Schools are in session, day cares are filling up once again, but is everyone back to work?

According to Florida Tax Watch, nearly 170,000 women left the workforce since the COVID pandemic began, and over 100,000 have yet to return.

Many of those jobs are now being filled all across the state, but by many out of state.

Cape Coral, Jacksonville, Orlando, Pensacola, Sarasota, and the Tampa Bay area are listed by LinkedIn among the 20 cities where American Job seekers are most likely to apply for remote work.

Many are calling what’s happening in Florida, “The Great Resignation.” The decision to leave work was not one everyone could afford to take.

It didn’t matter if it was before COVID, during COVID, or now two years later.

LaTonya Pelt has been working as the Director at Welbourne Nursery & Preschool in Winter Park. Her other job is also full-time work. Being a full-time mother to her son Victor, who just started college.

Taking a day off for this working mother during the pandemic was never an option.

“I couldn’t,” Latonya Pelt, the Director of the Welbourne Nursery & Preschool, states. “I am the sole winner and income for my household. My son still needed to eat, he still needed clothes to wear, so I had to continue to push forth.”

A recent national survey found one in three people working remotely said they would quit if they had to go back to an office full-time. They said a job that allows them to work from home allows them more family time, better personal time, and improved mental health.

For the past year, Latonya has had to push forth when it came to staffing her school. Pay and personal benefits, she said, had to go up in order to keep up.

“Our average teacher here is starting off with just the minimal requirements making $15 an hour,” Pelt begins to explain. “That is an industry plus for us.”

And that’s not all.

The school also offers emotional wellness classes to their teachers, yoga classes, and attendance bonuses. Dr. Sharon Carnahan is the executive director for the Hume House Child Development and Student research Center at Rollins College.

She says that during the pandemic, mothers did three times as much unpaid child care as men. And that in 2021, more than half of those women with a B.A. worked from home at least part of the time.

When the school year began this summer for infants and toddlers, some behaviors were noticeable.

“Some social anxiety from the very youngest friends,” Dr. Carnahan begins to explain. “The two-year-olds who were coming in to one of our home care for the first time. We found that they had slightly lower social skills, and a little less likely to interact with others in the room.”

For those that were home during those early years and transitioning to school for the first time, continue facing other challenges.

“What we are hearing nationally is that those children are showing a learning lag,” Dr. Carnahan says. “However, it depends a lot on how they spent their environment in for those two years.”

According to Florida Tax Watch, as of June of this year, the national quit rate rose to three percent. In Florida, in just nine months from September 2021 to June of this year, 61,000 Florida workers left their jobs. Each new hire is a significant win for Latonya.

“We were not only competing from within the industry but we are competing with Publix, and McDonald’s,” Pelt says. “It was easier for them to get paid more to go there, so when our board was able to get more pay for our teachers, that helped us a lot.”

The highest quit rate in the state continues to be three of its greatest needs; education, hospitality and leisure.

Florida Tax Watch also reports that in 2021, 38% of employees did some or all of their work from home. That is 14 percentage points higher than 2019, the year preceding the pandemic.