Testing is the Key to Keeping Child Care and the Economy Open Through COVID Surges and Beyond

If you’re a parent with a kid in a child care program you probably have experienced this scenario in the last couple of months: You get a call from your child care provider that there’s been a positive COVID case detected at the center and your child was exposed. Your child now needs to stay at home until cleared, and you're forced to miss work to care for them.  

We saw this play out over and over again for families across our country. When child care isn’t available, parents can’t go to work. Businesses are forced to close. Families lose income. And our economic recovery stalls. 

Even as the Omicron variant appears to wane, we’ve come to accept that COVID is something we will likely be dealing with in the long-term, perhaps for years to come. So how do we keep our kids in school, support our workforce, and keep our economy going amid another possible surge or variant? Once we make it through this wave, we need a plan for what happens next. 

As we’ve already seen, getting back to some kind of normalcy for many families hinges on one thing: child care. So how do we avoid where we found ourselves in 2020 (and 2021, for that matter)? We put infrastructure in place to keep child care open. Our ability to do that relies on making free, preventative COVID-19 testing available to child care providers.

While public health officials are working hard to increase vaccination numbers, that alone is not enough to support the early education and care sector and its ability to provide the care solutions upon which families rely. While the vaccine works to prevent severe illness, the consequences of one positive test can spread far and wide in the context of an early education and care setting.

Testing is imperative to keeping child care classrooms open at full capacity. Moreover, valuing our early educators, a workforce that is 92% women and predominantly people of color, requires investing in the proven public health measures — like testing — that help keep them safe. Already, the child care sector is suffering a workforce shortage, due to the low wages paid to its educators, which is forcing early education and care programs to close classrooms or reduce hours.

We know that free, coordinated testing for the early childhood sector is possible and effective, because we’ve been doing it here in Massachusetts. Over the last year, we’ve partnered with the Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care to design and implement a first-in-the-nation weekly, COVID-19 testing program for the Commonwealth that is free, fast and effective. Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker recently announced the expansion of that testing program to offer child care providers across the state with multi-pronged testing strategies and additional support.

Since September 2021, we’ve distributed more than 1 million tests and there’s been a massive uptick in enrollment, with more than 3,000 providers – nearly half of all providers in the state – receiving testing support through this program.

Massachusetts’ early education testing program is a model that can — and should — be implemented in every state. Weekly testing helps child care programs identify cases, reduce spread, and improve everyone’s confidence that their workplaces are safe. 

Testing itself is not a panacea. But, it’s a giant step in the right direction. It puts us on a path toward ensuring our kids are protected, parents can go to work, and a critical workforce can feel and be safe as they care for our children.

It shouldn’t have taken a pandemic for this country to realize that early education and care is critical infrastructure. States can and should take action now to prioritize the health and wellbeing of those showing up every day for children and families. Massachusetts is an example of how coordination between government and community partners like Neighborhood Villages can result in highly effective approaches to protect against COVID-19 in the child care sector; we stand ready to show others how to implement similar programs in their states.

Testing in early childhood is the fastest, most effective investment we can make right now in keeping child care open — one that is essential for not only getting beyond other variants and surges in the future, but for any hope of an economic recovery in 2022 that works for everyone.