Because of nonsensical preschool rules, we are expected to work full-time jobs while quarantining toddlers
It was while picking my 2-year-old’s pancakes from my 4-year-old’s hair last week that I got the email: After two days in school since our last quarantine, my daughter’s preschool class was in quarantine again.
Omicron has thrown everyone. It’s thrown medical professionals. It’s thrown politicians. And it’s thrown parents of children under 5 back to March 2020, when we were expected to work full-time jobs while quarantining toddlers. Now we’re doing it again. Unless the childcare quarantine rules change, we’ll keep doing it, a week at a time, again and again.
This whiplash is due to health guidance requiring unvaccinated people to quarantine following any COVID exposure. Because preschool- and day care-age kids are mostly ineligible for vaccines, this means that anytime one of the 27 students and staff in my daughter’s preschool class or the dozen children and staff in my son’s day care tests positive, my kid must quarantine for a week.
Given that approximately 1 in 10 Bay Area residents had an asymptomatic COVID infection at the height of the surge, and our preschool tests students twice weekly, it is no wonder my daughter was in preschool 10 days of the last four weeks.
It doesn’t have to be this way. It isn’t this way for school-aged kids. California and the CDC allow unvaccinated children to stay in school after an in-school exposure if the students were masked and the exposed student is asymptomatic and tested. Bay Area jurisdictions have embraced that policy despite the Omicron surge, insisting schools stay open.
Why is childcare treated differently? It can’t be vaccination eligibility, as the K-12 rules apply to unvaccinated students. It can’t be risk of severe disease, as children under 5 have very low risk of COVID hospitalization, like their school-aged counterparts. It can’t be masking rules, as the child care quarantine-at-home rule applies regardless of a child care center’s masking policy. (In my daughter’s preschool class, where mask compliance is high, not one exposed child has tested positive during any quarantine this year.)
I suspect part of the rationale for treating child care and school differently may be that K-12 students risk formal education loss if quarantined at home. But that minimizes the social and emotional learning that younger children do in childcare settings — learning that prepares them for elementary school and beyond. If you think early-learning experiences aren’t important to kids, I’ll put you on speakerphone the next time my son talks about doing the party freeze dance with Zoe and Nicco.
Such distinctions between child care and school also miss the parents’ perspective. It’s hard to overstate how difficult it is to work while caring for someone whose favorite game is called “one, two, three, KABOOM!” Many of my friends with small kids now wonder — again — if they should quit their jobs. We’re told this isn’t March 2020, but it can sure feel like it.
I don’t doubt the seriousness of this surge or COVID restrictions generally. But this policy just doesn’t seem right. Not when vaccines are widely available, and therapeutics help the most vulnerable. For Pete’s sake, we now allow young children to attend NBA games where, if even 1 in 40 attendees has COVID, a child has a greater than 25% chance that someone within a two-seat radius of them is infected. And yet, we don’t allow parents to send children to day care if one since-removed child tested positive.
To be sure, some parents will not send their child back to child care after an in-school exposure. But let that be our decision, based on our circumstances. We can’t keep doing this.
Cynthia Stein, of Oakland, is an attorney and mother of two kids under 5 years old.
CYNTHIA STEIN | Contributed
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