After months of upheaval caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, it was a relief to nine-year-old Jaxen Ricard, as well as his mom and dad, when he was able to return to daycare last month, with the ramping up of child care facilities across the city.
Jaxen has been attending the same daycare run by Our Children, Our Future at St. Charles Catholic Elementary School — where he’s a student — since he was two years old.
His mom, Jessica Ricard, said the family had a well-established routine where she and her husband would drop Jaxen off together in the morning, go off to their jobs, and pick him up together at the end of the day.
With no child care, Jessica and husband, Eric, managed to adapt their work schedules, with Jessica working the early morning shift, and Eric working from the afternoon until late in the evening.
While Jessica said Jaxen may miss being able to go for a bike ride any time he wants, he’s glad to be back to some semblance of his normal life.
“He was excited, yeah, because it’s just getting back to the normal routine,” she said.
Jessica said she’s been impressed with the safety precautions taken by the daycare, which includes keeping the same group of kids together and not letting them mingle outside of their “cohort,” temperature checks at the door and increased handwashing.
She said Jaxen will also be going back to school in the fall — although he’s a good student, distance learning proved to be a frustrating experience for the family.
Sudbury.com put the question of daycare out to our readers on our Facebook page, asking if and when their child would be returning to their daycare.
While some parents, like Jessica Ricard, were reasonably comfortable with sending their kids back, others are more hesitant.
“I don't feel comfortable sending my kids to daycare right now,” wrote Devin Arthur.
“It's just another transmission point for the virus. The longer I can keep them home, the better. I am lucky enough to be working from home still, and watching them plus working has been a challenge, but I think we're better off.”
On Friday morning, the Ontario and federal governments announced new funding to help support child care in the province.
Premier Doug Ford said the two governments have earmarked $234.6 million for childhood and early years settings among licensed daycare facilities.
Ford says the child-care money will be used to enhance cleaning and public safety protocols for facilities including licensed daycare providers and First Nations Child and Family programs.
The government says it will be providing face coverings to all those settings, but did not immediately offer details of other measures the money would help fund.
Some Ontario daycare centres were operating throughout the pandemic, providing emergency child care for essential workers.
But they were able to open for regular service — albeit with many restrictions — starting June 12 as part of the province’s Stage 2 reopening, and the rules loosened up somewhat as of July 27, when daycares were able to operate with more children.
Last week, the province also released its plan to allow licensed child care centres across Ontario to open at full capacity starting Sept. 1.
The province promised guidance documents to support reopening child care and early years programs will be available shortly.
Enhanced health and safety procedures will remain in place, including requiring all child-care staff to wear masks at all times, screening of children and staff, and frequent cleaning of child-care centres.
Ford said last week that roughly 90 per cent of child-care capacity has been restored, with more facilities set to reopen next month.
Although daycares have technically been allowed to reopen for nearly two months, many Greater Sudbury child-care centres didn’t reopen until July or early August.
Terry Deforge, director of program and quality assurance with Our Children, Our Future, said the organization’s 10 sites reopened gradually between July 6 and July 20.
He said time was needed to prepare the child care centres for physical distancing and recalling staff members laid off during the pandemic.
“It was a very tedious process. and we wanted to make sure that when we were reopening we were doing it carefully and safely so that children and parents and staff would be as safe as possible,” Deforge said, speaking to Sudbury.com last week.
Our Children, Our Future’s sites are definitely not currently operating at full capacity, though. As of last week, Deforge said only 210 children were being cared for at its facilities, with that number typically being at 975 at this time of year.
He said this is because of restrictions imposed by the provincial government, and because some parents didn’t feel comfortable sending their kids back just yet.
When daycares first reopened, they were only allowed to operate with cohorts of just 10, including staff. But that cohort number was increased to 15 kids in a group, plus staff, as of the end of July.
Deforge said despite the change, Our Children, Our Future is staying with the cohorts of 10 for now, as some of the daycare sites wouldn’t be big enough for physical distancing with larger groups of kids.
“We have decided to maintain the 10 people total in our cohort,” he said. “We might look at adding one or two children in August in certain spaces. We do have a couple of spaces that might allow us to bring in an extra one or two children.”
Deforge said when the daycare sites first reopened, there was of course some concern from both families and staff members.
“But once they arrived and they went through the experience of being screened, and they were in the program, I think a lot of their fear was put at ease,” he said.
Tracy Saarikoski, executive director of Discovery Early Learning and Care, said her organization’s four sites reopened Aug. 4.
“We’re one of the later child-care programs to open,” said Saarikoski, adding they decided to wait until for details of the rules surrounding daycares and how they’ll be funded amid the pandemic.
“We are opening with faith that our expenses will be covered,” said Saarikoski, speaking to Sudbury.com last week, before the provincial-federal funding announcement. “It’s very costly to run, because we’re not at full capacity.”
She said even though daycares can currently operate with cohorts of 15 kids, Discovery Early Learning hasn’t been able to open up additional cohorts or add children to existing cohorts because it just doesn’t currently have the staffing.
“Every summer we would probably hire 25-30 more staff to our team to help with covering vacation and illness and all of that, and extra children with the school-age youth being with us all summer long, but we don’t have those staff hired,” she said.
“The staff that we thought might come back didn’t come back — they have chosen to stay at home on CERB or found other employment.
“At the church location, we would serve around 50 children a day. With the new cohort, we are serving 16 children, that’s it.”
-With files from Canadian Press
