When Claudia Hernandez decided to reopen her Spanish immersion preschools and daycare programs after the coronavirus pandemic forced her to close for two months, it was really a matter of survival.

“I figured that if we didn’t we were not going to make it,” said Hernandez, the owner of Centro Armonia Preschools in Los Altos and San Jose.

But as parents have slowly brought their children back in hopes of returning to an uninterrupted workday, Hernandez still doesn’t see light at the end of the tunnel. With new social distancing mandates, the number of children she serves across her two schools has dropped by nearly half — from 76 to just 44.

Hernandez has been unable to hire many of her employees back after the initial closure; she will soon need to renegotiate rents with her landlords for a second time since March; and she’s continuously looking for new ways to cut her expenses.

“Between our high rents and the new limits on group sizes, we’re in trouble at this point,” she said.

Hernandez’s struggles to keep her childcare business afloat are not unique. Some Bay Area in-home care providers have decided to stop offering their services entirely for fear of exposing their family members to COVID-19. Other daycare providers have gone into credit card debt just to pay rent.

A new report from the University of California Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Child Care Employment found that the pressure to reopen California has placed a significant burden on the state’s child care system, exposing providers to health risks and leading to the potential collapse of programs.

The report, released Wednesday, surveyed 953 preschools and in-home daycare services throughout the state in late June and found the childcare industry in financial distress with many providers facing an uncertain future.

About a quarter of the programs surveyed remain closed and the vast majority of those open have done so despite fears of exposing themselves and others to COVID-19 but because they lack financial resources to survive a closure, the report found. Seventy-seven percent of the programs open have lost income from the families they serve and 80% have incurred higher expenses due to personal protective equipment and sanitation supplies.

“We understand now as a society how critical childcare is to support other industries and to get other people back to work,” said Lea Austin, CSCCE executive director. “But I don’t think that has translated into support and resources for the childcare programs and the people working in those programs in a substantial way,”

Beatriz Leyva-Cutler, executive director of Bay Area Hispano Institute for Advancement Inc. — a bilingual child development center in West Berkeley, has been weighing the potential health concerns of reopening her facility with the financial burden of keeping it closed for about four months now. Leyva-Cutler had plans to reopen her programs for in-person services earlier this month but pushed back the reopening date after two employees tested positive for the virus.

“Childcare programs are a stabilizing influence because it’s what allows you to go to work, to go to school, to find a job and for many families right now that lifeline is very shaky,” she said. “We’re doing everything we can to provide the vital services we’ve always known is crucial to our families but this has put a whole new lens on how we do this work.”

State-ordered social distancing requirements have restricted most programs to just a portion of the number of children they served before the pandemic — adding to the financial bind that providers find themselves in and exacerbating a child care shortage that was present well before COVID-19.

“These conditions were not created by the pandemic, they were exacerbated by it,” Austin said. “This is a system in California and the country as a whole that has been under-resourced and has not worked for a long time for children, their families and their workers, which in California is mostly women of color.”

For at-home daycare providers that remain closed, the report found that three-quarters of them were worried about putting their family’s health at risk.

Devora Pinsky, the owner of the at-home daycare program Peek-a-Book in San Jose, decided not to take on any new families when she reopened after a two-month closure for that reason.

“I have a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter at home and I want to shelter-in-place too,” she said. “I don’t want to expose myself or my family either.”

Because of that decision, however, only one of Pinsky’s clients returned over the past two months and due to the lack in demand, she’s decided to temporarily close again at the end of the month.