Renovation, staff expenses blamed for lack of infant daycare

CTV Kitchener: Daycare Dilemma, Part 2 Moving more infants and toddlers into Ontario daycares isn’t as easy as was hoped. Second part of a series from Lee Boyadjian.

The introduction of full-day kindergarten was supposed to open up spots for infants and toddlers in Ontario daycares.

So why is it that of the 20,000 new daycare spots opened up during the four-year rollout of full-day kindergarten, most are being used to care for kindergarteners before and after school?

Local daycare providers say it’s because of the cost that would be involved in retrofitting current facilities to handle younger kids and hiring more staff to help take care of them.

One staff member is needed for every three infants attending a licensed daycare.

With Waterloo Region only having enough daycare space for 12 per cent of the region’s children, some daycares say best financial decision is to focus on before-school and after-school care instead of taking in younger kids.

That leaves kids like Theodore James with no option but to start out in unlicensed daycare – home care.

Theodore’s parents wanted him at a licensed centre, but were unable to find one until he was a bit older.

“We noticed a big difference from when he transitioned from home daycare to the learning centre,” says mother Roshan James.

But other parents – like Mary Feldskov – say home daycares provide the best environment for young children –like three-year-old Audrey – to develop.

“The next best thing to being at home with her own mom is to be at home with someone else’s mom,” Feldskov says.

When Feldskov was ready to go back to work, she was so sure she wouldn’t be able to find licensed care that the first place she looked for daycare was Kijiji.

“Then we called some of our neighbours and our friends, talked to people at church and got several referrals from our network,” she says.

Despite the continued difficulty in finding licensed daycare for young children, local daycare officials say change is on the horizon.

“We’ve certainly had a number of programs who have come on board very, very quickly and some more waiting to see what the impact will be on them,” says Nancy Dickieson, Waterloo Region’s director of children’s services.

One of those organizations to include younger children “very, very quickly” is the YMCA.

John Haddock, CEO of both the Kitchener-Waterloo and Cambridge YMCAs, says the organization would take on even more toddlers if there was a demand for them to do so.

“We’ve been able to increase the number of spaces we have toddler-aged children, but we haven’t had the uptake yet of the toddler-aged children,” he says.

To date, the provincial government has spent more than $100 million to help retrofit daycare spaces for younger children.

CTV’s Lee Boyadjian is looking at the state of daycare in Waterloo Region in a special series this week on CTV News.