Can we talk about child care workers for a few minutes? My latest for @kcur, about how they're watching the kids of essential workers but lack a safety net for themselves: https://bit.ly/34n6obB  1/

This isn't a new story: low pay and lack of health insurance have been problems for early childhood educators for a long time. I reported on this issue a lot when I was in Indiana (how was that 6 years ago) and last spring when KC voters considered a pre-K sales tax. 2/

@LynnHorsley had already been doing some fabulous work on child care centers staying open to support essential workers for @kcur, but after seeing some of @MelissaRooker's tweets, I decided we needed a story about the workers themselves. 3/

Originally I was just going to do newscast spots. But then I decided this deserved more airtime than that. That meant I need to find child care workers. I started with contacts on the KS side of the state line, but after four child care workers declined to talk ... 4/

... it became apparent that they were scared. And let's unpack that for just a minute. We're talking about workers who make $9.25 an hour in KS or around $23,490/year in Missouri. That's $10 less than what I made at my first newspaper job. 5/

So I know what it's like to make less than $24,000/year. I DON'T know what it's like to support a family on that income or to pay back student loans. But money is tight, to say the least. I can definitely respect how vulnerable workers feel. 6/

That's why when I reached out to Annie Watson over @TurnthePageKC to see if she had any names for me, I said we would be willing to work with child care workers and providers if they had concerns about protecting their privacy. 7/

Shantelle Tomlin, who owns a child care center, was comfortable using her full name, and you'll see that in my story. Samantha and Angela, the two child care workers, were more comfortable with using their first names only. 8/

I know you've probably seen more unnamed sources than usual lately in the news, and I almost always use full names in my stories (except for students younger than 18 in certain circumstances, but that's another conversation). So I wanted you to know how I reported this story. 9/

I think it's an important one. I hope you'll read it. And when this pandemic is over, I hope we can have some really robust conversations about the people who make early childhood education possible. 10/10