ExchangeEveryDay Past Issues

Keep the comments coming. Our whole team at Exchange Press is listening—and learning! We are already overwhelmed with compassion and admiration for what you all are doing, for your honest appraisals, and your optimistic flexibility and persistence on behalf of your employees, teammates, children and families. We will be reviewing what you have to say in-depth and will respond! We are with you all the way. THANK YOU!

My biggest concern is the fact that our college has allowed Classified Staff- which our ECE at are center are; to choose an exemption instead of just mandating that all Staff are vaccinated and boosted!! So we have 2 ECE who have the exemption and are the only fulltime staff of 9 who have gotten COVID and the recent variant;( How do we get Early Childhood Educators to realize how vulnerable children are when their teachers are not doing everything they can to protect them and how selfish they are being by not doing everything they can to protect these little ones??
Thank you,
Tammy

How is the omicron surge affecting you and your work

This whole Covid Pandemic in general has done both good things and bad things for us at my work. While on the one good hand it has shown in general just how essential we are as an early education field for the very young who are still too young to engage in the primary academic educational institutions know as elementary schools. Parents are now able to recognize just how important we are in order for them to go to their jobs everyday and know their children are safe and learning in an environment that we are working hard to keep sanitized and healthy.
For the first 18 months of the Pandemic, we were able to stay open and only had to close down a couple classrooms but not our entire center. When this Omicron variant came around things took a turn and just got crazy. Because this variant seems to really be hitting our population hard, it has been quite challenging and the fact that the CDC kept changing its quarantine rules definitely made it even more challenging for us to keep things calm and orderly.
We were given skewed information from week to week and sometimes even day to day and hour to hour which didn’t help us at all. We had different guidelines and confusion as to when a quarantine ended for a family member and when another family members quarantine started. We were also told 5 day quarantine and then back to 10 day quarantine and then told to have the families show us Positive PCR test results and didn’t accept Rapid Antigen tests at first because one was more sensitive than the other and it was just like getting whiplash from the health department. This gave us and families less trust in what they said and they got their information from the CDC which didn’t help us at all.
We had to close down four different classrooms because of exposure from someone who was vaccinated but not boosted and so they were asymptomatic and didn’t know they had caught the Omicron variant of covid. This person wore a mask all day and still managed to get sick. We also have children who come to our center after they are done at their K-3-K-5 classes and interact with the other children who are here at the center all day and so we had to close all the rooms this person was in and call parents to come get their children. Some parents were not happy because their children had to be quarantined again after just being quarantined 2 weeks previously.
I had parents that were upset with us because they had run out of sick leave already in the first month of the new year and others who didn’t have family here to help them out and so they needed to miss work all together and stay home with their kids because they had no one else to watch their kids.
We do charge 50% rate when classrooms are closed but when parents aren’t working that is still a lot of money they have to dish out and pay when they can’t use our services.
It kills me to hear our kids crying when they leave because they don’t want to go because they just got back to school and now had to be woken up from their nap because we had to close their room down again.
Our parents are usually very patient and understanding with us when we tell them things we have to change in our center but because of the misinformation we get from different agencies its gotten to a point where they are starting to doubt what we are saying which really sucks.
We now have a teacher on quarantine who just recently tested positive and is asthmatic and had other health issues and now has found out that she has pneumonia and will not be able to return after the 5 day quarantine because she is very sick. This whole surge has just made things much more difficult for us and is taking both teachers and children out of the center and into quarantine constantly for the last few months.
Even though this has devastated the field in general, our teachers and some families are learning to really be there for each other and checking on each other which gives me hope that we will come through this stronger and have even better relationships in the future.

Yes, hardest time indeed! I think mostly it's psychological exhaustion as we directors try to navigate the repercussions of the decisions others make that can have a huge ripple effect on the center. Meaning, exposures that could have been avoided had families been open and honest about symptoms (even minor) that happened at home the day before. Now it's become our responsibility to educate and become experts on quarantine time periods and the effectiveness or noneffectiveness of at home tests vs. PCR. The stress of trying to find subs at a time such as this, and anxiety over potentially getting sick myself and what that could do to the center. Some centers have closed for a week or more, due to the circumstances (staff having COVID); I'm so hoping that will not be our story. Honestly, my faith is what has gotten me through and working in a faith-based center.

All of us are faced with frustration and anger over things we can't control: COVID-19 and its consequences, climate deterioration, the Other Political Party, supply chain shortages, insensitive and underfunded policies toward early childhood, and too many other etc's. We need to acknowledge this anger and frustration, so it won't sneak over into anger at people and activities we can control. We can then channel that energy, most often, into doing something positive that will help real people, like ourselves.