After the 2017 Tubbs wildfire destroyed the Santa Rosa preschool Renee Whitlock-Hemsouvanh had opened three years earlier, she felt desperate and hopeless and uncertain of the school’s future.

Many of the school’s families had also lost their homes, and she didn’t think she could recuperate enough insurance money to rebuild.

“There was just a lot of disbelief because whoever thinks that you’re going to lose everything, like it’s just gonna burn to the ground?” she said.

She eventually reestablished her preschool at another site, but the recovery took years. Lately, Whitlock-Hemsouvanh finds herself playing the role of wildfire survivor, giving advice to early educators in Los Angeles County figuring out how to move forward after last month’s devastating wildfires.

Forty licensed centers or homes that provide child care in Altadena and Pacific Palisades were destroyed, and about 240 others remain closed because of smoke damage or lack of power and water, according to the California Department of Social Services.

Family child care providers who lost their homes also lost their livelihoods. A coalition of childcare advocates, along with state and local agencies, are helping providers prepare for reopening and displaced families find child care wherever they land.

“A lot of folks are just getting to the point where they’ve been able to see what’s left, if anything is left, and starting to make plans for their next steps,” said Donna Sneeringer, chief strategy officer for Child Care Resource Center, based in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley.

Whitlock-Hemsouvanh advises program directors like Alana Levitt, whose preschool sustained smoke damage in the Palisades fire, how to mitigate that damage, how to deep clean playgrounds and how to support families whose lives were upended by the fires.

Levitt, director of Kehillat Israel’s Early Childhood Center, said enrollment had been cut in half because families scattered to other parts of California or even other states.

She temporarily moved to another preschool building in nearby Santa Monica that had space for the remaining children.

“We acted fast because the lesson that we learned from COVID is that we have to adapt really quickly,” Levitt said.

She was able to do that because the state is granting licensed child care providers some flexibility in where they can relocate and how many children they can admit so they can continue their work in the aftermath of a disaster. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass also issued an executive order this week to speed up the process of opening new child care facilities in the city.

Levitt’s experience parallels what Whitlock-Hemsouvanh went through seven years ago. Two weeks after the Tubbs fire killed 22 people and destroyed 4,600 homes — the most destructive in state history at the time — her preschool moved to a temporary site and relied on donated books and supplies. Parents pitched in to spruce up the classrooms and outdoor play area.

She then caught a break when the city of Santa Rosa decided to lease a former church on city-owned land at a fair market value.

City officials chose the preschool over other proposals to convert the property into transitional housing or a hospice facility after deciding to make affordable child care a priority.

In all, Sonoma County lost 450 child care slots to the 2017 fires and about 50% of its remaining licensed child care capacity after the COVID-19 pandemic gutted the early education workforce, according to a county report.

Experts say that because the sector already struggles with low profit margins, any additional costs brought on by events like the Sonoma and Los Angeles fires can destabilize providers and lead to closures.

“There’s already this lack of quality, accessible child care and when you add in an extreme weather event or natural disaster, it just kind of multiplies and exacerbates those existing problems,” said Ariel Ford, senior vice president of program impact at Child Care Aware of America, which offers emergency preparedness, response and recovery tips to its national network of child care resource organizations.

Child care is often an afterthought following a disaster, Ford said, “even though the parents are scrambling to find [it] because when you have little ones, you can’t do the work of recovery while you also have a baby on your hip.”

For Whitlock-Hemsouvanh, community support was instrumental in helping her recover from her loss.

Changes in zoning regulations and reductions in red tape allowed her to reestablish her business. She abandoned plans to rebuild the burned preschool and used money raised for that project to convert the church into a spacious preschool named Fulton Community School & Farm. Contributions from United Way Wine Country and First 5 Sonoma County helped cover the $100,000 cost of installing a fire sprinkler system to bring it up to licensing standards.

However, a day after moving into the building in March 2020, the state ordered shutdowns to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

“It was a wild time, and we stayed closed for two months,” she said.

When it reopened, the preschool operated at a lower capacity as children and teachers gradually returned to in-person learning. But after seven years of turmoil, enrollment has increased, staffing has stabilized, and she has paid off debts associated with losing her preschool to the fires.

The new building is on three acres of land, giving kids plenty of room to play outside, grow the food they eat and feed goats and chickens in the garden.

“From that time in 2017 until now has been nothing but change and recovery, and I think that it is this year finally that we’re seeing the light at the end of the tunnel,” Whitlock-Hemsouvanh said.

She encourages early educators to strengthen relationships in their community as they seek the help that they need. She also thinks a growing awareness of the child care crisis led voters in November to pass a quarter-cent sales tax to raise about $30 million annually to fund child care and mental health services for young kids. She sees the funding as part of the long-term recovery.

“There’s a lot more people looking at this early childhood time as a profound time in life and seeing it as valuable and worthy of investment,” she said. “I’m just hoping that that kind of momentum continues in our community. And I realize it’s not that way everywhere, but in Sonoma County and in Santa Rosa, it feels like we’re really being seen.”