During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, Nancy Sylvester watched with growing concern as child care centers around her own center in Jackson, Miss. closed their doors – for good.
“There was one center that was just down the street, the largest center in this area, which had been here 30 years,” said Sylvester, a retired public school counselor who runs the nonprofit Global Connection Learning Center in Mississippi’s capital city. “It closed and didn’t reopen.”
In fact, 18 childcare programs within a five-mile radius of Sylvester’s center closed between March 2020 and March 2021, according to data Reckon obtained from the Mississippi State Department of Health. The state lost 125 providers total during that year.
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Before the pandemic, the South was already a place where childcare workers are paid less, even when wages are adjusted for cost of living, than the national average. Many places in the South, particularly rural areas, don’t have enough childcare slots for the number of eligible children.
This year, Reckon obtained data on childcare program closures in Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, and spoke with child care owners and advocates across the South to get a clearer picture of how the pandemic affected the South’s childcare infrastructure.