 | | Maria-Isabel Ballivian, Executive Director at the ACCA Child Development Center in Annandale, Va.Cheriss May for The New York Times |
|
"I thought to myself, even if it were just for this one child, even if the only person that we're impacting positively is this one child, then it's worth it." |
— Maria-Isabel Ballivian, executive director of the ACCA Child Development Center |
Last April, Maria-Isabel Ballivian got a call from a man in Annandale, Va., whose wife had tested positive for Covid-19. She was displaying severe symptoms, he said, leaving him to care for their three children, all younger than 5. They lived in the basement of a house, making social distancing difficult. |
"He was by himself, without any food or any understanding of what to do," Ms. Ballivian, 47, said. She arranged to get some groceries and cleaning supplies delivered to the family, and contacted the health department to get him and the children tested and isolated. |
This interaction — though not a formal part of Ms. Ballivian's job description as executive director of the ACCA Child Development Center — has become part of a new normal for her. ACCA, a nonprofit organization that opened in 1967, serves many of Annandale's working-class, immigrant families. About 90 percent of the children enrolled in ACCA — all aged zero to five — are eligible for government subsidies and, for a large majority, English is their second language. |
When the pandemic hit, ACCA suddenly became the nucleus of the community — a place to get information, fresh food or even a space for school-age children to log on for virtual classes. |
Through May, Ms. Ballivian partnered with the health department to create care packages with basic supplies — face masks, hand sanitizer, cleaning equipment and information packets about the virus — and distributed them to all the families that were enrolled at the center. And she instructed her older and immunocompromised staff members — whom she had sent home to work remotely — to set up a time for daily virtual check-ins with families on their roster. |
"Because we serve a lot of low-income families, the incidence of children exposed to abuse and neglect is higher," Ms. Ballivian said. "So, that group that we set up to work with the families remotely had the task of doing two things: checking on the children and checking on the adults to make sure that everybody was OK." |
"Sometimes they would answer the phone and engage with us and sometimes they wouldn't, so we would just try again the next day," she added. |
 | | A young child at the ACCA Child Development Center.Cheriss May for The New York Times |
|
Many of the parents who use ACCA are frontline workers with few child-care options, so ACCA had to stay open. |
To make this happen, many of Ms. Ballivian's staffers brought their school-age children to the center so they could log on for virtual school while their parents worked their shifts. |
Then, parents started dropping off the older siblings of some of the toddlers already enrolled in the program. Before she knew it, Ms. Ballivian had 54 school-age children at the center, up from zero before the pandemic. |
Food turned out to be a challenge. Normally, the center would get its children's lunches from the county's school district. But when schools closed, so did their kitchens. Ms. Ballivian's team was left trying to figure out how to bridge the gap. |
Luckily, Ms. Ballivian already had a food handler's license, and some of her staffers were trained to prepare food. So "we just went to Best Buy and broke a deal with them and got some grills and air fryers," she said. They improvised lunch each day, throwing chicken nuggets into the fryer or grilling some vegetables. |
"Little did we know at that time that this situation was going to stand until now," she added. "We now have a full meal service program with a brand-new commercial dishwasher." |
In May, she managed to secure a loan of about $500,000 under the Paycheck Protection Program included in the first rescue package Congress passed last March, which carried the center through for a few months. And Virginia, like a few other states, waived its longstanding policy that government subsidies for children would be paid out based on attendance, instead paying child-care centers based on enrollment. Since so many of Ms. Ballivian's children qualified for government subsidies, that policy provided much-needed relief, she said. |
But that policy expired on July 1. |
And when in August, the schools didn't open back up, "the children who were supposed to graduate and go into the school system never did, they stayed with us," Ms. Ballivian said. "These children are registered in the school system getting virtual education, and what we're doing here is facilitating that virtual education." |
Enrollment at ACCA didn't dip much, because the center served essential workers, but the costs of more desks and air filters, not to mention the kitchen equipment, kept adding up. When Covid cases cropped up, parts of the school would have to close for two weeks, resulting in $30,000 of lost revenue each time. By September, the center was starting to lose money. |
"I have to be honest with you: At times, I thought, is this worth it? Is this fight worth it?" Ms. Ballivian said. "But there was one day when I saw a child, who had been diagnosed with special needs, sitting in a classroom and playing with a set of bells. I thought to myself, even if it were just for this one child, even if the only person that we're impacting positively is this one child, then it's worth it." |
In Her Words is highlighting the stories of child care providers from across the country, and how they were impacted by the pandemic. Read the full story here. |
 | | Maria-Isabel Ballivian with Vice President Kamala Harris at the White House on Thursday.Doug Mills/The New York Times |
|
Shortly after The New York Times published Ms. Ballivian's story, she received an invitation to come give a speech at the White House. |
On Thursday, she and her husband drove to Washington D.C. where Vice President Harris announced the release of $39 billion from the American Rescue Plan, which Congress passed in March, to address the child care crisis. |
"I stand here today on behalf of thousands of child care providers and educators who have decided to maintain their programs open and keep fighting for young children and parents," Ms. Ballivian said in her speech. |
"We as a country must come together and bring our best to ensure that every child grows knowing that they are worth the time, the effort and the investment. They deserve nothing less." |
Here are five articles from The Times you may have missed. |
 | | Jo van Gogh-Bonger at her desk in Amsterdam, sometime after 1909. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation) |
|
- "I started to see that she was the spider in the web. She had a strategy." Jo van Gogh-Bonger, the sister-in-law of Vincent van Gogh, is the force who opened the world's eyes to the painter's genius and the reason he became a star. [Read the story]
- "It's unlikely that the Covid vaccine would affect menstrual cycles." Can the Covid vaccines affect mammograms or the timing of fertility treatments? What side effects should you look out for? And what about those blood clot cases? Here's what women need to know about the vaccines. [Read the story]
- "She can talk anybody into anything." Meet Tracii Hutsona who built a glamorous life — expensive cars, chartered jets — on millions of dollars in stolen funds. [Read the story]
- "I sort of learned to put a wall in front of me so I wasn't disappointed that I couldn't do what I wanted to do." Madeline Forman, now 94, had a magical voice as a young woman and dreamed of being a singer. Seven decades later, she found a record in her closet that she had forgotten about completely. [Read the story]
- How are you dividing housework during the pandemic? The Modern Love Podcast is returning for a new season, and they want to hear about the creative (or fraught) ways you're handling the division of labor at home. Do you flip a coin? Reverse traditional gender roles? Leave passive-aggressive notes? [Send in a submission]
|
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 Sandra Stevenson. |
|
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home