Manitoba childcare shortages are very real and in your town

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Published on Thursday, September 29, 2016

By Tony Eu

Neepawa Banner/Neepawa Press

In Manitoba, we have a problem with child care services. That problem being that there simply aren’t enough of them.

As of July 31, 2016, the wait list for childcare in Manitoba contained 14,872 names. That means there are nearly 15,000 children waiting to get into a daycare, 15,000 children who need a place where they will be looked after and cared for while their parents, or parent, go to work.

Neepawa and the surrounding area aren’t exempt from this backlog of childcare spaces. In Neepawa, the largest daycare, Budz N’ Bloom Daycare Centre, can look after 52 children. In 2015, they had 131 names on their waiting list and that number is only growing.

Home daycares in the area are facing a backlog that’s just as bad. Steven Strelzick runs one such home daycare and he’s looking at a waiting list of 34 children. His daycare only has room for eight.

In order to combat this issue of space, the individuals in charge of our daycares are looking for ways to expand. Budz N’ Bloom, currently the only non-home based daycare in Neepawa, is focusing on getting a before and after school program up and running.

“[A before and after school program] is our primary [goal],” said Marla Steen, the treasurer for Budz N’ Bloom. She elaborated on why they chose to focus on a program like this, rather than expand their actual daycare, saying, “If we can find a space, we can open in a shorter time frame. We can get it up and running, whereas actually making a new daycare somewhere, there’d be a lot of planning and permits and that kind of stuff. But if we can get a before and after going, sooner than later, then we can relocate it to a permanent place once we’re able to secure one.”

“It would provide care before and after school, [during] in-services, Christmas break. [School age children] still need care, just not as long a day as a preschooler would,” Steen said about the program.

Another benefit of an after school program, outside of the actual daycare, is that it will open up spaces at the centre for more preschool aged children. These age groups need care all day, rather than just the hours before and after school.

“Being able to expand [the daycare centre] and offer more spots would definitely be a goal for our future, but we don’t have a definite plane in the works,” Steen added.

While there are no definite plans for a new centre, Budz N’ Bloom, Beautiful Plains School Division (BPSD) and the province of Manitoba are working towards that goal, according to Shannon Bayes, the secretary/treasurer for BPSD.

As for the before and after school program, Budz N’ Bloom is working to open programs in both Eden and Neepawa. In Eden, the program will be operated out of J.M. Young School, which is the elementary school there. The program will be operated under the umbrella of Budz N’ Bloom, with the daycare providing the staff and running the program under their permits. While they have the space, a start date for the program has yet to be determined.

“The program cannot be implemented until the occupancy permit is obtained,” said Danielle Carefoot, the parent contact for the program. Carefoot acts as a liaison between the program board members/parents and the director of Budz N’ Bloom. The Eden program is still waiting on a fire inspection before they can obtain the occupancy permit.

When asked about the demand for a program like this in Eden, Carefoot responded, “There has been significant interest in this program and parents continue to contact me to have names added to the list of children needing before and after school child care.”

In Neepawa, Budz N’ Bloom is still looking for a place to run the program.

The daycare centre made a request to BPSD for school space in Neepawa, however, due to the number of extracurricular activities, school and community run, the school board denied their request. “It’s difficult to find space in the school,” Bayes remarked.

“We’d really like to be able to partner with an organization in town and offer the space sooner than later, that’s our goal,” Steen noted. “We’ve had children in our centre that we had to turn away once they reach school age, because we don’t have the space. [It’s] unfortunate, when they come from an infant up and we can’t provide the care anymore,” she remarked. “We’d like to be able to do that now. For them,” she stressed.

While Budz N’ Bloom continues to work on getting their before and after school program up and running, Steven Strelzick has got his own plans to help lessen the daycare supply and demand gap, by building a new daycare centre.

“In the last year and a half we’ve gone through all the necessary regulations to get approval to get to this point,” Strelzick said. “We’re using the old Access to Books site, [corner of Brydon St. and Mountain Ave.] and we’re going to renovate the existing building. Because the structure’s sound, [we’re going to] renovate and build on to it.

The new centre, which will be called the Little Sharks Early Learning Centre, will be able to look after 49 children: 12 infants, 22 preschoolers and 15 school age kids. In the coming weeks, Strelzick will be holding a logo design contest for the daycare, so keep for eyes peeled for more information on that.

Along with a donation from the Beautiful Plains Community Foundation, Strelzick is selling 50/50 tickets at some businesses around town in order to help raise funds to support the construction of the daycare. Construction is planned to start in the next few months.

“We hope to open as soon as March 2018. If we can open sooner we will, it’s just a matter of getting licensed and getting everything in order that way. Then having enough funds to supply it with toys, tables, chairs, everything you need,” Strelzick said.

These new initiative to create more space in daycares are a good start, but they won’t be enough on their own. Growth in Neepawa will keep creating the need for more and more spaces in daycares. From natural birth growth to increased immigration, Neepawa has a lot of work to do if we want to maintain current waiting list numbers, let alone decrease them.