Working parents face a child-care crisis. Here's how LA employers are handling it
LOS ANGELES - The scramble began in March. Offices shut down, then schools and day-care centers.
Parents who could work from home struggled to stay productive while keeping toddlers entertained and teens focused on remote schoolwork. Those deemed essential workers somehow had to find someone to watch their kids while they spent their days in newly dangerous workplaces.
We just have to make it through the lockdown, they told each other. Then: We just have to make it through the summer.
Forced to adapt to this new normal, California's biggest employers responded, in varying degrees, with measures such as paid leave for caregivers, flexible work schedules and stipends for child care. But now that the L.A. Unified School District and many others across the state are electing not to reopen for in-person classes in the fall, many of those employers are still relying on emergency policies intended as short-term, stopgap measures, while some are even cutting back on new child-care benefits.
That leaves working parents like Amy facing a daily crisis that's both increasingly urgent and depressingly familiar.
A single mother of three who has worked at a Rite Aid in the Valley for nearly a decade, Amy has been on leave
