Aspen Park scene of child care
Comox Valley Record
Jul 16 2009 
By: Lindsay Chung

….The school board recently decided to award a one-year contract for child care at Aspen Park to the Boys and Girls Club.

… As a result of the Comox Valley Child Care Survey and Community Needs Assessment, the Comox Valley Boys and Girls Club had sent a request to the school board to build a new multi-age group child-care facility licensed for 16 children on the school grounds.

The board had put out a request for proposals (RFP) for a full daytime program but has since cancelled it.

"As I understand, there is not enough room inside the school at this point to have an in-house day care in the fall," noted board chair Susan Barr.

The board also decided it will review its policy regarding day-care centres.

During its discussions about the Boys and Girls Club's proposal and the RFP process, trustees spoke about paying for or asking the public to pay for portables for day care when there is no space inside the school.

"The way our government is cutting the funding for us left, right and centre, I cannot with a conscience fork out money for a portable at this point in time, " said trustee Lori Fowler.

Barr was also not in favour of spending money on a portable.

"For me, if there's available space to support a day care after-school care, I'm fine with that, but we just went through the painful process of cutting a bunch of money out of our budget, and I couldn't see myself shelling out money to renovate space or to site a portable," she said. "I'm not so sure ... that I would really be prepared to say I would like to see if somebody would like to pay to site a portable at that school when I don't really know what we're doing with that school yet - not that we're really seriously contemplating changes, but we need to keep our options open."