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Last month, Governor Charlie Baker announced the launch of a COVID-19 rapid testing program for public school districts, charter schools, and other educational settings.

Unfortunately, Phase 1 of this program leaves out early education and care providers.

To address this omission, Amy O’Leary, director of Strategies for Children’s Early Education for All Campaign, has written a letter to the governor, which says in part:

“We ask for equity and to be recognized and supported as essential infrastructure.”

Programs licensed by the Department of Early Education and Care (EEC) need rapid testing “to mitigate virus spread for children, families and staff” and “to remain sustainable and open.” But, despite months of advocacy, rapid testing requests from child care providers have gone “largely unanswered.”

Public radio station WBUR looked at the COVID-19 challenges that EEC programs face.

“As more people get COVID-19 across the state, it’s inevitable that cases will pop up in preschools and child care, despite health precautions such as wearing masks and rigorous cleaning,” WBUR reports.

“That’s what happened at Nurtury, which operates six centers and supports 130 family child care providers in Greater Boston. Since they reopened their facilities in July, they have had a few isolated cases of the coronavirus. The daily health screenings usually caught any potential cases before a child or caregiver came through the doors.

“But in late October, that changed… A teacher at one location had tested positive. At a different location, a parent had COVID-19. A third site: another positive teacher.”

Nurtury CEO Laura Perille tells the radio station, “I had some level of exposure in three different centers, in three different neighborhoods, in three different towns and no cross pollination of staff.”

The story adds, “After consulting with public health officials in Boston and Cambridge, Perille closed three classrooms at one location for a week. She completely shut down another center for nearly three weeks, affecting 18 staff members and 50 families.”

And as O’Leary’s letter explains, “Early education and care providers face overwhelming staffing challenges every day due to insufficient testing protocols. The inconsistency in test result time is devastating to programs that are struggling to remain open and families who need care to return to work.”

Moving forward, the letter adds, “we ask that the Governor’s administration work with the Department of Early Education and Care to develop a comprehensive testing protocol for EEC licensed programs… so that child care providers may remain open and continue to serve the children and families of Massachusetts.”

“Looking to the future, we ask that early education and care providers and educators are prioritized as essential workers in any future vaccine distribution. At the very least we ask for parity, so that the employees who are responsible for the care and education of the Commonwealth’s children are viewed as equal partners.”

It’s a matter of helping children, families, and the economy.

As Jonathan Kolstad, a health economist at the University of California, Berkeley tells WBUR, government support of K-12 programs and EEC programs is crucial.

“The return on investment from a federal or state government is off the charts,” he says. “Even if you simply value the lost productivity of parents who are unable to work at all or work completely, that alone would pay for the testing many times over.”

Kolstad estimates that lost productivity to be “$50 million to $100 million a month in family incomes in Massachusetts.”

In other words, the many benefits of rapid testing far outweigh the costs.