Tears rolled down Ivy Cobb’s cheeks as she walked her six-year-old daughter, Hannah, to Ladysmith Children’s Centre for the last time.

“You guys don’t know what it means to drop your kids off and not worry about them,” Cobb told the daycare’s owner Fran Bafaro and her employee Barb Paetz.

Last week the daycare, which is the only licensed group daycare in Ladysmith, was forced to close its doors due to a lack of staff… “It is overwhelming and I just feel flustered by it,” Cobb says.

Cobb had planned to go back to work full-time this September. However, if she can’t find after-school care for Hannah and daycare for her two-year-old son, Jackson, she worries she will be forced to remain a part-time employee at her job in Nanaimo. Hannah’s name is on the … waiting list and Cobb is still scrambling to find a centre that will take Jackson. Ladysmith has no licensed child care facility for children under three years of age.

“I have got him on a few waiting lists at places in Nanaimo. It is hard, one of the waiting lists he is on is for a place that charges $50 a day. By the time I pay for my daughter too, I wonder why I am going to work again,” Cobb says.

She is willing to pay the price tag if the place is somewhere her children enjoy going. Cobb would prefer to keep her money in Ladysmith, but even finding daycare spaces in Nanaimo is proving difficult.

“I have some family support, thank goodness, but you know grandmas can only play daycare for so long before it just gets exhausting,” Cobb says….

Ladysmith Early Years Partnership hopes to find solutions to address the needs of toddler and infant care and the general lack of daycare in the community. One idea is to find funding for the group to build their own child care facility, chair Sandy Weeks says.

“There is no infant/toddler centres in Ladysmith and now we have lost our group centre too, so it is becoming quite a grave situation in Ladysmith,” Weeks says.