Day care closure worries parents: Cedardale expansion will displace tots
North Shore News
19 Jan 2007
By: James Weldon

ONE of West Vancouver's coveted day cares may have to shut its doors if it can't find a new home by the summer.

Cedardale Child Learning Centre, which has been operating out of the Ecole Cedardale site on Burley Drive for more than a decade, has until the end of June to find new space or face closure.

The centre's managers have been hunting for six months, but have so far come up empty-handed.

The day care, which leases its space from the West Vancouver school district, was given a year's notice last July.

Ecole Cedardale, a French immersion elementary school, is expanding for the third consecutive year on the site, and it will need the space for its new Grade 3 class, slated to start in September.

If the day care can't find a new space by the summer, some 36 families currently enrolled -- and another 44 on the facility's waitlist -- will be left out in the cold.

"There is no available space," said Colleen Ring, a parent involved in the hunt for new digs. "To go anywhere else in West Van, there is at least a six-month waiting list."

Ring, a registered nurse with a two-year-old and a four-year-old enrolled in the program, will have to completely rearrange her work schedule if the centre fails to find a new site. Ring works days and nights at B.C. Children's Hospital, so the change won't be easy.

And she is not the only one in that predicament, she added. "Especially for working moms . . . we can't go out to work if we have nowhere to put our kids," she said. "The real tragedy of this is it's such a great program."

Ring and about 30 other affected parents have formed a committee to look for a new space and put pressure on various levels of government to help out. They have enlisted the services of a commercial real estate agent, but so far have had no luck.

On Wednesday, some of them made a presentation to the West Vancouver school board looking for help.

The board, which has previously met with the district about the issue, made no official commitment, but arranged for the parent committee to meet with the school district's senior instructor to discuss possible solutions.

They will try to come up with something, said school superintendent Geoff Jopson, but the outlook is not promising. "At this point, we don't have another easily accessible space," he said.

It is not that the board does not want the day care there, however, added Jopson. "We try to accommodate them wherever we can," he said. "It's to our advantage and to their advantage to have these facilities on our sites."

The problem is that enrolment is on the rise across the district, and demand is particularly strong for immersion schools, such as Cedardale, said Jopson.

The facility was reopened in 2004 after a 25-year closure, to accommodate overflow from Ecole Pauline Johnson. It started with a single kindergarten class, and has been adding a grade each year since, driving out tenants as it goes.

"We're gradually going to have to ask those people to leave as we require the space," said Jopson. The day care is the next on the list.

The squeeze is an unusual problem among British Columbia's 60 school districts, most of which have seen enrolment decline over the past number of years. West Vancouver is just one of three to see a rise, according to Jopson.

Municipal facilities also appear to be full, he added.

If no new site is found, the closure will add to a growing day-care crunch on the North Shore.

"The demand far exceeds the supply of regulated spaces," said June Maynard, manager of the child-care resources and referral program for the North Shore.

Maynard's agency, a provincial body that connects parents with child-care programs, received 950 inquiries from North Shore parents in 2004, and close to 1,100 in 2005.

At the same time, the number of available spaces here rose more slowly, going from 4,769 in 2004 to 5,362 in 2006. Those spaces -- all of which are apparently taken -- include pre-schools, day cares and under-three care.

Wait lists range around six months.

Ring says new rules have not helped the situation in West Vancouver. At the end of November, District of West Vancouver council voted to outlaw new large day cares in residential areas. Up until then, single-family residential zones allowed up to 20 children in a single home. Council ordered the director of planning to revisit the zoning regulations.

But North Shore municipalities, including West Vancouver, are taking the problem seriously, according to Patricia Leslie, a spokeswoman for the district.

The three municipalities recently commissioned a North Shore child-care needs assessment, a study aimed specifically at addressing the child-care crunch.

The study, overseen by Maynard's agency and the three North Shore planners, will take stock of the child-care facilities available here and talk to stakeholders about their needs.

The final report, due in May, will outline recommendations for policy and program changes that might alleviate the pressure.

But Ring also pointed a finger at the West Vancouver school district, saying it is allowing students from other municipalities to swell enrolment here, exacerbating the space problem.

The school district receives extra funding from the province for each additional student it receives, she said, meaning it is allowing its thirst for resources to trump the need for day-care space.

But while some 30 per cent of Cedardale's student body next year will indeed be from outside the municipality, the school district is only doing what it is required to by law, said Jopson.

Spaces in the new kindergarten class were allocated by lottery, he said, and West Vancouver parents were given priority. It was only the remainder that were given up to those from outside. The Ministry of Education requires that the school districts make any vacant spots available to students from other jurisdictions, said Jopson.

And at any rate, he added, most of those were from North Vancouver.