City opening emergency childcare for essential workers

Torontosun.com
Jan. 4, 2021
Kevin Connor

Essential service workers can rest assured their kids will be looked after during the remote learning week, thanks to the opening of emergency child care spaces.

That will be between January 4 to 8 as provincial lockdown measures apply to school-aged children in publicly-funded elementary schools.

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This measure is for designated essential service providers who aren’t able to keep their kids at home while they attend work.

During the week, child care programs for infants, toddlers and preschoolers will operate as usual.

Home child care programs are allowed to provide care to kindergarten and school-aged children.

Child care programs for kindergarten and school-aged children in child care centres will not be operating.

Those child care providers who don’t run programming during this period can’t charge fees during this time, and parents will not lose their child care space.

The list of eligible workers is available on the Province of Ontario’s COVID-19 website.

“The City of Toronto was the first municipality to offer emergency child care when the pandemic began to help our frontline heroes. I commend city staff as well as our partners at the Province of Ontario for making this service available again for essential workers,” said Mayor John Tory.

“I’m pleased that three of our city locations as well as our Toronto Home Child Care Agency have offered to provide emergency child care services to support some of the families of the essential service workers we rely on during the current lockdown period.”