Jamaica Showers and Tori Thomas were both away from their early childhood care centers when the tornado struck on May 16.
Showers is the owner of Jamaica Showers Playcare Center on Natural Bridge Avenue, and Thomas owns and operates Magical Minds Childcare 2 on Page Boulevard.
Thomas was at her second child care facility that she’s preparing to open later this year, and Showers had stepped away to get lunch. Both were about 10-15 minutes away from their respective centers.
Showers remembered watching the sky grow dark and then green on her drive home.
Her phone blared “TAKE SHELTER NOW.”
She hopped out of her car and ran into a gas station. Showers called her staff at the center, but kept getting a busy signal.
There were about 18 kids inside the facility.
Meanwhile, Thomas was able to get through to her staff, and she instructed them to all take cover in the bathroom, which has no windows.
There were about 20 kids and three staff members at Magical Minds.
“Put blankets and towels over the kids' heads and remind them to duck down like we practiced,” Thomas said.
Showers said what would normally be a ten-minute drive to the center turned into 40. The houses along Natural Bridge were destroyed.
“So I'm like, oh my God, them babies is in this house,” Showers said with her eyes closed. “So when you start seeing those houses completely gone. Oh, Lord, I didn't even want to pull up. I just stopped for a minute. I'm like, Lord, I want to pull up to this house, and this house look like that.”
Showers’ building was standing, but damaged. The awning above her front door was gone, and bricks broke an accessibility ramp.
The staff and children were tucked safely away in the basement, and to Showers’ surprise, in good spirits.
“The kids don't know nothing's going on. They're having a ball. They’re having so much fun reading the books with the flashlights and stuff like that,” Showers said. “They just thought it was a [tornado] drill because we go out for tornado drills. No. This was a real thing, baby.”
The buildings next to Thomas’s center sustained major damage, like blown-out windows and severely damaged walls and roofs.
But Magical Minds, though badly damaged, was still standing.
“This is God's house,” Thomas said while looking up at her center. “For everything to just be tore up, and this building just to be sitting, I thank God for that because it was a blessing. He knew [the center] had 20 children in the bathroom, and they all went home safe.”
Magical Minds and the Playcare Center are among the approximately 40 early childhood care centers that were damaged by the EF3 tornado that blew through parts of St. Louis nearly three months ago.
Many of the damaged centers are in north St. Louis, and about seven have not been able to reopen, which has deepened a preexisting shortage of child care in St. Louis.
An emergency response
There is a shortage of about 20,000 seats in St. Louis-area child care centers, according to Tamyka Perine, executive director of the Gateway Early Childhood Alliance.
Perine said that number, which includes both the city and the county, has grown by about 300 seats since the tornado.
For context, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that there are about 74,000 children ages 0-5 in the city and county combined.
Perine said that as soon as she heard about where the tornado hit, she and a team of volunteers started calling all of the centers in her network.
Her nonprofit works to solve the child care shortage in St. Louis by advocating for policies that help support the centers.
She helped launch the Early Child Care Tornado Response team and has since raised about $700,000 to help with immediate repair costs.
“The hardest part, I think, is that people don't understand that child care isn't just about babysitting. It's not just about child care. It's a great impact on the entire community,” Perine said.
Ongoing challenges for early childhood care centers
Supporting the child care community of owners and workers comes with its own set of challenges.
“So providers were afraid to share that they were impacted by the tornado because they were afraid of losing their license,” Perine said. “They were afraid that they would have negative impacts on their businesses. They were just afraid altogether.”
There are different types of child care facilities.
For family care centers, which are operated out of an owner’s home, they lost both their homes and incomes.
Perine said the timing of the tornado was especially hard for St.Louis families because it hit right as the school year was ending. Early childhood care centers typically accept children from birth to age five, but some will open their doors to school-aged children during summer break.
The impact of the closure of a child care center can be devastating for families.
“The parents had to take off work because their centers were impacted, and so, some of them lost their jobs because they didn't have anywhere to take their child,” Perine said.
It’s why Showers and Thomas both tried to open their centers after the tornado as quickly as possible.
Showers closed her center for six weeks while Thomas’ was closed for three.
They both tried to get children temporarily reassigned to neighboring centers, but Showers said not every parent is comfortable with sending their kid to a new facility.
So in response, she provided care from her own home for free.
“I understand it, because I was also a parent that was like that. My mom watched my kids. We didn't believe in daycares growing up; grandma or mama watched your kid. So I had to understand what someone was coming from,” Showers said.
Thomas, who leases her building, said she didn’t wait around for her unresponsive landlord to make repairs.
Volunteers from the Early Child Care Tornado Response team helped clean up the debris while she hired contractors to start doing repairs.
She said she’s spent about $7,000 so far on repairs.
Some of that money was spent on unreliable contractors who, Thomas said, have demanded up to 50% in deposits and then done shoddy work around the property.
“This little building is so expensive,” Thomas said while laughing. “Then on top of that, trying to keep up with payroll and insurance… It's a lot.”
Thomas was able to retain her staff during the closure, but Showers lost two providers because they couldn’t afford to go six weeks without pay.
There’s a shortage of workers within the industry due to the low pay. Most centers pay Missouri’s minimum wage, which is about $14 per hour, despite the demanding nature of the job.
Showers said it’s hard to compete against some of the big franchises like McDonald’s.
“Even no matter how much you love kids, you still got to live and most people got kids [to take care of].”
Showers has spent close to $35,000 on repairs after the storm, some of which has come out of her own savings.
“It takes a while to build, because your first couple years, you’re just pouring your money into it, and you're not bringing nothing out of it,” Showers said. “I literally just got on to the point where I was actually making something, but now I'm back to ground zero.”
Many early childhood education centers in St. Louis are financially strapped, which in turn drives low salaries for workers according to Perine.
“When we're looking at the cost of child care, centers in general don't charge the true cost of child care. They're charging a lot less than it is to run the centers, so they're running at a deficit,” Perine said.
A recent study from the St. Louis Federal Reserve shows that although childcare workers make significantly less than the median wage in Missouri, childcare still costs an average of $9,200 per year, or about ten percent of the median income for households with a young child.
Childcare providers feel that strain as well, leading to a shortage of qualified workers, according to Showers.
“So unless you're going to charge a parent an arm and a leg to where all they [are] doing is working to pay childcare, how can you really pay your staff [a living wage]?” Showers said. “No one's going to come and work [and say] I can't live off of that, so I have to get a second job after I do this full-time job.”
Showers said she pays her staff members minimum wage.
Looking ahead
Thomas and Showers have both made strides since the tornado to get their facilities back up and running, but there’s more work to do.
Both are dealing with recurring water damage after rainstorms.
“So when it rains real hard, the backyard fills up like a swimming pool,” Thomas said.
They are also replacing lost toys and supplies, none of which come cheap.
Showers said that the children’s furniture tends to be more expensive because it comes from specific retailers —- a small table and a set of chairs can cost up to $1,000. A diaper changing table can run up to $1,700.
But they’re both willing to pay the cost to make sure their doors stay open for families who need them, and so they can not only sustain, but also grow their businesses.
Perine said she is heartened by the community response in the face of tragedy, but hopes the tornado provides an opportunity to bring real momentum to solving a longstanding problem.
“If we think about thriving communities, we can't think about them in silos and segments. Thriving communities are K-12. It's early childhood. It's workforce,” Perine said. “If we were able to come together and solve this early childhood problem, we could solve so many things. We could drive the community as a whole forward in so many amazing ways.”
