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Most folks are familiar with the Ontario government's introduction of Full Day Learning kindergarten programs at the school boards. By next year, nearly all elementary schools in Ontario will have these programs.
These provide care for four-year-olds and five-year-olds in elementary schools from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. (for a fee for before and after-school hours). This has been touted as improving access for parents to better care for their children through the use of a school setting.
However, this initiative has had a significant impact on licensed childcare programs. I chair the board of directors at River Parkway and River Heights Children's Centres which, like many other licensed programs, has experienced the loss of kindergarten-aged children (and staff) to the schools as this program rolled out. Indeed, the City of Ottawa's 2014 Child Care Service Plan bluntly says that some child care centres in Ottawa will be forced to close as a result of full-day learning. Our centre is adjusting and looking at meeting other child care needs in the community, such as infant care. But there is more going on than just the impact of full-day learning.
School boards have also been given authority to provide both preschool and toddler child care programs in their schools, and already one local school board is seeking to provide 232 toddler and preschool spaces in six elementary schools over the next two years. And that's just the start. Other school boards are expected to follow. What happens then to programs like ours?
School boards have economies of scale to their advantage in terms of facilities, personnel and administration, and they can afford to pay their staff better (which child care centres like ours wish they could do but sadly can't). But school boards are not bound by the higher quality standards that licensed child care centres operate under (class size is one example where the standards differ). Why not?
Add to this the changes in child care subsidy rules by the city. Subsidies to make access to child care for low-income families affordable will no longer be tied to spaces in licensed centres as they were in the past, but will follow the child. This will affect childcare centres whose subsidies helped balance the books. But it won't increase the number of subsidized spaces for low-income families in Ottawa, now capped at about 6,500. That's about half of the children under 12 who live on social assistance in Ottawa. What is being done for them? Better question: what's being done to make quality child care more affordable?
Then there is the new legislation (Bill 143, The Child Care Modernization Act, 2014) proposed by the Ontario government, which weakens current childcare standards, including, among other things, larger class sizes. Many of us in the childcare community do not accept that service standards for the care of children should be watered down.
However, while the debate on this continues, it is obvious that change to how child care is provided in our community is coming; the writing is on the wall.
Yet there is no road map or transition plan on how community-based programs like ours fit into this new world. Are community-based quality childcare programs to become obsolete? There are 333 community-based licensed child care centres in Ottawa who have been providing quality care for some 27,000 children in our city for years, often in challenging circumstances. The city's 2014 Child Care Service Plan makes no mention of the expansion of school boards into toddler and preschool child care, yet the city has made a significant investment in providing infrastructure to community-based licensed programs - programs at risk of losing their toddler and preschool programs to school boards as they have already seen with their kindergarten programs. What happens to this taxpayer investment?
I am not advocating that the clock be turned back, because we need more affordable, accessible quality child care in Ontario. But we do need a road map on how we are going to make the transition from community-based care to school-based care. We need a serious discussion on what should be included in that plan - quality service standards for the care of children being one, affordability for families being another. These are important issues, not just for child care providers, but for families who need child care.
With a provincial election likely and municipal elections certain this year, this discussion cannot happen too soon.
Alex Cullen is the chairman of the board of River Parkway and River Heights Children's Centres. He is also the NDP provincial candidate for Ottawa-West Nepean.
-reprinted from Ottawa Citizen