Day care in the time of COVID-19

MOSES LAKE — The first thing you notice when you step inside Suky’s Daycare is the sharp smell of disinfectant.

“We get that a lot,” said Renata Vazquez, 25, who has been working as a teacher and the center’s assistant director for almost two years.

“Hand washing is double, disinfectant is double, cleaning is double,” Vazquez explained. “There’s just a lot more cleaning done.”

It’s how you run a day care center in the time of COVID-19. You install a special hospital-grade filter in the HVAC. You teach kids to wash their hands, and turn it into a game to make it more effective. And you clean everything. Over and over and over again.

“Every time we walk in the classroom we wash our hands,” said Ajelet Bergman, 26, who works with the toddlers. “We check their temperature, and we’ve showing them why it’s important to wash their hands and how to do it too. We sing a song every time we do it.”

“We’re working double because we have to disinfect everything,” said Suced Yusso, the center’s owner and manager. “We always had to do that, but now we have to do it more.”

This day care center, which Yusso has run on Burress Avenue in Moses Lake for the last five years, is part of her dream, and part of a way she keeps faith with the memory of her daughter Suky, who died some years ago at the age of 15.

“My daughter was born with a condition,” Yusso, 49, explained. Something about her veins — Yusso was hard pressed to describe it in English. “And the doctors said anytime she could die. We are so lucky, she lived 15 years.”

Yusso, 49, came to the United States from Mexico 31 years ago, originally as a migrant farmworker, toiling in fields harvesting crops. She also worked in restaurants. But her real passion has always been helping children.

“I started in home care. I love to do that, and my goal is to open a center for foster kids because I see that community has a lot of needs,” Yusso said. “Oh my gosh, I love to help kids.”

When she was running her home day care, Yusso said, she used to pass by a dilapidated building near the corner of Burress and South Broadway and think to herself what a good site that would be for a day care. After negotiating with the owner, Yusso and her family occupied the building and spent a year repairing, replacing and painting things.

“It took us one year to fix everything,” she said. “It was a family project, my oldest son and all my kids working too hard, to paint, to put down the floor, to fix this place.”

Suky’s is licensed for 35 kids, Yusso said, though normally she only has around 30 or 32. On Friday morning, a little more than a dozen kids were noisily playing in the two fenced-off playgrounds behind Suky’s Day care.

Yusso said she has tried to create a family-oriented day care. The staff members are close — they cook for the kids and for each other in a kitchen that last Friday smelled sweetly of cinnamon and hot peppers. And they work hard to get their older kids — Yusso accepts children aged one to five in her day care center — ready for kindergarten by teaching them letters and numbers and getting them familiar with books and stories in both English and Spanish.

“The teaching part of it is just like you would do in the school district,” said Mireya Ceja, a veteran preschool teacher who has been working for Yusso for more than a year. “I’ve been teaching for 19 years; some of my kids are already graduating high school. I still see them around, they say, ‘I remember you, you were my teacher.’”

Ceja said she sees how important caring for children is for Yusso.

“She often says she sees her daughter in the kids. She always says, ‘I wanted to know what she would become, and hopefully she is proud of me because I have helped all of these kids,’” Ceja said. “She goes beyond, and her husband is the same way. It’s become a family.”

“I love it. I love working with toddlers, it’s a lot of fun,” Bergman said. “You can be silly and you can be embarrassing and they don’t care, and they love to dance and sing.”

“I love everything. I love the kids, I love the staff, it’s a family-oriented place,” Vazquez said.

When COVID-19 first hit, Yusso said she kept all of her employees on, taking on extra loans to keep up with the bills, even as the number of children attending plummeted. Yusso even hired an extra staff member to handle much of the additional cleaning, she said.

Early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, the state asked day care and child care centers to remain open in order to serve children of “essential workers.”

“And, of course, you’re scared for yourself,” Ceja said. “A lot of us have a condition, some are diabetic. But some of the parents are doctors and nurses, a lot of nurses, and they are essential so we became essential too.”

“They see we are very necessary, and they tell us,” Yusso added.

Ceja said it’s a tremendous accomplishment for someone like Yusso to start out as a migrant farmworker to eventually become a business owner, something Yusso herself described as “a dream.” But the kids laughing and playing and making noise out back are the reason Yusso does what she does.

“I don’t do it for me, I do it because I love to help,” she said. “I love every time when I come here every morning, I come and I see the kids and that makes me feel, I don’t know, energized, I feel so happy.”