Reply to Daycares taking advantage of COVID

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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.  [/quote]

What daycares are closing for covid anymore? Even Montgomery County stopped doing that months ago.

You need to switch providers.[/quote]

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. 
[/quote]

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.[/quote]

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. [/quote]

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.[/quote]

I am a daycare parent and you do not sound reasonable at all. Let it go. The daycares are not at fault here.[/quote]

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.[/quote]

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. [/quote]

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.[/quote]

On the contrary, I think many centers were absolutely bearing costs of closures because families did have to disenroll due to closures.[/quote]

They lost money due to Covid, but not the closures. Parents that needed child care didn’t have a choice. [b]Some people decided to take advantage of WFH to save money by being bad parents and bad employees.[/b][/quote]

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. [/quote]

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.[/quote]

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.[/quote]

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.[/quote]

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.[/quote]

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