Jemell Melanson’s days stretch late into the night.

There are the 12-hour nursing shifts at Ochsner Medical Center. Picking up her two kids at an after-hours child care center in Jefferson. Then a trip across the Huey P. Long Bridge to the house in Harvey.

On nights when all goes right, her kids, 21-month-old Romello and 3-year-old Raynelle will be bathed and in bed by 10:30 p.m. On nights when there are snags, well, things can push much later.

It is a grueling schedule, but one made a bit easier by Nettles Academy, the extended-hours child care facility that Melanson calls a “rare find.”

The center is one of just a handful in the area that remains open past 6 p.m. And as a single mom juggling two nursing jobs, Melanson said she was running out of options before enrolling her kids there.

“I was really in a dilemma before,” said Melanson, who often works five days a week, with long shifts on at least three of those days. “I had a family friend watching them, but they kept raising prices and not being available. … It was either quit work and be a stay-at-home mom or come here.”

Melanson’s story is similar to those told by many other parents who work nontraditional hours. About a dozen or so who were recently interviewed bemoaned how difficult it is to find reliable child care options outside the typical 9-to-5 work schedule. Some said they had to quit jobs when they couldn’t find a suitable place for their kids.

Data support their stories: In a 2018 report, the Urban Institute estimated that 62% of families in Louisiana — including some 59,100 children younger than 6 — have parents who work some non-traditional hours, and 15% have parents whose working hours are primarily outside the 9-to-5 time frame.

Yet state-approved child care options at these times are few and far between. The Louisiana Department of Education lists 80 centers statewide that are licensed to provide nighttime care for babies and toddlers. But in practice, few of them stay open past 6 p.m.

The choices are especially sparse in and around New Orleans, even though it’s a region that relies on tourism dollars and has seen a growing health care economy. Both of those sectors include a host of jobs with late night and early morning working hours.

Throughout the seven-parish metro area, only five child care facilities are licensed to stay open past 9 p.m., state data show. And while there are nanny services and people who provide late-night care in their homes, parents complain that those services can be expensive, unreliable or of low quality.

Those were the concerns of Brittany Salerian, a 29-year-old store manager for Coach at Lakeside Shopping Center, who drops off her 6-month-old son, Oscar, at Shirley Honore’s Love Center Learning Academy, a 24-hour child care center nicknamed “The Love Center” on South Claiborne Avenue.

Because Coach’s business caters to peak shopping hours during Thanksgiving and Christmas, and her husband works until 7:30 p.m. as a behavioral therapist, Salerian said she needed a center, rather than a single babysitter. That way, she avoids the risk that a sitter will call in sick or have some other reason they can’t work when Salerian is working.

“We needed something that went until at least 8 p.m.,” she said. “We also needed stability.”

Like other parents, Salerian said she had mixed feelings about her child’s arrangements, in part because the Love Center is on the other side of town from her Lakeview home and her job in Metairie.

“I myself would have liked to have different options, to really choose that place that felt right,” she said. “But with it being our only choice, we’re happy with it.”

Bearing the brunt

While the city’s nurses and retail managers struggle with the problem of off-hours daycare, Gina Adams, a senior research fellow at the Urban Institute, says the problem is even worse for low-income families who rely on government aid to pay for child care.

Melanson estimates she brings home about $85,000 a year between her two jobs, and Salerian says her household income is about $150,000 a year.

But many families make much less and can’t afford child care without some kind of public assistance. Advocates have estimated that parents of 173,000 low-income children, birth through age 3, across Louisiana cannot afford quality care.

In Louisiana, the Education Department sets the threshold for low-income as a household of two earning less than $28,836, or a family of four earning less than $41,200 a year.

In a report she co-authored, “Increasing Access to Quality Child Care for Four Priority Populations,” Adams argued that working is made harder for low-income families who seek care when most daycare centers are closed.

That’s because while high-quality care can exist in people’s homes, or in unlicensed settings, recent attempts by federal lawmakers to improve standards have translated to more investment in daycare centers — meaning that families often can’t access that government aid if they choose to use a family babysitter or in-home, informal daycares.

In Louisiana, 92% of the children whose families get government aid for child care are served in daycare centers. Many more would be getting government aid if they could, Adams says, as 60% of low-income kids likely face barriers getting into those centers, including some families whose parents have schedules that don’t line up with the center’s hours.

“That means the majority of resources in Louisiana are going to settings the majority of low-income kids have trouble accessing,” Adams said in an interview.

The problem could get worse in and near New Orleans, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which showed hospitality and food service are among the fastest-growing job fields in the city.

There are now 53.4% more people working those jobs than a decade ago. The jobs often involve rotating schedules, and they also can be some of the lowest-paid, paying as little as $10 an hour.

“We need to understand this better,” Adams said. “The challenge is to design something that works for families, rather than try to fit families into what the current market provides.”

Little 24-hour care

While some child care centers advertise being open 24 hours, few really are. The Love Center is the lone place that regularly stays open past midnight, and directors of most of the others say they limit their pickup times to 10 p.m. or earlier.

Most providers say there’s not enough late-night business to warrant the extra investment in getting a 24-hour license, which has extra requirements.

All child care facility owners are required to get a license when they provide care to seven or more children for at least 12½ hours a week, which then requires them to have inspections and other state oversight.

State rules require that centers operating after 9 p.m. or before 5 a.m. must have two adults, who are awake, regardless of how many children are being cared for during those hours, and that each child must have a separate bed or cot; meals offered; and time for personal care, such as teeth-brushing.

Debbie Martin, the manager of Discovery Kids in Mid-City, is among the providers who say it doesn’t pay to operate beyond a certain time.

That’s why, right now, she stays open only until 9:30 p.m. She said she’s been in operation for 16 years and tried for most of that time to offer overnight services for parents. But she eventually gave up on it.

“It’s really not feasible to pay two ladies to stay here all night when in fact I have one child in here,” Martin said. “I spent long periods of time hoping the business would get me more kids … but I was actually losing money rather than making money.”

Facing limited options, parents have scrambled to work their own solutions.

For instance, Amanda Devereux, 40, relies on a trusted network she has built over time — which includes her ex-husband, friends and a babysitter on retainer for last-minute situations — to watch her three school-age kids Ingrid, Leo, and Noam when she’s called to work as a doula.

Others, like 35-year-old Nicole Dufrene, who works in sports medicine, found themselves exploring unlicensed centers offered in babysitters’ home. Dufrene eventually got a sitter she likes and trusts with her two children, 2-year-old Riley 10-month-old Ava — but only after six trials with home-based child care operations she wasn’t so happy with.

The reliance on care from unlicensed workers — especially among sitters watching multiple children — worries Teresa Falgoust, who works for Agenda for Children, a local advocacy organization.

“They’re not held to the same standards as licensing,” Falgoust said. “There are some regulations in place, but there can be up to six children in a home without any government oversight whatsoever.”

A nationwide problem

There are some bright spots around the country for parents seeking care during nontraditional hours.

In a June report, the publication Child Care Aware said that some employers have begun to address the problem themselves.

In North Carolina, for example, managers at Purdue Farms worked with child care providers when they planned a shift change for employees. And in California, children of workers at San Francisco International Airport are cared for at an on-site center from 5 a.m. to midnight seven days a week — a flex program created by employers, unions and community groups.

However, those instances are rare. Only 8% of the nation’s daycare centers offer some sort of before- or aftercare, according to Child Care Aware, and only 6% offer overnight care.

That’s despite the fact that 43% of all children under 18 in the U.S. have at least one parent who works an irregular schedule, meaning about 31 million children need care during nontraditional hours.

Back at Nettles Academy, director Ayango Nettles said she and her mother, Tina Thomas, who founded the day care center in 1986, had tried doing overnight care. But they couldn’t make it work.

At a flat fee of $25 a week, even the aftercare wasn’t profitable, Nettles said, but they provided it anyway because they knew parents needed it.

“We are very passionate about providing care to the metro area and about keeping tuition low,” Nettles said. “We’re just doing what we love.”