COVID-19 Child Care Public Health Order Announcement
March 24, 2020
Dear Community,
We wanted to give you this important update regarding child care and the shelter-in-place order.
On March 22, 2020, Governor Newsom issued a new public health order affecting all California child care providers, including family child care homes. That order says that you can only stay open to care for children of essential workers, and must use heightened cleaning and distancing rules in place for COVID-19. This means that there is now a statewide order to close all child care centers and family child care homes unless they are caring for a child of a parent working in one of the 16 essential sectors.
The entire FAQ from the Child Care Law Center can be read here.
The text of the new executive order can be found here.
In addition, the regulations around child care for essential sectors can be found here and contains strict regulations around providing emergency care (section 10.f.xxi):
- Childcare must be carried out in stable groups of 12 or fewer (“stable” means that the same 12 or fewer children are in the same group each day).
- Children shall not change from one group or another.
- If more than one group is cared for at one facility, each group shall be in a separate room. Groups shall not mix with each other.
- Childcare providers shall remain solely with one group of children.
We realize that this means many of you will need to close to remain in compliance or temporarily change your service model to provide only emergency child care for essential sectors.
The County’s Emergency Child Care Response is currently being developed. Please email us if you are interested in providing temporary emergency child care.
We understand that this is going to cause hardship for many. We will continue to provide updates and resources as they become available. Following this are answers to a few anticipated questions. Also, please visit our website for information and resources. Please send additional questions to covidresponse@sanmateo4cs.org.
Stay safe.
David Fleishman, Executive Director