Daycares scrambling to meet new rules

Thestar.com
Oct. 30, 2015
By Marco Chown Oved

The Day Nurseries Act was updated this year to make it safer for kids in care, lowering the number allowed in unlicensed home daycares, beefing up rules for licensed daycares and increasing penalties for infractions.

Daycare operators around the city, many of whom have been in business for years, say the new rules, which came into force at the end of August, have created some unforeseen headaches.

They’ve been lobbying the province to create exceptions - so far, to no avail.

Parents and first aid

Co-operative daycares, which ask parents to come in one day per week to help paid staff, say the new rules have hit them hard.

Because parents are factored into the child-adult ratio, they now need to have the same first aid training as daycare staff.

The 80 parents at Creative Preschool at Danforth and Jones Aves., already have to provide a criminal record check and do a 1.5-hour safety training course, but now they’re being asked to take an additional two-day CPR course.

“It’s a lot to ask,” said supervisor Jennifer Davison.

Parents are already taking a half day out of their week to help supervise kids and making them pay for and take a weekend course is likely to push them to another daycare.

At Creative Preschool, the children are never alone with parents and the dozen paid staff on site everyday all have their CPR training, Davison said, arguing that additional CPR for parents is unnecessary.

Full-day kindergarten has taken many kids out of daycare, she said, and this requirement is likely to mean more will leave.

“It’s getting to the point where it’s getting hard to survive. We don’t know what we’re going to do.”

Unregistered home daycare complaints

Child care advocate Martha Friendly says the unregulated sector, which looks after about 80 per cent of kids in care, has no proactive inspections whatsoever and relies too heavily on parents to police their own children’s care.

While anyone can Google “child care complaints” and find the appropriate ministry website, there is no information there on what rules daycares are held to.

“If you have a complaint-based system, you have to go to some length so that people understand under what circumstances they can complain, what they can complain about and what can be done,” she said.

The only rule that unregistered home daycares must follow is a limit of five children under age 6. While people can make complaints about fire safety, food or other issues, the ministry can only enforce the numbers rule.

For this reason, Friendly says the province should embark on a public education campaign about the complaints process to ensure parents and neighbours know to look out for large groups of kids. This information could be clearly linked to the complaints website as well.

“We have a market-based system and people are treated as consumers (buyer beware), but they don’t have enough consumer information to make an informed choice - they don’t even know what the rules are,” she said.