Helping families during COVID-19

Since reopening amidst the outbreak of the pandemic in the United States, child care centers have had to ensure they are following social distancing guidelines and keeping their students, staff members, and families safe - while also remaining open for families that have no other options.

The YMCA and Moss Street Children’s Center are two examples of well-known child care centers in the Eugene, Oregon community. While both organizations have had to greatly adjust their normal routines, the two centers have had the opportunity to remain open and continue offering their services to local families.

Lori Bond, the Assistant Director at MSCC, has witnessed the effects of the center remaining open among her staff members as well as the students.

“The kids are so happy to be able to play and be free,” she said, “however, everyone is exhausted and has anxiety about the possibility of bringing coronavirus into the classroom or taking it home to our families.”

While the facility has only been open for ten weeks, as of right now the staff sees the ten-week period as a positive indicator for the rest of the year – and they are endlessly grateful for that.

Bond touched on the fact that not having child care centers open within a community is not really an option. She also noted that there is a larger concern that many of the smaller facilities in Eugene will not be able to re-open after the pandemic has passed.

“We have one parent who is a mental health professional and has luckily been able to do their work from home but simply can’t have their children wandering into the office while they are talking to a client,” Bond added as an example.

In agreement with Bond’s belief in the necessity for child care centers is Beth Casper, the Marketing Communications Manager at the YMCA, frequently referred to as the Y, in Eugene.

“It has definitely been a challenge but it is absolutely essential while the community we are in is going through a global pandemic,” Casper said about the Y remaining open.

Casper also shared that she believes the Y was one of the first establishments to close in the spring – due to the fact that it had an employee who had possibly contracted the virus.

As the day-to-day lives of many child care center employees have already changed, their daily work schedules have also had to be adjusted while they remain ready for greater change to happen at any moment.

“Teachers can’t meet-up and collaborate like they used to. They aren’t allowed to commingle and every time they do meet it is over zoom,” Bond said, “they work the same amount of hours in a day, but so many more of those hours are filled with cleaning activities instead of interacting with the children.

“They spend hours at the end of the day sanitizing every inch of every surface around our facility, even the playground areas outside.”

The faculty at the center have felt worn down and saddened by the fact that they haven’t been able to spend the normal hours with their students. Despite the teachers spending less time with students, Bond said that within the classrooms there have not been any noticeable effects on interaction levels between students.

“We have noticed that the babies can still detect a smile even underneath a mask. The kids seem to trust and know us still,” Bond said.

The pandemic has affected more people than just full-time employees and students within child care facilities. MSCC normally has around eight college students who work in the center, but Bond said that they cannot risk having the young adults coming in and out of their classrooms. This is affecting University of Oregon education majors’ abilities to find on-site experience they need to graduate and enter into their future careers.

Jules Weissman, a communications disorders and sciences major at UO, is one of the lucky college students who has found work in child care since the outbreak began. She recently secured a job at Elements Health Club as a Kids Club Supervisor, where she has volunteered as a summer camp counselor for many years.

“I have had to completely change the focus of my work to safety and cleanliness as opposed to before, where I was more focused on the next fun activity and keeping the kids entertained,” Weissman said.

Carolyn Ready, a third-year education major at UO, has felt and seen how the pandemic has affected her peers and her own educational experience as well as how it is affecting the career they hope to enter into.

“Professors have been helping us learn how to teach and assist children virtually,” Ready said, “It’s something we have absolutely never done before and it’s honestly weird enough to interact with our peers over zoom, much less with little kids who have never even FaceTimed someone before.”

Staff members, children, and college students hoping to join the child care or education workforces are undoubtedly all feeling the ramifications of the coronavirus. However, the group that may be sensing these effects the most are the families of young students themselves.

Many families have had to adjust and adapt to having their children at home or finding new options for child care. Bond shared that under normal circumstances about 115 families make use of MSCC’s services but currently only 26 families are being served.

Parallel to Bond’s statement, Casper noted that the Y has also had to greatly reduce the number of students that it can serve. 

“We initially offered child care to only emergency responders and medical employees because they were in the most apparent need. We eventually opened up our services to essential workers, and this went on through the end of June,” Casper said.

Savannah Kelley, a Eugene mother whose name has been changed for anonymity, described life with a preschool-aged child at home during this time as “an absolute roller coaster.”

“We normally have an Oregon student watch our daughter throughout the week, even for the days we can work from home, but now we can’t risk her health or our own for the sole purpose of getting a little more work done,” Kelley said.

President Trump declared a national emergency on March 13th – nearly eight months ago. Throughout this time, many parents and children have begun to feel slightly “stir crazy” according to Bond. Many child care facilities, even during a pandemic, are providing the outlets that many children want and the help that many parents need.

“We still haven’t been to the playground, our kids haven’t been out in the world,” an MSCC parent told Bond.