. She is constantly on the move—talking to children, preparing food. “I am what people call ‘multifaceted,’ ” she told me. “When I sit still, my leg twitches. I can’t help it. There is always so much I could be doing.” As the child of a deacon in the Dominican Republic, Capellan used to buy peanuts from local kids so they wouldn’t have to go out and sell them. Instead, she made them stay behind and learn their ABCs. “I was the oldest sister, so I basically raised my siblings,” Capellan told me. “I take care of everything. My sons tell me this is a matriarch family, and I say, ‘Well, you either have to adjust or go find yourself a patriarch family somewhere else.’ ” Everyone calls her Belkys, which was supposed to be her given name. A religious local bureaucrat put the name Maria on her birth certificate, despite her father’s wishes.
Capellan got her start in child care nearly twenty years ago, as a young mother newly separated from her husband. She had fallen for him when she was a teen-ager, and then followed him to New York at the age of eighteen. She took the city in stride, with all her energy. She worked for a time as a wedding planner, a job that often required baking cakes and sewing dresses. She worked as a Zumba instructor, and volunteered at her church, where she took care of kids during services. By 2002, Capellan had three children, an ex, and a job at a newspaper-delivery system with variable hours. The scramble for child care was exhausting and unsustainable. “I didn’t have anyone to take care of my kids,” she said. “My church advised me to open a day care because I was in charge of twenty-nine kids in church. And I said, ‘You know what? Let me try it.’ ”
Capellan has never had to do much advertising. Early on, she made flyers, and at one point paid for an advertisement on Google. “It wasn’t helpful, so I took it down,” she said. “I was paying for nothing.” For the most part, parents heard about her at church or through referrals from local organizations, or by word of mouth. Her kids got scholarships to private schools. They read early. There is the child who played piano beautifully. The one who went to Cornell. She remembers them all. “Two-thirds of my kids pass gifted-and-talented tests,” she told me, proudly. “At one point, I thought I could go back to work in marketing. But I love what I do. I love my kids. They are my babies, each and every one of them.”
When COVID-19 swept through the Bronx, Capellan had, she said, “the perfect mix of children and parents.” She shut down her facility in March, 2020, contracted COVID, and spent the summer suffering from migraines and inflammation in her joints. All of her usual energy was gone. When she reopened, in August, she shouldered the cost of new cleaning supplies, and spent mornings and evenings disinfecting; she cooked to-go meals for families who couldn’t afford to come back full time; she visited with kids on Zoom. When one of her children started acting out at home, her parents guessed that she was missing Capellan and arranged for socially distanced meetups at the park. Another one of Capellan’s kids, Athena, did her remote kindergarten classes from Capellan’s house.
Athena’s mother, Ashley-Lyn Barone, has two older boys. When the city shut down, Barone, a single mother, had recently moved into a family shelter. “My one son has a heart condition, and it’s always him I think about immediately,” she told me. “I just thought, I can’t let him go outside.” She took her kids with her to buy necessities, but otherwise she kept them at home. The situation was placing a tremendous amount of stress on the whole family. Barone knew that Athena, who was five, needed something consistent in her life; Capellan was as good as family. “I just think it is very important to have child care in place,” Barone, who recently received a Section 8 voucher and is looking for a more permanent place to live, told me. “She gives them home-cooked meals; she teaches them yoga and meditation. It’s amazing.”
New York City has been expanding free child care since 2014, when Bill de Blasio introduced a pre-K-for-all program. In 2017, the city launched 3-K for all. By most measures, these two programs have been hugely successful. By 2019, more than sixty-eight thousand children were enrolled in the city’s pre-K programs, and the 3-K program is on track to serve some thirty-three thousand children in the next two years. “This is the opportunity we’ve missed through our society for generations,” de Blasio told a crowd at the launch of the city’s 3-K-for-all program. “There’s one opportunity to get right when the brain is developing, and we can get a child to learn so deeply and to be on a path of lifelong learning.”
The success of the programs, however, has left providers like Capellan with a smaller population of children to fill their own day cares. There are limits on the number of children a day-care provider can serve within each age group—a family day care cannot simply replace three-year-olds with an increased number of infants. And, following the loss of many day cares during the pandemic, parents with children under three have a smaller number of providers to choose from. In the Bronx, for example, more than two hundred and fifty day cares have shut down since the start of the pandemic, some owing to illness and others because of lost income. Some day-care providers have tried to stay full by contracting with the city to open 3-K programs, but they are compensated at significantly lower rates than Department of Education 3-K classrooms, adding to their financial woes.
As a result, in New York, child care is expanding and contracting at the same time. For Capellan and other child-care advocates, the question has become how to build a bureaucracy that is fair and flexible enough to accommodate a range of families and caretakers. How do you value and compensate workers, measure success, and insure that programs like Capellan’s are not left out of the equation?
Across the city—particularly in the Bronx and Brooklyn—family day cares have long dominated the child-care business. Capellan’s day care is part of the Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation, or WHEDCO, a community-development network that trains providers, helps them keep up to date on health-and-safety standards, and offers a food program to keep costs down. The child-care network was founded in the mid-nineties by Diana Perez, a sixty-three-year-old advocate and administrator. “This was in the middle of welfare reform, so people really needed to be able to find employment and keep employment,” Perez told me, of the Clinton-era legislation that emphasized work requirements in public assistance. “A big part of that was having access to day care,” Perez said. “People needed economic opportunity and they needed child care.”
Activists like Perez fought to create a voucher system that would pay providers directly. As the network grew through the early two-thousands, many of the businesses that became part of Perez’s network accepted vouchers, but not all of them. The vouchers, Perez explained, have never paid the true cost of child care; in most parts of the city, day cares make far more money from families who pay fees themselves. The program itself is also significantly underfunded. To be eligible for a child-care voucher, a family must earn less than two hundred per cent of the poverty line, or around fifty thousand dollars annually for a family of four, and one parent must either be working twenty hours a week or actively looking for a job. Before the pandemic, only fourteen per cent of eligible families were receiving vouchers, and, in the first year of the pandemic, the number of vouchers in circulation dropped from about sixty-six thousand to around forty-eight thousand. In 2021, total funding for the program shrank by fifty-two million dollars. Families applying for vouchers today, if not suffering from homelessness or receiving public assistance, are placed on a wait list and will be taken off only, according to New York City’s child-care-services Web site, “when more funds are available.”
When the pandemic hit, many parents lost child-care funding because they lost their jobs. More than five million women across the United States dropped out of the workforce, and almost two million have yet to return. The situation in the Bronx has been consistently worse than the national average. At one point, the borough’s unemployment rate was twenty-five per cent (a number that was likely higher among women). Because the vouchers are tied to employment, it can be difficult to get back into the system.
Capellan’s in-home day care is licensed to accept sixteen children. In December, she came close to filling up for the first time in nearly two years. For the most part, she only accepts families willing to pay her fees. She charges two hundred and seventy-five dollars a week for an older child. She has trouble, however, turning away families that are using state-funded vouchers. Her subsidized families pay her a hundred and seventy-five dollars a week. “Before, when I had to pay for my kids’ college, I couldn’t take anyone,” Capellan told me, of families with vouchers. “But now I want to help my community. I want to help those kids who couldn’t afford it otherwise.”
Capellan sees herself as a link in a chain of care—she has helped educate the children of nurses, teachers, medical assistants, and school aides. Capellan understands their struggles. Her life, she says, has always played out to the drumbeat of her monthly rent check. “I have been where they are,” she told me. “It is stressful, and stressed people can’t take care of other people as well as they want to.”
Lesly Martinez started sending her two-year-old to Capellan in the fall. She had been working as a medical assistant, often clocking forty-five hours a week, before her baby arrived in 2019. Martinez’s husband worked loading trucks at Hunts Point Market and would often work double shifts—early mornings and late nights—to keep the family afloat. They had split the living room in half to create an extra bedroom, and, in the hours when her husband slept, Martinez kept her three children in other parts of the apartment, as quiet as possible. “He would just be completely knocked out,” Martinez told me. “He wouldn’t even know what I would go through the whole day just to keep them busy.”
Martinez found a job in August, working as a school aide, but she had difficulty finding a day care that would accept her voucher. After she found Capellan, the processing of her voucher suddenly stalled. The agency called to tell her that they needed more information. “I had to prove that she was my daughter,” Martinez told me. She arrived in the office with a birth certificate, Social Security cards, a letter from her daughter’s doctor, and her I.D. Finally, checking on the status of her case, Martinez broke down crying: “I said, ‘You always expect us to work, to work, to work, but when we do find work you give us a hundred and one reasons to miss work, and, if we get fired, we’re back to square one.’ ” She was lucky, she said. Capellan held her daughter’s spot.
Although Capellan’s day care is full again, she is struggling to find employees. The Department of Education’s 3-K programs can offer higher wages to qualified educators and child-care workers. And anyone that Capellan wants to hire is required to file paperwork with the Health Department. They can’t start work until they’ve been cleared. The process is supposed to take a few days. Lately, it has been taking weeks, or even months. “I could have six babies if I had staff,” Capellan told me. “But people find other jobs while they’re waiting.” Perez is working to change the compensation structure for the city’s 3-K programs, making funding per child equal in Department of Education classrooms and in day-care settings, and increasing funding over all. “I think that the state is aware of the need to address this,” Perez told me.
For now, Capellan is busy painting a set of wooden dinosaurs for one of her kids. She is trying to find books to challenge a three-year-old who is already reading. She is submitting paperwork for yet another potential hire and fighting a Health Department fine for a missing smoke detector that was not, in fact, missing. She is working on recipes that her picky toddlers will eat. Without employees, Capellan works long days. She misses doctor’s appointments. She reads “Green Eggs and Ham” with a dramatic flair that never slips. People knock on her door, looking for care. They call her cell phone. For now, Capellan has to turn away most of the parents who find her. “People are desperate,” Capellan told me. “We are the backbone of the whole economy. Without day care, there is nobody working.”
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