Finding Childcare as an Essential Worker
Being a parent during the COVID-19 pandemic comes with a unique set of challenges: homeschooling, making time for self-care, and finding ways to occupy them that don’t involve copious amounts of screen-time, just to name a few.
Dr. Samhati Mondal is a cardiac anesthesiologist at the University of Maryland and parent of two young children along with her husband, also a physician at Union Memorial. When the pandemic hit, the difficulties she faced as a parent were compounded by the strain of being an essential worker during this time. Not only were she and her husband facing longer and more stressful shifts, but their long-term nanny quit out of fear of working in a healthcare provider’s home, forcing them to send their children to daycare. “We [kept] praying that they [didn’t] get a fever; otherwise daycare wouldn’t accept them,” Dr. Mondal said. “What a terrible way to think about kids by their parents, but [there weren’t] much choices left.”
That’s where MD COVIDsitters came in. An organization of aspiring healthcare professionals and volunteers, MDCS provides a variety of services catered toward essential workers in the DMV area and their families, including family care, pet care, errands, and online classes.
For Dr. Mondal, MDCS was the perfect solution. “It really takes away a huge load over our head just knowing that we have someone to watch kids and I don’t have to rush back home leaving everything at work when daycare closes,” she remarked.
A lack of adequate funding has forced many daycares to close during the pandemic, and the $2 trillion CARES Act only provided $3.5 million to support the industry. The Center for American Progress found that childcare capacity in the United States could shrink to roughly half of its original size.
However, finding available childcare facilities is only half of the problem. Even though those that remain open are facing much lower enrollment than they did pre-pandemic, they are still often responsible for as many as ten to fifteen children at a time, increasing the risk of contracting the virus. In fact, the Department of Health and Human Services reported that around 1335 individuals who tested positive in Texas were workers or children from childcare facilities around the state.
MDCS aims to solve this problem by pairing families of essential workers with volunteers to help them during the pandemic. The childcare program that MDCS offers is unique in that the volunteers are assigned to one family at a time and the children are looked after at their home instead of a separate facility, which greatly reduces the risk of exposure when compared to traditional daycares. The volunteers are available to provide assistance at any time of day to help parents with unpredictable work schedules. All of their volunteers are required to pass a background check before joining the organization and have been trained by a safe childcare protocol developed by the Minnesota Department of Health.
Learn more about MDCS and sign up for their services here.
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