The municipality of Klingenberg lists eleven day mothers on its website. There are twelve in the city of Dippoldiswalde. This shows how important this childcare offer is in the region. The child minders are currently affected by the corona lockdown just like the other children’s facilities – with one major difference. You work independently. If, as currently, they have no children in care or only a few because they are covered by emergency care, they feel the financial consequences directly. Employed educators, on the other hand, either receive short-time work benefits if they are employed by a private agency, or are fully employed if they work for the city or municipality. Because there is no short-time work in the public sector.
Unpleasant surprise
For the day mothers in the Klingenberg community, this situation brought an unpleasant Christmas surprise. They received notification that the day-to-day care of the community’s child minders will be cut significantly from January. You now only receive a flat rate for material costs of 161 euros plus a proportion of the costs for insurance. The normal amount is only available proportionally for the children that they actually have in emergency care. But that’s often just one or two children. “There are colleagues who have rented an apartment especially for day care and now have hardly any income,” says Sandra Uhlemann. She works in Höckendorf as a childminder and currently has one child in care. She found it particularly uncomfortable that she received this information from the congregation exactly one day before the Christmas holidays. She has now written an objection together with other colleagues.
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Dipps continues to pay the monthly benefits
Mayor Torsten Schreckenbach (citizen of Klingenberg) justified the reduction with the fact that day mothers are generally paid according to the number of children they care for. If the payments had just continued to run as they did before the lockdown, the accounting would have come at some point and the day mothers would have had to repay the excess money they received. He would have wanted to avoid that. “At the end of the day, the bill is always sharp and then the amount due is paid out,” he says. Klingenberg pushed ahead with this approach. “As far as we know, we are the only community where nothing is paid anymore,” says Sandra Uhlemann.
In the city of Dippoldiswalde, for example, the child minders are also involved in emergency care and are only partially busy. “Most of our child minders look after one or two children on average. In some day care facilities it can happen that there are no children in emergency care, ”informs Linda Knetsch, the office manager of Mayor Kerstin Körner (CDU). The day mothers would continue to be paid the current monthly cash benefits.
Read more news from Dippoldiswalde and the surrounding area here.
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