Saving the already-scarce child care services in Aspen during the pandemic became a million-dollar question for the city.
It was money very well spent, Aspen City Manager Sara Ott said during a city council work session Tuesday, giving large credit to Kids First — and the organization’s director, Shirley Ritter — for ensuring no child care facility went out of business while navigating closures mandated by the COVID-19 public health measures. Ritter, for her part, gave Ott plenty of recognition for prioritizing the issue.
“Sara’s right — across the state and across the country, there are estimates of dire shortages. Some places, as many as half of the programs closed. We don’t have enough capacity now, but we would be in such a crazy mess if that were the case here,” Ritter said.
The timing was good for such recognition, too. Not only did it come as those same public health restrictions are easing and business is starting to return to some semblance of “as usual,” including child care facilities, but both the city of Aspen and Pitkin County officially dubbed May the month of the “Young Child.”
How fitting, then, to acknowledge not only the continued goals for the future of meeting child care needs in and around Aspen but also taking a moment to look back on the challenges and successes of arguably the most difficult year in most professional lives.
That was certainly the case for Ritter, who looks back now and laughs at when she initially felt troubled by what to do with staff during required closures.
“When COVID first hit, I sat back thinking, ‘What am I going to do with all our staff because we’re not going to be doing our normal stuff?’” she chuckled. “Then of course we were crazy-busier than ever, trying to line up all these resources and getting them out and figuring out how to do coaching on Zoom.”
A large part of that is because of city council’s early recognition that child care is an essential service — even if the day care centers weren’t able to operate during the first few months of the pandemic, they’d be, potentially, more important than ever once families were able to return to their normal schedules, she noted.
“The city council early on, when they first … considered all kinds of emergency funding to keep the economy going, to keep the community going, one of the things that they designated was we needed to support child care,” Ritter said Wednesday.
Kids First, a city department dedicated to providing financial aid for qualified families’ child care needs while also working directly with programs to provide financial and staffing support, is supported by a 0.45% dedicated sales tax that goes toward child care and housing. But when the pandemic hit and it was obvious the sector was going to need more — in addition to the Paycheck Protection Program loans — city council directed a $1 million reserve fund to the effort. Kids First oversaw the allocation of those funds, Ritter explained.
“They authorized up to $1 million for the year and really gave it to the Kids First advisory board to work out what that needed to look like,” she said. “It’s for rainy days, and if there was ever going to be a rainy day, I’m pretty sure it was COVID.”
To that end, Ritter said that she and her team reached out directly to the child care program directors, asking them directly what they needed and how much it would cost. A lot of it came down to the expenditures not covered by PPP loans — the gallons of sanitizer, the gloves, the health-checking equipment such as thermometers.
“We got some monies from the state for masks and gloves and hand sanitizer, but that was kind of a one-time deal, and that was probably May or June, and we picked it up from that point on,” Ritter said. “They’ve always been disinfecting and washing hands, but not only did they need gallons and gallons of it, but all the sudden you couldn’t find it or it was extremely expensive. They really needed it all: they needed those PPP loans; they needed some funding from the city and Kids First.”
And Kids First’s work isn’t done. Of the $1 million, Ritter estimated that the department had used more than half, around $600,000, but that it’s still funding a lot of the efforts it’s been supporting since the pandemic.
Hopefully, that’s about to change, she continued.
“Probably next month will be our last month, but we have been reimbursing for any of those kinds of equipment items that they normally just didn’t use that much of,” she said.
Now, she and her Kids First colleagues — and, by extension, city council members — are looking to the future. In a town where people call to get on waitlists for child care the moment they learn they are pregnant — sometimes before even informing their families or employers, Ritter quipped — the need for more family services hasn’t changed, but the type of need may have, she noted.
It’s why Kids First is part of the Aspen Community Voice survey effort (aspencommunityvoice.com).
“We really, really need to hear from parents. We want to hear from anybody because everybody’s interested in this,” she said. “If you had a baby and you were doing all these different arrangements during COVID, what are you going to be doing now and what would you like to be doing? We need that data to go back to city council or go back to other partners and saying this isn’t thinking anecdotally — we have this many parents telling us they don’t have child care and they don’t know how they’re going to get back to work.”
That survey remains live until May 28, she noted. But in the immediate term and longer, the department is working diligently to find new options for parents. That model, too, will likely look different than pre-pandemic facilities, she noted. For instance, Kids First is in talks with Colorado Mountain College about potentially utilizing a classroom for a group of infants. Voters in November passed the Aspen School District’s bond that includes a new child care building, as well.
“I think that’s how it has to work in this community,” she said, adding that the town of Snowmass Village also identifies expanding child care as an official municipal goal. “So rather than, probably, seeing one big new building that looks like another Yellow Brick, we’re going to see a little bit here, a little bit there — which I’m really OK with because it gives more opportunities and gives better choices for parents. They can choose the location and hours that really work best for their family and child.”
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Looking back, looking ahead for managing Aspen’s child care needs - Aspen Daily News
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