After Mass Closures, Post-Pandemic Child Care Options Will Be Scarce
Kiddies Corner owner Anne Osula holds a child before putting him down for a nap at the daycare in Boston s Mattapan neighborhood on February 12, 2021.
Erin Clark / The Boston Globe via Getty Images
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Driving to work before dawn last winter, Valerie Norris heard an NPR report about a terrible disease spreading in China a pandemic, people were starting to call it. It sounded sad but very far from Rocky River, Ohio, where she’d led the Rockport Early Childhood Center for 34 years.
A few weeks later, she knew better.
It was still dark on the chilly morning of March 13 when Norris pulled into the big parking lot at the Rockport United Methodist Church, where her school was based. She always arrived first to unlock the doors.
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A teachers leads a card game with older children at The Children’s Place, a center in Concord, New Hampshire that reopened in the fall of 2020 and has since then continued to operate under pandemic conditions. Credit: MaryLou Beaver
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Driving to work before dawn last winter, Valerie Norris heard an NPR report about a terrible disease spreading in China a pandemic, people were starting to call it. It sounded sad but very far from Rocky River, Ohio, where she’d led the Rockport Early Childhood Center for 34 years.
After mass closures and too little support, post-pandemic child care options will be scarce Lillian Mongeau, The Hechinger Report
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Driving to work before dawn last winter, Valerie Norris heard an NPR report about a terrible disease spreading in China – a pandemic, people were starting to call it. It sounded sad but very far from Rocky River, Ohio, where she’d led the Rockport Early Childhood Center for 34 years.
A few weeks later, she knew better.
It was still dark on the chilly morning of March 13 when Norris pulled into the big parking lot at the Rockport United Methodist Church, where her school was based. She knew it was the last morning she’d walk down this hallway for a while. She didn’t imagine it was the beginning of the end of her center, of her career, of the community she had worked so hard to build.