Share your thoughts on child care services: Forum seeks to hear experiences and concerns
Vancouver Island News Group -- Ladysmith Chronicle
11 Sep 2007

Ladysmith children's services are asking parents for input on the state of child care in the community.

On Thursday, Sept. 20, those affect or concerned about the recent shortage of daycare spaces in the community are invited to attend a forum at Aggie Hall at 10 a.m. The event is organized by a sub-committee of Ladysmith Early Years Partnership to hear parent's stories and concerns about child care.

"This is sort of the missing piece," Ladysmith Early Years Community Coordinator Louise Ward says.

Due to an absence of qualified employees, Ladysmith's only licensed group daycare closed its door at the beginning of the month, leaving many parents scrambling to find child care. Many of the community's family child care facilities have waitlists …

The Ladysmith Boys and Girls Club is also bursting at the seams, having filled 45 spaces and accumulated a waitlist that almost matches that number, with 30 names on it. The club's central Island early child development coordinator Sarah Bryce says the club is the busiest it has been in years. So far this month they received 30 phone calls from people looking for spaces.

"There still are some spaces in the Chemainus Club," Bryce says.

If parents are willing to drop their children off in Chemainus, the club has a van to pick the children up after school. Bryce realizes the extra commute out of Ladysmith is not ideal, but at the moment it is one of the closer options.

A lack of qualified people coming into the child care field is taking a toll on part of Sandy Weeks' job finding care for children with special needs. As Ladysmith's liaison for PacificCARE, a child care resource and referral program, Weeks handles approximately 30 cases. Finding one-on-one care for the children has been a struggle, she says.

"For some of these kids, going into a group with 45 children is not an optimal setting," Weeks says.

Weeks says people working in the field saw warning signs of waning numbers entering the early child care field years before the current crunch. She believes the struggle can be traced back to the federal government's decision to cancel the Early Learning and Child Care Agreement in 2005, which represented a loss of $455 million over three years. She says the government keeps offering piecemeal packages, none of which make up for the massive funding loss.

"These are the results. (The government) is not putting funds into wages and yet there is all this research coming out that the early years are so important for brain development," Weeks says.