Early school great investment
Times Colonist
Ann Wilmut
November 19, 2009

When I read Janet Mort's timely and wonderful Nov. 15 article about planning and implementing an all-day kindergarten program for B.C.'s children, I wanted to stand up and cheer.

As a mother, retired early childhood educator, including special needs, and now the adoring grandmother of a two-year-old, I feel it is nothing but nonsense that we do not provide quality early childhood "school" experiences to children, certainly from the age of five up and not impossibly from even earlier ages.

We have all the means to train quality staff, the available workforce, space in empty schools and classrooms and the finances.

Mort wrote "tough economic times bring tough priority choices; less important offerings will have to be sacrificed." Not to denigrate the excitement of those involved in all the pre-Olympic celebrations, but I deplore the extremity of the cost for something so transitory, for the benefit of so few, for a brief moment in time.

Our children, and what we invest in them, are forever.