Bay District Schools hiring workers for employee child care

News Herald - 10/28/2018

Oct. 28--PANAMA CITY -- As a community recovers from disaster, one of the largest and most public displays of moving forward is the reopening of schools.

To help in that process, and help put residents back to work, Bay District Schools is planning on opening child care sites at several schools around the district specifically for their employees. They'll be holding a job fair on Tuesday to hire as many of those qualified CDA or child care credentialed workers as needed.

"We're not just trying to put our people back to work," said Director of Communications Sharon Michalik. "We're looking forward to helping some other people get back to work, as we know many of the day care centers were destroyed."

After housing, child care has been the biggest roadblock in getting people back to work, Michalik said. Making sure teachers and other district employees have those needs filled means they can return to school, then schools can open and help fill the larger need in the community -- letting even more people return to work.

"Opening school is kind of like this big public message that life is going to be okay and things are going to return to a new normal," Michalik said. "Not the old normal, we're not going to get that back, but kids are going to get on school buses again and they're going to be in classes again and they're going to learn again."

While Michalik said the district would help everyone who needs child care if they could, they can only offer the service to district employees. The child care sites will be at several locations to ensure that if there isn't child care available where an employee works, there will be one close by. She said she also hopes neighbors and friends come together to help each other out as the community recovers from Hurricane Michael.

"It's going to be different and it's going to be inconvenient and it's going to require an awful lot of flexibility from everyone," she said.

At Tuesday's job fair, taking place at the Nelson Building, 1311 Balboa Avenue in Panama City from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., interviewees are asked to bring their ID, Social Security card if possible, and proof of the required child care training, with Michalik saying interviewers on site will be flexible, understanding that many people lost everything in the storm. They should expect to be interviewed for the position that day, as Michalik said they're looking to move quickly in getting sites up and running.

As of right now, there is no set timeline for how long the child care sites will operate.

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