Anonymous wrote:Yes many are taking advantage. I was just thinking our daycare requires kids to stay home 48 hours after a fever subsided. Prior to COVID it was 24 hours. Maybe it made sense in 2020 but if a kid has a negative test there is no reason why it can’t be 24 hours like it always was. It just leads to more lost work or lying and skirting the rules. But the provider has to deal with fewer kids so it’s great for them.
Did they update the enrollment agreement to say that? Because MSDE exclusion criteria is still 24 hours, and nearly all child care center contracts I’ve seen just refer to the state rules.
Separately, though, it seems like the obvious, immediate solution is to never say they had a fever.
+1
Unless they get sick unexpectedly at daycare they are never sick.
They are at a routine doc appointment, visiting with family, slept badly the night before, exc.
I know that the daycare knows but it works for everyone.
And no I don't send my kid in sick. I just try to preserve these "extra" days when they are ok to go.
Yep. I’m pretty sure everyone knows that’s what parents do at the center my kid is at. It’s gotten easier. I’d usually acknowledge they were sick, but if they asked for symptoms I’d have to be careful to not say anything on the covid symptom list. Ear and tummy aches were “common.”
Anonymous wrote:I'm a full time employee at a hospital in Massachusetts. A single mother who my son goes to daycare 5 days a week. It is now December 2022 COVID is over!!! Daycares should not be closing every day of the year. My paid time has gone completely down the drain from calling out of work for non sense. We are paying for child care because parents are reliant on these daycares to take care of our children while we are at work. On top of that we have to pay the daycare regardless if they take days off and or if our child is not attending that day. This is completely unfair to parents who are trying to attend work to make a living, meanwhile these daycares are collecting their paychecks every week while they are home having days off. Also having to find someone to watch your child while daycare is closed and also paying that person for the day. The economy is not right for this to be happening. Families cannot afford to be paying for daycare and a backup person. THIS NEEDS TO STOP!!!! It is imperative that changes need to be made about these strict policies that these daycares have. Daycares are clearly taking advantage of families during these past three years.
What daycares are closing for covid anymore? Even Montgomery County stopped doing that months ago.
You need to switch providers.
+1
You are in Massachusetts and your health department and daycare licensing may have completely different rules than down here. Montgomery county was one of the strictest in terms of Covid closures. Technically, daycares are still supposed to report any Covid illnesses to the health department, and the health department may advise daycare classrooms to shut down, or entire schools to shut down, but I think this has gone by the wayside. If your state and local jurisdiction has dropped Covid mandated closures but your daycare is keeping them then you should be looking for a different daycare.
I understand your struggles, but daycares weren’t taking advantage. They still had to charge because they still had to maintain their spaces and pay their employees. Otherwise they would have to shut down and let people go and you would be out of a daycare permanently. Believe me when I say that nobody working in Daycare, whether owners, directors, or employees are living high on the hog.
MoCo DHHS never ordered child care providers or preschools to close. Once MSDE allowed them to reopen a couple months into the pandemic, all subsequent closures were entirely at the discretion of the provider.
2020/2021 we were absolutely ordered to shut down classrooms and entire schools. They used heavy language and our licenses were threatened, and since we had received Covid money to pay our employees, we were told that we had to follow the health department in regards to Covid guidelines and threatened to have to pay back the money. The county backtracked and gave ho-hum explanations further along because they were receiving pushback from the parents and the general public. Even a few months ago, we received a memo stating that we would still need to follow the health departments guidelines and recommendations in terms of exclusion and closures. It was fine print buried at the bottom of a document but it’s still there. It’s also largely ignored. I looked back at 2020 and 2021 and it was a time of mass confusion and fear among my colleagues and other daycare owners.
I have gone back to pre-Covid sick guidelines for children. I have a strict individual sickness policy, but it prevents large virus outbreaks, and is much better for all of the parents and children in the long run.
I am glad it’s all over.
Honestly, as someone who spent countless hours talking to state and county officials about this, I only have so much pitty for you. Yes, you were being lied to and misled, but you were in a much, much better position to resolve this quickly than parents were. Did you ever talk to Steven Hicks in MSDE? Earl Stoddard in the county executive's office? Sean O’Donnell in DHHS? Did you tell any of them what OCC and Early Childhood Services were telling you? Did you go yo thr press, or even the county council, when your questions weren’t answered directly?
I doubt it.
I am a daycare parent and you do not sound reasonable at all. Let it go. The daycares are not at fault here.
I agree they’re not the ones mostly at fault, but they could have sought clarification on the regulations versus voluntary recommendations. Or at least accepted the clarifications that parents sent in. I doubt my provider was the only one hiding behind claims that they had to follow certain rules, even when I provided messages from the state and county that said otherwise. At a certain point that changed from honest confusion to willful ignorance.
I think in this situation the line between recommendations and regulations is a little bit blurry. In actuality, the county had little ability to punish providers for not following the guidance. But it was certainly the expectation that providers would - not just the expectation of the government but also many parents. I think it's a little silly to, at this stage, be bashing providers for following public health guidance during a pandemic. And I don't say this because I liked the guidance, I had a lot of issues with it.
I disagree. If providers incurred the cost of those closures, do you really think they would have sat back and claimed their hands were tied? Of course not. They would have at least sought clarification of the rules, and may have encouraged changes to voluntary guidance. But because they were passing the costs onto the parents, they simply went along with it— despite those closures almost certainly violating the enrollment agreements they had with parents.
That’s probably one reason the larger centers didn’t seek clarification— if they were explicitly informed the closures were voluntary, then they would have been willfully violating those contracts by excluding kids using criteria not described in those enrollment agreements.
On the contrary, I think many centers were absolutely bearing costs of closures because families did have to disenroll due to closures.
They lost money due to Covid, but not the closures. Parents that needed child care didn’t have a choice. Some people decided to take advantage of WFH to save money by being bad parents and bad employees.
Totally agree WFH and child care is not ok. But I was suggesting many parents hired nannies. I live in not fancy neighborhood in a small townhouse community and the two other families with young children had nannies until very recently. Of course for many that was fear of COVID but for many it was also bc daycare was not worth it financially. Child care only works if it is provided.
Sure, that happened, but very, very few people were in a position to do that financially. It didn’t have much of an impact on child care centers.
It's a lot more than you think. As I said where I live is not a fancy neighborhood. There are a lot of professionals with HHIs under $250k that can stretch to pay for a nanny when it comes down to it.
If the HHI that immediately comes to mind is $250k, then you live in quite the bubble.
There are also a lot of feds in the area that would be obligated to pay taxes/insurance for nannies, dramatically increasing the cost compared to a child care center.
If you think most low and middle income families with young children, especially children under age 3, are sending their children to child care centers, then you live in quite the bubble. Families with incomes above the median (which is around $125k) are the key customer base for centers which are quite costly.
Median household income in MoCo is $117k. There's a big difference between that and $250k. So you're already knocking out a huge percentage by thinking of families making around $250k. And of those, the number that actually have an extra $20-30K to pay for a nanny is small.
Again, I'm not saying it doesn't/didn't happen. Just that it was responsible for a very small percentage of lost revenue by child care operators. Some areas would have been hit harder than others. Perhaps operators in Bethesda, Potomac, and even parts of Rockville may have lost more than a couple kids this way, but not most of the area.
I live in Silver Spring and there are a bunch of families here that would have used daycare but for the pandemic. Many citing daycare is just not worth it so they eat the cost of the nanny. With WFH they don't need to pay for overtime hours.
One thing I've noticed about daycare centers is the children in most are overwhelmingly (but not exclusively, of course) White. The median income for White families in Montgomery County is $190k. Gives you a sense of the population we are talking about. In Montgomery County a quarter of households make more that $200k. This is a very high income region even outside of Bethesda.
Again, I'm not saying it didn't happen, but you're deluding yourself if you think a large number of families have an extra $20-30k a year to spend on a nanny. There's not even that many nannies to go around. So while I'm sure centers lost some kids that way, they lost more for other reasons. Work from home being the big one. I don't know anyone that ended up with nannies, but I know several that made due with a combination of WFH parents and grandparents. Even of those that were able to get nannies, I suspect WFH is still what led to that in most cases, rather than child care center closures.
given how many childcare workers have left centers, yes, the people are there. You can tell me I am "deluding myself" (classy way to argue btw), but that does not change the data. Many do have enough money, especially the demographic that uses centers without a voucher
$20-30k is a lot of money for most people making $200k. Surely you understand that, don’t you? Where do you think all these nannies came from? Our center has lost a lot of child care workers during the pandemic, but none became nannies. Losing benefits, or less generous benefits, would have made that a nonstarter. The vast majority left for various MCPS positions. Most of our new employees were poached from other centers in the midcounty area.
You're a very rude person aren't you? No wonder you assume your child care provider is fleecing you. I guess child care center profits must be way up and providers must be expanding based on how much they are all "taking advantage", right? Why are all those workers leaving a job where they must get so much free vacation?
Anonymous wrote:Yes many are taking advantage. I was just thinking our daycare requires kids to stay home 48 hours after a fever subsided. Prior to COVID it was 24 hours. Maybe it made sense in 2020 but if a kid has a negative test there is no reason why it can’t be 24 hours like it always was. It just leads to more lost work or lying and skirting the rules. But the provider has to deal with fewer kids so it’s great for them.
An outbreak is a huge deal and no center wants that and if staff are sick and they don't have staff they have to come. If you send your sick kid who infects 10 more, that impacts 10 families which is really crummy.
Anonymous wrote:I'm a full time employee at a hospital in Massachusetts. A single mother who my son goes to daycare 5 days a week. It is now December 2022 COVID is over!!! Daycares should not be closing every day of the year. My paid time has gone completely down the drain from calling out of work for non sense. We are paying for child care because parents are reliant on these daycares to take care of our children while we are at work. On top of that we have to pay the daycare regardless if they take days off and or if our child is not attending that day. This is completely unfair to parents who are trying to attend work to make a living, meanwhile these daycares are collecting their paychecks every week while they are home having days off. Also having to find someone to watch your child while daycare is closed and also paying that person for the day. The economy is not right for this to be happening. Families cannot afford to be paying for daycare and a backup person. THIS NEEDS TO STOP!!!! It is imperative that changes need to be made about these strict policies that these daycares have. Daycares are clearly taking advantage of families during these past three years.
What daycares are closing for covid anymore? Even Montgomery County stopped doing that months ago.
You need to switch providers.
+1
You are in Massachusetts and your health department and daycare licensing may have completely different rules than down here. Montgomery county was one of the strictest in terms of Covid closures. Technically, daycares are still supposed to report any Covid illnesses to the health department, and the health department may advise daycare classrooms to shut down, or entire schools to shut down, but I think this has gone by the wayside. If your state and local jurisdiction has dropped Covid mandated closures but your daycare is keeping them then you should be looking for a different daycare.
I understand your struggles, but daycares weren’t taking advantage. They still had to charge because they still had to maintain their spaces and pay their employees. Otherwise they would have to shut down and let people go and you would be out of a daycare permanently. Believe me when I say that nobody working in Daycare, whether owners, directors, or employees are living high on the hog.
MoCo DHHS never ordered child care providers or preschools to close. Once MSDE allowed them to reopen a couple months into the pandemic, all subsequent closures were entirely at the discretion of the provider.
2020/2021 we were absolutely ordered to shut down classrooms and entire schools. They used heavy language and our licenses were threatened, and since we had received Covid money to pay our employees, we were told that we had to follow the health department in regards to Covid guidelines and threatened to have to pay back the money. The county backtracked and gave ho-hum explanations further along because they were receiving pushback from the parents and the general public. Even a few months ago, we received a memo stating that we would still need to follow the health departments guidelines and recommendations in terms of exclusion and closures. It was fine print buried at the bottom of a document but it’s still there. It’s also largely ignored. I looked back at 2020 and 2021 and it was a time of mass confusion and fear among my colleagues and other daycare owners.
I have gone back to pre-Covid sick guidelines for children. I have a strict individual sickness policy, but it prevents large virus outbreaks, and is much better for all of the parents and children in the long run.
I am glad it’s all over.
Honestly, as someone who spent countless hours talking to state and county officials about this, I only have so much pitty for you. Yes, you were being lied to and misled, but you were in a much, much better position to resolve this quickly than parents were. Did you ever talk to Steven Hicks in MSDE? Earl Stoddard in the county executive's office? Sean O’Donnell in DHHS? Did you tell any of them what OCC and Early Childhood Services were telling you? Did you go yo thr press, or even the county council, when your questions weren’t answered directly?
I doubt it.
I am a daycare parent and you do not sound reasonable at all. Let it go. The daycares are not at fault here.
I agree they’re not the ones mostly at fault, but they could have sought clarification on the regulations versus voluntary recommendations. Or at least accepted the clarifications that parents sent in. I doubt my provider was the only one hiding behind claims that they had to follow certain rules, even when I provided messages from the state and county that said otherwise. At a certain point that changed from honest confusion to willful ignorance.
I think in this situation the line between recommendations and regulations is a little bit blurry. In actuality, the county had little ability to punish providers for not following the guidance. But it was certainly the expectation that providers would - not just the expectation of the government but also many parents. I think it's a little silly to, at this stage, be bashing providers for following public health guidance during a pandemic. And I don't say this because I liked the guidance, I had a lot of issues with it.
I disagree. If providers incurred the cost of those closures, do you really think they would have sat back and claimed their hands were tied? Of course not. They would have at least sought clarification of the rules, and may have encouraged changes to voluntary guidance. But because they were passing the costs onto the parents, they simply went along with it— despite those closures almost certainly violating the enrollment agreements they had with parents.
That’s probably one reason the larger centers didn’t seek clarification— if they were explicitly informed the closures were voluntary, then they would have been willfully violating those contracts by excluding kids using criteria not described in those enrollment agreements.
On the contrary, I think many centers were absolutely bearing costs of closures because families did have to disenroll due to closures.
They lost money due to Covid, but not the closures. Parents that needed child care didn’t have a choice. Some people decided to take advantage of WFH to save money by being bad parents and bad employees.
Totally agree WFH and child care is not ok. But I was suggesting many parents hired nannies. I live in not fancy neighborhood in a small townhouse community and the two other families with young children had nannies until very recently. Of course for many that was fear of COVID but for many it was also bc daycare was not worth it financially. Child care only works if it is provided.
Sure, that happened, but very, very few people were in a position to do that financially. It didn’t have much of an impact on child care centers.
It's a lot more than you think. As I said where I live is not a fancy neighborhood. There are a lot of professionals with HHIs under $250k that can stretch to pay for a nanny when it comes down to it.
If the HHI that immediately comes to mind is $250k, then you live in quite the bubble.
There are also a lot of feds in the area that would be obligated to pay taxes/insurance for nannies, dramatically increasing the cost compared to a child care center.
If you think most low and middle income families with young children, especially children under age 3, are sending their children to child care centers, then you live in quite the bubble. Families with incomes above the median (which is around $125k) are the key customer base for centers which are quite costly.
Median household income in MoCo is $117k. There's a big difference between that and $250k. So you're already knocking out a huge percentage by thinking of families making around $250k. And of those, the number that actually have an extra $20-30K to pay for a nanny is small.
Again, I'm not saying it doesn't/didn't happen. Just that it was responsible for a very small percentage of lost revenue by child care operators. Some areas would have been hit harder than others. Perhaps operators in Bethesda, Potomac, and even parts of Rockville may have lost more than a couple kids this way, but not most of the area.
I live in Silver Spring and there are a bunch of families here that would have used daycare but for the pandemic. Many citing daycare is just not worth it so they eat the cost of the nanny. With WFH they don't need to pay for overtime hours.
One thing I've noticed about daycare centers is the children in most are overwhelmingly (but not exclusively, of course) White. The median income for White families in Montgomery County is $190k. Gives you a sense of the population we are talking about. In Montgomery County a quarter of households make more that $200k. This is a very high income region even outside of Bethesda.
Again, I'm not saying it didn't happen, but you're deluding yourself if you think a large number of families have an extra $20-30k a year to spend on a nanny. There's not even that many nannies to go around. So while I'm sure centers lost some kids that way, they lost more for other reasons. Work from home being the big one. I don't know anyone that ended up with nannies, but I know several that made due with a combination of WFH parents and grandparents. Even of those that were able to get nannies, I suspect WFH is still what led to that in most cases, rather than child care center closures.
given how many childcare workers have left centers, yes, the people are there. You can tell me I am "deluding myself" (classy way to argue btw), but that does not change the data. Many do have enough money, especially the demographic that uses centers without a voucher
$20-30k is a lot of money for most people making $200k. Surely you understand that, don’t you? Where do you think all these nannies came from? Our center has lost a lot of child care workers during the pandemic, but none became nannies. Losing benefits, or less generous benefits, would have made that a nonstarter. The vast majority left for various MCPS positions. Most of our new employees were poached from other centers in the midcounty area.
You're a very rude person aren't you? No wonder you assume your child care provider is fleecing you. I guess child care center profits must be way up and providers must be expanding based on how much they are all "taking advantage", right? Why are all those workers leaving a job where they must get so much free vacation?
Day care workers make $20-30K a year, not your $200K. For them missing a week of work usually means no pay and they often don't have insurance for doctors visits. $200K ice a very comfortable salary.
Anonymous wrote:I'm a full time employee at a hospital in Massachusetts. A single mother who my son goes to daycare 5 days a week. It is now December 2022 COVID is over!!! Daycares should not be closing every day of the year. My paid time has gone completely down the drain from calling out of work for non sense. We are paying for child care because parents are reliant on these daycares to take care of our children while we are at work. On top of that we have to pay the daycare regardless if they take days off and or if our child is not attending that day. This is completely unfair to parents who are trying to attend work to make a living, meanwhile these daycares are collecting their paychecks every week while they are home having days off. Also having to find someone to watch your child while daycare is closed and also paying that person for the day. The economy is not right for this to be happening. Families cannot afford to be paying for daycare and a backup person. THIS NEEDS TO STOP!!!! It is imperative that changes need to be made about these strict policies that these daycares have. Daycares are clearly taking advantage of families during these past three years.
What daycares are closing for covid anymore? Even Montgomery County stopped doing that months ago.
You need to switch providers.
+1
You are in Massachusetts and your health department and daycare licensing may have completely different rules than down here. Montgomery county was one of the strictest in terms of Covid closures. Technically, daycares are still supposed to report any Covid illnesses to the health department, and the health department may advise daycare classrooms to shut down, or entire schools to shut down, but I think this has gone by the wayside. If your state and local jurisdiction has dropped Covid mandated closures but your daycare is keeping them then you should be looking for a different daycare.
I understand your struggles, but daycares weren’t taking advantage. They still had to charge because they still had to maintain their spaces and pay their employees. Otherwise they would have to shut down and let people go and you would be out of a daycare permanently. Believe me when I say that nobody working in Daycare, whether owners, directors, or employees are living high on the hog.
MoCo DHHS never ordered child care providers or preschools to close. Once MSDE allowed them to reopen a couple months into the pandemic, all subsequent closures were entirely at the discretion of the provider.
2020/2021 we were absolutely ordered to shut down classrooms and entire schools. They used heavy language and our licenses were threatened, and since we had received Covid money to pay our employees, we were told that we had to follow the health department in regards to Covid guidelines and threatened to have to pay back the money. The county backtracked and gave ho-hum explanations further along because they were receiving pushback from the parents and the general public. Even a few months ago, we received a memo stating that we would still need to follow the health departments guidelines and recommendations in terms of exclusion and closures. It was fine print buried at the bottom of a document but it’s still there. It’s also largely ignored. I looked back at 2020 and 2021 and it was a time of mass confusion and fear among my colleagues and other daycare owners.
I have gone back to pre-Covid sick guidelines for children. I have a strict individual sickness policy, but it prevents large virus outbreaks, and is much better for all of the parents and children in the long run.
I am glad it’s all over.
Honestly, as someone who spent countless hours talking to state and county officials about this, I only have so much pitty for you. Yes, you were being lied to and misled, but you were in a much, much better position to resolve this quickly than parents were. Did you ever talk to Steven Hicks in MSDE? Earl Stoddard in the county executive's office? Sean O’Donnell in DHHS? Did you tell any of them what OCC and Early Childhood Services were telling you? Did you go yo thr press, or even the county council, when your questions weren’t answered directly?
I doubt it.
I am a daycare parent and you do not sound reasonable at all. Let it go. The daycares are not at fault here.
I agree they’re not the ones mostly at fault, but they could have sought clarification on the regulations versus voluntary recommendations. Or at least accepted the clarifications that parents sent in. I doubt my provider was the only one hiding behind claims that they had to follow certain rules, even when I provided messages from the state and county that said otherwise. At a certain point that changed from honest confusion to willful ignorance.
I think in this situation the line between recommendations and regulations is a little bit blurry. In actuality, the county had little ability to punish providers for not following the guidance. But it was certainly the expectation that providers would - not just the expectation of the government but also many parents. I think it's a little silly to, at this stage, be bashing providers for following public health guidance during a pandemic. And I don't say this because I liked the guidance, I had a lot of issues with it.
I disagree. If providers incurred the cost of those closures, do you really think they would have sat back and claimed their hands were tied? Of course not. They would have at least sought clarification of the rules, and may have encouraged changes to voluntary guidance. But because they were passing the costs onto the parents, they simply went along with it— despite those closures almost certainly violating the enrollment agreements they had with parents.
That’s probably one reason the larger centers didn’t seek clarification— if they were explicitly informed the closures were voluntary, then they would have been willfully violating those contracts by excluding kids using criteria not described in those enrollment agreements.
On the contrary, I think many centers were absolutely bearing costs of closures because families did have to disenroll due to closures.
They lost money due to Covid, but not the closures. Parents that needed child care didn’t have a choice. Some people decided to take advantage of WFH to save money by being bad parents and bad employees.
Totally agree WFH and child care is not ok. But I was suggesting many parents hired nannies. I live in not fancy neighborhood in a small townhouse community and the two other families with young children had nannies until very recently. Of course for many that was fear of COVID but for many it was also bc daycare was not worth it financially. Child care only works if it is provided.
Sure, that happened, but very, very few people were in a position to do that financially. It didn’t have much of an impact on child care centers.
It's a lot more than you think. As I said where I live is not a fancy neighborhood. There are a lot of professionals with HHIs under $250k that can stretch to pay for a nanny when it comes down to it.
If the HHI that immediately comes to mind is $250k, then you live in quite the bubble.
There are also a lot of feds in the area that would be obligated to pay taxes/insurance for nannies, dramatically increasing the cost compared to a child care center.
If you think most low and middle income families with young children, especially children under age 3, are sending their children to child care centers, then you live in quite the bubble. Families with incomes above the median (which is around $125k) are the key customer base for centers which are quite costly.
Median household income in MoCo is $117k. There's a big difference between that and $250k. So you're already knocking out a huge percentage by thinking of families making around $250k. And of those, the number that actually have an extra $20-30K to pay for a nanny is small.
Again, I'm not saying it doesn't/didn't happen. Just that it was responsible for a very small percentage of lost revenue by child care operators. Some areas would have been hit harder than others. Perhaps operators in Bethesda, Potomac, and even parts of Rockville may have lost more than a couple kids this way, but not most of the area.
I live in Silver Spring and there are a bunch of families here that would have used daycare but for the pandemic. Many citing daycare is just not worth it so they eat the cost of the nanny. With WFH they don't need to pay for overtime hours.
One thing I've noticed about daycare centers is the children in most are overwhelmingly (but not exclusively, of course) White. The median income for White families in Montgomery County is $190k. Gives you a sense of the population we are talking about. In Montgomery County a quarter of households make more that $200k. This is a very high income region even outside of Bethesda.
Again, I'm not saying it didn't happen, but you're deluding yourself if you think a large number of families have an extra $20-30k a year to spend on a nanny. There's not even that many nannies to go around. So while I'm sure centers lost some kids that way, they lost more for other reasons. Work from home being the big one. I don't know anyone that ended up with nannies, but I know several that made due with a combination of WFH parents and grandparents. Even of those that were able to get nannies, I suspect WFH is still what led to that in most cases, rather than child care center closures.
given how many childcare workers have left centers, yes, the people are there. You can tell me I am "deluding myself" (classy way to argue btw), but that does not change the data. Many do have enough money, especially the demographic that uses centers without a voucher
$20-30k is a lot of money for most people making $200k. Surely you understand that, don’t you? Where do you think all these nannies came from? Our center has lost a lot of child care workers during the pandemic, but none became nannies. Losing benefits, or less generous benefits, would have made that a nonstarter. The vast majority left for various MCPS positions. Most of our new employees were poached from other centers in the midcounty area.
You're a very rude person aren't you? No wonder you assume your child care provider is fleecing you. I guess child care center profits must be way up and providers must be expanding based on how much they are all "taking advantage", right? Why are all those workers leaving a job where they must get so much free vacation?
Day care workers make $20-30K a year, not your $200K. For them missing a week of work usually means no pay and they often don't have insurance for doctors visits. $200K ice a very comfortable salary.
I mean according to you households on $200k are living month to month and can't possibly afford a nanny.
Also if all these workers are leaving why doesn't the daycare which is "taking advantage" of families and not at all struggling according to you just pay the workers better?
Anonymous wrote:Yes many are taking advantage. I was just thinking our daycare requires kids to stay home 48 hours after a fever subsided. Prior to COVID it was 24 hours. Maybe it made sense in 2020 but if a kid has a negative test there is no reason why it can’t be 24 hours like it always was. It just leads to more lost work or lying and skirting the rules. But the provider has to deal with fewer kids so it’s great for them.
An outbreak is a huge deal and no center wants that and if staff are sick and they don't have staff they have to come. If you send your sick kid who infects 10 more, that impacts 10 families which is really crummy.
That's why we have these things called COVID tests. So kids getting over a cold can come back to daycare as they have for decades.
Anonymous wrote:I'm a full time employee at a hospital in Massachusetts. A single mother who my son goes to daycare 5 days a week. It is now December 2022 COVID is over!!! Daycares should not be closing every day of the year. My paid time has gone completely down the drain from calling out of work for non sense. We are paying for child care because parents are reliant on these daycares to take care of our children while we are at work. On top of that we have to pay the daycare regardless if they take days off and or if our child is not attending that day. This is completely unfair to parents who are trying to attend work to make a living, meanwhile these daycares are collecting their paychecks every week while they are home having days off. Also having to find someone to watch your child while daycare is closed and also paying that person for the day. The economy is not right for this to be happening. Families cannot afford to be paying for daycare and a backup person. THIS NEEDS TO STOP!!!! It is imperative that changes need to be made about these strict policies that these daycares have. Daycares are clearly taking advantage of families during these past three years.
What daycares are closing for covid anymore? Even Montgomery County stopped doing that months ago.
You need to switch providers.
+1
You are in Massachusetts and your health department and daycare licensing may have completely different rules than down here. Montgomery county was one of the strictest in terms of Covid closures. Technically, daycares are still supposed to report any Covid illnesses to the health department, and the health department may advise daycare classrooms to shut down, or entire schools to shut down, but I think this has gone by the wayside. If your state and local jurisdiction has dropped Covid mandated closures but your daycare is keeping them then you should be looking for a different daycare.
I understand your struggles, but daycares weren’t taking advantage. They still had to charge because they still had to maintain their spaces and pay their employees. Otherwise they would have to shut down and let people go and you would be out of a daycare permanently. Believe me when I say that nobody working in Daycare, whether owners, directors, or employees are living high on the hog.
MoCo DHHS never ordered child care providers or preschools to close. Once MSDE allowed them to reopen a couple months into the pandemic, all subsequent closures were entirely at the discretion of the provider.
2020/2021 we were absolutely ordered to shut down classrooms and entire schools. They used heavy language and our licenses were threatened, and since we had received Covid money to pay our employees, we were told that we had to follow the health department in regards to Covid guidelines and threatened to have to pay back the money. The county backtracked and gave ho-hum explanations further along because they were receiving pushback from the parents and the general public. Even a few months ago, we received a memo stating that we would still need to follow the health departments guidelines and recommendations in terms of exclusion and closures. It was fine print buried at the bottom of a document but it’s still there. It’s also largely ignored. I looked back at 2020 and 2021 and it was a time of mass confusion and fear among my colleagues and other daycare owners.
I have gone back to pre-Covid sick guidelines for children. I have a strict individual sickness policy, but it prevents large virus outbreaks, and is much better for all of the parents and children in the long run.
I am glad it’s all over.
Honestly, as someone who spent countless hours talking to state and county officials about this, I only have so much pitty for you. Yes, you were being lied to and misled, but you were in a much, much better position to resolve this quickly than parents were. Did you ever talk to Steven Hicks in MSDE? Earl Stoddard in the county executive's office? Sean O’Donnell in DHHS? Did you tell any of them what OCC and Early Childhood Services were telling you? Did you go yo thr press, or even the county council, when your questions weren’t answered directly?
I doubt it.
I am a daycare parent and you do not sound reasonable at all. Let it go. The daycares are not at fault here.
I agree they’re not the ones mostly at fault, but they could have sought clarification on the regulations versus voluntary recommendations. Or at least accepted the clarifications that parents sent in. I doubt my provider was the only one hiding behind claims that they had to follow certain rules, even when I provided messages from the state and county that said otherwise. At a certain point that changed from honest confusion to willful ignorance.
I think in this situation the line between recommendations and regulations is a little bit blurry. In actuality, the county had little ability to punish providers for not following the guidance. But it was certainly the expectation that providers would - not just the expectation of the government but also many parents. I think it's a little silly to, at this stage, be bashing providers for following public health guidance during a pandemic. And I don't say this because I liked the guidance, I had a lot of issues with it.
I disagree. If providers incurred the cost of those closures, do you really think they would have sat back and claimed their hands were tied? Of course not. They would have at least sought clarification of the rules, and may have encouraged changes to voluntary guidance. But because they were passing the costs onto the parents, they simply went along with it— despite those closures almost certainly violating the enrollment agreements they had with parents.
That’s probably one reason the larger centers didn’t seek clarification— if they were explicitly informed the closures were voluntary, then they would have been willfully violating those contracts by excluding kids using criteria not described in those enrollment agreements.
On the contrary, I think many centers were absolutely bearing costs of closures because families did have to disenroll due to closures.
They lost money due to Covid, but not the closures. Parents that needed child care didn’t have a choice. Some people decided to take advantage of WFH to save money by being bad parents and bad employees.
Totally agree WFH and child care is not ok. But I was suggesting many parents hired nannies. I live in not fancy neighborhood in a small townhouse community and the two other families with young children had nannies until very recently. Of course for many that was fear of COVID but for many it was also bc daycare was not worth it financially. Child care only works if it is provided.
Sure, that happened, but very, very few people were in a position to do that financially. It didn’t have much of an impact on child care centers.
It's a lot more than you think. As I said where I live is not a fancy neighborhood. There are a lot of professionals with HHIs under $250k that can stretch to pay for a nanny when it comes down to it.
If the HHI that immediately comes to mind is $250k, then you live in quite the bubble.
There are also a lot of feds in the area that would be obligated to pay taxes/insurance for nannies, dramatically increasing the cost compared to a child care center.
If you think most low and middle income families with young children, especially children under age 3, are sending their children to child care centers, then you live in quite the bubble. Families with incomes above the median (which is around $125k) are the key customer base for centers which are quite costly.
Median household income in MoCo is $117k. There's a big difference between that and $250k. So you're already knocking out a huge percentage by thinking of families making around $250k. And of those, the number that actually have an extra $20-30K to pay for a nanny is small.
Again, I'm not saying it doesn't/didn't happen. Just that it was responsible for a very small percentage of lost revenue by child care operators. Some areas would have been hit harder than others. Perhaps operators in Bethesda, Potomac, and even parts of Rockville may have lost more than a couple kids this way, but not most of the area.
I live in Silver Spring and there are a bunch of families here that would have used daycare but for the pandemic. Many citing daycare is just not worth it so they eat the cost of the nanny. With WFH they don't need to pay for overtime hours.
One thing I've noticed about daycare centers is the children in most are overwhelmingly (but not exclusively, of course) White. The median income for White families in Montgomery County is $190k. Gives you a sense of the population we are talking about. In Montgomery County a quarter of households make more that $200k. This is a very high income region even outside of Bethesda.
Again, I'm not saying it didn't happen, but you're deluding yourself if you think a large number of families have an extra $20-30k a year to spend on a nanny. There's not even that many nannies to go around. So while I'm sure centers lost some kids that way, they lost more for other reasons. Work from home being the big one. I don't know anyone that ended up with nannies, but I know several that made due with a combination of WFH parents and grandparents. Even of those that were able to get nannies, I suspect WFH is still what led to that in most cases, rather than child care center closures.
given how many childcare workers have left centers, yes, the people are there. You can tell me I am "deluding myself" (classy way to argue btw), but that does not change the data. Many do have enough money, especially the demographic that uses centers without a voucher
$20-30k is a lot of money for most people making $200k. Surely you understand that, don’t you? Where do you think all these nannies came from? Our center has lost a lot of child care workers during the pandemic, but none became nannies. Losing benefits, or less generous benefits, would have made that a nonstarter. The vast majority left for various MCPS positions. Most of our new employees were poached from other centers in the midcounty area.
You're a very rude person aren't you? No wonder you assume your child care provider is fleecing you. I guess child care center profits must be way up and providers must be expanding based on how much they are all "taking advantage", right? Why are all those workers leaving a job where they must get so much free vacation?
Day care workers make $20-30K a year, not your $200K. For them missing a week of work usually means no pay and they often don't have insurance for doctors visits. $200K ice a very comfortable salary.
Maybe the owners of the daycares should pay them more. During COVID the owners of our daycare kept sending sob story letters about how the businesses was at risk while living in a neighborhood with rich people and driving Mercedes.
Anonymous wrote:I'm a full time employee at a hospital in Massachusetts. A single mother who my son goes to daycare 5 days a week. It is now December 2022 COVID is over!!! Daycares should not be closing every day of the year. My paid time has gone completely down the drain from calling out of work for non sense. We are paying for child care because parents are reliant on these daycares to take care of our children while we are at work. On top of that we have to pay the daycare regardless if they take days off and or if our child is not attending that day. This is completely unfair to parents who are trying to attend work to make a living, meanwhile these daycares are collecting their paychecks every week while they are home having days off. Also having to find someone to watch your child while daycare is closed and also paying that person for the day. The economy is not right for this to be happening. Families cannot afford to be paying for daycare and a backup person. THIS NEEDS TO STOP!!!! It is imperative that changes need to be made about these strict policies that these daycares have. Daycares are clearly taking advantage of families during these past three years.
What daycares are closing for covid anymore? Even Montgomery County stopped doing that months ago.
You need to switch providers.
+1
You are in Massachusetts and your health department and daycare licensing may have completely different rules than down here. Montgomery county was one of the strictest in terms of Covid closures. Technically, daycares are still supposed to report any Covid illnesses to the health department, and the health department may advise daycare classrooms to shut down, or entire schools to shut down, but I think this has gone by the wayside. If your state and local jurisdiction has dropped Covid mandated closures but your daycare is keeping them then you should be looking for a different daycare.
I understand your struggles, but daycares weren’t taking advantage. They still had to charge because they still had to maintain their spaces and pay their employees. Otherwise they would have to shut down and let people go and you would be out of a daycare permanently. Believe me when I say that nobody working in Daycare, whether owners, directors, or employees are living high on the hog.
MoCo DHHS never ordered child care providers or preschools to close. Once MSDE allowed them to reopen a couple months into the pandemic, all subsequent closures were entirely at the discretion of the provider.
2020/2021 we were absolutely ordered to shut down classrooms and entire schools. They used heavy language and our licenses were threatened, and since we had received Covid money to pay our employees, we were told that we had to follow the health department in regards to Covid guidelines and threatened to have to pay back the money. The county backtracked and gave ho-hum explanations further along because they were receiving pushback from the parents and the general public. Even a few months ago, we received a memo stating that we would still need to follow the health departments guidelines and recommendations in terms of exclusion and closures. It was fine print buried at the bottom of a document but it’s still there. It’s also largely ignored. I looked back at 2020 and 2021 and it was a time of mass confusion and fear among my colleagues and other daycare owners.
I have gone back to pre-Covid sick guidelines for children. I have a strict individual sickness policy, but it prevents large virus outbreaks, and is much better for all of the parents and children in the long run.
I am glad it’s all over.
Honestly, as someone who spent countless hours talking to state and county officials about this, I only have so much pitty for you. Yes, you were being lied to and misled, but you were in a much, much better position to resolve this quickly than parents were. Did you ever talk to Steven Hicks in MSDE? Earl Stoddard in the county executive's office? Sean O’Donnell in DHHS? Did you tell any of them what OCC and Early Childhood Services were telling you? Did you go yo thr press, or even the county council, when your questions weren’t answered directly?
I doubt it.
I am a daycare parent and you do not sound reasonable at all. Let it go. The daycares are not at fault here.
I agree they’re not the ones mostly at fault, but they could have sought clarification on the regulations versus voluntary recommendations. Or at least accepted the clarifications that parents sent in. I doubt my provider was the only one hiding behind claims that they had to follow certain rules, even when I provided messages from the state and county that said otherwise. At a certain point that changed from honest confusion to willful ignorance.
I think in this situation the line between recommendations and regulations is a little bit blurry. In actuality, the county had little ability to punish providers for not following the guidance. But it was certainly the expectation that providers would - not just the expectation of the government but also many parents. I think it's a little silly to, at this stage, be bashing providers for following public health guidance during a pandemic. And I don't say this because I liked the guidance, I had a lot of issues with it.
I disagree. If providers incurred the cost of those closures, do you really think they would have sat back and claimed their hands were tied? Of course not. They would have at least sought clarification of the rules, and may have encouraged changes to voluntary guidance. But because they were passing the costs onto the parents, they simply went along with it— despite those closures almost certainly violating the enrollment agreements they had with parents.
That’s probably one reason the larger centers didn’t seek clarification— if they were explicitly informed the closures were voluntary, then they would have been willfully violating those contracts by excluding kids using criteria not described in those enrollment agreements.
On the contrary, I think many centers were absolutely bearing costs of closures because families did have to disenroll due to closures.
They lost money due to Covid, but not the closures. Parents that needed child care didn’t have a choice. Some people decided to take advantage of WFH to save money by being bad parents and bad employees.
Totally agree WFH and child care is not ok. But I was suggesting many parents hired nannies. I live in not fancy neighborhood in a small townhouse community and the two other families with young children had nannies until very recently. Of course for many that was fear of COVID but for many it was also bc daycare was not worth it financially. Child care only works if it is provided.
Sure, that happened, but very, very few people were in a position to do that financially. It didn’t have much of an impact on child care centers.
It's a lot more than you think. As I said where I live is not a fancy neighborhood. There are a lot of professionals with HHIs under $250k that can stretch to pay for a nanny when it comes down to it.
If the HHI that immediately comes to mind is $250k, then you live in quite the bubble.
There are also a lot of feds in the area that would be obligated to pay taxes/insurance for nannies, dramatically increasing the cost compared to a child care center.
If you think most low and middle income families with young children, especially children under age 3, are sending their children to child care centers, then you live in quite the bubble. Families with incomes above the median (which is around $125k) are the key customer base for centers which are quite costly.
Median household income in MoCo is $117k. There's a big difference between that and $250k. So you're already knocking out a huge percentage by thinking of families making around $250k. And of those, the number that actually have an extra $20-30K to pay for a nanny is small.
Again, I'm not saying it doesn't/didn't happen. Just that it was responsible for a very small percentage of lost revenue by child care operators. Some areas would have been hit harder than others. Perhaps operators in Bethesda, Potomac, and even parts of Rockville may have lost more than a couple kids this way, but not most of the area.
I live in Silver Spring and there are a bunch of families here that would have used daycare but for the pandemic. Many citing daycare is just not worth it so they eat the cost of the nanny. With WFH they don't need to pay for overtime hours.
One thing I've noticed about daycare centers is the children in most are overwhelmingly (but not exclusively, of course) White. The median income for White families in Montgomery County is $190k. Gives you a sense of the population we are talking about. In Montgomery County a quarter of households make more that $200k. This is a very high income region even outside of Bethesda.
Again, I'm not saying it didn't happen, but you're deluding yourself if you think a large number of families have an extra $20-30k a year to spend on a nanny. There's not even that many nannies to go around. So while I'm sure centers lost some kids that way, they lost more for other reasons. Work from home being the big one. I don't know anyone that ended up with nannies, but I know several that made due with a combination of WFH parents and grandparents. Even of those that were able to get nannies, I suspect WFH is still what led to that in most cases, rather than child care center closures.
given how many childcare workers have left centers, yes, the people are there. You can tell me I am "deluding myself" (classy way to argue btw), but that does not change the data. Many do have enough money, especially the demographic that uses centers without a voucher
$20-30k is a lot of money for most people making $200k. Surely you understand that, don’t you? Where do you think all these nannies came from? Our center has lost a lot of child care workers during the pandemic, but none became nannies. Losing benefits, or less generous benefits, would have made that a nonstarter. The vast majority left for various MCPS positions. Most of our new employees were poached from other centers in the midcounty area.
You're a very rude person aren't you? No wonder you assume your child care provider is fleecing you. I guess child care center profits must be way up and providers must be expanding based on how much they are all "taking advantage", right? Why are all those workers leaving a job where they must get so much free vacation?
When did I say they’re “fleecing” me? They’re rates are fine. It’s the fact that they charged parents during voluntary closures that I have a problem with.
Anonymous wrote:I'm a full time employee at a hospital in Massachusetts. A single mother who my son goes to daycare 5 days a week. It is now December 2022 COVID is over!!! Daycares should not be closing every day of the year. My paid time has gone completely down the drain from calling out of work for non sense. We are paying for child care because parents are reliant on these daycares to take care of our children while we are at work. On top of that we have to pay the daycare regardless if they take days off and or if our child is not attending that day. This is completely unfair to parents who are trying to attend work to make a living, meanwhile these daycares are collecting their paychecks every week while they are home having days off. Also having to find someone to watch your child while daycare is closed and also paying that person for the day. The economy is not right for this to be happening. Families cannot afford to be paying for daycare and a backup person. THIS NEEDS TO STOP!!!! It is imperative that changes need to be made about these strict policies that these daycares have. Daycares are clearly taking advantage of families during these past three years.
What daycares are closing for covid anymore? Even Montgomery County stopped doing that months ago.
You need to switch providers.
+1
You are in Massachusetts and your health department and daycare licensing may have completely different rules than down here. Montgomery county was one of the strictest in terms of Covid closures. Technically, daycares are still supposed to report any Covid illnesses to the health department, and the health department may advise daycare classrooms to shut down, or entire schools to shut down, but I think this has gone by the wayside. If your state and local jurisdiction has dropped Covid mandated closures but your daycare is keeping them then you should be looking for a different daycare.
I understand your struggles, but daycares weren’t taking advantage. They still had to charge because they still had to maintain their spaces and pay their employees. Otherwise they would have to shut down and let people go and you would be out of a daycare permanently. Believe me when I say that nobody working in Daycare, whether owners, directors, or employees are living high on the hog.
MoCo DHHS never ordered child care providers or preschools to close. Once MSDE allowed them to reopen a couple months into the pandemic, all subsequent closures were entirely at the discretion of the provider.
2020/2021 we were absolutely ordered to shut down classrooms and entire schools. They used heavy language and our licenses were threatened, and since we had received Covid money to pay our employees, we were told that we had to follow the health department in regards to Covid guidelines and threatened to have to pay back the money. The county backtracked and gave ho-hum explanations further along because they were receiving pushback from the parents and the general public. Even a few months ago, we received a memo stating that we would still need to follow the health departments guidelines and recommendations in terms of exclusion and closures. It was fine print buried at the bottom of a document but it’s still there. It’s also largely ignored. I looked back at 2020 and 2021 and it was a time of mass confusion and fear among my colleagues and other daycare owners.
I have gone back to pre-Covid sick guidelines for children. I have a strict individual sickness policy, but it prevents large virus outbreaks, and is much better for all of the parents and children in the long run.
I am glad it’s all over.
Honestly, as someone who spent countless hours talking to state and county officials about this, I only have so much pitty for you. Yes, you were being lied to and misled, but you were in a much, much better position to resolve this quickly than parents were. Did you ever talk to Steven Hicks in MSDE? Earl Stoddard in the county executive's office? Sean O’Donnell in DHHS? Did you tell any of them what OCC and Early Childhood Services were telling you? Did you go yo thr press, or even the county council, when your questions weren’t answered directly?
I doubt it.
I am a daycare parent and you do not sound reasonable at all. Let it go. The daycares are not at fault here.
I agree they’re not the ones mostly at fault, but they could have sought clarification on the regulations versus voluntary recommendations. Or at least accepted the clarifications that parents sent in. I doubt my provider was the only one hiding behind claims that they had to follow certain rules, even when I provided messages from the state and county that said otherwise. At a certain point that changed from honest confusion to willful ignorance.
I think in this situation the line between recommendations and regulations is a little bit blurry. In actuality, the county had little ability to punish providers for not following the guidance. But it was certainly the expectation that providers would - not just the expectation of the government but also many parents. I think it's a little silly to, at this stage, be bashing providers for following public health guidance during a pandemic. And I don't say this because I liked the guidance, I had a lot of issues with it.
I disagree. If providers incurred the cost of those closures, do you really think they would have sat back and claimed their hands were tied? Of course not. They would have at least sought clarification of the rules, and may have encouraged changes to voluntary guidance. But because they were passing the costs onto the parents, they simply went along with it— despite those closures almost certainly violating the enrollment agreements they had with parents.
That’s probably one reason the larger centers didn’t seek clarification— if they were explicitly informed the closures were voluntary, then they would have been willfully violating those contracts by excluding kids using criteria not described in those enrollment agreements.
On the contrary, I think many centers were absolutely bearing costs of closures because families did have to disenroll due to closures.
They lost money due to Covid, but not the closures. Parents that needed child care didn’t have a choice. Some people decided to take advantage of WFH to save money by being bad parents and bad employees.
Totally agree WFH and child care is not ok. But I was suggesting many parents hired nannies. I live in not fancy neighborhood in a small townhouse community and the two other families with young children had nannies until very recently. Of course for many that was fear of COVID but for many it was also bc daycare was not worth it financially. Child care only works if it is provided.
Sure, that happened, but very, very few people were in a position to do that financially. It didn’t have much of an impact on child care centers.
It's a lot more than you think. As I said where I live is not a fancy neighborhood. There are a lot of professionals with HHIs under $250k that can stretch to pay for a nanny when it comes down to it.
If the HHI that immediately comes to mind is $250k, then you live in quite the bubble.
There are also a lot of feds in the area that would be obligated to pay taxes/insurance for nannies, dramatically increasing the cost compared to a child care center.
If you think most low and middle income families with young children, especially children under age 3, are sending their children to child care centers, then you live in quite the bubble. Families with incomes above the median (which is around $125k) are the key customer base for centers which are quite costly.
Median household income in MoCo is $117k. There's a big difference between that and $250k. So you're already knocking out a huge percentage by thinking of families making around $250k. And of those, the number that actually have an extra $20-30K to pay for a nanny is small.
Again, I'm not saying it doesn't/didn't happen. Just that it was responsible for a very small percentage of lost revenue by child care operators. Some areas would have been hit harder than others. Perhaps operators in Bethesda, Potomac, and even parts of Rockville may have lost more than a couple kids this way, but not most of the area.
I live in Silver Spring and there are a bunch of families here that would have used daycare but for the pandemic. Many citing daycare is just not worth it so they eat the cost of the nanny. With WFH they don't need to pay for overtime hours.
One thing I've noticed about daycare centers is the children in most are overwhelmingly (but not exclusively, of course) White. The median income for White families in Montgomery County is $190k. Gives you a sense of the population we are talking about. In Montgomery County a quarter of households make more that $200k. This is a very high income region even outside of Bethesda.
Again, I'm not saying it didn't happen, but you're deluding yourself if you think a large number of families have an extra $20-30k a year to spend on a nanny. There's not even that many nannies to go around. So while I'm sure centers lost some kids that way, they lost more for other reasons. Work from home being the big one. I don't know anyone that ended up with nannies, but I know several that made due with a combination of WFH parents and grandparents. Even of those that were able to get nannies, I suspect WFH is still what led to that in most cases, rather than child care center closures.
given how many childcare workers have left centers, yes, the people are there. You can tell me I am "deluding myself" (classy way to argue btw), but that does not change the data. Many do have enough money, especially the demographic that uses centers without a voucher
$20-30k is a lot of money for most people making $200k. Surely you understand that, don’t you? Where do you think all these nannies came from? Our center has lost a lot of child care workers during the pandemic, but none became nannies. Losing benefits, or less generous benefits, would have made that a nonstarter. The vast majority left for various MCPS positions. Most of our new employees were poached from other centers in the midcounty area.
You're a very rude person aren't you? No wonder you assume your child care provider is fleecing you. I guess child care center profits must be way up and providers must be expanding based on how much they are all "taking advantage", right? Why are all those workers leaving a job where they must get so much free vacation?
Day care workers make $20-30K a year, not your $200K. For them missing a week of work usually means no pay and they often don't have insurance for doctors visits. $200K ice a very comfortable salary.
Why don’t you provide your child care workers health insurance?
Anonymous wrote:Yes many are taking advantage. I was just thinking our daycare requires kids to stay home 48 hours after a fever subsided. Prior to COVID it was 24 hours. Maybe it made sense in 2020 but if a kid has a negative test there is no reason why it can’t be 24 hours like it always was. It just leads to more lost work or lying and skirting the rules. But the provider has to deal with fewer kids so it’s great for them.
An outbreak is a huge deal and no center wants that and if staff are sick and they don't have staff they have to come. If you send your sick kid who infects 10 more, that impacts 10 families which is really crummy.
A 48 hour fever policy isn’t going to keep RSV, influenza, HFM, Covid, etc. out. Sick policies never have and never will. You’re often contagious before you have significant symptoms.
Anonymous wrote:I'm a full time employee at a hospital in Massachusetts. A single mother who my son goes to daycare 5 days a week. It is now December 2022 COVID is over!!! Daycares should not be closing every day of the year. My paid time has gone completely down the drain from calling out of work for non sense. We are paying for child care because parents are reliant on these daycares to take care of our children while we are at work. On top of that we have to pay the daycare regardless if they take days off and or if our child is not attending that day. This is completely unfair to parents who are trying to attend work to make a living, meanwhile these daycares are collecting their paychecks every week while they are home having days off. Also having to find someone to watch your child while daycare is closed and also paying that person for the day. The economy is not right for this to be happening. Families cannot afford to be paying for daycare and a backup person. THIS NEEDS TO STOP!!!! It is imperative that changes need to be made about these strict policies that these daycares have. Daycares are clearly taking advantage of families during these past three years.
What daycares are closing for covid anymore? Even Montgomery County stopped doing that months ago.
You need to switch providers.
+1
You are in Massachusetts and your health department and daycare licensing may have completely different rules than down here. Montgomery county was one of the strictest in terms of Covid closures. Technically, daycares are still supposed to report any Covid illnesses to the health department, and the health department may advise daycare classrooms to shut down, or entire schools to shut down, but I think this has gone by the wayside. If your state and local jurisdiction has dropped Covid mandated closures but your daycare is keeping them then you should be looking for a different daycare.
I understand your struggles, but daycares weren’t taking advantage. They still had to charge because they still had to maintain their spaces and pay their employees. Otherwise they would have to shut down and let people go and you would be out of a daycare permanently. Believe me when I say that nobody working in Daycare, whether owners, directors, or employees are living high on the hog.
MoCo DHHS never ordered child care providers or preschools to close. Once MSDE allowed them to reopen a couple months into the pandemic, all subsequent closures were entirely at the discretion of the provider.
2020/2021 we were absolutely ordered to shut down classrooms and entire schools. They used heavy language and our licenses were threatened, and since we had received Covid money to pay our employees, we were told that we had to follow the health department in regards to Covid guidelines and threatened to have to pay back the money. The county backtracked and gave ho-hum explanations further along because they were receiving pushback from the parents and the general public. Even a few months ago, we received a memo stating that we would still need to follow the health departments guidelines and recommendations in terms of exclusion and closures. It was fine print buried at the bottom of a document but it’s still there. It’s also largely ignored. I looked back at 2020 and 2021 and it was a time of mass confusion and fear among my colleagues and other daycare owners.
I have gone back to pre-Covid sick guidelines for children. I have a strict individual sickness policy, but it prevents large virus outbreaks, and is much better for all of the parents and children in the long run.
I am glad it’s all over.
Honestly, as someone who spent countless hours talking to state and county officials about this, I only have so much pitty for you. Yes, you were being lied to and misled, but you were in a much, much better position to resolve this quickly than parents were. Did you ever talk to Steven Hicks in MSDE? Earl Stoddard in the county executive's office? Sean O’Donnell in DHHS? Did you tell any of them what OCC and Early Childhood Services were telling you? Did you go yo thr press, or even the county council, when your questions weren’t answered directly?
I doubt it.
You’re ridiculous. They were under no obligation to go to all of these extreme measures.
Don’t like the policies now? Find a new daycare.
Yes, that’s my point. They didn’t have to follow the extreme Covid measures. They chose to, and then hid behind the county.
Cool. Well, keep whining and stomping your feet about it. Oh, and if you don’t like their offerings, don’t use them. Shrug.
Anonymous wrote:Yes many are taking advantage. I was just thinking our daycare requires kids to stay home 48 hours after a fever subsided. Prior to COVID it was 24 hours. Maybe it made sense in 2020 but if a kid has a negative test there is no reason why it can’t be 24 hours like it always was. It just leads to more lost work or lying and skirting the rules. But the provider has to deal with fewer kids so it’s great for them.
Did they update the enrollment agreement to say that? Because MSDE exclusion criteria is still 24 hours, and nearly all child care center contracts I’ve seen just refer to the state rules.
Separately, though, it seems like the obvious, immediate solution is to never say they had a fever.
Anonymous wrote:Yes many are taking advantage. I was just thinking our daycare requires kids to stay home 48 hours after a fever subsided. Prior to COVID it was 24 hours. Maybe it made sense in 2020 but if a kid has a negative test there is no reason why it can’t be 24 hours like it always was. It just leads to more lost work or lying and skirting the rules. But the provider has to deal with fewer kids so it’s great for them.
Did they update the enrollment agreement to say that? Because MSDE exclusion criteria is still 24 hours, and nearly all child care center contracts I’ve seen just refer to the state rules.
Separately, though, it seems like the obvious, immediate solution is to never say they had a fever.
I hope you lose your spot, you selfish jerk.
There would be plenty of spots to choose from in that situation. Almost no parents would report a fever if it automatically meant taking 2 extra days off from work **after** their child recovers.
Anonymous wrote:Do daycares still have these policies or are people still complaining about 2020 and 2021?
Most dropped the worst of their policies late spring/early summer. I think it is still common to have wildly unrealistic symptom screening policies, but most don’t seem to actually follow them. Some places still shut down rooms for cases, but it is very much the exception at this point. And apparently some have decided to create their own exclusion rules separate from the state, such as the pp who reported their center having a policy of keeping kids out for 48 hours after a fever resolves. No idea where that came from, given that that was never guidance.
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