Prospect of hybrid schooling leaves parents scrambling for child care

Most public schools plan to have students attend in person two days a week this year. But elementary school children are too young to be left alone, too old for traditional day care – if any spots are even available, or affordable – and potentially too coronavirus-exposed to safely be left with grandparents.

And some employers say it’s time for their workers to get back to the office.

“It’s not only a problem for parents,” said deputy county executive Maria Whyte. “From an employer’s point of view, how do you have a workforce you can count on? This causes very serious effects throughout the county. This is definitely a serious workforce challenge.”

And not only is it a huge challenge, but it’s being tackled under enormous time constraints. There’s only about a month before schools are scheduled to reopen. And before that, somehow, child care provisions need to be created for thousands of kids, all while school plans are changing by the day.

“We’re trying to put a child care structure around a plan that may not even look the same 24 hours from now,” said Whyte, who is working with a task force to find solutions. “If I’m being honest, I don’t think the state gave us enough time.”

Parents are doing the best they can to make arrangements for their children. Yessica Amezquita’s daughter Mahogany will be starting kindergarten at Herman Badillo Bilingual Academy in Buffalo this fall.

Amezquita, who is a program coordinator with the Leaving Our Legacy youth group, has been working from home for months. But it’s unclear how long that will continue.

“There are a lot of day cares but a lot of them are closed still or limited in capacity,” she said. “That just means there’s a lot of waiting lists.”

For the first several weeks after the pandemic hit, she and her partner both were able to work from home. In May, he went back to work. After that, five or six relatives were able to help.

Now, two of Mahogany’s grandparents help with child care. Whenever Amezquita drops her daughter off to them, she asks them about any potential Covid-19 symptoms they might be having, any recent exposure to other people.

“As a parent, it’s a new norm that we have to set up to make sure we have a system in place when she does get taken care of by a family member,” she said. “To go through that screening measure: Have you been well enough for me to drop her off?”

School plans in flux

It seems almost impossible for parents to know how to plan for the coming year.

Schools had until the end of July to roll out plans for three possible models of instruction – fully remote, fully in person and a hybrid of the two. The governor announced Friday that schools can bring students back into the classroom. Because most schools do not have enough space to fit all students at once while also accommodating social distancing, the vast majority will open using a hybrid model.

But many schools have made it clear that whatever hybrid model they rolled out the previous week is likely to be revamped. In at least one district, that’s already happened.

The Kenmore-Town of Tonawanda schools just over a week ago posted a plan that had students attending school every other day. One week, a student would attend Monday, Wednesday and Friday. The next, on Tuesday and Thursday.

While that approach spread out in-person instruction as evenly as possible, many parents were outraged.

“There was feedback from parents that it would be tremendously challenging,” said Patrick Fanelli, a spokesman for the district. “The major concern from parents was that because the days would change from week to week, it would be more difficult to arrange for child care and for employers to arrange for scheduling.”

Ken-Ton announced Friday that it has decided instead to have half the students in school Monday and Tuesday and the other half on Thursday and Friday.

One challenge leads to the next

But finding a hybrid schedule that parents can stomach is just the first hurdle. The next: finding enough openings in child care programs for all the kids who need one.

In Niagara Falls, as in many communities, the main child care programs are nearing capacity. There’s talk of opening another program in a building that once housed a senior center, but that would require cutting through a lot of red tape in a remarkably short amount of time.

And even if it’s possible to get that site open in time, that just leads to the next challenge. Child care providers are worried that if the federal government extends the $600 weekly unemployment enhancement, it may be difficult to find enough staff.

“They’re concerned that people would not come back,” Niagara Falls Superintendent Mark Laurrie said. “That’s the same concern I have with bus drivers and bus aides.”

Even if a program can be fully staffed, there’s yet another challenge: Wednesdays.

In many schools, half the students will attend in person on Mondays and Tuesdays, and the other half on Thursdays and Fridays. On Wednesday, all the kids will be learning remotely, while crews give the schools a deep cleaning.

So, while only half the kids in any school will need child care the other four days a week, all the kids in a school – in other words, twice as many as on the other days – will be in need of a place to go on Wednesdays.

And even if somehow enough child care openings can be made available and staffed – including on Wednesdays – the next challenge is figuring out how to minimize kids’ exposure to one another. Schools are planning to keep kids in small groups or pods as much as possible, so that they’re sitting with the same several children throughout the day, every day.

But children might then be mixing with an entirely different group of kids on the days they’re attending a child care program.

‘I don’t think it’s doable’

If hybrid schooling is going to work, every family will need to be able to secure safe, reliable child care for the days their children are not in school.

And the clock is ticking.

So the key question is this: Will it be possible to find or create a place for every child who needs one before schools reopen?

“I’m going to try awfully hard,” Whyte said. “But I don’t think it’s doable.”