There are three things I do every Valentine’s Day: Go on a lunch date with my husband, do some Valentine’s Day crafts with my two children, and send out cards to people I love, including family and friends. This Valentine’s Day, I’m doing one more thing: showing love to the teachers and staff members at the daycare center that my 4-year-old currently goes to.
The pandemic wave has made it clear that our child care needs a systemic overhaul. Parents of kids under 5 are now in a state of despair and semi-panic, and part of our upset is the fact that the expensive child care we are paying for is often unreliable: Children’s day care classes are routinely getting shut down because of too many coronavirus cases or because kids were getting sent home for quarantines.
In the meantime, things are just as bleak from child care providers’ point of view. Last two months in my child’s day care center, there were five kids and six staff members tested positive for the coronavirus, and three out of the seven classrooms were closed at some point. A teacher I know told me that it breaks their hearts to close a classroom, because they worry about how the families they serve are going to pay their bills and feed their kids if the parents can’t go to work.
Continue to read the original post and a recipe for rainbow crayon on MomsRising here.
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