Ongoing staffing shortages in the field of early childhood education have amounted to a five-alarm fire. In surveys, news stories, anecdotes and just about any other source of information on the sector, early care and education providers say they are in crisis, pointing to a dearth of qualified educators that many attribute to low compensation. Without sufficient staff, programs are not able to operate at full capacity, nor deliver the highest-quality care and education to the children they serve. And the educators who have remained in the field say their mental health and well-being have declined materially. Efforts to address these issues have been a mixed bag. A federal solution fell apart in Congress earlier this year. States have stepped up, but not universally, and in many cases, their solutions are short-term. Families, educators and children have all suffered.

Zahava Berman, director of the Ginsburg Solomon Schechter Early Childhood Center in Skokie, Illinois, shared her experiences with these intersecting challenges with EdSurge in an interview, which has been edited for length and clarity.

For almost three years now, I’ve been watching early childhood educators—in my program and in others—make the difficult but inevitable choice to walk away from their careers working with young children to take better-paying, lower-stress jobs elsewhere.

But it still hurt, still shocked, when one of the best early childhood educators I’ve ever worked with told me she was leaving, too. She was one of a kind: so passionate about this work, so engaging, knowledgeable, calm, warm and inviting. Her heart was in this field, really in it. But like so many others, she couldn’t afford to stay in this industry any longer.

Lately, I lay awake at night worrying. I worry about my own early childhood center, a program in the suburbs of Chicago where I serve as director, and about all the families we are turning away and the dispiriting search for teachers we’ve been on for years now. I worry that we’ll have to close for good. We’ve considered it and have come pretty close already.

I also worry about the whole sector, because I know that what we’re going through in Skokie is what program directors and early childhood educators all over the country are experiencing. And that is scary. It’s existential. It’s not just, “What will become of my program? Will it survive long-term?” It’s also, “What will become of the early childhood field when there are no teachers left? Will the field survive?”

The entire industry is imploding. The entire industry is in danger of collapsing, and I don’t think people realize how serious that is. I’m nervous for the future, for the workforce.