Last November, Melissa Bruno and other parents found themselves fighting with their daycare after the privately owned Sunnyside Daycare in High Park sent a letter to parents stating that it would be leaving the Canada-wide Early Learning and Child Care program as of January 1st.
The daycare’s two west-end locations were two out of 14 centres in the city that gave notice they were leaving the $10-a-day system after the province announced a long-awaited new funding formula last summer. The national program subsidizes fees for parents and in Ontario, they have so far been cut at least in half with a goal of getting to $10 a day by 2026.
Ontario has been pushing the federal government for more money, saying that the province has so far used the federal funding to cut fees for parents, but that little money is left to help operators add more spaces or help ease an early childhood educator recruitment and retention crunch.
“We were shocked like that wasn’t a thing that we had anticipated or planned for. We thought all the operators had to stay in the program until 2026,” said Bruno.
“They eventually responded to us by saying that the program simply wasn’t viable and that we had until the end of November to decide whether we were going take our children out and find alternative care or pay,” she explained, adding that it would have cost her $4,700 a month for son and daughter.
“That’s just simply not affordable for most people.”
Bruno and other parents pulled their kids out of the daycare while reaching out to the media and creating a petition that garnered hundreds of signatures advocating for the daycare to change course. On January 23rd, it seemed like the caregivers had won when the centre sent out a letter saying that after consulting with government officials, childcare professionals and other daycare operators, it would remain in the program.
But for the families who spoke out their troubles didn’t end there.
“We were super happy and so all the parents that had left, we contacted the daycare by phone, in writing, in person, to ask that our children be re-enrolled in the vacant spaces. And all of those requests have gone virtually unanswered.”
Bruno and the other parents are now left wondering if they would be in this predicament if they didn’t speak out.
“We’re absolutely enraged. A directive should have been given to the daycares proactively, as a gesture of good faith to the community in which they serve, that these families that were forced to leave because of the decisions that they made be offered a vacant spot.”
CityNews reached out to Sunnyside Daycare but has yet to receive a response.
