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Colleen O'Brien would like to send her four-year-old daughter off to junior kindergarten this week, but like her six-year-old sister before her, Caitlin will be missing out on this rite of passage for the same, simple reason -- there's no room for her at the on-site day care of her public school.
The kindergarten programs in the English school boards in the city are only 150 minutes per day, and trying to tease together day care arrangements for such young children can be a logistical nightmare for working parents and disjointed for their young children. So more and more are choosing the O'Brien option -- pulling the plug on junior kindergarten altogether and keeping their school-aged children in their regular day care for another year.
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Early childhood education expert Martha Friendly, co-ordinator of the Childcare Resource and Research Unit at the University of Toronto, says it shouldn't be up to families to pick up the slack for shortsighted politicians, but understands why so many do.
"Four-year-olds ... should be in one integrated program, not going from place to place. It's silly to have things cobbled together the way they are. Why don't the politicians get it, and when are they going to do something about it? With all the talk about the early years and the education premier, it's not gotten better."
There are 3,157 licensed kindergarten day care spots in Ottawa schools, far fewer than the number of kindergarten students attending the city's English public and Catholic schools -- which totalled about 6,000 junior kindergarten students and 6,500 senior kindergarten students last year in the two English school boards.
And less than half of the English elementary public schools in the city have day cares in them, leaving it up to working parents of kindergarten children in most schools to figure out care for the other five hours of the work day.
The challenge is especially hard if the child is placed in the afternoon stream, which falls smack in the middle of the work day; the day care must be located in the designated school boundary area for the board to provide busing services to and from the kindergarten program.
Meanwhile, most of the waiting lists for the day-care centres in the remaining schools are long. On the eve of the 2007/08 school year, 958 youngsters were still waiting for a spot in a licensed kindergarten program connected to a public school in the city.
Joel Westheimer, University Research Chair in Democracy and Education at the University of Ottawa, calls the provincewide phenomenon the "de facto privatization of kindergarten" for families with the means to pay for a seamless day at a high-quality day-care centre or private school.
Mr. Westheimer says government funding must be invested to either expand day cares in public schools so these centres can provide on-site care to kindergarten children for the entire work day, or implement full-day kindergarten and expand their after-school programs.
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- reprinted from the Ottawa Citizen