April 22, 2021

Children from the school-age room lined up outside Kinder Kare before heading to the onsite playground.Valaurian Waller for The New York Times

By Alisha Haridasani Gupta

Gender Reporter

"It's just been an emotional roller coaster. One day we're feeling very hopeful and then the next day, you're just like, OK wait, what's happening next?"

— Kristin Nowak, the director of Kinder Kare in Midland, Mich.

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In Her Words is highlighting the stories of child care providers from across the U.S. You can read the full series here.

At 8 a.m. on a chilly February morning, Kristin Nowak was on breakfast duty at Kinder Kare, a child-care center in Midland within the Michigan Child Care Centers Inc. network.

She poured out cereal, made fresh juice and cut up fruit; pushed it all out on carts to the classrooms; and then packed, labeled and stored the leftovers.

Except Ms. Nowak isn't Kinder Kare's cook. She's the center's director. Minutes after getting breakfast done, she took phone calls from two parents who wanted to know if they could reduce the number of days their child spent at the center over the summer.

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This juxtaposed day — rolled-up sleeves in the kitchen one minute, administrative duty the next — has not only stretched her thin but is also the only way the center has managed to stay open.

"We're doing more on the floor because we're trying to absorb some of the costs and multitask," Ms. Nowak explained. "I've started taking on breakfast because it cuts a few hours off of our cook — she comes in and does lunch for us."

Kinder Kare is, as Ms. Nowak described, "a melting pot": Her children range in age from newborns to 12 years old, and about half of them qualify for government subsidies and the other half come from middle-income families. Before the pandemic, she had an average of 80 children a week and a six-month wait-list. She now has an average of 50 children a week and, until last week, had no wait-list.

Like many other states across the country, Michigan didn't designate child-care workers as essential workers when it first entered lockdown. But Kinder Kare decided to stay open anyway. "We are known for always being open, we have always prided ourselves on that," Ms. Nowak said.

Luke Lewandowski supervised hand-washing in the classroom.Valaurian Waller for The New York Times

In those first few weeks, she had just eight to 10 children come in per day — all of them children of essential workers. So the first thing Ms. Nowak did was cut back her staff from 22 to just four, including herself.

Then she reached out to a local organization that was offering Covid-related relief and applied for a donation. "I contacted them immediately, saying we need help, we're not going to be able to cover rent, let alone buy sanitizing stuff and all that," Ms. Nowak said. "So we received a $10,000 grant from them, which helped us with about three months of our rent."

"Now, we still have all our food costs and we pay six utility bills because I have six furnaces," Ms. Nowak added. "So that's why myself and the other director, we were here every day on the floor. I canceled our cleaning person and I cleaned every night before I went home. We were literally multitasking to try and get as far for as long as we could."

Ms. Nowak and her co-director would look after the children in the morning and then the two other staff members would take over in the afternoon.

In May, the Michigan Child Care Centers Inc. network secured a P.P.P. loan to be distributed across its nine locations. That enabled Ms. Nowak to bring 14 of her staffers back on payroll for 24 weeks, even if they weren't working full time when there were fewer children at the center (which is exactly what the loan program was designed for, in order to stem layoffs from small businesses). And at one point, Ms. Nowak's landlord waived one month's rent.

Kristin Nowak organizes cereal for each classroom.Valaurian Waller for The New York Times

Each month, the center would cobble together a plan to just make it through to the next month. But without the piecemeal funding and support, or the all-hands-on-deck approach, the center simply would not have survived, Ms. Nowak said.

It wasn't until this month that her enrollment numbers finally started to tick back up.

"It's just been an emotional roller coaster," she added. "One day we're feeling very hopeful and then the next day, you're just like, OK, wait, what's happening next?"

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In Her Words is written by Alisha Haridasani Gupta and edited by Francesca Donner. Our art director is Catherine Gilmore-Barnes, and our photo editor is Judith Levitt.

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