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EXCERPTS
Quebec's Family Minister Michelle Courchesne announced at mid-week the addition of 18,000 new day-care places province-wide by 2010. The allocation of these places by region will be revealed at the beginning of August, about six weeks later then the previously announced June 15 date. In Laval, the need is estimated at 1500 places.
The 18,000 new places have been added to the 2,000 announced earlier, with the date advanced to 2010 from the previous 2012 target.
Timetable too short?
Day care institutions needing more space or additional facilities had to make their requests known by May 15. To date, unconfirmed figures point to demand submitted in 80,000 applications from day-care operators, according to Mr. Mario Boucher, Director-General, Centre de Regroupement des Centres de la Petite Enfance (CPE) de Laval. This extremely high demand accounts for the delay in the allocation of new places.
"As soon as the requests from day care operators came in, they were evaluated," Kim Ledoux, spokesperson for Minister Courchesne, told Courrier Laval at the beginning of the week.
Mr. Boucher explains that it's difficult for the Ministry of Family and Senior Citizens to estimate the demand for day care places, in the absence of a centralized mechanism to coordinate needs prevalent in the various regions of Quebec.
Presently, Laval is the only region with a centralized tool, a website that allows parents to put their children's names on a waiting list for day care places in a specific district.
"There is a project underway for a waiting list and coordinating mechanisms are expected to be set up in certain Quebec regions in the autumn," states Kim Ledoux, without specifying either location or numbers for these regional services to be placed at the disposal of parents seeking day care places for their children.
Places, places, and more places
Some solutions to the need for new day care places are looming on the horizon, among which are the expansion of existing day care centres, and the government takeover of private ones.
"Laval is an urban region with private day care centres. The Ministry could set up agreements with these private centres to create more places at $7," says Mr. Boucher.
Family Minister Michelle Courchesne is on record with previous promises to work with public day care centres, family day care services, and private day care institutions towards resolving the problem of scarce places for children.
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- reprinted from Courier Laval