Parents scramble to find childcare during Seattle teachers' strike
By Bryan Cohen
SEATTLE (Reuters) - A two-day-old teachers' strike in Seattle has parents scrambling to find babysitters or to ferry their children to and from extended daycare programs as the labor dispute unexpectedly lengthens summer vacation for 53,000 students.
Some 5,000 public school teachers and support staff walked off the job on Wednesday after contract talks collapsed, forcing the largest school district in the Pacific Northwest to cancel classes indefinitely on what should have been the first day of the new academic year.
While many parents in the predominantly liberal city were sympathetic to the teachers' cause, the strike put many working parents in a bind, forcing them to improvise childcare on short notice.
Seattle resident Lon Vaughn said he was paying $60 a day to keep his two sons at a Boys & Girls Club program.
"I would love to send the state the bill on that one," said Vaughn, a salesman.
More than a dozen community centers with before-and-after-school programs were converted into all-day care facilities where parents could drop off their children for free, an accommodation that cost the city about $21,800 a day.
Available spots were filling up quickly, with a third of the community centers reported near or at capacity, and extended hours set to end after Friday, the city said.
There was a 20-person waiting list at the Queen Anne Community Center on Thursday, where Brian Frederick said he was dropping off his first-grader grandson for his daughter, who had to go to work.
"She's a single parent. It's tough for her," Frederick said.
Andi Love, the mother of two students, said she lucked out with a babysitter who was also off from school because of the strike. That allowed Love and her husband to return to full-time work after working half days during the summer.
Clay Gilge worried he would have to pull his son out of school early next summer if classroom time lost to the strike added days to the school calendar, as his family had already booked a trip to Italy.
Not all parents were stressed out and some even took their children on impromptu field trips to picket lines for a first-hand lesson in organized labor.
"I watched for a little bit and played with my friends," said 11-year-old Michael Malcolm, who was brought by his father, Ian, to a demonstration outside Roosevelt High School. "I got a good workout."
(Reporting by Bryan Cohen in Seattle; Editing by Eric M. Johnson and Peter Cooney)
