‘Hard times on top of hard times’: lessons learned from families and child care providers following Helene

By Jessica Wakeman

Three weeks after Helene hit western North Carolina, Marcia Whitney thought she was close to a breakthrough. The president of Verner Center for Early Learning was desperate to reopen and help their families and children return to at least some of their routines.

Through her involvement in the Rotary Club of Asheville, Whitney secured a donated water filtration system, capable of filtering up to 20,000 gallons per day. Locals with water engineering experience had set it up, and it was ready to go.

But the N.C. Division of Public Health’s environmental health specialists wouldn’t approve use of this water for the Verner Center’s two facilities. The reason? Though the water tested as clean, the filtration system didn’t have a chlorine residual — a detectable level of chlorine required in the public water supplies by the EPA — to add to the water.

“We couldn’t have used it as potable water in our child care centers,” Whitney explained. “I went to the Director of the [North Carolina Department] Division of Health and Human Services for the state. I had state senators involved.”

Though the day care couldn’t use the water from the Rotary’s filtration system inside its buildings for handwashing, cooking or drinking, the program could send it home with kids. And they did—many families brought the filtered water home, as did the staff and faculty. That particular decision is “going past the realm of logic,” Whitney said. The kids’ “formula can be made with that water at home [but] it can’t be used to wash their hands here.”

The reopening of early childhood education centers like Verner were dependent on approval from the state. More than 100 child care licensing consultants, as well as 10 regional child care environmental health specialists assisted with helping centers reopen after Helene. But the process was a frustrating endeavor for many centers, as they waited for guidance from the state on what alternative water supplies were acceptable.

After Verner’s potential water supply from the Rotary was denied, the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services and N.C. Division of Child Development and Early Education approved a different emergency operation plan on Oct. 23. That plan included first boiling and cooling water, and then setting up a “continuous flow spigot container.” Verner made this happen with “thousands of dollars worth” of food-grade plastic jugs with spigots that Whitney had the foresight to order days after the storm.

Then, the facilities waited for inspections by state officials, which took place Oct. 28 and 29. Finally on Nov. 4, both Verner sites reopened for the 200 plus children it serves. Students had been out of class for over five weeks.

This “water saga,” as Whitney calls it, is one example of early childhood centers’ challenging path to reopening after Helene. The weeks-long, and in some cases months-long, closures after Helene had cascading effects for the families who rely on child care in order to be able to work, and for the staff employed by these centers. Nearly 80 percent of families at Verner are eligible for free or low-cost child care because of their financial circumstances.

“We’re the workforce behind the workforce,” Whitney said. “If we’re not open, none of the businesses are going to get their workers.”

‘Nobody knew what was going to be acceptable’

Early childhood education centers in North Carolina are a patchwork of full-time public, nonprofit and for-profit providers who are licensed through the N.C. Division of Child Development and Early Education. Some families also opt for unlicensed providers, which typically provide half- or partial-day care and are not monitored by state agencies.

There are 820 licensed early childhood education providers in the 25 western North Carolina counties deemed disaster areas by FEMA following Helene, according to state officials. While most have reopened, damage to nine centers will prevent them reopening “in the near future,” according to NCDHHS spokesperson Kelly Haight Connor. Another three are “operational” (meaning, their license is still open), but they closed for staffing or programmatic reasons. And 23 providers are operating in emergency locations.

It’s unknown how many children haven’t returned to their original provider. Connor says the fluctuations in enrollment at early child care centers are not reported to the state. However, as of Dec. 1, sites that were still closed due to damage from Helene had capacity for 505 children.

With the systemic lack of child care options already taxing families, providers knew reopening was a critical part of recovery from Helene. Some local child care providers describe confusing instructions about the state’s process for reopening and where they were supposed to submit their emergency operations plans.

Amy Barry, executive director of Buncombe Partnership for Children, says a lot of frustration came from a lack of clear direction on requirements for a reopening plan.

“I was kind of astounded that the Division of Child Development and Early Education, if they knew what was approvable, why not put out [some templates]?” Barry said, adding that guidance about acceptable water containers would have been particularly appreciated. “It would have made things move more quickly and been less of a burden to directors,” she said.

Gov. Roy Cooper’s Oct. 9 executive order allowed “flexibilities” for child care providers to help them reopen after Helene knocked out water systems across the region. Some of those flexibilities were outlined by the USDA with regard to serving meals, but there weren’t specifications on the requirements that centers “must provide water with gravity flow for handwashing.”

During October, Buncombe Partnership for Children hosted twice-weekly meetings for early childhood education leaders to share knowledge and resources. “Everybody would go to those meetings and be like, ‘OK, so what are these flexibilities?’ ‘I don’t know,’” the Verner Center’s Whitney recalled. “‘So, what do we need to do with this water plan?’ ‘I don’t know.’”

“Nobody knew what was going to be acceptable,” she added.

When one program’s alternative water plan finally got approved, they all felt relieved to have a template of sorts. But some also believe that valuable time and resources were wasted on trial and error.

“There were [programs] who had to submit [emergency plans] three times,” Barry said. “Families were getting really upset because they needed care.”

‘Hard times on top of hard times’

Parents of small children went weeks without child care by relying on their social networks— or toughing it out themselves.

Keana Blackburn had her 5-year–old son home from his West Asheville preschool every day for five weeks, minus a couple of days he spent with his father. Blackburn, a peer support for a recovery organization, worked remotely at home amid finding ways to entertain him. He couldn’t use his tablet because the internet was down or play outside safely due to storm damage. “I wasn’t really getting any work done,” she said.

Blackburn continued, with a laugh, “I’m gonna preface this with, I love my son, and I have built my entire life around him. But I am fully aware that I am not stay-at-home mom material. … It was hard.”

Some families banded together while child care centers were closed. Speech pathologist Laura McWilliams had to find a solution for her three kids, ages 18 months to 5 years old. Two of them are usually at Mission Child Development Center, but that program was shut down for over a month due to flooding.

“We essentially became a shuffling day care situation where one parent would offer their house, while some parents could work or fix their house,” McWilliams said, adding that her home also sustained roof damage. “And then the next week, somebody else would offer their house for the next few days.”

While McWilliams’ husband was out of work at Buncombe County Public Schools, he watched the group of kids as part of this shuffling day care setup. When he returned to work in late October, they needed another solution. They were relieved when one of Mission Child Development Center’s day care teachers offered a “nanny-share” in one person’s home; for one week, about five families split the cost with each other.

Overall, McWilliams found navigating child care after Helene to be stressful—“hard times on top of hard times,” as she put it. During the COVID-19 pandemic “the CDC was guiding a lot of what was happening in the different day care communities,” she said. “With the hurricane fallout, you’re kind of at the mercy of the facility.”

In Buncombe County, eight of 91 licensed child care centers and providers were severely impacted, according to Buncombe Partnership for Children. Of those eight, two had playground damage, like a tree falling on the equipment, and five severely flooded.

Fortunately, Helene did not destroy any complete child care buildings in Buncombe, but it did cause enough damage that three centers are still closed awaiting construction repairs, according to Jenny Vial, director of child care resources for Buncombe Partnership for Children. Building Blocks Child Care Center Inc. in West Asheville is closed. The Christine Avery Center’s Valley campus in Swannanoa is also closed but the program is operating at another site. Additionally, one home-based child care is waiting to learn how high they have to raise their house up in order to rebuild, Vial said. These locations aren’t anticipated to reopen in their original locations until at least January.

Six other programs in Henderson, Transylvania, Yancey and Watauga counties remain closed due to damage. Seven programs in western North Carolina are operating at emergency relocation sites.

Keeping the system afloat

As the Verner Center for Early Learning leadership navigated a complicated reopening process, they also wanted to alleviate stressors from their staff, which included people who lost housing and one person who lost a family member in the storm. The nonprofit’s board voted the first week of October to continue to pay staff full salary and benefits while not operational, so long as it had cash reserves to do so.

“That allowed people to breathe,” said Whitney.

They also didn’t charge families tuition in October, which Whitney says cost them about $50,000 in revenue.

Advocates say more financial investment from the state could prevent early childhood education centers from sustaining longer closures. Instead, philanthropic organizations had to step in. Dogwood Health Trust provided $2 million to Buncombe Partnership for Children to distribute to child care providers to “retain their workforce and sustain their operations,” according to Barry. The Partnership is also working with the Community Foundation of WNC to distribute $280,000 in grants to eight licensed centers in Buncombe County that were damaged and closed for an extended period.

Barry points out that home-based, unlicensed day care doesn’t have access to the same buckets of state funding, even though they too experienced damage and lost revenue when they were closed. Barry says they were able to give nine home-based child care businesses $1,000 each in financial assistance from privately raised funds. Additionally, the international humanitarian group Save the Children provided about $84,000 in “flash grants” and vouchers for classroom materials.

“Especially for home-based programs, the majority of them were closed for at least a month,” said Vial. “[The funds are] a drop in the bucket for what their needs are and are going to be long-term.”  

The General Assembly included $10 million for child care in its Oct. 24 Helene relief bill, but the Office of State Budget and Management identified a need for at least $36 million, according to the NC Budget and Tax Center.

Western North Carolina providers will also get some reprieve from the statewide appropriation of $34 million in “child care stabilization grants” approved in November, which is stopgap funding that aims to keep the system afloat. But those grants, and the formulas used to set rates, wasn’t enough to keep seven western North Carolina centers from closing in October.

While there may be other resources in the federal relief bill, including low interest disaster loans from the U.S. Small Business Administration, providers say this is risky as many don’t turn a profit.

“We’ve had programs that took out extremely high interest personal loans, because it was all they could get,” says Vial.

Lessons learned from Helene

Child care providers in western North Carolina understand that the water outages caused by Helene took everyone by surprise, and therefore, there weren’t detailed instructions in place on what would make an alternative water plan approvable.

The Verner Center’s Whitney suggests that the state’s Environmental Health Section could have presented several emergency operations plans child care providers could choose from. Instead, she says they felt left in the dark. “We’re early childhood educators,” she said. “We don’t have any idea how to do water systems, but we had to figure it out.”

Connor, the NCDHHS spokesperson, notes that 30 days after Helene hit, 752 out of 820, or 92 percent, of early childhood education centers, were open. She says they worked as quickly as possible to get child care providers back up and running.

“Helene was unique and required solutions on a much larger scale than previous floods and storms,” Connor wrote in response to questions over email. “We will be better prepared should this occur again, because this experience has created additional policies, procedures, and flexibilities with the support of the NCGA that we can lean on for future disasters to help ensure children are in safe environments.”

In addition to clarifications around emergency operations and policies, the region’s providers have a wishlist that doesn’t change from year-to-year: higher pay for early childhood educators.

Verner is “nowhere near living-wage certified, because we can’t afford to be,” Whitney said, adding, “We want to be.” The center’s lowest paid teacher earns $18 an hour; living wage is $22.10 an hour in Buncombe County, according to economic justice nonprofit Just Economics.

Whitney adds that Verner has colleagues “who are literally experiencing homelessness and poverty working full-time, because they live in Buncombe County and they make the wages we’re able to pay them.”

Vial from Buncombe Partnership for Children says long-term it will be important to look at ways to decrease harm caused to the early childhood education workforce. “What happens when there’s a major disruption to child care and you end up getting laid off?” she asked.

Parents want more early childhood options, particularly ones that are affordable. Blackburn, the mother of a 5-year-old, notes that she works two part-time jobs (dog-walking and at a restaurant) in addition to her day job in order to afford child care. But because of her gross income from these three jobs, she doesn’t qualify for greater child care subsidies.

Early childhood education advocates have long called for more robust funding—both to enable parents to afford high-quality child care and for staff and educators to be better paid. A crisis like Helene underscores the fragility of the whole child care system.

McWilliams lamented the work culture that already has a flimsy web of support for working parents, and that becomes even less reliable during widespread emergencies. Despite all her family’s aggravation during Helene, she says she knows they are lucky to have pieced together enough child care.

“I know it was harder for a lot of families … and that’s what breaks my heart,” McWilliams says. “[They are] people who are already not supported, and their kids are already not supported. They’re the fabric of our community.”

Jessica Wakeman is an independent journalist based in Asheville. She is a former reporter for the newspaper Mountain Xpress and has been published in The Assembly, Rolling Stone, the Guardian and Glamour.

This story was produced by the WNC Helene Hub, a project of the NC Local News Workshop made possible with funding from the Knight Foundation and Center for Disaster Philanthropy.

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