Central Mass. child care providers say reopening guidelines hard to meet

Some local child care providers are daunted by the state's reopening guidelines, saying that while they understand the need to be safe during the pandemic, the new regulations will limit their ability to serve families.

At least one center operator said she can't envision reopening under those new rules, which were announced by the state last week.

"No one's going to be able to do it – there's no way," said Ann Latino, director of Miss Betty's Step in Time Daycare Center in Worcester, who added the regulations for older students, who cannot be in groups larger than 10 and must remain with the same staff members each day, is particularly challenging. "That means no floaters – (staff) won't even be able to go to the bathroom."

Like schools and colleges, child care centers and preschools in Massachusetts had to shut down to most families in mid-March, when the coronavirus pandemic took hold of the state. The only exceptions were children of emergency workers, who were still allowed to attend specially licensed centers.

Earlier this spring, Gov. Charlie Baker set a target of June 29 for centers to begin reopening to the general populace, and on June 1 unveiled the guidelines for doing so.

For many small private child care providers around the region, however, it may be too late to reopen, said William Eddy, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of Early Education and Care in Worcester.

"Their entire revenue streams went away" in March, he said. "Those programs are under tremendous stress right now, and some quite frankly won't be coming back."

Some centers that are partially subsidized by the government, meanwhile – meaning they receive funding to take in lower-income children, children under the care of the state, and other vulnerable populations – will also be hard-pressed to meet some of the state's guidelines, some of which are "grim, just grim," Eddy said.

But he also said the updated regulations are necessary to get the state's child care and preschool system back to some semblance of what it was before the virus.

"The emergency care (offered the past few months) has not been to their usual standards," Eddy said, adding Massachusetts normally has some of the most stringent standards in the country for early childhood education. "(Emergency care) has been effective, it's been necessary, but it's not the system parents are used to for their students."

Linda Cavaioli, executive director of the YWCA Central Massachusetts, and Darlene Belliveau, the organization's Director of Children's Services, said they can appreciate the state's strict reopening requirements as the world continues to face down a still mysterious and deadly disease.

"I think it's based on data," Belliveau said. "Can we accept them, health and safety wise? Yes."

But whether the YWCA's two early education and care centers in Worcester and Westboro can financially weather the new regulations is another story, they said.

"To be perfectly honest, we're in the process of trying to do a year-end estimate," Cavaioli said. "We're not sure if we'll be able to break even with this ... we're trying to figure out who's going to show up (once the centers reopen on a non-emergency basis in July), and if we're able to make a go of it."

One of the main problems facing their centers, they said, is the square footage requirement per child, which will increase to 42 square feet under the updated guidelines. That means the Worcester center will have to accept 43 fewer students than normal, while the Westboro center will have to accept 24 fewer, according to Cavaioli and Belliveau, leaving many of their usual clients without a placement for their child this summer.

Under the emergency care regulations, in comparison, the state "was a little bit laxer on the ratios," Cavaioli said.

Yet the YWCA didn't have any instances of students, who had to submit to temperature screenings every morning, getting sick from COVID-19 over the past three months they said. That was also the case at Miss Betty's, said Latino, who wondered why the state couldn't just continue with the current emergency care guidelines going forward.

"Why do the regulations have to change so drastically?" she said, when centers like hers have been able to make their operations work this spring.

Child care and preschool providers are hopeful the reopening regulations will not be in place for long, assuming the pandemic continues to wind down and centers are eventually able to go back to more normal operations this fall.

But in the meantime, they're worried about not being able to help parents who are now gradually getting back to their regular work routines – "our mission is absolutely critical," Cavaioli said.

Scott O'Connell can be reached at Scott.O'Connell@telegram.com. Follow him on Twitter @ScottOConnellTG

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