How an Education or Child Care Employer Operates
The functions
An education or child care employer sells presence. It earns tuition by putting a teacher and a group of students in a room, a laboratory, a studio, a gymnasium or a playing field; it earns weekly fees by caring for children in rooms whose ratios its license fixes; it earns auxiliary revenue by housing, feeding and transporting students and by renting its facilities; and every one of those activities is a group meeting, most of them involve travel, and all of them are commerce. The industry performs twelve functions, each at a place, with a counterparty, on an input that a governmental order can reach and did reach. The customer base is the family, and every family in the country was itself under orders.1
IN, in-person instruction
The core service is a class taught in a building to students who are physically present: a kindergarten of twenty children, a chemistry laboratory, a dance studio, a driving lesson, a seminar of twelve, a lecture of three hundred. Tuition is earned by delivering it. An order that closes school buildings to students, that suspends "normal in-person instruction," that fixes the earliest date on which in-person instruction may begin, that bars in-person instruction in counties on a monitoring list, that confines classrooms to cohorts of a fixed size, that requires six feet or three feet between desks, that requires a face covering of every person in the room as one of its exposure-control conditions, or that excludes a class for ten to fourteen days after an exposure, changes what the classroom does and how many children can be in it.2
RL, remote learning
Remote learning is the compelled substitute of March 2020, not a business the industry sold. It requires devices, connectivity, a redesigned schedule, redesigned assessment, retrained staff and a different relationship with every family; it earns no laboratory fee, no studio fee, no athletic fee, no dormitory rent and no dining revenue; and for a child care center or a preschool it does not exist, because a two-year-old cannot be cared for by video. The orders that closed the classroom compelled the switch, the orders that gated reopening compelled its continuation, and the orders of the 2020-21 year (metrics, hybrid models, cohort rules, quarantine rules) compelled schools to run two systems at once.3
EC, extended care and child care
Before-school and after-school care, preschool, infant and toddler rooms and summer programs are the revenue lines most exposed to orders, because their capacity is set by licensed ratios and their customers are working parents. In March and April 2020 at least twelve States and the District of Columbia closed child care to all but the children of essential workers or permitted only newly certified emergency programs to operate; the others imposed group-size and ratio rules that cut licensed capacity by half or more; from May 2020 the reopening orders conditioned every room on cohorts of ten or fewer, screening, exclusion and face coverings; and in 2021 the school and child care orders of Kentucky, Delaware, New Jersey, Illinois, Connecticut, Denver and the District of Columbia, which imposed universal face coverings with screening, exclusion and quarantine requirements on every licensed room, and the staff vaccination-or-testing orders of Connecticut, Washington, New Jersey, New York City and the District reached child care by name.4
TR, transport
Schools own or contract buses, run car lines and take field trips; colleges run shuttles. A school bus is a conveyance. The 2020 closure orders idled every route; the 2020-21 school orders extended their infection-prevention requirements to every rider, a face covering in the States that required one in the classroom and capped seating where the distancing rules applied; from February 1, 2021 the federal conveyance order, an airborne-transmission control on every conveyance in the United States, required a mask of every passenger and operator, school buses included, on every day through September 30, 2021; and the 2021-22 school orders reached "vehicles used for transportation such as school buses" in terms.5
FS, food service
Cafeterias serve congregate meals reimbursed under the National School Lunch Program and the Child and Adult Care Food Program; colleges run dining halls on board contracts. The closure orders ended congregate feeding and left schools serving meals at the curb or not at all; the federal government waived the congregate-feeding requirement nationwide for school years 2019-20, 2020-21 and 2021-22 because the schools could not comply with it; and the reopening orders required meals in classrooms, staggered lunches and distanced seating.6
AC, athletics, activities and events
Interscholastic sports, arts performances, assemblies, dances, graduations, fundraisers, camps and facility rentals are revenue lines and the reason many families pay tuition. Michigan suspended every K-12 sport and extracurricular activity "while any state of emergency or state of disaster prompted by COVID-19 is in effect"; Minnesota paused organized youth sports from November 21, 2020 to January 4, 2021; New Mexico's Activities Association cancelled the spring 2020 seasons and postponed the fall 2020 seasons because the Governor's public health order barred them; West Virginia barred every youth winter sport from November 13, 2020 and every sport from practice until February 14, 2021 and from competition until March 3, 2021; Massachusetts ran mandatory sector rules for youth sports from July 6, 2020 to May 29, 2021; the gathering limits of every State governed every assembly, graduation and game; and the camp orders of 2020 fixed whether a summer program could open at all.7
AD, admissions, tours and enrollment
Open houses, campus visits, entrance testing, enrollment fairs and international recruitment fill next year's seats. The stay-at-home orders closed the campuses to visitors; the entry proclamations and the suspension of routine visa services closed the pipeline of new international students for fall 2020; the Student and Exchange Visitor Program's broadcast messages of March 9 and July 6, 2020 fixed the terms on which an F-1 student could remain in the United States while taking online courses; and fall 2020 first-time enrollment fell 13.1 percent nationally.8
CP, campus housing and dining
Boarding schools and colleges earn room and board. The March 2020 orders emptied the dormitories and dining halls of every campus that ceased in-person instruction; the reopening orders of 2020 and 2021 fixed the conditions of residential life (single rooms, cohorts, testing, quarantine housing, closed dining rooms); Denver's public health orders for institutions of higher education ran from October 16, 2020 to April 23, 2021; Washington's Proclamation 20-12 series governed campus operations from March 20, 2020 through the third quarter of 2021; and the entry orders determined which international students could occupy the beds.9
HR, hiring, screening, training and credentialing
The industry hires by background check, fingerprinting, certification and licensure, runs substitute pools, and screens every adult who enters a building. The 2020 orders closed the fingerprinting and licensing offices and suspended the testing on which certification depends; the 2020-21 orders required daily screening, exclusion and testing of staff; the 2021 orders required every school and child care employer in California, Washington, Oregon, New Mexico, Connecticut, New Jersey, Illinois, New York and the District of Columbia to verify the vaccination status of every worker and to test the unvaccinated weekly, and Washington's and Oregon's orders barred the unvaccinated from working at all after October 18, 2021.10
OP, office, administration and telework
Business offices, admissions offices and front desks were reached by the general telework and workplace orders of every State: New York's one-hundred-percent in-person workforce reduction, Oregon's prohibition of office work "whenever telework and work-at-home options are available," the State workplace standards of California, Virginia, Oregon, Washington and Michigan, and the reopening orders' occupancy caps, screening and masking rules.11
WF, workforce availability
The workforce is teachers, professors, aides, child care teachers, bus drivers, food service and custodial staff, coaches and office staff, predominantly women, many with school-age children of their own. Every school-closure order was therefore an order on the industry's own workforce as well as on its customers; the quarantine and isolation orders removed exposed and infected staff for ten to fourteen days at a time; the Families First Coronavirus Response Act compelled paid leave from April 1 to December 31, 2020 for every employee under a quarantine order or caring for a child whose school or place of care an order had closed; and the 2021 staff vaccination-or-testing orders fixed who could work.12
CB, families, the customer base and its payers
The customers are families, the employers of those families, school districts that contract for transportation, food, tutoring and special-education services, and the State and federal agencies that pay child care subsidies, Head Start grants and child nutrition reimbursements. A stay-at-home order on the family, a telework order on its employer, a closure order on the district that contracts for the service, and a federal rule that alters the terms of the subsidy each limited the commerce of this industry directly.13
Revenue lines, seasonality and geography
Revenue is tuition and fees billed by term or by week; auxiliary revenue from housing, dining, bookstores and parking; extended-care and summer fees; athletics and events (gate, food-stand and merchandise sales, rentals); child nutrition reimbursements; child care subsidies and Head Start grants; tutoring fees by session or package; and donations and annual funds. The academic year runs from August or September to May or June; the admissions season (January through April) fell inside the spring 2020 closures; the summer camp and summer child care season (June through August) fell under the 2020 camp orders and the 2020 reopening conditions; and the fall 2021 start fell inside the Delta-wave orders of July through September 2021. Child care operates year-round on weekly tuition with ratios set by license, so that a ratio or cohort order cuts capacity and revenue directly. The industry operates in every county in the United States, and its largest concentrations are in the metropolitan areas whose local orders the layer inventory below sets out.14
The counterparty map
Families and their employers: the stay-at-home, telework and workplace orders of every State and metro, and the federal paid-leave mandate that made a school or place-of-care closure a qualifying reason for leave. State licensing agencies: the emergency child care rules, ratio and group-size orders, emergency licenses and disaster relief centers of 2020 and the emergency face-covering and vaccination regulations of 2021. State health departments: the communicable-disease orders, the school face-covering and exposure-control orders, the quarantine and isolation standing orders and the reporting orders. Departments and boards of education: the closure directives, remote-learning declarations, reopening frameworks, instructional-time rules and 2021 face-covering regulations. Athletic associations: the cancellations and postponements that followed the States' orders. Bus contractors and food distributors: the conveyance order, the contract terms of closed districts and the nationwide meal waivers. Landlords and host churches: the worship-gathering orders that governed the buildings in which many preschools operate. The international pipeline: the Student and Exchange Visitor Program, the consular suspensions and the entry proclamations. The payers: the Administration for Children and Families' Head Start and child care instruments and the Food and Nutrition Service's waivers. The layer inventory below sets out each class.15