Meet an emergency provider: Jessica Teixeira

When Gov. Charlie Baker suspended the operation of all non-emergency child care programs in mid-March, Jessica Teixeira’s heart broke for the families she serves in her Revere ECE program, Imagination Station Early Learning Center. Many of them include first responders. Teixeira is also married to a former first-responder. She was well aware that their already perilous work was about to get much riskier and didn’t want to compound their stress by leaving them without child care.

After talking it over with her husband, Teixeira decided, “I can’t close. There’s got to be something we can do to help these families.”

When she learned the MA Department of Early Education and Care (EEC) was seeking ECE providers to operate as Emergency Child Care Programs, Teixeira was among the first to apply.

Emergency child care providers like Teixeira’s Imagination Station serve COVID-19 Essential Workforces—parents or caregivers who work in health care, public safety, and public health—along with vulnerable children whose families are involved with the state’s Department of Children and Families (DCF) or qualified for subsidized care.

Teixeira and a staff of eight care for anywhere from 20-26 children per day—roughly half her normal enrollment, which means she had to make the difficult decision to lay off some employees.

“We're just trying to keep things as easy as possible for parents and to keep the kids happy and keep them engaged,” Teixeira said. “We're trying to keep whatever routine we can, and hopefully we go back to whatever we used to have in our normal lives. That's what we're all hoping for.”

In addition to her 20-year career as a childcare professional—the last three as proprietor of Imagination Station—Teixeira is raising children of her own. So she did have concerns about the risk to her and her family of operating an emergency child care during the coronavirus pandemic.

To minimize risk of exposure to the virus for the children in her care and for her family, Imagination Station has effectively eliminated traffic in and out of the building by having parents and caregivers do pick-ups and drop-offs with staff at the entrance to the center rather than having them come inside. Parents observe social distancing protocols by staying at least six feet apart from other families during drop-off and pick-up, she added.

“There's really no need for our parents to come in and out of the center,” said Teixeira. “I think less traffic coming in, especially with the parents that are on the front line, is better.”

And while ECE regulations already mandate sanitation and sterilization protocols that meet current guidelines regarding the coronavirus, Teixeira is taking additional measures to keep her center clean and safe. Early on, she made daily shopping trips to accumulate an abundant stock of cleaning supplies. Cleaning happens more often and teachers have children washing their hands more frequently throughout the day. And despite Imagination Station’s current lower enrollment, Teixeira opted to keep four of her classrooms open rather than EEC’s minimum requirement of two to give everyone more personal space.

“It's not ideal financially, but it's ideal to be able to spread the kids out so that we're not having so many kids in one classroom,” she said.

Otherwise, when it comes to the children in her care, it’s business as usual. Many of them, said Teixeira, don’t even realize the upheaval the ongoing public health crisis has caused in our daily lives. And though familiar faces have been replaced with new ones, and children come and go from her program sporadically, Teixeira tries to stick to her curriculum and maintain routines.

“They're still doing projects,” she said, though they’ve stopped using communal materials like Play-Doh. “We're still doing circle time, singing songs. We have like a little karaoke machine for the kids in preschool, so they're singing songs. Even for the staff, and for myself, it's better just to kind of keep our mind off of [the pandemic]. We all know it's there. We're all going to worry about it once we stop doing what we're doing, but not at the center.”

Teixeira also takes her mind off the crisis with StrongStart professional development trainings. She said she just signed up for two webinars and encourages her staff to take advantage of opportunities to further their professional learning.

“I'm constantly pushing my staff and pushing myself to get online and see what's out there and learn more stuff, because there's always something new to learn.”