Home care for aging parents, adults with disabilities in Philadelphia

Leaders at the Pennsylvania Homecare Association, which represents about 700 home care, home health and hospice agencies, say the industry’s workforce, about 290,000 people, is not growing at the same pace as the client population.

Low pay, moderate benefits and high burnout are making it increasingly hard to attract and retain workers, said association leaders, who estimate more than 112,000 direct care shifts go unfilled every month because of shortages.

“When you already can’t find somebody to do the work and then you’re not paying those folks well, those folks can go somewhere else and make more money,” Harris said. “Then you have more people who should be getting services, who need those services, who aren’t.”

Harris, who represents parts of South and West Philadelphia, recently met with families who depend on home care services, like the Walker family.

A home care worker comes by a couple times a week to support Barbara Walker’s adult son, Anthony, who has an intellectual and developmental disability.

In the past, Walker said she would often have to take off from work to stay home if Anthony was having a bad day or needed specialized services.

“It was hard. It was really hard,” she said. “It took a whole lot of time and patience.”

“We wanted to have a sure thing,” said Roman, who enrolled her son last year. But now his school year is about to be upended amid allegations of fraud by Croft’s founder, and questions about whether the school will have enough money to stay open past the end of this week.

Roman and her husband are among hundreds of families weighing their options for finding last-minute schooling for their children next week after they abruptly learned about the school’s financial problems during spring break. Some are forming home-school pods, enrolling in local public schools, or scrambling to find a private school with an open seat.

There are about 220 children enrolled in the Providence school, and another roughly 370 at two locations in Boston.

“Obviously, our first hope is that the school can stay open,” said Roman, who is planning to enroll her 6-year-old in the Providence Public Schools if Croft closes. She can rank preferences, but doesn’t know which school he will attend.

In her search, she found private schools were not issuing financial aid midyear, and she can’t afford to pay full freight. She also entered the state’s public charter school lottery, but it doesn’t award seats in the middle of the school year.

Providence schools Superintendent Javier Montañez sent a letter to families on Friday pledging support, and set up a Google form to help parents enroll. Information sessions are being held to help.

Depending on where they live, families will not necessarily be able to enroll at the school in their neighborhood, though they can list preferences. Spokesperson Alex Torres-Perez said there are 639 open K-7 seats throughout the district, grades that are currently enrolled at Croft. At the elementary school closest to Croft, Vartan Gregorian Elementary School, there are 22 seats currently available; at the closest middle school, Nathan Bishop, there are 19 seats.

“Our district is committed to providing a high-quality education for every student every day with the help of our dedicated educators,” said Torres-Perez, who noted that the district is in the middle of a $1 billion program to reconstruct its school buildings. The project includes building new K-8 schools, and some students have been moving around to swing spaces while construction is ongoing.

In his letter to parents, Montañez touted “tremendous momentum,” including new dual language programs, career and technical education, and improved graduation rates.

Molly Birnbaum first heard about Croft after Given came to her daughter’s day care to pitch the school.

“I was really taken by his vision, and the way he spoke about education and equality, and project-based learning,” Birnbaum said. “When she was old enough for kindergarten in 2022, we were so excited to tour the school and see what he had built.”

She enrolled her daughter, who is now in third grade. Her son, a kindergartner, joined a few years later.

Now, Birnbaum has been going to information sessions across the city at different schools, deciding where to send them. The closest public school to her is Vartan Gregorian, and she is also looking at private schools.

Like many parents, Birnbaum prepaid the tuition at Croft for next year, and may be out tens of thousands of dollars. And her children could lose their teachers, who will be furloughed next week if more money isn’t secured. She hopes some of them could be hired by families who opt to form homeschooling groups for the rest of the year.

“These are some of the most special, loving, warm teachers that I’ve encountered,” Birnbaum said.

Katherine Linwood, whose 10-year-old daughter Vivienne is in fifth grade at Croft, said she’s been “burning the candle at both ends” to try and keep the school open, but is also planning for contingencies if school closes next week. She compared it to the scramble to find child care when schools went remote during COVID.

“In terms of trying to patchwork, keep her safe and secure and engaged, while working a full-time job,” Linwood said.

This isn’t Vivienne’s first time going through something like this. She previously attended the private Henry Barnard School on the Rhode Island College campus, which closed in 2020.

Linwood, who works at Rhode Island Kids Count, a child advocacy organization, is not considering sending her daughter to the low-performing Providence Public Schools.

“To me, this also speaks to why we need to have better investments in our public education system,” Linwood said. “I strongly believe that every child has the right to a wonderful education.”

The problems at Croft came to light in mid-March, a week after the four-member board that controls the school was told by executive director Scott Given, the founder, that he had “mismanaged and misrepresented” the school’s finances, including hiding large debts.

Given was suspended and then fired. His lawyers said last week he is cooperating with the ongoing investigation and “has never used any school funds for his own personal benefit.”

The board told families it has enough cash on hand to make payroll on Tuesday, but would need $5 million to keep the schools open through the end of the year.

In an effort to keep the Providence campus open, a group of eight parents has filed a petition in Rhode Island Superior Court, asking a judge to put the school into receivership, a type of state-level bankruptcy.

If granted, a receiver would be given authority over the school and could make financial decisions. A lawyer for the families said Tuesday there is an anonymous donor willing to fund the school for the rest of the school year, but only if it is removed from the control of the current board.

Superior Court Judge Brian Stern did not immediately make a decision on the receivership during a hearing on Tuesday.

Time is of the essence; a memo from board member Mike Goldstein, which was cited in court documents, said teachers would be furloughed as of April 1 if the school does not have funding for the next payroll cycle by Friday.

Roman said she tried to explain to her son, in age-appropriate terms, what is going on. He asked why someone would take money from a school, and opined: “That’s not kind.”

“I’m not afraid to send my child to public school, he will be fine,” Roman said. “I worry that people will think this is just a rich person problem, but it’s not. The school was trying to do something different and make education accessible to everyone.”

Steph Machado can be reached at steph.machado@globe.com. Follow her @StephMachado.

Awards for maple syrup are pinned to the wall of the kitchen within the Branon sugarhouse in Fairfield, Vt.
Danielle Parhizkaran/Globe Staff

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Cecile Branon looks at the tapped maple trees just outside the sugarhouse at Branon Family Maple Orchards.
Danielle Parhizkaran/Globe Staff

For Cecile Branon, 68, the innovations have made it possible to imagine passing the operation on to the next generation.

“They already have plans,” she said of her grandchildren.

Maple production in Vermont has climbed to about 3 million gallons annually, with revenue approaching $100 million a year. The state makes more than half the syrup produced in the country. The gains are not just a result of sugar makers tapping more maples. The amount of sap produced per tap — the small spout inserted into a tree — has more than doubled since the start of the century.

Even 20 years ago, the industry’s continued growth was a major question. Maple syrup is a high-stakes crop because the bulk of the season’s product is made on just a handful of sap “runs,” when shifting temperatures create pressure changes that push clear, sweet liquid from the trees. Those perfect conditions typically happen in late winter or early spring, though some producers have found ways to take advantage of sap runs when the weather warms up even earlier.

Emma Marvin, the co-owner of Butternut Mountain Farm in Morrisville, Vt., said the precarious, weather-dependent nature of sugaring means producers have to be good at navigating uncertainty.

“There’s no indication for us what our yield is going to be other than what the weatherman tells us,” Marvin said. “Some of the volatility is baked in, and we’re used to adapting to it.”

Climate change is disrupting the delicate balance of freezing nights and above-freezing days required to trigger sap runs. Temperatures in Vermont, one of the fastest-warming states, have risen by about 3 degrees Fahrenheit since 1900. In 2012, a series of heat waves cut the season short, causing maple trees to “bud out” and ruining the flavor of the sap. Production in New England fell by nearly a third from the year prior.

Extreme weather, exacerbated by climate change, poses another threat. Severe storms can rip down tubing and fell trees. Flooding and drought stress the roots of sugar maples, a “Goldilocks” tree that doesn’t like to be too wet or dry.

Cecile Branon, a fourth-generation sugar maker in Fairfield, has seen these changes firsthand. The Branons are one of Vermont’s best-known maple families and manage a sugaring operation that surpassed 100,000 taps this year, a point of pride. Blue ribbons decorate a wall in the sugarhouse, including a hefty rosette for “best of show” at the Vermont Maple Festival.

After digging through more than two decades of her husband’s daily notes logging the work done on the land, Cecile Branon found that the start of the sugaring season has been steadily creeping earlier, changing by as much as a week some years.

“You could see it right in his book,” she said.

The two major innovations the Branons have adopted — vacuum tubing systems and reverse osmosis machines — are now widespread across the industry. Both technologies directly combat how climate change stresses maples.

The tubing sucks sap from the trees, increasing yields from unpredictable sap runs. Reverse osmosis machines, similar to those used in desalination plants, remove much of the water from sap to create a sugary liquid that boils into syrup more quickly. The machines keep production profitable even when sugar levels drop due to climate disruptions.

Other sugar makers are adjusting their forest management practices, reinforcing culverts and other infrastructure to withstand extreme weather, and embracing red maples, a resilient species long overlooked by maple producers. Producers have also started to tap trees earlier, so as not to miss out on a significant share of the season.

“The folks who are going to thrive are the ones who are able to make adjustments and don’t just rely on the way things have always been,” said Mark Isselhardt, University of Vermont Extension’s maple specialist.

At the Baird Farm in the foothills of the Green Mountains, Bob Baird had long assumed he’d be the last in his family to produce syrup on the land. But by keeping up with the latest practices, he and his wife, Bonnie, made it possible for their daughter Jenna Baird and her partner, Jacob Powsner, to take over.

“It’s not even a question,” Powsner said. “Either adapt, or you lose a huge amount of ability to compete in the modern marketplace.”

Jenna Baird and Powsner have made these changes part of their branding. Their maple jugs show blue tubing threading through the woods and a solar panel on top of their shed. On a tote bag emblazoned “Syrup Daddy,” Bob Baird flashes a toothy grin with tubing looped over his arm.

The marketing is paying off. Bob Baird said that when he recently visited the nearest city — Rutland, population 15,500 — a man recognized him and said his girlfriend wouldn’t believe he had met Baird in person.

Despite the progress, many questions remain about the industry’s future. At the University of Vermont’s Proctor Maple Research Center, scientists are trying to fill the research gaps. They’ve tricked out a tree with monitoring devices to better understand how maples are faring, and are assessing how vacuum pumps affect tree health over time.

“There’s unfortunately very little research specific to maple,” said Tim Rademacher, a German plant biologist who runs the center. “That explains partly why somebody who grew up in a country without maples can still make a career in it.”

The center works closely with producers, meaning a paper published one year might affect the practices of sugar makers the next.

Maple producers continue to worry about whether Vermont will continue to have suitable growing conditions. One 2019 paper predicted that the region of maximum sap flow would shift north by about 250 miles by 2100. Some researchers, though, challenge those findings and say they do not mean maples will disappear from Vermont. Predictions of the industry’s demise have been overstated for decades, they added.

Allison Hope, executive director of the Vermont Maple Sugar Makers’ Association, said maple producers have to be “eternal optimists.” The technology can only go so far when the weather doesn’t cooperate.

“They’ve mitigated the effects of climate change up till now,” she said, but “what’s that next thing? Have we taken it as far as we can?”

That future felt far off this March at the Branon sugarhouse, where the sugaring season was in full swing. The air was steamy and thick with the smell of boiling sap. One of Tom and Cecile’s sons manned the equipment, while Cecile Branon whipped up a fresh batch of maple granola.

She nodded toward her 5-year-old granddaughter Elsie, who was racing past the tanks and coils of tubing dressed in pink sweatpants and a sequined dress.

“Those trees,” she said, “need to be there for them.”

Kate Selig can be reached at kate.selig@globe.com. Follow her on X @kate_selig.