Children enjoy a socially distanced picnic lunch at the Chautauqua Lake Child Care Center. Submitted photos

Families across Western New York know the pressure of securing quality child care, often times being placed on waiting lists before their children are even born.

In Chautauqua County, that pressure has led to the region being referred to as a child care desert, a census area with over three times more children than licensed child care enrollment spots, with 20 child care centers and school-aged child care programs and 49 home-based providers.

“Access to high quality, affordable child care was a challenge for families long before COVID,” said Tory Irgang, Chautauqua Region Community Foundation executive director.

“The pandemic, and subsequent stay at home order, revealed the critical impact child care has on workforce participation in our community, particularly for women.”

According to research gathered by the WNY Women’s Foundation, nearly 31% of women aged 25-44 with children at home were not working because of COVID-19 related child care issues, compared to 11.6% of men.

A child at Little Chickadees Child Care holds two toads she discovered while exploring nature.

As a result of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s “New York State on PAUSE” executive order in mid-March, schools and non-essential businesses were required to shut down, forcing working parents to take on the role of full-time educators and child care providers, in addition to their day jobs, while essential workers scrambled to locate child care for their school-aged children.

Almost immediately, the Community Foundation worked with Jamestown Public School District staff to release restrictions on grant dollars awarded for the Summer LEAP Program so that those dollars could be used to support child care for essential workers.

“With the Community Foundation’s support, we were able to safely expand our school-aged programs at Ring and Fletcher Elementary Schools, as well as several satellite locations, to accommodate nearly 80 children of essential workers at no cost to those families,” the district said in a statement.

For younger children, parents waited to see what child care facilities would do — remain open despite dwindling enrollment numbers and shrinking revenue or close to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 and prevent operational losses.

At the Chautauqua Lake Child Care Center (CLCCC), despite operating on a paper-thin budget and at 25% capacity, the decision was an easy one.

“We needed to remain open for our families,” said Beth Starks, CLCCC executive director.

Right away, Starks and her staff began implementing social distancing practices, utilizing sanitizing stations and conducting health checks for staff and the children in their care.

Recognizing that many child care facilities and organizations across the nonprofit sector were facing a unique set of challenges to continue providing vital services, the Community Foundation adjusted its competitive grant making process to be more responsive to these needs.

In 2020, the foundation awarded more than $60,000 to support gaps in operational budgets and costs associated with reopening in child care centers and programs such as CLCCC, The Relief Zone, the Winifred Crawford Dibert Boys and Girls Club of Jamestown, and preschool programs at First Covenant Church and Zion Covenant Church.

For families struggling to navigate remote learning and working full-time, The Relief Zone worked to reduce their burdens.

“We were able to add a full-day program that includes homework help and the ability to participate in any required remote instruction,” said Lisa Lyon, The Relief Zone executive director.

Additionally, the foundation partnered with other local funders as a member of the Chautauqua County Crisis Response Fund: COVID-19, to distribute more than $150,000 in funding to help off-set reduced revenue and increased expenses at child care facilities across the county.

Perhaps most significantly impacted by reduced revenues and increased costs to operate were local home-based child care providers, such as Sarah Vosz, who owns and operates Little Chickadees ChildCare in Fredonia.

“As a former Preschool and Kindergarten teacher, I decided to open a home daycare so that I could stay home with my own child while continuing to do what I love,” Vosz said. “I did not have an easy start as the pandemic began just after I received my license.”

According to research from the Chautauqua Child Care Council, 77% of providers had families that removed their children from care from March 17 to June 30. With this dramatic loss of enrollment also came lost revenue which was reported at nearly $220,000, collectively.

“This was challenging for many reasons,” said Sue Marker, Chautauqua Child Care Council director. “Not only were home-based providers losing income, they found that they were ineligible for many Federal and State support opportunities that were offered to small businesses.”

Through a generous grant from the Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Foundation, the Community Foundation received $100,000 in funding to support these small businesses. That funding led to an additional $100,000 grant from Home Grown, a collaboration of national funders committed to strengthen home-based child care practices.

Working in collaboration with Chautauqua Opportunities, these dollars were distributed to 49 licensed home-based child care providers to help with expenses such as mortgage payments, utilities, insurance, cleaning supplies, equipment to support social distancing and outdoor play.

For Vosz, that meant being able to make several adjustments to her home, in order to expand her nature focused program and keep the children in her care, safe.

“It is imperative to our community that child care centers, home-based providers, preschools and school-aged child care programs remain viable,” Irgang said. “We will continue to support the needs of this sector as we emerge from the COVID crisis, but we recognize that our community’s child care crisis is far from over.”