BISMARCK, ND (trfnews.i234.me) The latest on the child care situation and COVID-19 in North Dakota from Governor Doug Burgum. It’s still in the planning stage of how to handle it. No decisions yet.
um the next topic I want to talk about for a minute is childcare we said yesterday that we’d be providing more guidance today on on childcare we know that if we’re going to have a potential crunch in the weeks ahead to provide medical services for people that may become critically ill in numbers that stretch our capacity if we’re going to be doing that we’ve got to make sure that childcare is one of the essential pieces of infrastructure we need to be able to do that and we have we’ve talked about the numbers before 1800 providers in our state 44,000 students in that K through a pre-k age group that utilized those systems today we also have students that are below the age of 12 that are in our k-12 system that would be people in kindergarten through approximately 50 or sixth grade when you throw those things in we have a hundred and thirty-two thousand of the citizens in North Dakota are under the age of 12 and that’s a wonderful wonderful thing but we you know 71 percent of the of the kids in eight that are aged 0 to 5 have all their parents in the workforce and the labor force participation rises to 78 percent of kids that are in that 6 to 12 age group so we know that there’s been a big impact on a child care with people suddenly finding themselves out of work because of the decline in oil prices that was the thing was hitting us in the last couple weeks so as as we were having unemployment increases there people are at home they may be pulling their kids out of childcare so we’ve had reports of some child care providers who’ve seen a drop in their census count that hurts their economics and and creates challenges for them and again the childcare sector in North Dakota is essentially private sector private sector solution on the flip side we know what the schools closing then some of our child care centers have been reporting hey we’ve got a bunch of parents that you know normally in the summer we would take kids that would be elementary school-aged during the summer but we don’t take them during the school year because they’re in school now parents are saying hey can we drop off our kids that are in first through fifth grade so others are seeing increase in in in in pressure in terms of more capacity the health care providers have all been calling us and saying hey we’re concerned about child care for our workers should we be working to try to set up you know temporary solutions we would like to not set up temporary solutions childcare is a federally regulated activity to work in a childcare center you’ve got to be gone through a federal background check which includes fingerprinting you’ve got to go through licensing which we administer here at the state we care at most about the safety of our children and so we have no plans on relaxing the requirements to either work out or become licensed to do a childcare that’s why we don’t want to create a bunch of pop up or alternative systems we want to support those childcare organizations many of which are small businesses we want to support them as they get get through this about 10 percent of those 18 hundred have already closed many more have limited their service so far what we’re announcing today is a rapid planning process it started over the weekend we’ve identified three objectives from this planning that we’re doing one is provide childcare for essential worker households number two is protect the health children families of childcare workers and and then three as we want to importantly want to sustain the childcare sector as an industry that’s essential to every business in our economy if you think about it as sort of a million dollar a day business in aggregate it’s about a three hundred sixty-five million dollar aggregate business in the state of North Dakota that is again severely challenged right now so how are we going to do that the planning process that we’re going to look at it’s going to look at a couple of things to improve the and protect the health of the children and the the people that work there we’re going to be putting together some modified operating practices those modified operating practices may include things like changing the ratio of the number of childcare workers to the children and that would have if you’re going to have increased distancing among kids or have them spread between more physical rooms to create that distancing you’re going to need more workers most organizations at a time when they’re having a decline in their census count would be laying off childcare workers we’re going to be likely heading towards a set of rules which will require them to have more workers and so if we do that then we believe that there may be a role and responsibility to to consider financial support
Governor Doug Burgum Provides Latest Updates on COVID-19 and Childcare in North Dakota
