For six years, Ernestina Fuentes had been building out her early childhood program, hiring trained staff, developing a model tailored to children with trauma and eventually earning a four-star quality rating from the state.

Fuentes, the founder and director of Herencia Guadalupana Lab Schools in Tucson, Ariz., had mostly avoided the high turnover rates that so often plague the early childhood sector. She found a steady staff of qualified teachers, many of whom had been with her program for years.

That consistency is important to any program for young children, but especially for hers, which primarily serves children who live in poverty and are, as Fuentes puts it, “wounded”—often moving through the foster care system, carrying experiences of neglect and abuse.

Before the pandemic, Guadalupana had 14 employees, all of whom, Fuentes says, were dedicated to the program’s mission to transform the lives of children and send them into kindergarten “verbal, confident and brilliant.” But by the end of March 2020, she’d lost nine staff members, all for reasons relating to threats or challenges created by COVID-19.

“It left a big hole in the quality of our program, the strength of our program,” Fuentes said by phone in mid-January, during her program’s third 14-day closure due to multiple confirmed COVID-19 cases. “It’s not just the loss of staff, but the loss of quality. It’s a hard job to build quality. We pride ourselves on that. That’s gutted.”