A lack of childcare spaces has reached a critical point in the South Cariboo for parents like Jayme Klingbell.
Klingbell told the Free Press back in June of this year that she put her daughter on the waitlist of as many of the daycares as she could in August of 2022 thinking a year would be more than enough time to secure a space.
“There has been no movement at all from any of the ones I had contacted so I just had to go on leave without pay,” she said in an update on Nov. 5.
She and her husband are currently planning to reevaluate the situation in the New Year and see what her options are then.
“My options, really, are to apply for something remote, see if the job that I currently have can offer something remote, or I’m going to have to resign,” she said. “Those are my only options coming up unless something opens up, right, then I can go back to work.”
Klingbell is not alone in her attempts to find care for her child. She said every other day on some of the parents’ pages she belongs to on Facebook she sees people asking if anyone has heard anything about daycare.
Vasylyna Delone and her son came to Canada to escape the war in Ukraine. When she arrived in the South Cariboo she hoped to put her son in daycare so he could make friends and she could begin making a life for them.
Unfortunately, as is the case with many parents in the area, there were no spaces available. This has led to a great deal of stress and anger on her part.
Back in Ukraine they also have a queue but when children are born parents are warned to register them and when they are three they will have a place. “When my son was one week old I immediately put him on the registration of a state kindergarten in Ukraine,” she said.
ChildCareBC was launched in 2018 and includes the New Spaces Fund which is designed to support not-for-profit, Indigenous, and public sector organizations, including municipal governments to create new licensed child care facilities. Since the launch of the program, 290 new childcare spaces have been funded and 55 of these new spaces are operational in the Cariboo.
Additionally, the Start-Up Grants program is designed to increase the number of licensed childcare spaces available to B.C. families by supporting individuals who want to operate a licensed childcare facility in their personal residence. A spokesperson for the Ministry of Education and Childcare said that there are currently more than 820 licensed childcare spaces available in the Cariboo including 32 $10 a day ChildCareBC spaces.
Yet according to the 2021 Stats Canada population census, at the time there were 470 children ages 0-4 and 530 ages 5-9 in the South Cariboo alone.
With so many parents struggling to find suitable care for their children in B.C., some are turning to nannies.
Sharon Leboe of 100 Mile House recently retired after a long career as a live-in nanny. Her career has taken her to B.C., Alberta and California plus four orphanages in Thailand, Taiwan, Mexico and South Africa.
“I went to Kwantlen College in Richmond, B.C in 1989,” Leboe said. “They had a six-month nanny course - I have been a live-in nanny ever since.”
The course consisted of things such as child development, sociology, literature and cooking. It also had two home placements, one daycare and one kindergarten placement, she said.
One of the problems she has run into is how much some people are prepared to pay for her services.
“Families don’t or can’t afford to pay minimum wage or higher,” she said. Last summer she tried a job but they were only paying $30 per day.
“It wasn’t worth it with having to pay for gas and my meds in order to work.”
Elke Baechmann, family literacy coordinator with the Cariboo-Chilcotin Partners for Literacy Society in 100 Mile, said her daughter works as a nanny in Kamloops while working on her early childhood education online.
“The third family that she is working for has especially younger kids who needed a spot, and didn’t get a daycare spot so they chose the nanny.”
She said her daughter is lucky to be in Kamloops as she has families who work on the Trans Mountain Pipeline. It makes it easier if the parents have jobs that pay well to pay it down to the nanny.
“But in town, I know it’s hard if you’re a nanny just to get minimum wage.”
Baechmann works with StrongStart and said she knows how hard it is for families when the mom wants to go back to work and they can’t get a daycare spot, so they have to look for private solutions.
It is not just a lack of daycare spaces creating the problem, a lack of trained early childhood educators (ECEs) is contributing to the issue.
As part of the ChildCareBC plan, the provincial government launched the Early Care and Recruitment and Retention Strategy to help recruit more childcare workers by helping with education costs, enhancing wages and providing access to training and professional development.
“Eligible ECEs working at participating licensed child care facilities will receive a $2-per-hour raise in January 2024, based on hours worked in December 2023, on top of the existing $4-per-hour raise. This government-funded raise is the most recent in a series of increases to the ECE Wage Enhancement, bringing the total raise to $6 per hour and increasing the median wage for ECEs up to approximately $28 per hour,” the province said in an Oct. 30 news release.
Baechmann is not sure why there are not more spots available in 100 Mile but thinks it is a smart move by the government to provide incentives through the ChildCareBC plan.
“Hopefully with that people more interested in getting into that field or even in opening up centres again, because they get the support from the government to pay employees a decent and deserved wage, right?”
The lack of childcare in the South Cariboo is one that affects a lot of people, said Klingbell. She is just putting the issue on the back burner because, for now, it’s a 2024 problem until something changes.
“There will be a lot of people reading that story and going “oh, this is me.’”
