Thank you, Madam Speaker. I have been hearing much lately about GNWT initiatives for early childhood development and early childhood education. I’m fully supportive of these initiatives. In fact, I think we should be putting more money into improving programs and services for our children aged zero to three.
Today I want to highlight some of the implications of the government’s early childhood development initiatives. The Department of Education will, in September 2014, start junior kindergarten in 29 of our 33 communities, and that will expand to all 33 communities by September 2016 when it will start in Yellowknife. Yellowknife is one of only a few NWT communities where there are several fairly large licenced daycares, and preschool or junior kindergarten programming is available at all Yellowknife school boards. But the implementation of junior kindergarten in 2016 will impact both the daycares and the schools.
My first concern: Junior kindergarten will provide an opportunity for parents to place their four-year-old into free classes instead of the fee-charging daycares, Montessori, or school-run junior kindergarten. For daycares, which are a for-profit business, who take children from a few months to four years of age, the four-year-olds provide the greatest chance for profit. The required ratio of caregiver to children is less than that for the zero to three-year-olds, and the business can register more four-year-olds than they can babies. Junior kindergarten will draw all those four-year-olds away from the daycares and into free junior kindergarten. In order to replace those four-year-olds with younger children, the daycare will have to hire more staff, thus losing out on their profit opportunity.
It’s quite likely that at least one daycare will lose enough of their profitability that the business will have to close, and in the end all that will accomplish is a reduction in the number of available child care spaces when they’re in short supply already. Yellowknife daycares have already seen a drop in their enrolments after the schools added their junior kindergarten fee-paying programs.
A second concern: Another initiative of ECE is to require certification of early childhood educators. That’s all well and good, but better qualified instructors means higher remuneration for staff and higher costs for the business that employs them. Will the Department of Education amend the ECD funding formula to assist daycares with the extra staffing costs they will incur? Apparently not.
I seek unanimous consent to conclude my statement.
---Unanimous consent granted
I inquired of the Minister of Education a short while ago whether or not his department will make any adjustments to the funding formula for daycares as a result of the implementation of junior kindergarten. The response from his office indicated no funding changes are coming. According to reports in the news media, the Minister has said that daycares will be provided with infrastructure money to change four-year-old spaces to spaces for babies or toddlers, but money for cribs and blankets doesn’t address the problem of bigger wage costs.
Until we have publicly funded early childhood care/early childhood education, the GNWT must increase the funding assistance for licenced daycares or we will lose some of our present services. I urge the Minister of Education to reconsider his $780 infrastructure funding announcement and provide more operational funding for licenced daycares to ensure we keep the daycare spaces we now have.
I will have some questions to the Minister of Education at the appropriate time.
Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. The Member for Inuvik Boot Lake, Mr. Moses.
