To the Editor:

Last week, we opened the doors to The Burke Foundation Early Childhood Center at YWCA Princeton. With temperature screenings upon arrival, staggered pick up and drop off to avoid crowding, and masks worn by staff and many of the children we serve, it wasn’t the opening we imagined, but it’s the one our community needed.

Many schools are transitioning to online learning — and for older children, it’s the most practical approach — but 2-year-olds can’t be taken care of via Zoom. In addition, social interaction is crucial to social-emotional learning, a pillar of early childhood development that our curriculum prioritizes. For this reason, we’re introducing an after care program for children between the ages of 3-6, who may be learning remotely during the day, to get a few hours of social interaction and physical activity.

During the construction of The Burke Foundation Early Childhood Center at YWCA Princeton, we opened our summer childcare program at a licensed childcare facility just a mile away from our building. Our program ran from July through August, and our staff and the families we serve adapted quickly to our new safety protocols. This allowed us to employ staff who were temporarily laid off at the beginning of the pandemic, and we gained valuable experience that has prepared us to open our childcare on a larger scale. The health and safety of our staff and the families we serve is our highest priority, and there were no cases of COVID-19.

The safe reopening of our summer childcare confirmed to my staff and I that we could safely reopen in the fall; however, a testimonial we received from a parent at the end of the summer made us all realize that we need to reopen. This parent witnessed his daughter’s attitude toward learning transform in the two months she was in our summer childcare program. Not only was she counting and speaking better, she couldn’t wait to tell her family about what she’d learned at the end of each day. At our core we strive to empower and inspire the children in our program, and to prepare them to thrive in kindergarten, and beyond. That’s why we do this work, and why we’ve opened for the fall.

We will live-stream the ribbon cutting ceremony to commemorate the opening of The Burke Foundation Early Childhood Center at YWCA Princeton on Saturday, September 26, at 11 a.m. on our Facebook page (@ywcaprinceton). The event will feature remarks from Mayor Liz Lempert, James Burke of  The Burke Foundation, Councilwoman Leticia Fraga, and First Lady of New Jersey Tammy Murphy will be our keynote speaker. I hope the community will tune in and join us.

Tay Walker
Executive Director, YWCA Princeton