Creative ideas used to create child care; Reporter Maria Rantanen examines the struggles to develop, find and maintain spaces.
Maple Ridge-Pitt Meadows Times
December 7, 2007
By: Maria Rantanen

When women go back to work after having a child, it seems the only way to get decent child care is to create a daycare centre or bring someone in from 10,000 miles away to take care of your children.

That's what some women in Maple Ridge are doing as they plan to go back to work after a year of maternity leave.

However, while parents create their own solutions, some daycare centres struggle to find enough children to fill their programs and make ends meet.

As productive domestic work has decreased over the last century, women are keeping their jobs after having children to "bring home the bacon" instead of growing it in the backyard. With 70 per cent of women with children aged under five in the workforce, finding good quality child care has become a top priority for professional women.

One group of mothers has devised a "time share" daycare solution. Another mother of three is opening an entire daycare/preschool for 82 children in the heart of Maple Ridge where the focus is the needs of the parents, including what she calls flexible napping times and less rigid schedules than most centres have to offer.

Michelle Picard knew before her daughter Kaitlin was born six months ago that finding child care would be difficult and expensive. But now that she's looking at going back to work in May, she has had to create her own daycare spot to keep costs low.

"It's a struggle because there aren't a lot of spaces available," Picard said. When she was expecting Kaitlin, she said that she and her husband "naively" thought he, as a paraplegic who works from home, could look after their daughter. Now that she's an active six-month-old, they have realized that's not going to work.

Picard and three other mothers who met through a moms-and-tots meet-up group have decided to form their own daycare centre.

Depending on what licensing officials allow, the four children will be taken care of in either the former Thornhill Elementary school, or in the basement of Andrea Mellalieu-French, whose family owns the school.

The four families will get an international nanny who will board with the Mellalieu-French family. Each mother will work four days a week and spend one day with the nanny, so that there are two adults looking after the four children….

Senior staff members at School District 42 are not sure whether the ministry of education will accept school space used for daycare in its calculation of empty classrooms in the ongoing school closure process.

But school board chair Cheryl Ashlie said there is a precedent for it, and that the ministry, rather than making a "blanket policy" for the province, will look at each district's unique situation.

But, philosophically, having child care in schools is a positive bonus to the community.

"It goes to what we believe," said trustee Kathy Marshall.

There are also currently several applications to the school board to open daycares in school facilities.

"People would be more inclined to go to a school where there's a daycare," Ashlie said…

An informal assessment done by the society also showed a need for infant-toddler child care and before and after school care, but not necessarily for child care for children aged three to five.

But matching up needs and available facilities and transportation for daycare programs proved to be too difficult for one church, which had started a before and after school care.

Amazingly, with so many parents looking for quality daycare, one centre is actually closing because it can't find enough children.

Helen Houghton is the administrator at Burnett Fellowship on 123rd Avenue and she said she felt "really bad" about having to inform parents that their Rainbow Before- and After-School Care "ministry" was closing.

Houghton said perhaps the church didn't investigate the situation carefully enough, not realizing that drawing from only two schools wouldn't fill the 40 spots they had reserved for their program. Because they don't have a van for pick-up and drop-off, they can't service more schools.

"We couldn't get enough full-time kids to pay the salaries," Houghton said. Because the centre was in a church at Burnett Fellowship, there were no administrative costs and no rent, and the church considered it a part of their ministry….

"The government talks a lot about grants -- getting to those grants is impossible," Boatter said.

She has applied for a capital grant from the Ministry of Families and Child Development intended to help new daycares open, but she won't find out until the end of February, one month after the centre opens, whether she gets it.

This is the first time private daycare providers can apply for capital grants to start up a daycare centre.

The Child Care Resource and Referral Centre has been the only agency that has helped her through the process of setting up a business.

"They're going to be my backbone," Boatter said, adding that a lot of support for opening a child care centre has come from the community rather than the goverment.

When she's hiring, Boatter said she asks herself: "Am I going to leave my nine-month-old son with this person?"

Although the centre will be a for-profit centre, as opposed to a non-profit organization, Boatter said most of the money coming in will go to staffing.

"I've heard of infant-toddler (workers) making $10 per hour," Boatter said.

In child care, there is a lot of turnover in staff, and Boatter thinks it has to do with the low wages….

According to the Maple Ridge Child Care and Referral and Resource centre, about 60 per cent of licensed facilities are family daycares which are private; about 40 per cent are group daycares.