was originally reported by Chabeli Carrazana of . .

They started showing up shortly after the now viral video was posted to YouTube, claiming Minnesota day cares run by Somali Americans were rife with fraud. The video showed no real proof of that claim and has since been . They came anyway.

The first time it happened, the day care received an anonymous call from a woman brusquely asking them to open the door. When Fay, the owner, went outside, a man was already there recording. “There’s nobody here,” he was saying into the camera on his phone.

“Can I help you?” she asked him. The man said he was there because of Nick Shirley’s video. He wanted to see the children.

“I’m not going to let you in,” she replied. “There are kids here.”

“If you’re not lying,” he told her, “let me in.”

Fay, whose name The 19th has changed to protect her identity over fears for her safety, didn’t waver. Even under normal circumstances, she would never let an unknown man enter the day care and come near the children, much less film them, and certainly not under these circumstances, as a Somali day care provider who suddenly feels like she has a target on her back.

It’s been like this for over a month. A pair of young men turned up one night looking through the windows until a nearby business owner walked up to them and asked them to leave. Another time, an older man came twice in one day with a paper in hand, trying to pull open the doors.

“Does he want to get to the kids? Does he want to shoot us?” Fay wondered. She called the police.

Child care providers in Minnesota — especially Somali Americans — are facing high levels of harassment in a city besieged by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers. As strangers continue to show up asking to get access to the children inside, there is also the constant fear that ICE may come for the parents, the children or their staff, a large portion of whom are immigrants. Nationwide, about child care workers are immigrants, almost all of them women. It’s a fear now extending from child care to schools, with parents standing up adhoc networks to support providers, teachers and other immigrant families.

“I really love America more than I love anywhere in the world, and now I am feeling scared and sad and humiliated,” said Fay, who has been in the country for more than 20 years, is an American citizen and has been operating her center for nearly a decade.

The video YouTuber Nick Shirley posted just after Christmas alleged widespread fraud at day cares in Minnesota that were siphoning government funds but not providing care for any children at all. In the video, Shirley goes to multiple Somali-run day cares. Some appear closed, others do not let him in when he asks to see the children. Unannounced inspections by state officials into the centers following the video found them operating normally, and nearly all have prior going back years that further prove they have been serving children. Some fraud at child care centers in Minnesota has been previously , but there is that widespread fraud is taking place.

Nevertheless, the video has created a powerful narrative of rampant abuse, drawing the attention of the president and precipitating a drastic surge in ICE activity that by many accounts has turned South Minneapolis into something resembling a war zone. Already, have been killed by federal agents and — including — have been hurt and detained.

“As a child care community we are feeling attacked and we are an easy target: Child care historically has always been done by women and especially women of color in an exploitative practice,” said Leah Budnik, the board secretary at the Minnesota Association for the Education of Young Children, a child care advocacy organization.

After Shirley’s video, the Trump administration put a freeze on child care funding to the state, though funds are still available . The administration also asked for additional documentation such as attendance records and student information from providers, an effort that Minnesota’s Department of Children, Youth and Families has ratcheted up by sending members of the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension to parse through paperwork. That means that armed law enforcement is now joining in on the compliance checks, raising questions from providers about the need for that step — particularly around children.

“I can understand the need for the state to have people-power to go in and collect documentation the federal government is asking for in very short notice, but bringing armed law enforcement into child care centers is probably not the right way to do it,” Budnik said. “It does make people feel scared and criminalized.”

Cisa Keller, the president and CEO of Think Small, a nonprofit that works with many of the state’s child care centers offering additional education and support services, called the administration’s response to Shirley’s video a “kneejerk reaction” that is ultimately going to harm providers who had nothing to do with the false allegations. Most of the nine programs in the Shirley video, she said, are programs her staff has worked directly with.

“We are in and out of those programs with coaching and professional development, and we have a presence as part of the system,” Keller said. “We would be able to see if something was going awry.”

Instead, what’s happened is an escalation of a situation where children are going to be the most directly impacted, she said.

In the Twin Cities, where the bulk of ICE activity is taking place, the situation has boiled over to full panic. Providers are losing staff to the ICE raids because immigrant staffers are either being arrested or choosing to stay home. Some families the providers serve are , not taking their children to school or day care to avoid ICE.

Dawn Uribe, the owner of four Spanish-immersion preschools in Minnesota, said two of her staffers have been detained by ICE. One of them was on break at work in early January when it happened and called a supervisor to let them know they were being taken away and to please inform their family.

Since, a vast community mobilization effort led by parents has sprung up to support staff, centers and other families.

Over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend this month, a group of about 20 grandparents and parents showed up to a two-hour training at one of Uribe’s day cares to learn how they could step in as volunteers should the school lose additional staff and be unable to meet teacher-to-student ratios. (By law, day cares must adhere to strict ratios for child safety; in Minnesota there can be to every teacher, for example.) The parents and grandparents who showed up learned about shaken baby syndrome, how to do accident reporting and how to ensure kids are accounted for at all times should they ever need to be called on to step in.

The parents, Uribe said, are also delivering food to staff, taking parking lot shifts to watch for ICE and ensure teachers get safely to and from school, and standing watch in the lobby.

“The community in general, the Twin Cities in general, we don’t like what’s happening and we are going to stand up and say that this is wrong,” Uribe said. “Every time there is a training offered [in the community] people are there and they’re showing up to help their neighbors, they’re showing up to take groceries, they’re showing up to protests to be an observer and record what’s going on. That part’s powerful.”

Sarah Quinn, a mom of two in Minneapolis, said parents at her older daughter’s elementary school had been working together to take food to immigrant students and their families since ICE first showed up in the city in early December. When reports that ICE was patrolling near the schools started to circulate, parents stepped in to give kids rides to school using spare booster seats and car seats. They got an estimated 50 kids back to school in December through those efforts.

But then came Shirley’s video and the murder of Renee Nicole Good. Calls for aid flooded in. The preschool Quinn’s son attends got so many harassing calls in one day that police had to be sent to the school.

Parents started to set up school patrols, stationing volunteers in the parking lot and in their neighborhoods to make sure kids, families and staff could come and go to school safely. The number of parents doing food deliveries to other families’ homes shot up.

“People said ‘jump’ and we all kind of said, ‘How high?’” Quinn said. “As parents who care about our neighbors and who love this part of Minneapolis life that is diverse and involves immigrant families who have really just been responding as neighbors.”

They have also resolved to be more careful, watching everyone who comes and goes from the schools to make sure they are not inadvertently letting anyone in behind them who could harm the kids. In Chicago late last year, ICE agents entered a Spanish immersion preschool and detained a worker .

“We are not going to be Minnesota nice,” Quinn said.

Parents in Quinn’s daughter’s elementary school were made aware in December of a child in her grade who had not been at school for a week. They later learned the child’s parent had been detained and the other parent was keeping the child home out of fear.

When Quinn went into her daughter’s class recently to do a holiday craft, she realized the missing child was her daughter’s deskmate.

It’s presented a quiet challenge among the parents in the immensity of this moment: How do you talk to a second grader about what’s unfolding around them?

“We have had to find a lot of different ways to talk to our kids about how to be safe. Our children know the word ‘ICE’ and they know the word ‘ICE agent,’” Quinn said.

They’ve developed something of a mantra between them.

“What do we want?” Quinn may ask.

“We want them to leave,” the kids will reply. “We want all of our immigrant friends to feel safe.”

In 2021, when Dade County Schools Superintendent Josh Ingle was in his first year on the job, his facilities manager came to him with an idea that seemed like a no-brainer: a program that would use federal funds to test his schools’ water fixtures for lead.

Previously, the district had paid a third-party business to test for lead, but Ingle decided to enroll all four of his district’s schools into the Clean Water for Georgia Kids program, which launched in 2021 and is available for free to schools and child care centers. The district received training videos and equipment on testing all of its sinks and water fountains.

“I mean, it’s a free opportunity to have your water tested, you know, and we deal with kids each and every day,” Ingle said. “My kids go to Dade County Schools. As a parent, I would want to know.”

Doctors say no amount of lead exposure is safe, and children are especially vulnerable to lead poisoning, as even small amounts can accumulate in the body and cause problems with brain development, leading to decreased intelligence and behavior problems.

Lead in water is not detectable by taste or smell, and unlike other contaminants, it should be tested for at the tap rather than the water source or treatment plant. That’s because lead can enter the water through corroding pipes once it has already been treated.

When the results came back for Dade County, it was mostly good news. Most of the drinking fountains had no detectable lead, though some had slightly elevated levels. A few kitchen sinks and faucets in employee break rooms had higher levels, with one Davis Elementary kitchen hand-washing sink standing out at 13.47 parts per billion. Results for all participating schools and child care centers are available .

None of Dade County’s samples reached the 15 parts per billion threshold that requires immediate action.

Statewide, 6.1% of fixtures tested were above 15 parts per billion, while 18% met the best possible result of less than .1 parts per billion. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that lead in water not exceed 1 part per billion, and 59.5% of fixtures in Georgia schools and daycares meet this goal.

Ingle said he followed recommendations for fixtures with higher levels, which include installing new filters and flushing faucets each morning, which can remove any lead that may have built up overnight.

His only gripe with the program is that the district is on the hook for about $600 for optional retesting of the fixtures with elevated levels, which he says is not a big deal in the long run. The federal grant funds do not cover retesting for samples with less than 15 parts per billion.

“We didn’t realize that we were going to have to pay for this retesting, which, I don’t care, I guess we assumed it would be free, but because we did not have any over that 15 parts per billion, then we had to pay, which is very minimal in the grand scheme of things,” Ingle said.

Participation

Ingle said he’s glad to have a handle on the issue and to be able to show parents that the schools are taking lead safety seriously, but Dade County is in the minority.

Of the more than 2,200 Georgia public schools, only 91 have signed up since August of 2021. Only 118 of approximately 3,100 child care centers and 1,500 family child care learning homes have signed up.

Those participation rates are especially low when compared to North Carolina, where the program that became the model for Georgia’s launched in 2020. In that state, the program is required for daycare facilities, and nearly all of the state’s approximately 4,500 centers have signed up. In North Carolina, about 75% of fixtures returned less than 1 part per billion, and 2.3% were greater than 15 parts per billion.

Georgia’s Department of Early Care and Learning, or DECAL, set a goal of 500 facilities in the testing program’s first year.

“We had hoped for more, but it is on a voluntary basis,” said chief DECAL spokesman Reg Griffin. “We are continuing our outreach efforts to encourage programs to enroll.”

“We have continued our outreach efforts by emailing our programs and discussing the Lead Project in our Child Care Services newsletter sent to more than 4,400 licensed programs across the state,” he added. “We have also had a strong social media push and featured on our weekly podcast, DECAL Download.”

RTI Laboratories, the group partnering with the government to test the water samples, is also working to get the word out, says Jennifer Hoponick Redmon, an environmental health scientist and director of environmental health and water quality at RTI.

“We want to show facilities that this is something that can be done pretty easily at the individual facility level, and there’s really no better time than now to take advantage of this,” she said. “So we would love to hear from facilities that are on the fence about whether or not to sign up to see if there’s any additional support we can help to provide them to complete the testing. We are amenable to individual concerns and needs.”

Schools and daycare centers can enroll year-round at .

Some providers may incorrectly believe that they don’t need to test because their facility is newly built or because their water provider tests, she said.

Another concern may be that facilities will be stuck with a public record of elevated lead levels but no money to mitigate it. Redmon said some facilities may hesitate “because they want to make sure that they’re not joining something that’s voluntary, that they don’t need to do, that’s translating into more headaches for each facility.”

But she said most recommended fixes are free or low-cost, such as installing filters or flushing faucets every morning, and facilities could access funds for bigger fixes from the bipartisan infrastructure bill passed in 2021, she added.

On Monday, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Assistant Administrator for Water Radhika Fox announced $58 million in grant funding from the bill to pay for activities that remove sources of lead in drinking water.

“And what we’ve really found in North Carolina is that by providing information about participation and participating in the program and things being available online, that transparency has removed a lot of what would otherwise be perceived as hiding problems that are found at a school,” Redmon added.

Fixes

A February report from Environment America gave Georgia, along with most other states, for protecting drinking water in schools. The highest grade, a B+, went to Washington D.C.

The researchers note that Georgia does participate in Clean Water for Georgia Kids, but finds that only a small portion of programs take part, and adds that the state has no laws or regulations to address lead in school drinking water.

Last year, Gov. Brian Kemp signed aimed at protecting kids from lead by lowering the threshold of lead in a child’s blood that would trigger state action, including testing and required fixes.

That’s a good measure, but even better would be to prevent kids from getting lead poisoning, Redmon said.

“Ideally, it’s best to stop exposure before it starts,” she said. “Blood lead testing is a reactive way to identify children that have already gotten lead exposure, and our goal is to stop that at the source so that there is less of a need to identify children that have blood lead poisoning and then the need to identify where that source is coming from.”

Schools that do not participate may be testing on their own or hiring out, Ingle said, but the Legislature requiring facilities to test could boost participation in the free program.

“Well, the gray area is, it’s not a requirement. It’s optional,” he said. “And some districts may not know that much about it. I know about it because our facilities director did a great job of pushing out the communications.”

“If the legislature pushed this, made it mandatory, obviously, it would definitely increase participation,” he added.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Georgia Recorder maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor John McCosh for questions: info@georgiarecorder.com. Follow Georgia Recorder on and .

She could manage most days, when the two parents were on opposite schedules. What she needed was what the child care industry calls “backup care,” the kind taken up by friends, family members or the occasional high school or college student when a parent is in a pinch. If it’s paid at all, it’s often not enough, and, for parents like Edington, who need it at odd hours, it’s usually unreliable.

Until recently, Edington would have had few options. She has no friends or family nearby, and even big providers — like Care.com and Bright Horizons, which offer backup care as an additional service — can’t always fill the gap.

But that’s all been changing. The pandemic caused mass closures of child care centers, putting a focus on just how weak the existing structures for care really are. That sent parents — especially mothers — in search of solutions.

Edington found hers in , a new, fast-growing service that allows parents to screen and book sitters in their area for last-minute care through an app. Parents can also add their own existing sitters — siblings, parents, friends — to the database and help them get paid for all the care they would typically perform for free. The service is paid for by parents’ employers, who partner with Helpr to subsidize the care as a work benefit. In the last year, Helpr has tripled its growth, now reaching nearly 100,000 workers through partnerships at about 30 companies, including Vice and Snapchat parent Snap. It’s also influencing the first piece of legislation in the country, out of California, that seeks to mandate that large employers offer backup care.

Edington recently got access to Helpr through her employer, Clorox, which offers 60 subsidized hours through the app. She taps into it once or twice a month, when her schedule overlaps with her husband’s, and pays her sitter about $8 an hour. Clorox pays the rest. (Workers on the app get paid the area’s living wage.)

For Edington, accessing the aid was transformational. In rural Arkansas, her options for affordable, quality care are slim. Her only choice was often a friend who lives three hours away.

“It fills a big gap that we have because we don’t have anyone else,” said Edington, 25, who is expecting her second child in November. Without options, she said she would “rather miss work than leave my kid with someone I don’t know” and don’t trust.

Having accessible child care is crucial to the financial and economic stability of parents, especially mothers, who are most likely to take time off to do care work. About 6 percent of unemployed people, most of whom are women, are not working because they are caring for a child who is not in school or daycare. That’s 6.3 million people, according to the most recent .

The disruption of child care has contributed to an from the workforce in the past year. A survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia in August found that in that region said child care challenges made it difficult to bring back furloughed workers or hire new ones, a problem that was affecting assembly lines. And in recent months, child care access has been framed by President Joe Biden’s administration as critical to parents returning to work. An extensive child care plan is expected to be included in the second piece of an infrastructure package that will be unveiled in the coming weeks.

It’s the moment Helpr co-founders Kasey Edwards and Becka Klauber Richter have been working toward in the five years since they launched the app after working in the child care industry themselves. They created Helpr with the idea that access to backup child care could help parents fully participate in the workforce and keep them employed. Now the moment is meeting them, the pandemic making the case they’ve been trying to make for years: Offering this benefit is essential, not tangential.

“We envision a future where … child care should sit alongside [employment benefits like] vision and dental,” Edwards said. “It shouldn’t sit alongside the perks program. We’re not talking about discounted tickets to the Lakers game or whatever.”

The undervaluation of care work is reflected in how it’s paid — and how it’s not.

The median hourly pay for a child care worker in the United States was $12.24 in May 2020, according to the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, making it one of the . Child care workers earn less, on average, than retail sales workers, who earn a median wage of $13.02; housekeepers, who earn $12.61; parking attendants, who earn $13.02; and telemarketers, who earn $13.42.

Low pay and few benefits also contribute to high turnover and low retention rates in the child care industry— . This makes it hard to find quality care for families that are already paying exorbitant rates to access it, annually costing parents more than .

The care work that isn’t paid — the work often performed in homes by women — is estimated to be worth trillions of dollars a year. One estimate found that the unpaid work women do is worth at least a year in the United States if those women were paid minimum wage. On a global scale, that’s $10.9 trillion.

To help address that, Helpr ensures professional sitters are paid about $25 an hour on average, but must have at least two years of child care experience. The app is in most major cities, about 20 in the United States, plus in Mexico, Canada, China, Argentina, Australia and others. Wages are adjusted based on the living wage in each location.

Helpr is also hoping to change another practice: expecting family and friends who typically do care as a favor for parents to not get paid at all. The service launched a new feature for onboarding family and friends in 2019, and it has since become fully integrated into the Helpr app. It’s the most popular option for families, Edwards said. About 700 family and friend sitters have been uploaded so far. The app also offers about 1,000 of its own professional sitters.

“Everybody has some sort of village that they lean into, and we try to help those folks see that you can stop asking your sister-in-law for favors and you can put some money behind the transaction and formalize that relationship around that caregiving need,” Edwards said. “That way it’s more reliable, it’s more punctuated and it’s more helpful to both parties in the transaction.”

Grace Johnston, a tech worker in California, has onboarded her sister and sister-in-law into the Helpr app to help with care for her daughter, who was born in May 2020, when Johnston and her husband transitioned to working from home.

“Having someone for just a few hours a day has made a massive difference.”
—Grace Johnston, a tech worker in California who uses the Helpr service.

“I realized within a few days that it was unrealistic for us to both work full time and watch our baby. That is when we started relying on Helpr,” Johnston said. “Having someone for just a few hours a day has made a massive difference and has made it feel totally sustainable to both keep working from home with the baby.”

For family and friend sitters, parents provide a name and email, and Helpr handles the onboarding process. Johnston uses the app several times a week and pays $6 an hour. Her employer, a tech company in Silicon Valley, pays the rest. Because she can rely on sitters she already trusts, Johnston said she feels more comfortable using care services more frequently, calling it the single thing that has had the “biggest impact on my journey to become a working mom.”

But there are still barriers to adoption, both for parents and companies, Edwards said. About 42 percent of parents are afraid using the child care benefits provided through their employer could put their job at risk, , a nonprofit that does research on working women.

“We’re going to continue to face challenges on user adoption,” Edwards said. “There’s still a lot of guilt for a lot of moms and parents who don’t want to feel like they’re over overstepping or leaving their kids alone.”

What’s encouraging, in the face of the pandemic, is that more companies are looking to normalize access to child care benefits as an economic imperative that improves retention. The recession has also created the space to even have the conversation about solutions.

“We’re really excited about this being a new language to say, ‘The bottom line of any company is highly supported by this network of people who are taking care of everyone’s kids,’” Edwards said.

Normalizing access to backup care is something Helpr believes can also be legislated. This year, it worked to draft a bill that would mandate that companies with more than 1,000 employees offer backup child care as a benefit.

In California, state Assemblymember Wendy Carrillo took up the cause, — the first time a bill of its kind has been proposed. Employers would be required to subsidize 60 hours at an estimated cost of as little as $50 per employee, per year.

That number changes depending on how much employees tap into the benefit — many employees don’t use ancillary benefits at all even if they’re available. Adopting something like Helpr would be particularly costly for smaller businesses, which is part of the reason Carrillo left them out of the legislation.

In the tech world, backup care isn’t a new idea. Some of the country’s largest employers have offered the benefit for years, including Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Google. In 2019, a group of about 1,800 moms at Amazon, who called themselves the Momazonians, campaigned for the benefit before the company . It expired in October.

In the past several years, workers have been , prompting other companies, including and , to start offering backup care, too. That’s expected to grow in the wake of the pandemic, when companies are implementing more flexible benefits, . Care.com and Bright Horizons, the leaders in the backup care space, have also pointed to , including the backup child care option, since the start of the pandemic.

A change in legislation makes a pretty clear business case for Helpr, which stands to benefit from mandated backup child care, particularly in California. But it would also open up the market, drawing new companies and possibly sparking similar legislation in other states.

“This could advance, not just the actual benefit availability for families, but really step forward that culture,” Edwards said.

It does present a barrier for companies, which would be required to incur the additional cost if the legislation passes at a time when many businesses are trying to return to normal operations following the worst of the economic fallout of the pandemic.

The pandemic is also why Carrillo said this year felt like the right time to propose the bill and tap into the opportunity to “radially change the way in which parents and companies return back to a functioning society.”

“Why can’t [child care as a benefit] be the standard?” Carrillo said.

Business groups have already come out against the proposal. The California Chamber of Commerce dubbed the legislation one of its “job killer” bills of the year, calling it a costly requirement that is unnecessary in a state with expansive paid leave regulations.

“We share your concern about the availability of child care as an important support for working families,” the chamber , adding that “without viable child care solutions, and reopened schools, working parents will have a difficult time returning to work.”

“The issue is not whether child care should be robustly available, but who is responsible for paying for this service,” the chamber said. “Employers cannot be the safety net for this pandemic or for addressing the ills of society generally.”

The aid, it argues, should instead come from the state or through the expanded federal programs in the light of the pandemic, including the , that are aimed at providing parents additional funds for child-related costs like backup care.

“As businesses struggle to maintain operations and avoid additional layoffs while they recover from COVID-19 closures, now is not the time to place yet another burden solely on the shoulders of California’s employers,” the chamber said.

But Carrillo and Helpr see the bill as a long-term investment born from this moment.

“It is an opportunity for larger companies to think about all the realities that have already been proven about how difficult it is for women to return to the workforce,” Carrillo said.

She also sees it as an issue of equity.

“To me, this is an actual real example of what shattering the glass ceiling looks like,” she said. “That also includes the recognition that women are also mothers and caretakers.”

This article originally appeared at  and is published in partnership with