Daycare closure necessary, despite concerns: officials
Whistler mom unhappy with decision to close Teddy Bear in June
Whistler Question
By Jennifer Miller
March 27, 2008

If the Teddy Bear Daycare hadn’t been open on Monday (March 24), Bea Gonzalez would have been scrambling to find care for her 5-year-old son so she could go to work. In fact, if it weren’t for the Millennium Place daycare, Gonzalez said she’d have been stuck for childcare since she returned to work in February.

“The only place I can get childcare right now is at Teddy Bear,” she said. “Having Teddy Bear this winter has been a great lifesaver. If it wasn’t there, I don’t know what I would have done.”

Gonzalez said she’s “miffed” at last week’s announcement that the Village-located daycare is closing by the end of June and she doesn’t know why the decision was made to close the only Whistler daycare offering flexible services and weekend care.

Both of Gonzalez’s kids attended the Whistler Children’s Centre for years, and the care there has always been “superb,” but when she was planning to return to work this year the centre didn’t have space for her son. She’s been on a waiting list at the Children’s Centre since December.

Taking her son to Teddy Bear Daycare has allowed her the flexibility of working on holidays and the extended hours and ability to add or drop days at Teddy Bear have also been convenient, she said.

“None of that is offered at the Children’s Centre,” Gonzalez said. “What I really want to see is for Teddy’s not to close. It serves a need in the community not offered elsewhere.”

Dennis Marriott, general manager of Millennium Place, said the idea behind closing Teddy Bear Daycare is to make the best use of community resources and to find efficiencies where possible.

He said the Whistler Children’s Centre has space to integrate both the staff and kids who attend Teddy Bear, if they so choose, allowing the space the daycare occupies in Millennium Place to be used for other things — such as a central arts and culture hub in Whistler….

The Teddy Bear Daycare was created and is operating at near capacity, which is 16 children. “The program itself worked very well,” Marriott said, adding that staff has built a “great program.”

But when a childcare steering committee — including representatives from the municipality, Whistler Blackcomb, the Children’s Centre and others — met to evaluate Whistler’s changing daycare landscape, the unused capacity at the Children’s Centre Spring Creek location was identified, he said.

While the Whistler Children’s Centre’s two locations currently offer care Monday to Friday from 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., Teddy Bear is open 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Saturday. Sunday services were discontinued last summer because of a lack of demand, Marriott said.

Only a small percentage — about three of 16 kids, or about 19 per cent — of children are enrolled before 8 a.m. and after 5:30 p.m., and an average of three children attend the daycare on Saturdays, he said.

Teddy Bear is also the only Whistler daycare offering drop-in services to visitors, but Marriott said drop-ins average only three per day in the high season. …

There is a need for an arts and culture centre in Whistler and the space could potentially be used as a central location for event planning and delivering arts and culture programming by various organizations, he said.

“The general trend for the building is to become an arts and culture centre,” Marriott said.