Update, Monday March 23:

Gov. Kate Brown has issued an executive order with new statewide restrictions on travel, business, and outdoor recreation to slow the spread of COVID-19. As part of that order, Brown is requiring nearly all childcare facilities to close from March 25 through April 28. There are exceptions for daycares that provide care to 10 or fewer children, so long as they are the same children every day.

Original Story:

As Portland confronts the growing impacts of COVID-19, the city's daycare workers have found themselves struggling to balance their responsibility to parents who need childcare with their own health and financial wellbeing. By now, many workers believe that the region's daycares should closed while the pandemic plays out.

“I would really love to see something… where we’re actively balancing the needs of working-class families with the needs of society as a whole,” said Becky Burgess, a teacher at Wild Lilac, a daycare in Southeast Portland. “I don’t think keeping childcares open for regular business as usual is the right way to do that.”

That's not how state officials see it. When Gov. Kate Brown ordered public school districts to close last week, she didn't extend that order to the state’s daycare facilities, many of which are small, privately owned businesses. And, as of Tuesday, the Oregon Department of Education is still allowing daycares to remain open—and is even offering financial incentives for more families to use daycares during the pandemic.

“At a time when Oregon’s families are weathering numerous difficulties in their daily lives due to the spread of the coronavirus and its impact on our economy, we need to do everything we can to make sure child care providers can keep their doors open so that parents can continue to work,” Brown said in a statement issued Tuesday afternoon.

Olivia Pace, a teacher at a daycare called Growing Seeds Learning Community, said she and other workers were concerned when they heard that Growing Seeds wouldn't be closing in tandem with public schools last week

“I don’t know any workers who felt like that was an extremely sound decision," said Pace, who is also an organizer with the burgeoning Growing Seeds Workers Union.

Growing Seeds employees asked families who used the daycare to join them in expressing their concerns to management last week. Their pressure appears to have worked: As of Monday, Growing Seeds is closed until at least March 27.

To Pace, the decision to close is responsible on a public health level. While most kids aren’t vulnerable to developing serious symptoms from COVID-19, they can be asymptomatic carriers, meaning they could easily infect the adults who care for them. And some daycare workers are immunocompromised, meaning it’s unsafe for them to leave the house for any unnecessary reason right now. According to analysis from the New York Times, early childhood educators are more at-risk for contracting COVID-19 than the average person.

But Pace and other workers feel “conflicted,” because they know that Growing Seed’s closure brings more uncertainty for both families and workers. Some parents have jobs that can’t be done from home, and daycare employees still need paychecks.

In lieu of in-person work, Growing Seeds workers are being asked to do some administrative and housekeeping tasks from home over the next two weeks, and will have guaranteed pay during that time regardless of how many hours they work. But should the daycare continue to be closed past March 27, it’s currently unclear whether employees will still be paid.

“People still need care, people still need food,” Pace said. “[But] the solution to that cannot possibly be that low-wage workers are pushed onto the frontlines in even more unstable and unhealthy working conditions than we face generally.”

It’s a Catch-22 faced by many daycare managers and workers in Portland. But some Portland childcare professionals are coming up with their own solutions.

PDX Childcare Collective is an organization founded last year with the mission to provide free childcare to people involved in grassroots organizing. But as COVID-19 has caused some daycares to close, and disrupted some families’ schedules, the collective’s scope has grown, and it is now beginning to match childcare providers with families impacted by closures. Providers who can afford to do so offer care for free or at a reduced rate for parents who have necessary jobs, like working in the medical industry or as a sanitation worker.

“Now, everyone is trying to find the thing they can do to help, so we’re trying to pool our resources,” said Wild Lilac's Burgess, who is a member of the collective. “We’ve gotten people saying, ‘My school is closed, and I can’t provide care for XYZ reasons.’”

Burgess added that if the Portland area sees a major spike in its number of severe COVID-19 symptoms, she expects the collective will see a wave of childcare requests from “people affected by just being sick, or having sick people to care for, or navigating the hospital system.”

Wild Lilac is currently closed due to COVID-19. Burgess said her regular salary is guaranteed over the next two weeks, but that “we’re not really sure what happens in April if this closure lasts beyond that.”

Not all daycare centers in Portland were closed this week. Small Wonders, a Portland daycare and preschool with two locations, was still open as of Tuesday. One Small Wonders Employee, who asked to be kept anonymous, told the Mercury they “feel like it should be closed.”

“I understand why they aren’t,” the employee added, “because people do need childcare. But also, the safety of teachers, especially early childhood educators, is really important. And if they all get sick from this, then they’ll need to close anyway.”

Later that day, Small Wonders decided to close the school beginning on Wednesday.

Childroots, another Portland daycare with three locations, chose to close starting this week. Sonya Rheingold, an administrator at Childroots, called it a “really, really challenging” decision, in part because Brown has urged childcare facilities to stay open.

A teacher at Childroots, who asked to be kept anonymous, told the Mercury that last week, Childroots administration “was really resisting” suggestions from staff that the daycare should close. On Friday, the teacher said, management “was pressuring and guilt[ing] staff who had requested to not keep the school open.”

Childroots staffers and families pressured the administration to close, which the teacher believes directly lead to the daycare’s closure.

“It’s tricky, because on the one hand we need to contain this virus, which means everyone needs to remain in isolation,” Rheingold said. “But then we have quite a few families that work in the medical field—a lot of doctors and nurses. These people need to go to work.”

Childroots’ employees will continue to be paid for two weeks, and are expected to continue performing work either on location or from home. It’s unclear what will happen after those two weeks are up. Childroots is currently asking parents to continue paying tuition during the closure.

While the Childroots teacher is glad that the daycare closed, they’re also worried about what will come next.

“There are staff members who are immunocompromised, so they are absolutely not able to work right now for their own safety,” they said. “There’s really no assurance they will continue to be paid their salaries or have health insurance through this.”

Burgess, with PDX Childcare Collective, said she sees community-based responses like the one organized by her group as the most effective solution to the difficult decisions faced by daycare businesses and workers right now. She said she’d also like to see the state government use alternative methods, such as opening emergency childcare centers meant just for low-income families and parents who are frontline workers. A similar program is now in place in San Francisco.

The state's current plea for private daycares to stay open is not a long-term solution, Burgess said.

“I do think [closing is] the responsible thing to do, since our entire goal as a society is to slow down infection rates right now," she said. “There’s just so much risk for exposure.”