There has been a lot of conversation in the nation's news about child care. Many reports focus on the heightened awareness that child care is an essential element to a functioning economy as well as that the entire child care system is teetering on the brink of collapse. Here are just a few reports that have been released addressing different aspects of COVID-19 on the child care field.
Picking up the Pieces: Building a Better Child Care System Post COVID-19, Child Care Aware of America has released a report which was built off of data typically collected for their annual reports but gathered as much information as they could for 2020 to add the COVID-19 layer on top of it. "The child care system was fragile before COVID-19. The child care industry is now shattered completely." There is a dynamic version you can view online or download the pdf.
COVID-19 Risk Among Child Care Providers, Yale University conducted a survey of more the 55,000 child care providers from May to June to help us understand the safety of child care providers when it comes to COVID-19 exposure. They found that "As long as there were strong preventative measures in place, providing care to infants, toddlers and preschoolers didn’t seem to pose additional risk to child care workers. Based on the results of the survey, the Yale team found that during the early months of the U.S. coronavirus pandemic, child care providers were not more likely to contract COVID-19 whether their workplace closed or stayed open."
Family Child Care Providers: Unsung Heroes in the COVID-19 Crisis, Herr Research Center and the Erikson Institute published a research to policy brief in September 2020. These institutions have been working on a project to better understand the decline of family child care providers prior to COVID-19. They are now looking into family child care during the pandemic. They 22 conducted focus groups in four states with 123 family child care providers.
The Financial Impact of COVID Licensing Standards on New Jersey Child Care Providers, National Institute for Early Education Research. "This paper examines in-depth the impact of new and existing regulations on child care providers’ revenues and expenditures, and the subsidy rates required to financially sustain child care providers in New Jersey."
The First Five Years Fund sends out daily emails with links to all of the ECE stories throughout the nation as well as Friday emails outlining where ECE stands in policy conversations.
Tom Copeland will be joining our Annual CACFP Conference this year to talk about sustaining your sponsorship and child care business in the midst of a pandemic. Learn more and register here! Get all of the information you need on our conference website! https://www.ccfproundtable.org/2020conference