Oceanside students raise awareness of the challenges of child care

Sydney Tavroff and Gabriella Reluzco have more in common than being 16-year-old juniors at Oceanside High School. They both want better — and less expensive — options when it comes to caring for children of working parents. Especially in the new pandemic era.

The duo will join two dozen of their classmates on a trip to Rochester on March 11 to make their case with the career and technical student organization DECA as part of a statewide community-awareness essay competition.

“We both have a background in child care, and we wanted to find an issue that we both felt for,” said Reluzco, who, along with Tavroff, is considering a career in the medical field. Tavroff wants to become a pediatric physician’s assistant.

Reluzco provides children’s health and wellness services for several charities, and Tavroff volunteers to babysit three times a week, works with an organization that raises money to send children to summer camp, and has even volunteered at Cohen’s Medical Hospital.

“We were going through ideas, and it took us a little while, because it’s difficult to spread awareness, especially right now because of Covid,” Reluzco said. “But the moment we were talkingbout it, we saw a bunch of statistics on the inaccessibility of child care on Long Island, and we realized that we had to do the topic, because it’s such a big issue that no one really touches on.”

Child care simply isn’t something that’s discussed much, Tavroff added. “You see a lot of other issues that are more out there,” she said.

Their primary essay focus was not only on raising awareness of the lack of child care facilities, but also on its high cost, and its unaffordability to many.

“It’s expensive, and a lot of [child care facilities] are closed because of Covid,” Reluzco said. “We talked to child care facility owners within our community, and [Sydney] talked about how there are so many changes because of Covid. They lost a lot of kids, and they had to let go of a lot of employees, which is a big issue.”

Both researched Long Island and New York state child care statistics. They found that more than a quarter of child care facilities remain closed because of Covid, according to a CNBC report.

Much of their research coincided with one of the spikes in coronavirus cases, so they took to social media to share just how limited access to child care had become. “We decided because of Covid to create an Instagram page where we advocated for child care accessibility,” Reluzco said.

The two also found that New York ranked fifth among states with the least affordable child care in the country.

“Child care costs are rising by $730 each year, and … 48 percent of lower-income households reported that they don’t have the ability to return to their [pre-pandemic] child care arrangement,” Reluzco said.

Thanks to their DECA essay, Tavroff and Reluzco now aspire to start a club focused on finding and promoting accessible child care. “We had a goal of using the information we found to start a club to prepare kids for babysitting, with CPR and first-aid certification,” Tavroff said. “Last summer, I did an online class through the Red Cross where I was CPR- and first aid-certified. It was a few hours, and then you went on to hands-on training. We would want to be able to bring that kind of training to students.”

An army of well-trained new child care providers could then be sent out into the community helping working parents. “They will have students that are willing to help and are qualified,” Tavroff said.

“We both believe there are so many skills that can also be taught — not just CPR certification, but education on nutrition and allergies,” Reluzco said. “I think that it would help if they had that necessary training so that parents feel comfortable with them looking after their kids.”

If their essay advances past the state competition in Rochester, Tavroff and Reluzco would move on to the International Career Development Conference in Atlanta in April, a global DECA competition.