What is your daycare doing during the Covid19 closure?
Is it possible for a daycare to offer anything useful online for 2-year olds? Our daycare is sending lots of email advice, and trying to organize sing-alongs, but I find this more frustrating than useful. Is any type of remote care or instruction possible for the under 3 set? We also have a 5 year old, and for that age, zoom circle time and other online content seems useful. Our daycare is also trying to figure out what to do about tuition for the coming months. Any insights from what your daycare is doing would be helpful.
Mar 25, 2020
Parent Replies
Our daycare is not doing much for the 2-year-olds, and I'm not mad about it. The teacher called to check in. I appreciate her concern, but I'm not sure there's much to realistically expect of these folks, remotely. We are paying them to watch our kid while we're at work, and they can't do that now. My 2yo definitely doesn't understand Zoom meetups. Right now, our family hasn't lost income, and so we are going to continue to pay the daycare, even though he's not going. I know our daycare doesn't have a financial cushion, and I want the staff to keep getting paid. I want them to be able to pay their rent. And I want them to still be in business when we're all allowed out of our houses again, so I'm sending my usual tuition checks as scheduled. It is understandably a different calculation for those who are out of work right now.
Ours so far is remaining open, but only the essential worker parents are sending kids at this time. Husband and I are both working from home with our 2 and 4 years olds home until who knows when.
Months ago we had planned to move the 2 y.o. to preschool April 15. In light of SIP and worry for our daycare provider’s income being impacted, we decided to pay for an extra month) even though our daughter will not be going. Our daycare provider has always been there for us and as long as we remain able to (or both have our jobs), we want to be there for her. That said, I fully understand that everyone’s situation is different right now and we are all just doing the best we can.
Zoom does not work well for the little ones so doing daycare instruction online is not very helpful. Our daycare is just close for now and we are still paying the usual tuition. Once shelter in place is lifted and they re-open we are looking forward to going back, and in the meantime we have a parent's group online where we exchange pictures of kids so kids can browse picts of each other. My kid loves it.