It's a long road to a daycare
The Vancouver Sun
06 Dec 2006
By: Karen Gram

EXCERPT

VANCOUVER - When Carol Wood enrolled her three-year-old son, Henry Campbell, in daycare, she never thought she would be the one getting an education.

But after three years and a pile of correspondence that goes halfway up her forearm, she's a whiz when it comes to the no man's land of child care politics.

Until this September, Wood was president on the parent board of Harbour View Daycare, a non-profit child care centre for 25 three-to-five-year-olds located on a corner of Burrardview Park in east Vancouver.

A few months into her three-year tenure, Wood was thrown into a campaign to expand the daycare and replace the building, a long and frustrating process that still hasn't seen results. It taught her much about how the various levels of government work or don't work. That's the upside.

The downside is that Henry doesn't go to the daycare any more. He is six years old, his teeth are wiggly and in September he graduated to Grade 1.

In the natural order of things, Wood would graduate too, from the daycare parent board to the school parent advisory committee. Indeed, parents at the school lobbied her to stand for election.

Other parents whose children moved with Henry to Grade 1 have washed their hands of the building project. Dick Woldring, Wood's co-chairman for several years, says he's got nothing more to give.

"I'm done," he says, noting the process will take at least two more years.

"My kids are gone and I'm done."

But Wood, a program director at Co-Development Canada, a B.C-based small non-profit organization involved in international development in Latin America, has remained at the daycare because she doesn't want to leave the coming work in the hands of new parents who don't have the benefit of her years of learning. It's too important.

"The concept of who is responsible for daycare is perhaps skewed," she says, adding that parents, especially working parents with young children, should not have to shoulder such a burden.

"My position is a product of that skewed thinking, but for me it is an important piece of the community. It's just reality."

So Wood will continue to use her evenings and vacation time to prepare for and attend meetings with the city, the park board and the province for additional funding, development permits, neighbourhood consultations, inspections and the myriad other things that will need to be done before the kids can move into something new.

"I don't mind going to meetings, but the amount of time . . . . It takes so long for decisions to be made. Time is running out and where are we?"

This story begins in 1974, when the provincial government's Ministry of Human Resources installed eight portable buildings in Vancouver to be used as temporary (two-year) facilities for daycares. Harbour View was one of the eight but somehow it got lost when the B.C. Building Corp. assumed responsibility for the portables. The other seven continued to receive maintenance but Harbour View did not. It tried once to get it, but was rejected.

Then in June 2003, BCBC wrote to the seven daycares saying it did not wish to be in the daycare business anymore.

It offered to replace the portables housing the daycares since 1974 or pay up to $250,000 toward a new building. Over the following year of negotiations, the province agreed to increase the grant to $415,000 to each of the seven operators and contribute $40,000 for relocation costs.

The province, under the direction of Deborah Rhymer, director of child care programs, hired Bob Brandell to see the seven projects through.

Harbour View Daycare never got the letter sent to the other seven facilities.

When its board got wind of it, it applied to be included, arguing that it too was owned by BCBC. Its 30-year-old portable, while still safe, wasn't aging well....

For 12 months, the province refused to consider Harbour View's request because it denied it owned Harbour View.

Finally, after seeing a development permit listing BCBC as owner, the province agreed to give Harbour View Daycare the same $415,000 it offered the others. But unlike the others, Harbour View wasn't given the option of straight replacement.

It would have to find a way to build something with the cash it received.

And because the province still refused to accept ownership of the portable, Harbour View would not have access to Brandell's services. It was on its own.

Getting a daycare built in B.C. is "a huge undertaking for a small non-profit society," says Carol Ann Young, a social planner at Vancouver city hall who has been helping the Harbour View parents.

"For a small stand-alone it's a very significant piece of work."

The kind of work that puts everything, including a new playground, on hold.

There is a wall on the southwest corner of Harbour View where the parents display a plan, its paper edges torn and curled. It's surrounded by fading pictures by kids. This wall is like a torch keeping a plan for a beautiful new playground alive, says Wood.

Four years ago, before anyone dreamed they could get a new building, parents secured $60,000 through grants, bake sales and coffee sales to design and build a new playground. They hired a designer, selected a plan and had a demolition party scheduled.

But days before demolition, they heard about the letter from BCBC to the other seven day- cares and decided to shelve the playground renewal until the building issue was resolved.

They can't put in a new playground knowing it will get knocked down for the new building. A whole generation of kids has gone through the day- care and moved on since the playground plan was shelved.

If they don't get to it soon, they may have to return the grant money, says Wood, adding it would be a shame if the playground fell victim to the delays.

Three years ago, the money from the province would not have covered the cost of replacing the portable, partly because city standards for daycares demand more space than the original portables.

But Harbour View didn't want to just replace it. The neighbourhood needs toddler spaces and the parent board was told that city money would be available to them if they expanded to include 12 toddlers.

So the board embarked on a process to secure funds from the city to augment the $415,000. What they have ended up with seems more like a house of cards on a windy day than secure funding.

City and provincial funding are contingent on the daycare expanding to include 12 toddler spaces, which brings the cost of construction up to about $1.6 million.

Expansion is contingent on park board approval, which is contingent on the daycare having all its funding in place and having community support.

The city money is also contingent on the daycare having all other funding in place. The city does not intend to provide it if the province doesn't ante up additional money.

And the province won't ante up unless the city already has.

"They all point the finger to each other for something that is supposedly so important to everybody," says Wood.

To complicate matters more, the additional provincial money was to have come from the former federal Liberal government's national child care program, which contributed $187 million to the province last year out of a promised $883 million over seven years.

But the Conservatives shut down the program when elected and by next March, the money the province has received must be distributed. It still hasn't allocated $127 million, according to child care advocates. The province issued a call for submissions from child care providers last January, but Harbour View wasn't ready.

"We always expected there would be another one coming," says Wood.

But so far, the province hasn't issued a second call for submissions to spend what is left of that money and nobody knows if it will.

"Because the feds cancelled, that's put everything in jeopardy," says Wood.

To satisfy each level of government, the parent board must jump through many time-consuming hoops, attend meetings and wait for the political process to proceed.

"For a volunteer parent board and a non-profit neighbourhood house, this is very time-consuming and as costs go up we get more and more worried about whether we are going to be able to go ahead with it," says Wood, adding the process has been difficult for her to understand.

"I work in the non-profit sector so it's not like we have a lot of resources to waste. Basically you make a decision and you do it. You can't dither around. So it has been very difficult for me personally to be patient with all of the different steps that need to be done. I understand. But it's difficult."

Since last May, Wood and her board have been in a holding pattern while city social planners prepare a request for $500,000 from the city. There is still no date for it to go before council. But Wood wants to make sure everything is in order.

"We need to persuade council to approve the money," she says. "I'm worried. City funding will be contingent on provincial funding which was to come from the feds and is pretty iffy at this time."

Construction costs are up between 10 and 12 per cent in the Lower Mainland this year over last year, and rising at a rate of one to two per cent a month in Vancouver.

"You can hear building costs going up," says Wood. "At a certain point, we are going to have to say we can't wait any more.

"If they say no, then I don't know. We basically let the building run into the ground. Nobody wants that."

Only two of the eight day-cares have moved into their new buildings so far.

Two more are expected to be finished by spring. The other four, including Harbour View, are still a long way from completion.

Carol Ann Young says the complicating factors involved with the Harbour View project, including the issue of ownership, its location on park land and the expansion for toddler spaces, have slowed the process. But she said it takes time to build a daycare.

"It's not longer than most [daycares]," she says, adding the biggest challenge for the parents is securing funding.

Nancy McRitchie, executive director of Kiwassa Neighbourhood House, which oversees Harbour View, says the east-side neighbourhood that Harbour View serves has no licensed group toddler child care spaces.

"We are turning away many families who need this type of care," she says, adding Victoria should spend the $127 million in its budget for child care in B.C. "The community needs the province to substantially support the Harbour View project now so we can add toddler spaces, and continue to provide quality child care in a safe, healthy, and appropriate environment."

Sharon Gregson, child care advocate with the Coalition of Child Care Advocates of B.C., says Harbour View is a classic example of how fragile and unplanned child care is in B.C.

She says the city is a leader when it comes to child care, with strong regulations on par with schools, and policies that pull dollars from developers for child care spaces and an endowment fund for child care.

"The city is doing its bit, but child care is a provincial responsibility," she says.

"We know we need mothers in the workforce. We know we need a comprehensive family policy. The provincial government is not living up to its responsibility around child care and supporting young children."

Wood says she believes a sexist attitude underlies lack of political will on this issue.

"If your fundamental belief is that kids should be at home with their moms and moms should be home with kids until they go to school, well obviously you are not going to prioritize out-of-the-home child care," she says. "They are political decisions.

"Everybody at all levels, politicians especially and to a certain extent the bureaucrats that work with them, they stand up and say how important child care is. But when it comes to actually saying 'We as a level of government are going to take full responsibility for this,' no chance."

As Wood gets Henry ready for school, she gathers up all her documents for another meeting about the daycare.

"I sure hope I won't still be going to these meetings when Henry graduates to high school," she laughs.