The kids went back to school. Then COVID-19 upended life for 3 rural California families
This story is part of the Central Valley News Collaborative — a bilingual, community journalism project funded by the Central Valley Community Foundation and with technology and training support from Microsoft Corp. The collaboration includes The Fresno Bee, Valley Public Radio, Vida en el Valle, Radio Bilingüe and the Institute for Media & Public Trust at Fresno State.
Laura García’s 13-year-old daughter, Jennifer, returned to in-person instruction at Raisin City Elementary School in mid-August, following a more than year-long hiatus brought on by the pandemic. Not even a month into the new school year, Jennifer developed a fever, cough, sore throat and agonizing headache, she said.
It didn’t take long before 33-year-old García, her husband, Oscar, and three other children had also tested positive for COVID-19. That meant Oscar, the sole breadwinner, was unable to go work in the fields, leaving the family without wages for two weeks.
“It’s so awful to be in this situation when I have so many children, and what do I do when the food runs out?” García said in Spanish in a September 2 interview with The Fresno Bee. “I don’t want another family to go through this.”
García’s family was among the three Raisin City farmworker families who spoke with The Bee about their experiences with a small COVID-19 outbreak at their school in August. Administrators at the Raisin City Elementary School District, which has about 526 students from kindergarten to 12th grade, say a total of seven students in the school have been infected since last month’s outbreak. But that tally doesn’t include the family members at home who were also exposed to the virus by their children or the socio-economic, mental health and academic challenges they continue to endure as a result.
In Raisin City, an unincorporated community of 414 people located about 13 miles southwest of Fresno, most residents are low-income Latino immigrants who lack access to critical health and educational resources. Though the families have recovered from the virus, their experiences demonstrate how even a small outbreak can have long-lasting adverse effects across rural communities. For example:
▪ Laura García’s husband lost two weeks of income while sick and quarantining with his family. With little money to pay for food, the family relied on friends and relatives to help them feed their six children.
▪ Carmen Cuautenco León, 40, is a single mother of three kids. Her 13-year old daughter is in eighth grade at Raisin City Elementary and also tested positive for COVID-19. She quit her job picking grapes to take care of her daughter and two other children who were sent home to quarantine.
▪ Victoria Morales, 40, is a single mother who doesn’t have children in the eighth grade class. But three of her five kids were sent home due to another COVID-19 scare. The remote location of their home made it difficult to connect to a hotspot and they struggled with distance learning.
Family suffers financially after breadwinner contracts COVID-19
García and her husband moved to Raisin City three years ago to escape the high cost of housing in Watsonville. But they still struggle to put food on the table and pay for simple expenses like water and electricity.
She stays home to take care of her infant children while her husband, Oscar, typically makes about $2,100 a month picking crops. But when he fell ill, he was forced to quarantine for two weeks, leaving them with a little less than half his wages this month to pay for all of their expenses.
She says their scarce finances and lack of a safety net constantly weigh on her.
“We are worried, always worried, but especially about the rent and bills for this month,” she told The Bee in Spanish. “I still haven’t paid the electric bill and without our friends and acquaintances we wouldn’t have food.”
García’s experience is representative of the struggles facing low-income communities of color amid the pandemic.
Dr. Tania Pacheco-Werner, co-director of the Central Valley Health Policy Institute at Fresno State, said a lack of access to health care, coupled with lower education levels and job opportunities, create a “perfect storm” for many parents living paycheck-to-paycheck who don’t have another option but to take time off of work to care for their sick children.
“We see that burden falls especially hard on rural families who don’t have a lot of other options other than not getting an income during the time that their children have to stay home,” she said.
Families nationwide are facing similar challenges. Compared to white and higher-income families, Black and Hispanic parents and those with lower incomes reported higher rates of social, emotional and academic setbacks among their children due to the pandemic, according to an August 19 report from the Kaiser Family Foundation. About a quarter of Black and Hispanic parents and a third of low-income parents also reported that a pandemic-related employment disruption significantly affected their families’ finances and stress level, compared to just 10% of white parents, the study showed.
They found that Latino and Black parents from lower income households were more likely to face other challenges due to job loss or a pandemic-related job disruption as well. Like García’s husband, many were forced to take time off of work to quarantine, while others had to take time off to care for their children, placing a significant amount of stress on the family and their mental well-being.
The national survey included 1,259 Black, Hispanic and white adults from various socioeconomic backgrounds who have at least one child under the age of 18 living in their household. The researchers conducted the survey in English and Spanish.
Farmworker ‘very afraid’ after daughter contracts COVID-19
The dirt roads leading to Cuautenco León’s home are lined with dusty rows of grapevines that saturate the air with a sweet, musty aroma.
On a recent hot, arid Thursday in September, she stood outside her house, located on a small plot of land in the Raisin City area, and spoke in quick, exasperated phrases. She recalled how her daughter tested positive for COVID-19 just four days after her sister had died from COVID-19 complications.
She feared her daughter would suffer the same fate as her sister. Worried her daughter’s condition would rapidly deteriorate, she immediately left her job to take care of her and two sons who were also told to stay home.
“I left work because my daughter’s health came first,” she said in Spanish. “I was very afraid when I first found out she was positive for COVID-19. I was still grieving my sister. I prayed to God that what happened to my sister wouldn’t happen to my daughter.”
Considerably more than white parents, many Latinos like Cuautenco León fear their child could become seriously ill from COVID-19, said Lunna Lopes, a survey analyst at the Kaiser Family Foundation and one of the authors of the study.
“There are some real concerns parents have,” she said. “The year was pretty tumultuous for the country as a whole, but it was especially for parents who had to deal with work disruptions and childcare disruptions, and the fear of their children potentially getting sick or themselves getting sick.”
The worry and stress has led at least one in four Hispanic parents, as well as those with lower incomes, to experience a significant negative impact on their mental health, the study shows.
Since her daughter got sick, Cuautenco León hasn’t let her guard down. She is hesitant to welcome just anyone inside her home and keeps her daughter separated from the other two children, despite the fact that she’s no longer contagious.
Before her daughter fell ill, she put off getting the vaccine. Watching her daughter suffer with COVID-19 changed her mind.
“I thought maybe this was a test from God, who was telling me that it was time to get vaccinated,” she said. “So I took my 15-year-old son and I to get vaccinated because I didn’t want to go through this again.”
Quarantined kids in rural areas can’t access online classes
Forty-year-old Victoria Morales lives in a small house on a dried up tract of land in Raisin City with eight children, five of her own and three from her sister.
Their rural location, far removed from a cell tower or any sort of broadband infrastructure, made it difficult for her children to participate in their online classes after they were sent home following what school administrators believed was a COVID-19 exposure. One of Victoria’s daughters had an asthma attack, she said, which school officials misinterpreted as COVID-19 symptoms.They sent the other siblings home out of caution.
It especially weighed heavily on her eldest daughter, who struggled to connect to a hotspot that the school provided.
The 14-year-old girl fell behind on her classwork and nearly failed her class after missing vital instruction time and neglecting to submit homework assignments, Morales said.
“She struggled a lot with accessing her classes and continues to worry a lot,” she said in Spanish. “She didn’t connect to the Internet, cell phone or hotspot and had trouble with her computer. But there’s nothing we could do and we felt like we didn’t have much support from the school.”
At least half of Latino parents with children above the ages of 5, and those from lower-income households, said at least one of their children fell behind academically, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation study. More than a third of parents said their child fell behind in their social and emotional development, while about 30% said their child experienced mental health or behavioral problems as a result.
The risks are exacerbated now that children are returning to school, Pacheco-Werner of Fresno State said. Schools in rural areas were already underfunded pre-pandemic and continue to lack many of the new resources needed to protect children from contracting the virus, including increased testing, upgraded ventilation systems and personal protective equipment for staff and students, she said.
She said more financial investment is needed in these communities, through a “systemic response” that could relieve some of the burden on under-resourced parents like Morales.
“Often schools — even without the pandemic being a factor — are doing a lot with a little,” said Pacheco-Werner. “That’s why we really need a more coordinated systemic response that’s focused on testing and surveillance at a systemic level and not base the burden solely on the small school districts who may not have the resources.”
This story was originally published September 26, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "The kids went back to school. Then COVID-19 upended life for 3 rural California families."