The Department for Children and Families on Wednesday revealed new Covid-19 guidance for child care facilities and kids programs outside of school, including recommending mandatory indoor masking.
Without a state of emergency, which the memo said most likely will “not be justified this year,” the guidance is nonbinding. As cases remain high across the state, child care facilities and parents are left trying to navigate Covid-19 policies largely on their own.
The state issued a similar memo Aug. 4 for K-12 schools, recommending teachers and staff wear masks indoors and stay home when sick. But the drop in guidance in comparison to last school year, when the state issued a 41-page document laying out Covid-19 procedures, has left much of the pressure on superintendents and school boards to make crucial public health decisions, often amid protests by parents.
Now, the same issues are playing out in child care facilities, where the new guidance is too little, too late, said Samara Mays, director and owner of Montpelier Children’s House, a birth through preschool child care facility.
Mays feels that the state’s response has been reactionary and has forced child care facilities to try to navigate the pandemic on a week-to-week basis, largely on their own. With vaccines for children younger than five still far away, birth to preschool facilities like hers need clear and complete guidance for how to go forward.
While vaccines for 5- to 11-year-olds could be ready by the end of the year, vaccines for 2- to 5-year-olds may not be ready until early spring, and trials for children ages 6 months and above have yet to begin.
“We’re not figuring out systems that are going to carry us through the long term,” Mays said. “It’s more like, how do we get through this week? And then how do we get through the week after that? And how do we get through the week after that?”
Without guidance from the state and facing rising cases, Mays had to come up with her own Covid-19 policies with no public health training or knowledge of her own to rely on. She connected with a health expert, who helped her craft the facility’s rules, including mandatory vaccines for all staff, primarily outdoor education, and masking indoors and outdoors for everyone older than 2.
Children’s House also recommends that families limit their exposure to Covid-19 and keep their sick children at home.
But parents understand that those rules come directly from Mays without state and department of health backing. While most have been on board, some have been very vocal in their pushback, she said, especially about the illness exclusion policy.
The state memorandum says that children or staff who show symptoms of Covid-19, have a fever, or are in quarantine or isolation should stay home. But Mays says the guidance is too vague and leaves it on directors like her “adrift” to navigate unfamiliar waters themselves.
How soon after symptoms stop should a child go back to school? What happens when a child has a two-week-long runny nose, as young kids often do? Mays does not have the answers, and she does not want to tell parents to take their children to severely overloaded pediatricians for every cough.
That leaves the decision to Mays, who has to tell parents, already stretched thin from taking care of their children during a pandemic, that they may have to keep their sick kids at home indefinitely. And things can get heated.
But Mays said she has no other choice when children are especially adept at spreading illness.
“Illness transmits very easily in an early childhood setting, no matter how many mitigation strategies we use, especially in infant and toddler spaces when they are mouthing things and drooling,” Mays said. “There’s just a lot of mouths on the objects all the time.”
Prolonged staffing shortages mean that Mays cannot afford to lose staff to illness. If more than one of her teachers has to take time off at a time, she will have to close, she said.
Leslie Welts and James Brady, whose 4-year-old daughter attends Children’s House, have welcomed Mays’s leadership.
“We support the policies that are clearly based on science and are so appreciative that both our government and the school that our daughter attends have made decisions based on science, even if they cause inconvenience to staff or the community,” Welts said.
Their daughter views the mask she’s required to wear as “part of the outfit she picks out every morning” and a fun accessory, Welts said.
They worry about how they will manage should Children’s House be forced to close. At the start of the pandemic, they lost child care and had to care for their then-2-year-old while working at home. Having their daughter at home means they have to work nights and weekends to make up for the time lost in child care, leaving their attention constantly divided between her and their work.
“You just end up doing everything poorly,” Welts said. “That’s what we felt like. We felt like we were not doing a good job in any aspect of our life.”
For parents like them, the pandemic is “a marathon not a sprint,” Brady said, and they’re just hoping to make it out in one piece.
