Five years ago this month, Ohio issued an emergency stay-at-home order in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Schools shut down. Child care providers stopped operating. Libraries paused their programming.
In the past year, folklorist Nicole Musgrave sat down with two dozen child care workers across Central Appalachia — in communities like Chillicothe, Portsmouth and Athens — to document their experiences during that time.
The collection is part of a bigger project: In the aftermath of the pandemic, Congress called on the American Folklife Center to collect and archive memories of it at the Library of Congress.
The center recently published Musgrave’s collection of Interviews, It Takes a Village: Rural Central Appalachian Childcare Providers’ COVID-19 Experiences. Here are highlights from a few of her conversations.
The care provider
Marge Steele has been a child care provider in Chillicothe for more than three decades. When the pandemic started, she didn’t consider closing down.
“The parents needed me and the kids needed me,” she said. “It's very important to keep your kids on a schedule, to keep that routine going. And who am I to take that away from them just because there was a virus going around?”
Since COVID, though, she said she’s seen a lot of providers leave the profession.
“This is the least amount of providers that I've ever known of having,” she said. “And it's just dwindling down.”
The librarian
The library in Chauncey in southeast Ohio is about the size of a living room, said librarian Tessa Evanosky.
“Halfway through spring break, we cancelled all the programs,” she remembered, “which was a huge problem at our library because the kids were just so bored.”
She had a program planned to build a cornhole set. The unused plywood sat behind a desk for weeks.
Things are mostly back to normal now, but Evanosky says the isolation of the pandemic impacted teenagers. She’s noticed an uptick in depression and suicidal ideation.
“For me, I went home to my nice house and had a really good garden that year and canned a lot of food,” she said. “But these kids just went to, like, a trailer park, maybe a foster home. Some of them went to really abusive homes and there was no way to reach them.”
The child care advocate
Megan Riddlebarger is the executive director of the Corporation for Appalachian Development. Before that, she ran the Sycamore Run Early Childhood Center in Athens, which permanently closed early in the pandemic.
“I’m still crying about it,” she said. “So much of my heart and my soul was a part of that place.”
Now she advocates for affordable child care. She says the pandemic spurred a lot of investment in child care, but many of those resources have since dried up.
“I think our kids are our most precious asset as a society,” she said, “and that it should be on all of us to ensure their care.”
