Recruitment and retention of Early Childhood Educators in child care: Staffing the vision and transition

Excerpts:

RECOMMENDATION

That this Committee recommend to Regional Council that the Regional Chair be authorized to write a letter to the Honorable Dalton McGuinty, Premier of Ontario, the Honorable Laurel Broten, Minister of Education and to the Niagara Members of Provincial Parliament requesting that:

In order to transition and sustain high quality regulated child care services in Ontario, the Province commit to providing the child care sector with competitive salaries, benefits and training opportunities as a foundation of a recruitment and retention strategy for qualified child care staff.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

• Child care is facing a critical shortage of qualified staff that is expected to rise significantly with further implementation of Full Day Kindergarten (FDK).
• Niagara's child care system employs over 1,100 staff, equating to 765 Full Time Employees (FTE's) of which only 54% (415 FTE's) are Registered Early Childhood Educators (RECE's).
• When FDK is fully implemented, the Province is expected to require 20,000 RECE's.
• Phase 3 of FDK, starting in September 2012, will require double the number of RECE's already employed by school boards for the first two phases, building to an estimated need for over 300 RECE's when FDK is fully implemented in Niagara.
• The human resource management challenges of child care administrators are immediate and are difficult to address due to historically low wages and the concurrent loss of revenue associated with 4 and 5 year olds leaving the system for FDK.
• Child care operators are already experiencing increased costs associated with recruitment of staff to fill vacant positions, training and re-training, maintaining legislative qualified staff-child ratios through approvals of "otherwise" approved and retention of staff in the absence of competitive compensation to those with school board FDK job offers.
• On average, the wage gap between qualified staff in child care as compared to those entering FDK classroom is at least 25% in Niagara.