In others, facilities that were operating under a so-called pandemic license will be able to expand their classrooms.
“As businesses reopen and families return to work, we know that childcare will be more important than ever,” said Jocelyn Richter, district leader of KinderCare Education, a multi-state chain that has a location on Derr Road in Springfield. “In order for our economy to restart, working families need access to quality childcare.”
Per guidelines from the governor’s office, facilities will be forced to maintain one staff member per four infants and no more than six children in a room. The ratio is 1:6 for toddlers and 1:9 for preschool children and school-age children.
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All staff, children and adults are to be checked for fever upon arrival, and anyone with a temperature of 100 degrees or higher is not to enter, though Richter said KinderCare has set its standard at 99.7.
The guidelines also call for children and staff to wash hands after nearly anything they might do as well as upon arriving and before departing.
The state also recommends limiting visitors and staggering drop-offs and pick-ups to ensure social distancing.
“Ensuring the health and safety of everyone in our center communities has always been a top priority,” Richter said. “We have a variety of practices that are standard in our centers like washing hands frequently and rotating and sanitizing toys daily.
“With the advent of COVID-19, we’ve enhanced our health and safety practices by requiring all teachers to wear masks, daily temperature checks and a health questionnaire for anyone entering our centers. We’re also restricting access to our classrooms and practicing safe social distancing by staggering pick-up and drop-off times to avoid group gatherings. We are making those standard moving forward.”
Like KinderCare, Theresa’s Gingerbread House locations in Urbana and West Liberty operated with the pandemic childcare license, and owner Heather Chamberlain said they are looking forward to being able to serve more families beginning this month.
“Yes, we will be able to add more children in the preschool and school age rooms since the ratios were changed from 1:6 to 1:9,” she said.
“We had implemented taking children’s temperatures at the door and picking children up from their parents at the entrance to take to their rooms as well as at pick up to decrease the foot traffic into classrooms before it was mandated because we felt it was the best practice.”
She called the transition from regular “normal” times to the pandemic practices easy.
“We just have to have extra staff available throughout the day to ensure we can have someone that isn’t in ratio who can go to rooms at drop off and pick up times,” Chamberlain said.
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As far as getting kids to go along with some of new practices, Richter said at KinderCare they have done what they can to make games out of wearing masks and washing hands frequently.
“We had fun with it, so we talked about superheroes and we talked about masks and did activities to help them get used to that,” she said. “And then like with washing hands we put glitter on their hands and had them wash off the glitter. We’ve done soap bubble gloves to where they had to rub and rub and rub until they got full hands of bubbles.”
On the downside, facilities are still not able to operate at the capacity they were before the arrival of the coronavirus that brought about the restrictions in March.
The Champaign County YMCA is in that group, and CEO Paul Waldsmith said the facility will be making adjustments to meet the state guidelines both for daycare and its annual summer day camps.
The Y is looking at how to welcome back some children who have not been able to attend for the past two months while continuing to serve the children of “essential” workers.
“Most of these families do want to resume using our Y’s child care services,” Waldman said of those who were eligible for the pandemic childcare but weren’t previously attending the Y. “So the next question is, ‘Who gets first dibs?’ Is it the families served by our Y prior to March 23 or the families we’ve been serving since the third week in March?
“The State of Ohio did not issue specific guidance for that question.”
Not everyone who wants to be able to use the Y’s service will be able to, a problem also faced by KinderCare.
“We are turning people away,” Richter said. “We have had to actually send an email out to families that said, unfortunately we are full to capacity with the new mandated capacities, but we will be opening capacities as we can when the government releases us or we can split classrooms with fire marshal’s approval or things like that.”
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