Lawrence Mayor Dan Rivera. Source: City of Lawrence Instagram page

“Are we in a place where we can safely go back to business, go back to work or go back to life?” Lawrence, Mass., Mayor Dan Rivera said last week on a Zoom call with the early childhood community.

This question, Rivera explained, is what the members of the Massachusetts Reopening Advisory Board have been asking as they grapple with how to emerge from the statewide shutdowns caused by COVID-19.

Rivera serves on the reopening board, and he’s working hard to protect his city, which has had, as of Tuesday, 3,438 COVID-19 cases and 127 deaths. Last month, The Boston Globe reported that Lawrence had become “a coronavirus hot spot, with the fourth-highest per capita rate of infection in Massachusetts.”

On the Zoom call, Rivera provided a mayor’s-eye-view of the crisis and its impact on child care.

Handling disasters isn’t new work for Lawrence. In 2018, gas line explosions shoved the city into crisis mode.

“Because of the Columbia Gas crisis, we know what suffering would look like if we didn’t step up right away,” Rivera explains in a follow-up interview.

The challenge now: How do you reopen early childhood programs in the middle of a city being hit so hard by a pandemic?

Rivera says it’s a balancing act, weighing child development, economic development, and public safety against each other, but prioritizing public safety.

It’s also a matter of meeting the needs of the entire child care community.

“As we roll out child care, we know that if you’re a big enough provider, you can survive, but if you’re not that big you could be left behind. We have to be thorough and thoughtful because we have a lot of smaller, in-home programs that are certified by the commonwealth. They’re good quality, educational, child care providers.”

Who can help? Early childhood providers, Rivera says. “We have this problem, and they’re the experts. We need all the brains in the room to solve the problem. That helps eliminate competition.”

Another part of the solution?

“We have to raise taxes,” Rivera says. “The expectation is that of course the poorest community in the commonwealth is going to say that. But the reality is that if we don’t keep Chapter 70 [state aid to public schools] and transportation funded, everyone is going to get hurt.”

“As we move forward, it’s going to be about the things we build together.”