Education Matters: New child care centre
- Details
- Published on Tuesday, October 9, 2018
Photo by Eoin Devereux
The new daycare at Neepawa Collegiate is beginning to rise above the ground as winter closes in.
Submitted
Neepawa Banner & Press
On June 27, 2017, Beautiful Plains School Division was notified that there would be a major addition to Neepawa and Area Collegiate along with a stand-alone child-care centre.
Growth in population in Neepawa and surrounding area over the past several years has created a need for both school space and daycare spots. This much needed space will provide facilities for our community, our division, our staff and our students.
In Manitoba, there are child-care centres located either in school buildings or stand-alone facilities on school division property. The Public Schools Finance Board Act, assigns The Public Schools Finance Branch (PSFB) with the responsibility of administering the capital support program. PSFB works in conjunction with Child and Family Services to assess the need for early learning or child care facilities in the communities where new schools are being built or when there are major additions to schools.
Located on the far northwest corner of the school division property, the child-care centre will be approximately 6,000 square feet and will accommodate 20 infants and 54 pre-school children for a total of 74 new spaces. This centre will be built in accordance with Manitoba Early Learning and Child Care design guidelines which deals with, among other items, overall space requirements per child both indoors and outdoors, group size per room, building layout, access to natural light, height of windows and various design details. The daycare building will be built in tandem with the addition to Neepawa and Area Collegiate. A majority of the funding for the addition and the stand-alone childcare centre comes from Public Schools Finance Board. Any balance in funding required for the addition will be borne by the School Division and for the childcare centre, it will be the provider.
The stand-alone childcare centre building will be owned by Beautiful Plains School Division with the childcare provider leasing the building from the School Division. The provider will be responsible for operating the childcare centre independently from the School Division. All daycare operations will be the responsibility of the daycare board including adhering to childcare standards that all licensed daycares in the province are required to meet.
As the childcare would provide care to children mainly from within School Division boundaries, the School Board Trustees felt it was important that an equitable process was used to select the childcare provider. A Request for Proposal (RFP) process was the selected method. This is similar to a tender process which the School Division uses when major purchases will be made such as school buses, fuel or when services for projects are required. An RFP outlines what is required in the proposal, details about the expectations of the School Division and the other party making the proposal and timelines for both parties to meet as well as information needed for the party making the proposal. Each proposal is evaluated based on specific criteria and then compared to determine which proposal will be chosen.
For the child-care RFP, high quality proposals were submitted from the local community clearly indicating their enthusiasm towards the childcare centre project. We thank all who took the time to prepare these proposals. The Board of Trustees is pleased to announce that the operator of the new child-care facility will be Budz N’ Bloom Day Care Centre Inc. Over the next year we will work with Budz N’ Bloom to prepare for the opening of the new child-care centre in the Fall of 2019.
