TJB policies, protocols, and practices in place to prevent spread of Illness & Covid-19.

Hours of Operation

TJB will be open from 7:30AM-5:30 PM Monday through Friday.
We also have restrictions on no mixing of groups and limited switching of teachers between groups.

Staffing

Teachers are assigned to work with one group of children only. We can use substitute teachers, but each sub should only work with one group, as well. Teachers should not float between groups, helping wherever needed (as we typically do). This may present challenges if any teachers become sick. If a teacher has the symptoms of fever and respiratory illness, she will have to self-isolate for a minimum of 7 days (see illness policy below). Teachers may need to stay home to care for their own children or other family members who become sick. There may be days when we don’t have enough teacher coverage. We would do our best to avoid this, but there may, unfortunately, be days when we reduce the number of hours we are open, ask certain groups to stay home or close the Center per LA County Health Dept.

We remain deeply committed to supporting your child’s social, emotional, and mental health. We will be working, in this new mode, to find ways to meet children social and emotional needs, while keeping everyone as safe as possible from COVID-19 and typical childhood illnesses.

Children will be naturally drawn to each other, especially after being apart for so long. This is completely expected, and your children’s feelings will be validated (“You are so happy to see your friend, ___!”). Our role is to design an environment to keep each other safe and not share our germs while still having fun together.

We understand that often this is the child’s first experience in group can and we anticipate that the transition may be a bit bumpy for some children.
We know that children need and deserve nurturing, comforting, warmth, and connection with their caregivers – possibly more now than ever. Please know that any child that needs emotional support, including physical comforting, will receive it.
If possible, we’d like to make each child’s first days at school shorter days, to give him/her the chance to adjust to being away from parents and to get acclimated to the our program.

To protect the safety of everyone in our community, we will have a strict illness policy. Based on the CDC’s current list of symptoms of COVID-19 and recommendations from Public Health and Child Care Licensing, we will be asking anyone with COVID-19-related symptoms to stay home. Teachers, children, and parents should stay home, even if they have mild symptoms.

The most common symptoms are cough, shortness of breath/difficulty breathing, and fever. Anyone with any of these symptoms should stay home. In children, COVID-19 may present through cold symptoms, including a runny nose, cough, diarrhea. Because children can have mild cases, but can carry the virus to others, we will be asking for children with runny noses to stay home. There are other identified symptoms of COVID-19 that may appear, and they should be monitored, especially when they show up in combination: chills, repeated shaking with chills, muscle pain, headache, sore throat, loss of smell or taste, vomiting and/or diarrhea. Vomiting and diarrhea are more common in children. The CDC recommends that parents should also watch for signs of fatigue and/or crankiness in their child, which can indicate that they are not feeling well. One new symptom that has come to light as unique to children is purple spots on the toes and fingers. It may be the only COVID-19 symptom that children exhibit, but they can still be carriers of the virus.
Parents should conduct their own health screening (including a temperature check), on self and on child, at home each morning before leaving for school. Parents should closely monitor, their children and in members of their family (or anyone with whom their child comes into contact).

Anyone who has fever in addition to cold/respiratory symptoms must stay home for a minimum of 7 days.

Anyone who thinks they may have been exposed to COVID-19 must self-quarantine for 7 days. You are considered to have had close contact if you had contact with the person within 48 hours prior to when they first showed symptoms.

While the virus may be most contagious when the infected person is clearly ill, some individuals may infect others even when they don’t have obvious symptoms or any symptoms at all. Given that risk, children who have been exposed to someone who has respiratory illness should remain home for 7 days to see if they also develop symptoms of illness. Home quarantine of an exposed child reduces the chance of spread to other children and staff. If no symptoms appear within 7 days, the child may return to TJB.

Children will have health checks/temperature taken throughout the day at TJB. If your child comes down with any of the symptoms above he/she will need to leave the facility as quickly as possible. To facilitate quick pick up in such cases (or if the Center needs to close quickly due to a COVID-19 case in our population), parents should be reachable at all times, and should be available to get their child (or have a designated alternate pick up person get their child) within 30 minutes of being contacted.

One concern that some families have expressed is that, when their child joins the group care setting, their child will be interacting with other children whose families may not be taking the same protective measures that their family is taking (increasing their risk of exposure). It will be important for all families to care for each other’s health by following all of the physical distancing and other health-related requirements set forth by both our state and local governments and the Covid-19 Parent Contract for our program. It will be important to remember that what each of us does can affect the health of many others.

Each person should do a health screening before entering the facility. The Centers for Disease Control uses 100 degrees as their definition for “fever”. Our experience has shown that children can be sick, contagious, not feeling well, etc. at temperatures below 100 degrees. For the period in which we will be monitoring for COVID-19, we will be using 100.0 degrees as the benchmark for when a child/teacher should stay home/be sent home (unless a child has been highly active just prior to having their temperature taken, in which case, we’ll wait for several minutes, let them child cool down, and then retake their temperature).
As part of the sign in process we will be asking parents a series of questions, designed to rule out illness in your child, as well as any risks of exposure to COVID-19.