Raising the bar
North Shore Outlook
By K McManus
September 17, 2009

…. staff at Capilano University’s childcare centre converted an extra office space into an experimental art room, what you might call a learning explosion. Right alongside those swaths of full-body toddler-art, the practicum students from Capilano U’s companion Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) programs posted notes and essays about brain development, framed photos of the kids diving into the paint. …

So the partnership – the childcare centre and the early learning courses – was just the right fit for a new degree program in early childhood education, says Capilano coordinator Jen Moses. This fall 35 students joined in the degree stream, the first of its kind in Western Canada. It’s an exciting development for the university, she says.

According to the North Shore municipalities, planners, and leaders in childhood education the new degree will offer a desperately needed boost to a childcare industry described as chronically underfunded and understaffed….

EDUCATORS, NOT BABYSITTERS

….She describes her staff as passionate educators who want to push the understanding of how young minds absorb information and how young children relate to the people around them….

One-hundred-seventy-three children make up the centre’s waiting list.

Priority goes to students and to potential staff who hope to work there … The centre is the kind of place that actually keeps staff for decades in a field where the turnover for early childhood educators on the front lines is about three years, and this is one key draw for parents like Cook.

“In an industry where the pay is so low and the burnout volume can be so high it’s really unique that they’re able to retain teachers for so long,” says Cook. “The pay (for childcare workers) is terrible.”

That “terrible” pay facing graduates is part of a child care crisis according to the North Shore Child Care Resources and Referral program (NSCCRR).

A 2008 wage survey found most local childcare workers can expect to make between $14 and $18 per hour on the North Shore. Administrators and supervisors could make between $20 and $22 per hour.

Lori Roberts, who graduated from Capilano’s ECCE diploma program in 1991 and now works for NSCCRR, says the $20-dollar range is high.

“Eighteen dollars (per hour) would be somebody that’s probably a senior teacher on the floor and that would be an incredibly high salary. I managed a childcare and barely made that.”

The resource program surveyed 33 preschool and group daycare centre workers from centres across the North Shore and found less than half of those respondents had medical or dental benefits.

Fewer than 10 per cent held a pension plan and none were unionized.

Just over half of those surveyed had seen a salary increase in the previous two years.

This is the kind of bad-news sandwich Jen Moses, coordinator with Capilano’s ECCE program, delivers unto the new recruits….

Coordinator Jen Moses says the diploma and the new degree programs blend the concepts of childcare and education. We tend to think learning begins in kindergarten, she says, but the years from zero to six years old are a critical stage in the child development.

“We know what happens every day, every minute of a child’s day is about learning and teaching and care,” explains Moses. “They need to be respected and cared for and listened to and understood as engaging thinkers. So they may still need their diaper changed. They may need assistance to get up on a chair, but it doesn’t mean they need somebody to do their thinking for them.”

HIGHER PARENT FEES FOR HIGHER WAGES?

Andrea Smith, another ECCE degree-candidate and a teacher at the childcare centre, says those learning philosophies at Cap U have attracted her to the program and kept her in the field.

“The pay is horrible, especially if you have a family. I don’t see how you can afford it (to work in childcare).” But she adds, “I love what I do and hopefully I’ll always be able to make it work.”

Her colleague Chan is just as optimistic, hoping to transition into a research career in early learning or a university teaching job.

Moses hopes very much that these young people will do as Chan plans and “ladder” into senior research and policy positions.

She says that trend may elevate the position of early learning in the public eye: “Put those people around decision-making tables and I think it can have a massive impact on where early childhood education can go in this province.”

Jean Christie isn’t so sure that will happen – what she agrees would be a much-needed elevation in the position of childcare workers. Christie is the director of the Lonsdale Creek daycare centre society, now a three-decades old non-profit operation that serves 130 families.

“We’ve now got a degree program,” said Christie, herself a graduate of Capilano’s ECCE program in the 1970s. “Are people going to stay in the field for 14, 16, 18 dollars an hour?”

It’s a tension point that childcare providers bring up again and again. The revenue for childcare workers comes in the form of parent fees. But raising those fees pits struggling families against the workers struggling to stay in the field.

“But that’s who you’re negotiating with,” explains Moses. “So you’re turning to a single parent or any parent in your group and you’re asking them for more money so you can make more money. It’s a very delicate situation.”

More than 75 per cent of surveyed parents told the Canadian Childcare Advocacy Association of Canada that a lack of affordable childcare is a serious problem in this country. On the North Shore, placing an infant or a toddler in full-time childcare can cost anywhere between $45 and $150 per day.

Next week The Outlook talks to parents about the childcare options on the North Shore. With somewhere around 335 licensed facilities offering spots for 5,300 children, wait lists can be long – sometimes in the ball park of 500 families long.