This won’t be news to many young families in Prince George, but the city is suffering from a dire shortage of toddler/infant child care spaces.
The My PG Now newsroom contacted the largest child care centres in town and found they were all dealing with significant waiting lists.
“The waiting list for our under three year old program is extensive. The kids on that list will be six before they ever get in” A spokesperson with the Carney Hill Neighborhood Centre said.
Stephanie with the YMCA says they are in the same boat “Lot’s of parents, if they know they are whatever number down the list, they won’t even bother. It’s definitely to that extent.”
She says the YMCA’s new Lac des Bois Family Development Centre opening this spring will have 12 more toddler spaces to cope with demand.
The College of New Caledonia’s daycare centre confirmed they have several children on a list waiting for the two toddler/infant spaces they have.
Child Development Centre Executive Director Darrell Roze says the crunch is due to a shortage of early childhood educators. “That’s one of the challenges that we have right now; there’s too many daycare classes and not enough early childhood educators.”
In his opinion, recent funding from the provincial funding has missed the mark. “If you subsidize the expansion of daycare spaces and there isn’t enough people to staff them. Then it makes it really difficult for everyone in the field.”
Children below the age of three require a 4 to 1 child to staff ratio, meaning that toddler care can be a costly business to get into.
“If you have a regular day care class that isn’t dealing with toddlers, then they would be able to have twice as many children.” Roze says “Unless you are able to charge a very high rate, that becomes a difficult thing to provide.”
He added that many of the day care subsidies for low income families have not kept up with inflation, putting centres that have an affordability mandate like Carney Hill and the CDC, in a tough spot.
For kids over the age of three, the daycare crunch isn’t nearly as dire. But according to the CDC, 54% of children in the South Fort George Bowl Area hit kindergarten with some form of developmental delay or special needs. Roze says right now, extra support workers are simply not available to give those children the extra support they need.