After mass closures, too little support, post-pandemic child care options will be scarce

Driving to work before dawn last winter, Valerie Norris heard an NPR report about a terrible disease spreading in China — a pandemic, people were starting to call it. It sounded sad but very far from Rocky River, Ohio, where she’d led the Rockport Early Childhood Center for 34 years.

A few weeks later, she knew better.

It was still dark on the chilly morning of March 13 when Norris pulled into the big parking lot at the Rockport United Methodist Church, where her school was based. She always arrived first to unlock the doors.

Child artwork covered the walls in the quiet hallway. Brightly decorated doors said things like “Ready! For a colorful year.” She knew it was the last morning she’d walk down that hallway for a while. She didn’t imagine it was the beginning of the end of her center, of her career, of the community she had worked so hard to build.

“We’ve weathered storms before,” Norris, 61, said of her center, located in a well-to-do suburb about 10 miles west of Cleveland. “But this one is a tsunami.”

Read the full story at The Hechinger Report.

Photo Credit: Valerie Norris (submitted)