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Toronto parents Sarah Fitting and Mykola Jemetz struggle to pay annual daycare fees of more than $30,000 for their 5-year-old daughter and 3-year-old twin boys.
So a city budget proposal that advocates say would add as much as $80 per child per month for parents in Toronto's 373 school-based child-care centres is a shock.
"This is an issue that is dear to many working parents' hearts," said Fitting, 39, whose children attend a school-based child care in the city's west end. "For those of us who don't have a parent or relative who can pick up the slack, it's infuriating to think that, once again, it's working families who are going to be paying for the budget crisis in the city."
In an effort to erase the city's $433 million structural deficit, Toronto's children's services department is recommending city council cancel a 12-year agreement with area school boards that covers rent for school-based child-care centres and family resource centres. The agreement costs the city $5.8 million annually. Since Toronto would still pay rent for subsidized spaces and family resource centres, the net savings would be about $3.2 million by 2011, budget documents say.
It would affect more than half of the 652 child-care centres the city funds through subsidy and wage agreements.
City staff say parents like Fitting who pay full fees for child care, would pay about $2 a day more, a monthly increase of 5 to 8 per cent. But school board officials say the city agreement is based on rental costs that are several years old and that new rents would likely push parent fees higher.
The move comes as Queen's Park is phasing in all-day kindergarten for 4- and 5-year-olds with a long-term goal of creating community hubs in schools for kids from birth to age 12. "To destabilize the school-based child care now, before the province is able to implement its full vision, is so short-sighted," said Jane Mercer, of the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care. "We don't want the system to die on the operating table. We're going to need everybody to pull together, the fees, the province and the city to make this happen," she said.
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Toronto Councillor Janet Davis (Ward 31, Beaches-East York), chair of the city's community development and recreation committee, which oversees child care, said city council has rejected recommendations to end the rent subsidy for school-based centres in the past.
But it's too early to tell what will happen between now and April, when council sets the city's 2010-11 budget, she said. "There's no question we are facing a crisis in child care this year and that the rent issue is just one of the problems."
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- reprinted from the Toronto Star