Her tiny town of Gerton rests in a wide spot between the Rocky Broad River and the mountainside along a steep road that connects the bustling tourist towns of Black Mountain (in the valley) and Chimney Rock (on the mountaintop). When Helene brought 70-mile-an-hour winds and more than 14 inches of rain to the region last month, what is normally a tumbling creek swelled into a raging flood.
“A third of my house had 30 inches of water in it. My heating system was destroyed. Three storage sheds with materials for my preschool went underwater. My driveway has eight inches of mud and silt in it. Trees are down in the driveway, the yard.” Sinclair has been an early childhood educator for more than 40 years, and licensed to care for eight children in her home for 20 years. Her business is insured, but it doesn’t include flood insurance, nor has the creek ever threatened her home in all those decades.
Now, she’s applied for emergency assistance from FEMA, “but the cap won’t come close to covering it. The new heat system alone is $27,000. If the SBA (Small Business Administration) releases more funds for loans, I could get one of those. But paying back a loan from a child care business is almost impossible. I operate on a shoestring budget and this is my sole income. I’ll apply for Disaster Unemployment Assistance – $600 a week – but I’m self-employed, so I don’t know if I’ll get that. I want to keep doing this, but right now I don’t know if I can survive.”
For Sinclair and other home-based child care providers in Western North Carolina, the headline-making disaster wrought by Helene comes on top of a quiet and largely invisible disaster caused by decades of underfunding for child care generally and specifically for the family child care homes where thousands of children, especially those ages 0-3 and those who live in rural areas, are cared for each day.
Restarting a child care business after shutting down in the midst of a region-wide disaster takes more than just repairing one’s individual home business. All child care programs in the region closed in the immediate aftermath of the storm, along with K-12 schools, which have only recently issued reopening plans. Businesses and homes across the region lost power, cell service and internet for more than two weeks. Some, in hard-hit Buncombe County, had no running water for almost three weeks, and remain under a “boil water notice” that may run into 2025.
Nearly 100 North Carolinians lost their lives in the floods. Families lost homes, vehicles and their livelihoods. Even if she were to open tomorrow, Sinclair says, “One of my families has evacuated out of state. Another one used to be a 15-minute drive from me, but now, with the road closed because of a landslide, she’s 45 minutes away. She can’t get here until the road is repaired, which will be six months at least.”
Three weeks after the storm, Danithzia Baker, a licensed provider in the under-resourced Emma neighborhood of Northwest Asheville, worried that even when she’s opened again, parents wouldn’t be able to pay her modest rate of $180 per week. “If they work at a restaurant or a small business that was flooded, they say they are not working now. I can’t push them when they don’t have a job. Still, they call me everyday.”
Parents are exhausted and desperate, dealing with their own property disasters, juggling babies, toddlers and sometimes their older children as they wait in line for hours to speak with a FEMA representative or muck mud and water out of their basements. The flood wiped out Saralyn Belmer’s botanicals business in Marshall, North Carolina. A tree fell on the family’s home, and her 2-year-old’s home-based preschool closed. “So basically while my husband is trying to demo the damaged part of our house, I’m caring for a toddler while also calling customers whose orders washed down the river, looking for funding to get my business going again, and trying to find a rental where we can live until the house is repaired–most of that in the two-hour nap window.”
For many home-based child care businesses, the state’s complex environmental and safety regulations overseen by local consultants complicated reopening. Baker and Amica Venturi, who operate under a Center in Residence (CIR) license, waited a month for approval from the state before they could reopen. Although Venturi and Baker’s programs serve just eight children, they are required to follow the same rules as large commercial child care centers, which required the submission of a plan for cleaning and washing without running potable water and an on-site inspection before they could reopen.
“I set up a crock with a spigot for children to wash their hands with clean drinking water. I told my parents I wouldn’t be making food. Children could bring their own lunches and bottled water. The county says the water is OK for washing hands, but I’m going over and above, right? And then, still, I needed to fill out a long form and a person who had to come from environmental health to inspect and that took another week, and all this time my parents were calling and calling because they needed to get back to work,” says Venturi.
On October 17, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper called for additional funding from the General Assembly and for “regulatory flexibilities in storm-impacted counties.”
“NCDHHS is helping child care facilities reopen so they can support the children and families in their communities,” says the memo from NCDHHS. “Regulated child care facilities that lack their usual sources of power, drinking water, wastewater treatment, etc., or have lost records, documents or other paperwork may be able to reopen under an Emergency Operations Plan.”
But the details of that emergency operation planrolled out very slowly. A comprehensive resource guide updated daily by a collaboration of volunteers, still lists no resources at all for child care. NCDHHS has set up a hotline (1-888-600-1685) to assist parents in finding child care, but with nearly 200 programs impacted by the storm, it may be impossible to find openings.
Baker and Venturi expressed that what would have been most helpful is clear communication and assistance from the state’s Division of Child Development and Early Education. “If they want us to have a specific container with a spigot, then give us those. If they have a specific procedure for cleaning or diaper changing with bottled water, then tell us what it is. We needed a green light sooner to open safely so that we can go back to work and parents can go back to work,” argues Venturi.
Meanwhile, Sinclaire, whose business remains closed, stresses that she wants to continue her work as a professional child care provider. “It’s a terrifying unknown,” she says through tears. “I’ve never had an empty spot in my program, but now my families are unemployed too. I don’t know if my chosen career will ever support me again. And I’m not the only one. I worry that this is going to be the last straw for a lot of programs.”
On top of worrying about her own financial disaster, she is anxious about what will happen to children and families if child care programs shut down. “My entire adult life has been about educating children and loving them every day,” says Sinclair. “But people cannot go back to work without child care, so kids are going to be in unsafe situations. They’ll leave their kids home with a sibling, like a 9-year-old taking care of a baby because the parents have no choice. That’s an impossible situation for kids, and an impossible situation for families.”
Baker echoes those concerns. She says she hasn’t been sleeping at night “because this is like my worst nightmare. Child care was already in trouble, and now things are even worse for us and our families.”
Among the persistent dark clouds, there are silver linings. Nonprofits and private organizations, as well as state and federal agencies are giving money, time and other resources to support communities in need. Locals who lost their jobs are instead using their time to work on volunteer crews doing everything from handing out towels at mobile shower stations to flushing toilets for elderly neighbors. Sinclair’s clients, friends and neighbors cleared her driveway, helped her pressure wash materials covered in mud and bought her a generator.
And, specifically for home-based child care providers, Home Grown, a national funder collaborative focused on improving the quality of and access to home-based child care, has set up the Home-Based Child Care Emergency Fund for Severe Weather and National Disaster Response.
The Fund will grant $800 to $1,500 in immediate cash support to family child care providers and family, friend and neighbor caregivers across the disaster zone. Through a partnership with Beam, the funds will be given in easily accessible cash through Zelle or mobile debit card. “We have a track record of responding to national crises that adversely and uniquely impact home-based child care providers. We want to reinforce existing local efforts to sustain the supply and ensure the wellbeing of caregivers and providers,” says Home Grown’s Executive Director, Natalie Renew.
The cash assistance will be funneled through local networks El Telar, Smart Start of Transylvania County, Child Nutrition Program, Inc, and the Family Child Care and Center Enrichment Foundation (FCCEF) that serve more than 100 home-based child care providers (including both licensed and FFN providers) impacted by Helene.
“We want this money in providers’ hands as soon as possible. And we’re going to fight for more money. We’ll fight until we can’t fight no more because this is about saving lives,” says FCCEF Director Vantoinette Savage. “This is about saving children’s lives and the livelihood of those who care for children and really, the whole economy of this region that everyone in North Carolina is a part of. Child care is infrastructure, and we need to get our businesses up and running just as urgently as we need to fix the water system, the power lines, and the roads.”
This article was first published by the Daily Yonder. Read the original article.
