Port Moody doesn’t have a daycare crisis, it has a shortage of play space for the daycares that have set up shop along the busy St. Johns Street corridor.
At least that’s the position of School District 43 officials who are negotiating with daycares that use Moody elementary school grounds for outdoor play for their children.
Last Tuesday’s board of education meeting — the first with the recently elected board, which includes three new trustees — was dominated by discussion about how to deal with the situation at the Port Moody school.
As many as five daycares use the Moody grounds after school and some have been letting children play in the covered area but the school administration says the activity is causing problems to orderly school dismissal and has blocked it from using the covered area until 3:30 p.m., 45 minutes after school has ceased.
This has angered some parents, who say it’s not fair that their children who go to the elementary school have to vacate the covered area and stand out in the rain while the rest of their peers get to use it while they wait for their caregivers.
“It’s an arbitrary decision by the principal,” said Lisa Tscherner, whose child attends Block 8 Academy, which operates out of the Port Moody Arts Centre and last year received a provincial grant for more child care spaces.
Block 8 would not comment because of negotiations, except to state that the issue has to be “examined carefully with a view to the longer term.”
But owner Danita Stepp said that using the school grounds for outdoor play is necessary to meet licensing requirements.
Daycares in urban areas, such as Port Moody’s downtown, are increasingly reliant on public outdoor spaces — schools and city parks — because the facilities are located in buildings without green space.
SECURITY CONCERNS
But that is putting an unfair pressure on the school district, which has to manage the situation, says secretary-treasurer Chris Nicolls.
“If you talk to parents whose children go to daycare along St. Johns, they don’t need more daycare space, they need outdoor play space. That’s what happens with urbanization,” said Nicolls, who said there have been security concerns at the school, such as doors propped open for easy access to the washroom, leaving the school open to intruders.
And with the SkyTrain nearby, transient people have been observed using the school grounds. At one point, police were called to remove two homeless people from the school grounds, Nicolls said.
Initially, coloured pinnies were handed out to keep track of students but didn’t solve the problem, according to the school district, and an effort by Port Moody Trustee Lisa Park to resolve the situation with a procedural amendment that would make caregivers, not the principal, responsible for students after school, was not approved.
Much of the current issue originates from a move by SD43 to reclaim classroom space to meet class size and composition after a 2016 Supreme Court of Canada decision. Three child care programs serving 70 students had to relocate from the school because Moody needed all the classroom space available.
Finding a way to meet family daycare needs and outdoor space requirements will be among the jobs of a new task force on daycare. But that group has yet to meet or even set out terms of reference.
TIGHT SQUEEZE
In the meantime, the district has produced a child care report showing that Moody is under capacity and still can’t house a daycare on the property while other schools, such as Eagle Ridge elementary, still manage to provide child care space even though they are over capacity.
But being under capacity is not the best way to measure daycare readiness, said Nicolls. In many cases, schools at or slightly under capacity that don’t have a daycare need every classroom to meet class size and composition requirements, according to Nicolls, because students with special needs are counted as two seats in a classroom.
Nicolls said schools that appear over capacity and have daycares are utilizing portables — including 30 new ones installed to meet the class size and composition requirements— but at 3.2 acres, Moody grounds are half the size of a typical elementary school, making placement challenging. There’s also the question of whether the district should pay $300,000 to put down a portable if it isn’t for educational use.
“What we have to do is hold firm and our obligation and duty is to supervise and dismiss kids in a safe environment,” Nicolls told The Tri-City News.
The updated child care report shows 2,074 spaces are located in SD43 facilities: 33 in owner-operated portables, six in SD43 owned portables and 44 in classrooms.
In the meantime, determining how to pay for more portables for daycares and the need for outdoor space for kids to play will likely be on the agenda of the child care task force when it meets in the new year as SD43 and the cities look for ways to take the province up on its offer to provide funds for more daycares.
