“COVID-19 revealed to the entire country what the early education and care field has known for years: Childcare is the backbone of our economy,” a new report says.

Unfortunately, that backbone is badly broken.

The report – “Boston’s Child-Care Supply Crisis: What a Pandemic Reveals” – was released by The Boston Opportunity Agenda and the Boston Birth to Eight Collaborative. The report’s findings were shared this week in a webinar that included Amy O’Leary, the director of Strategies for Children’s Early Education for All Campaign. A recording of the webinar is posted here.

The report highlights Boston’s shrinking supply of child care, a decrease that began long before the pandemic. Between 2017 and March 2020, the city “experienced a net loss of 3 percent of its licensed child-care seats for children 0–5 years old,” the report says. This loss worse in individual neighborhoods, including a 14 percent loss in Dorchester and a 15 percent loss in East Boston.

Add the pandemic in, and this loss is staggering. “Between December 2017 and September 2020, the loss at the city level was estimated at 16 percent.” At the neighborhood level, “East Boston, Dorchester, Hyde Park and Roxbury lost, respectively, 33.5 percent, 24 percent, 18 percent, and 17 percent in that period.”

Government action has provided some help. As the Boston Globe reports:

“Some financial support and policy changes from the city and state have helped child-care providers stay in business and shoulder growing costs, said Justin Pasquariello, executive director of East Boston Social Centers. But retaining employees, many of whom are parents themselves and worry about being infected with the coronavirus, has been a challenge.

“ ‘Our teachers, who are on the front lines and taking on a lot of risk, many of them could make more money working in individual households,’ Pasquariello said. ‘And so recruitment and retention have been very challenging at this time.’ ”

Another challenge, as the report points out, is that many child care programs provide a lot more than child care. Losing programs means losing extensive support for families. For example:

“The East Boston Social Centers, serving one of the neighborhoods hardest hit by the pandemic, provided thousands of meals and bags of groceries, masks, educational materials, formula and diapers,” and

“Nurtury, a network of centers and family childcare, launched a Family Resource Program to meet the needs of its families. Through this program, Nurtury collected and distributed diapers, wipes, formula and food. Nurtury’s board members and volunteers made masks for all children and staff. Additionally, Nurtury communicated regularly with families through phone calls and personal outreach to provide critical information, remote learning resources, emotional support, and to identify specific challenges of some of Boston’s highest needs families.”

Given how crucial these programs are, they need help to survive, grow stronger, and maintain a steady supply of child care spots.

This supply challenge may “fly under the radar of policymakers,” The Boston Business Journal reports, “due to the number of parents and caregivers who are keeping children home” during the pandemic. So this makes it crucial for advocates to keep a bright light on the problem.

“Returning to the same pre-COVID child-care system is inconceivable,” the report concludes, calling on policymakers to look to the Alliance for Early Success’ “Build Stronger Child-Care Policy Roadmap,” which we blogged about in September. The roadmap identifies four areas of focus:

• support the early education and care profession

• build a better child care business model

• expand state investments to increase access and affordability for families, and

• reform child care financing

An important theme runs through the report and the roadmap: it will take many stakeholders – parents, policymakers, businesses, and the early childhood and care profession – all working together to address the child care crisis.

As Kim Lucas, the senior director of Civic Research & Innovation at MetroLab Network, explains in the webinar:

“This is an ecosystem. There are so many interdependencies here that… we need to think about our approaches to solutions and approaches to support that are ecosystem approaches, not just piecemeal approaches, but ecosystem approaches.”