Martin Sauer is upset: "The situation is very critical." He is involved in the parents' council of a day care center in Bad Homburg.

The staff there is so thin that the care time has had to be reduced for three weeks – to six instead of eight hours a day.

This has dramatic consequences: Sauer reports on parents who are about to be fired because they can no longer fulfill their contractual obligations as employees.

A single mother does without lunch and breakfast breaks at work to compensate for absenteeism.

You too are threatened with dismissal.

Rainer Schulz

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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The situation in the Bad Homburg kindergarten is not an isolated case.

Many care facilities lack staff and the situation is tense.

Roland Drissen, chairman of the parents' council of a municipal day-care center in Kelkheim, reports that childcare times there have also been reduced from 4 p.m. to 2 p.m. due to a lack of staff.

"All proactive attempts to work out solutions with the executing agency, the city of Kelkheim, have failed," he says.

The city does not provide transparent information, and many suggestions from committed but also desperate parents are not addressed.

“The victims are the families, who have to massively change their everyday lives, and in the end the children.” The end of the corona-related home office obligation is contributing to aggravating the situation.

Drissen expects

that the shortage of skilled workers will worsen with the increasing housing construction in the metropolitan region.

"We have a foreseeable socio-political problem here, as in nursing, which simply belongs at the top of the political agenda."

"Parents are up in arms all over Hessen"

The state working group of daycare parents in Hesse has now written an open letter to the Hessian Minister of Social Affairs Kai Klose (The Greens).

"Parents are up in arms all over Hesse," reports spokesman Nikolai von Schlotheim.

The issue has gotten worse again.

The state government has declared normal operation for the daycare centers again, according to the open letter.

However, many parents are still confronted with significant restrictions on childcare times, up to and including childcare being completely eliminated.

In some places it is also difficult for parents to even get a place in a daycare center.

“This situation is becoming increasingly unbearable for many families,” it continues.

The shortage of skilled workers, which was already critical before Corona, has worsened again.

Among other things, due to sick leave, staff departures, increased birth rates, the expansion of all-day care in schools and the requirements of the Good Day Care Act.

The authors of the open letter now want to find out from the state government how many educators are missing in Hessian daycare centers.

They want to know how many positions are vacant and how the number has developed in recent years.

They ask about regional and carrier-specific abnormalities.

They also want to know how many childcare hours have been canceled in the last four years and how many parents have had to complain about a childcare place.

The state working group considers this information to be necessary in order to get a reliable overview of the situation in Hesse.

"The children and families in Hesse need good, reliable early childhood education and care," says the open letter.