YMCA offers $195/week day care at Austin public schools during mandatory online learning

The YMCA of Austin, Texas, is offering day care services on public school campuses after the district decided students would attend mandatory online learning instead of in-person classes for the start of the school year.

The Austin Independent School District ruled earlier this month that students would learn exclusively online for the first three weeks of the school year, which starts Aug. 18, before returning to in-person classes.

To fill the need for working parents, the YMCA is setting up full day care services for those first three weeks at 10 different locations in the city, including several elementary schools and public charter schools, a local NBC affiliate reported.

The program is for children ages 4 through 12 and costs $195 weekly per child.

The initiative is an extension of the YMCA’s summer program, and will include temperature checks every morning and classroom cleanings every hour, the Daily Caller reported.

“After 20 weeks doing COVID-safe programming, we’ve gotten pretty used to all of the precautions. Kids have been very safe and we’ve had very few symptoms,” Dr. Joan Altobelli, the vice president of licensed child care for the YMCA of Austin, told the NBC affiliate.

“We’re in a small part of the building. We know which rooms each children have been in every day. We know which adults have been with those children. If anybody comes up with a symptom in that classroom, we immediately close the classroom,” she said. “We’re able to trace exactly which children, whose parents need to be notified.”