As child care expands in Ontario, advocates wonder who will staff those spaces
Global News
With 71,000 new spaces promised as part of the deal, the sector wonders who will staff all those new rooms if centres are already having trouble keeping their doors open.
TORONTO — Andrea Lewis has been having trouble recruiting and retaining staff at her Manitoulin Island child-care centre, to the point where she has been forced to close the daycare for six weeks.
The last staff member to leave went to the school board, where many early childhood educators have been enticed to work, she said.
“It’s shorter hours, you get all the holidays, the pay is better — we can’t match that,” Lewis said.
“I’m finding that also a lot of people are getting burnt out ,…They’re just leaving the sector in total, because they didn’t get that recognition during those few years of COVID and I think it’s just taking a really big toll on them.”
Lewis’s centre is one of several across Ontario to close their doors for varying lengths of time recently due to staffing shortages. She is able to reopen the school-aged program next week, but is hoping she can reopen the room for younger kids on Nov. 1.
That’s the same day as the deadline for licensed child-care operators to decide if they want to opt in to the $10-a-day program.
The deadline was extended after the government changed some guidelines to entice more for-profit operators to sign up, but with less than one month to go, progress still varies widely by municipality. Some smaller jurisdictions have seen all providers opt in, while others only have about 50 per cent uptake.
In Toronto, more than 70 per cent have opted in, while it is at about 85 per cent in Durham Region and about 57 per cent in Peel Region.