Hilton Head parents who work Saturdays have few childcare options. Their kids lose out
The friends of 10-year-old Lucy Rodriguez-Beas hang out at the pool on Saturdays in Hilton Head.
Meanwhile, Lucy sits in a nearly empty condo in Palmetto Dunes.
Every once in a while, her mother, Ana, calls from another room.
“Lucy, bring me the mop!”
She obliges.
Ana Beas, 41, cleans five houses and condos between 9:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. on Saturdays. Then she and Lucy return to their Marshland Road home.
At 4 p.m., thousands of Hilton Head visitors open doors and expect sparkling clean vacation homes.
Saturday, traditionally called “turnover day” on Hilton Head Island, is when many weeklong vacations end. In the six hours between 10 a.m. check out and 4 p.m. check in, linens are changed, rental bikes reset and kitchens cleaned for the next wave of visitors.
But the people who reset the island are hurting. Not a single traditional childcare center is open on Saturdays.
That’s why Lucy sits on a stranger’s couch watching videos on her mom’s phone instead of eating snacks with her friends and playing on the playground.
There’s nowhere safe for her to go.
How childcare affects short-term rental companies
Although Lucy is older and more responsible than Beas’ other two children, Ana Beas resents having to bring her to work.
“Even if she is on the phone watching her favorite movie or whatever, she isn’t happy,” Beas explained. “I wish I could have another option for her to have fun.”
Ed Bray, general manager of Beach Properties, has seen this difficult dilemma challenge parents for over a decade.
“I’ve been doing this for 16 years, and the entire time this has always been an issue,” Bray said.
His company contracts with 30 different cleaning companies to handle the 420 rentals that Beach Properties manages. He said he’s written language into contracts with those companies that people cannot bring their children to work with them.
“It’s never stopped (children) from tagging along with their parents on a grueling hot day while they’re cleaning,” Bray said.
Bray said he’s walked into rental properties to find unsupervised children playing in pools while their parents clean nearby.
Patricia Soltys, an inspector with Beach Properties, said the extension of the tourism season comes with an often-overlooked side effect.
“The tourist season is elongated to the whole year,” she said. “The need we have for workers is the same.”
But on an island where so many lives and livelihoods revolve around the week-to-week tourism economy, a lack of weekend childcare puts parents in an impossible bind: Do they break the rules and bring their children to work, or lose out on one of the most profitable days of work?
Or do they leave their children with someone they don’t know?
Elizabeth Quintero, who works as a line cook at the newly opened Nectar Farm Kitchen on the island’s south end, said it’s hard for her to find someone she trusts outside her family to watch her two children, Antonia and Juan, while she and their father are at work on Saturdays.
“Many people leave their kids in other homes, and you don’t know who lives there,” she said in Spanish. “I can’t work well if I’m worried about my kids’ safety with someone I don’t know.”
Quintero said she’s lucky to have her mother-in-law nearby, who can sometimes watch her children while she’s at work. But that requires her to change her own work schedule.
This problem, she said, should have been addressed long ago on Hilton Head.
“It’s not easy to find a job where you have to have off on weekends,” she said. “This is a tourist place, and we need everyone to work on weekends, but we just don’t have a safe place to leave the kids.”
How to fix it
A solution is on the horizon.
Last year, Soltys, an inspector who checks properties after they’ve been cleaned, approached Bray about working with The Children’s Center on the north end to start a “Saturday School” program.
He and other short-term rental companies surveyed cleaning companies to figure out what staff need in weekend childcare. Bray said only 10 to 15 companies sent him responses, but that was enough to get a proposal off the ground.
With $30,000 in pledges from rental companies, Jody Levitt, executive director at The Children’s Center, said the center can serve up to 40 children on Saturdays at a cost of just $25 per family.
“These kids (need) some place safe to come, some place where they will be provided meals and get a variety of activities that are educational,” Levitt said.
Last month, Levitt went to the Town of Hilton Head Island to apply for an accommodations tax grant to round out the program’s funding. She made the case that the Saturday school may not directly serve tourists, but by helping women like Quintero and Beas, it would enhance the tourist experience on the island.
“Certainly the Children’s Center does not bring tourists to our island,” she said in her presentation. “We had almost 60% of our families working in the tourism industry. Mostly in restaurants, hospitality serving as cleaning folks, maintenance folks and landscaping, so we do support, very significantly, the tourism experience.”
The accommodations tax committee denied the grant, citing too indirect a connection to the recommendations for using the tax money. The S.C. Tourism Expenditure Review Committee requires the taxes go to “advertising and promotion of tourism to develop and increase tourist attendance through the generation of publicity.”
Still, with pledges from the private sector, The Children’s Center’s Saturday School plans to operate throughLabor Day weekend this summer.
Quintero’s 3-year-old daughter, Antonia, has been attending the program in recent weeks.
“I am happy they can watch her Saturday because I can work and I can relax, knowing she is in a good place and she is safe and happy,” she said. “It’s really, really good for me and other moms that work.”
Meanwhile, the Saturday childcare means that Beas, who works during the week at Main Street Cafe as a server and in the kitchen, has a safe place for her younger two children, Dania and Gerardo, as she picks up extra hours on Saturdays cleaning homes and condos.
But the Children’s Center’s program is open only to children between the ages of 3 and 8.
That means Lucy Rodriguez-Beas will still have to spend her Saturdays lounging around rentals.
“It’s stressful to bring her to work,” Ana Beas said. “It’s just a hard time for everybody. For the girls and for me.”
