Early Childhood Educators Offered My Daughter Something That I Couldn’t

In early December 2020, I found myself in my bedroom, conducting an interview over Zoom with a third generation New Orleans-area child care center owner named Paula Polito. The interview was part of an oral history project about the early childhood education workforce during the pandemic. Downstairs I could hear my seven-year-old daughter eating breakfast. My four-year-old daughter was narrating a traffic jam of her toy cars. Meanwhile, my husband was on the phone with our health care provider, trying to schedule our family for COVID-19 tests.

“How are you?” Polito asked.?

I took a deep breath. “Well, it’s a little chaotic here,” I began. I told Polito how just that morning, we had received a message from our younger daughter’s preschool announcing that a teacher had tested positive for COVID. The school was closed, we were quarantining. We were still awaiting details on the teacher’s health, scheduling COVID-19 tests, and rescheduling work meetings.

When I was finished describing the chaos of the morning, I immediately felt embarrassed. I knew from our previous conversations that Polito had had to shut down her program for the entire spring, unsure if she would have to lay off her employees. As positive tests appeared, classrooms had to quarantine. In October 2020, Polito had to make the tough call to close her entire school for two weeks after multiple teachers had tested positive for the virus. Polito, her husband, and children all contracted COVID-19 themselves.?

Polito had been through adversity before. Her child care center sustained $600,000 worth of damage during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when she was pregnant with her first child, and it took her years to rebuild. But even Polito was daunted by COVID-19, describing the pandemic as “Katrina times 10.” I felt silly for panicking over our preschool closure and test appointments.

“Don’t worry,” Polito said reassuringly. “That’s so hard.” Then, with the calm demeanor that only a professional who has lived through it before, Polito led me through what to expect. The tests had gotten much better, she told me. It wouldn’t hurt my four-year-old at all. If we did get sick, we’d likely be fine, she told me, reciting stats about children’s resilience to the virus. Was the teacher young? Yes. Did she have underlying conditions? No, not that I knew. She was like most of Polito’s staff, and she’d likely be fine too, just as they were.

I began to feel better. By the time I was finished with the interview, my husband had secured a test appointment for our daughter, the person with direct exposure. In the coming days, her test would come back negative. Another test would confirm that she was negative. The teacher who contracted the virus suffered only mild symptoms. The closure lasted about a month, inclusive of the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. My family was fine; COVID-19 was an inconvenience for us, not an existential threat.

Like many child care programs across the country, our daughter’s child care center shut down in March 2020, reopening in June. This was the same time period that Adrienne Briggs closed her home-based child care program in Philadelphia. Briggs described this period as “the most depressing, scariest, uncertain time of my life.”?

It wasn’t so for us. To be sure, my husband and I were scared about what would happen to our children if we contracted the virus. We were stressed, trying to compress an eight-hour workday into four, working around childcare shifts.

But unlike early childhood educators, my husband and I weren’t worried for our jobs or livelihood. We were able to work remotely. We didn’t have to interact with anyone who might be carrying the virus.

With playgrounds closed, my daughters spent hours playing in the backyard, building forts and having water fights. My four-year-old learned how to ride a bike, cycling down normally busy streets, now deserted amid the pandemic. We popped popcorn and watched movies projected onto a white wall in the living room. We didn’t fill up our gas tank for three months, confined to the radius of a few blocks from our home.?

We sat with my four-year-old daughter as she participated in daily circle time over Zoom. She was excited to see her teachers and classmates, but her enthusiasm became more muted over time. After all, they weren’t here with her. One teacher’s internet went in-and-out. The children didn’t know how to mute and unmute, creating chaos. Teachers’ lesson plans were dependent on what students might have lying around the house. To keep her engaged, we’d have my daughter paint during circle time. Other times we’d promise a treat for attending.?

It wasn’t the same as being in school.

It was hard for the teachers too. Shemeakia Zinnerman, a substitute teacher for three- and four-year-olds at a Head Start program in North Carolina, taught remotely for most of 2020. She told me, “A classroom, you can be hands-on. I can really help the child with his own [work], but you can't really do that when you're doing virtual.”?

Still, we thought we were doing fine. We declined when the child care center announced that it would reopen in mid-June 2020 and wondered whether we’d like to send our child. With so much about the virus unknown and our daughters seemingly happy at home, we weren’t sure that we wanted to take the risk. We’d wait and see how well the safety protocols the school was implementing were working. Maybe in the fall, we told ourselves.?

Over the Zoom circle time, my daughter began to see a few of her classmates who were back at school. At a socially distanced picnic, a friend from school told her how much fun he was having. In response, our daughter insisted that we drive her to school in the morning. We humored her, figuring that it might be a fun activity to wave to the kids on the playground through the gates.

When we arrived at the child care center, our daughter sat outside the front door and cried because she could not go in. “I miss my school,” she sobbed.

Our four-year-old daughter had made the decision for us. The educators at our daughter’s preschool offered something that neither my husband nor I could. She went back to preschool in July 2020, insisting on being the first child in line to enter the building each day.

Things were different than before. Parents weren’t allowed to enter the facility. There were temperature checks. The staff—but not the children, initially—wore masks. State and county rules limited the number of children in each classroom and didn’t permit mixing between cohorts. Teachers couldn’t move between classrooms, creating staffing shortages. The program was open for fewer hours a day. The playground was sanitized between uses and each classroom could spend only limited time using it.?

Our daughter liked to recite her pre-K class’ daily schedule. “We come into the classroom and wash our hands. We have free-play and we wash our hands. We do activities and we wash our hands. We eat snack and we wash our hands.” There was a lot of hand-washing.

These were the kinds of changes that many child care programs around the country were making in 2020 and into this year. Shelley Jolley, an education manager and disability specialist at a Head Start agency in Utah, was typical of the early childhood educators I interviewed. She reported that her program’s COVID plan included “wearing masks, cleaning and sanitizing, and social distancing.” Like many educators who participated in the oral history project, Jolley’s agency didn’t allow students’ family members into facilities for much of the pandemic.???

The episode of my daughter sobbing in front of her school, unable to enter, was what I thought about as Polito walked me through what to expect of the COVID-19 testing and quarantine. We’d been far luckier than most. We had a child care program to return to when we needed it, in summer 2020. Unlike Polito’s program, this was the first time that our center had reported a positive COVID-19 test, forcing a quarantine. It would end up being the only quarantine that we experienced while my younger daughter was in preschool.

Now she is in kindergarten. There was a positive case in the class last month and our younger daughter had two PCR tests and entered a modified quarantine.

It almost feels like old hat now. The scrounging for testing appointments. The driving to the testing site. The directions about how to swab. The waiting for results. The worried feeling when opening the notification email. The staying away from others. The countdown until a return to normal, whatever normal looks like now.

Educators were hopeful during my last round of interviews and surveys for the oral history in the spring of this year. Most had been vaccinated. COVID-19 case counts were declining. They were still nervous, still vigilant about cleaning protocols, still wearing masks. But they were optimistic about the future. Now, with the delta variant raging, more reported breakthrough infections, and children affected at higher rates than in the past, there is less optimism. There is still determination, though.

Last month, Polito found herself evacuated to stay with family in Florida as Hurricane Ida hit New Orleans. It was just one more obstacle in a devastating two years. But Polito came back, surveyed the damage—which she declared to be nothing like Katrina—cleaned up, and began the school year on Sept. 13.?

As for us, we are hopeful too. Everything is familiar now—the masks, the prohibition about students coming onto campus, the social distancing, the daily health screening form, the testing, even the fear. There is a vaccine for children on the horizon, which brings us hope. Case counts are down where I live, at least for now. And my children are back at school.

Rachel Burstein is an education researcher and writer. She was formerly a researcher at EdSurge, where she led the early childhood education oral history project referenced in this article. Rachel holds a PhD in U.S. labor history from the CUNY Graduate Center and lives with her husband and two daughters in the Bay Area. Learn more about Rachel's work at www.bursteinresearch.com.