Day cares on the brink

MARCH 27 WAS HANDS down the worst day of Cathleen Farrell’s professional life. COVID-19 had hit the country like a tsunami a couple weeks before, prompting childcare centers, including the three she owns and operates in Medfield, Mass., to close until further notice. For two weeks, Farrell had continued to pay her 26-person staff, hoping the crisis would be over soon. But by the end of that month, her finances had become untenable. She reluctantly assembled her employees to deliver the grim news: everyone would be furloughed indefinitely. On the video call with her staff, Farrell cried.

“I felt like I was doing it to them,” she says, her voice cracking in the retelling. Stopping people’s paychecks during a period of economic uncertainty cut against how she saw herself. “I’m a caretaker,” she says. “I take care of people.”

But Farrell’s decision to furlough her staff was just the beginning of her financial woes. In order to reopen her day-care centers in July, shortly after Massachusetts gave childcare directors the green light, she had to retrofit her facilities to keep kids safe and quell their parents’ fears. That meant purchasing thousands of dollars’ worth of new equipment: 18 air purifiers at $200 a pop; an $800 electrostatic sanitizing device; half a dozen $369 strollers to keep toddlers farther apart; and outside play equipment and tents that set her back well over $10,000. Farrell also doubled