Child care relief needed
Vancouver Island News Group - Victoria News
February 22, 2008
Opinion

We're in favour of doing more to support working families and providing more resources during the critical first five years of life. However, we're not sure about the wisdom of the government's plan to spend a year researching at least one of their ideas.

In Tuesday's throne speech, the province announced a new agency focused on early childhood learning. Among the ideas floated during the speech were expanding the hours of kindergarten classes from half day to full day. It's a concept supported by the B.C. Teachers Federation, which says they've been proposing the full-day kindergarten for almost two decades.

Currently, kids begin their journey through the public school system at the age of five. That first foray into formalized education consists of half-a-day of semi-structured play. It's a great system for stay-at-home parents or working moms and dads in jobs with flexible hours. It takes considerable more work for the majority of working parents who can't schedule their workday around their kids.

For these parents, the struggle begins once maternity leave ends. Soon to be released statistics, released exclusively to the News, help illustrate just how difficult it is to find child care in this city. The Regional Child Care Council found that 37 out of 50 daycares sampled had an average of 44 families on their waitlist. One daycare had 400 families lined up for a space to put their child.

The survey counted about 3,500 spaces in total for the 17,500 children under the age of five living in this region.

Those numbers add up to a considerable crunch of kids trying to find room in care programs.

We think the province needs to act on its plan and introduce full-time kindergarten sooner than later….

The B.C. Government and Services Employees' Union argues that the government needs to put money directly into creating daycare spaces instead of wasting cash on studies. The fear is that lowering the age of entry to the public school system will have a devastating impact on existing child care infrastructure. Both non-profits and home-based businesses that provide child care will suffer from staff shortages and unfair competition. Even more troubling for some is the idea of children so young being placed in formal learning environments. Toddlers need unstructured playtime, which they might not get from schools with homogenized curriculums.

There are plenty of questions about the benefits of lowering the age for entry into the school system. A government study might help answer some of these, or it might just lead to an endless chain of reviews and reports.

Regardless, it will cost taxpayers money. And that's sure to raise the ire of the cash-strapped child care industry that has the most to lose.