Mount Pleasant daycare stays open
Georgia Straight
March 26, 2009
By Matthew Burrows

Parents breathed a collective sigh of relief at the Vancouver park board meeting on March 23, as commissioners voted unanimously to allow the existing Mount Pleasant Community Centre daycare to stay open until March of next year.

This means the existing daycare will continue to operate after the new community centre at 1 Kingsway is completed in September, and until a new child-care building is ready at nearby Simon Fraser elementary school. ….

Many parents, including Mallory O’Connor, were upset….

“I’m here to support option two as an interim solution for the community centre,” she told commissioners. “I cycle-commute every day, and for us ease of access is one point, and the other is safety. I’m concerned about shuttling my four-year-old through the busy intersections at Main and Kingsway.”

Earlier in the meeting, Mount Pleasant Community Centre Association president Nancy Chiavario echoed these concerns.

“The 1 Kingsway site is not the right solution,” she said. “Where we are is the right solution.”….

Now Chiavario and her association have to raise money to keep the daycare going.

NPA commissioner Ian Robertson said at the meeting, “The real concern for me, as Commissioner [Constance] Barnes has outlined, and as parent of boys who are now teenagers, is that the angst and uncertainty around childcare is really an issue. What really concerned me in looking at option number one is the uncertainty. The fact that kids would be moved from a child-care facility and into a bus and over to another child-care facility—there are just a lot of unanswered questions. So I am pleased to see this amended motion put forward, and I support it wholeheartedly.”