Originally posted at The Whole Buffalo Review.
If you are wondering what all the fuss at the heart of the conflict over overcrowding at École La Vérendrye is about, it can be summed up in two words: child care.
I have three children at La Vérendrye. My oldest also went there, from nursery through grade six, so we witnessed the growth of enrolment first hand. I work at home, so I am able to be home from school, but my youngest is enrolled in kinder care - for nursery - so I can actually get work done until school ends at 3.
Some have blamed the parents at La Verendrye for not doing to enough to plan for overcrowding. This is unfair: it was obvious the school was running out of room, and there were efforts to have the WSD address the overcrowding issue dating back several years.
The tipping point, however, was in January 2015, that parents learned that the school would likely lose 25 child care spaces in the upcoming year, in part due to new construction of a gym.
Child care is a deal breaker when it comes to choosing a school. In today’s economy, whether you can get affordable child care can make the difference between whether or not you can pay your bills. The cost of daycare per child can easily exceed the cost of university tuition.
La Verendrye’s parents run their own child care program at the school. The management are unpaid parent volunteers, the costs are low, and the paid caregivers are often parents too. Different care options are available, but a parent can drop their child off at 7:30 am and pick them up at 6pm for $180 a month. Because the school division will not pay to supervise children at lunch time, parents also have to pay $22 a month to have staff watch their children.
There were several reasons for the push for a swap with Earl Grey - another public school two blocks away with a capacity of 600 but about 225 students. One was that you could keep both schools mostly intact, so siblings could stay together, but it would avoid buying entirely new libraries and equipment. But above all, to guarantee there would be enough child care spaces.
However, one of the reasons the WSD has given for turning down the swap is that Earl Grey parents would have difficulty with their own child care.
That is because Earl Grey parents do not run their own child care program. They do have a Montessori School and three other private child care companies, one of which charges $416 a month for preschool. According to their website, employees have “excellent salaries and bonuses”, group benefits, three weeks vacation, and pension contributions.
The major stumbling block for moving Earl Grey students to Laverendrye was because it was argued that the private daycare could not be relocated and relicensed in time for next year. The fact that the daycare had installed $45,000 worth of equipment in the school.
This is part of the root of the frustration for La Verendrye. While the child care needs of Earl Grey were recognized as a central concern, those at La Verendrye have gone unaddressed. We didn’t just need more educational space, we needed more child care space that supported French Milieu, and that hasn’t happened.
The plan to re-open Sir William Osler makes educational sense, but it has no child care spaces, and no before-and-after program, because there are no parents there to set it up. Instead, all the youngest children will be shuttled back and forth between Osler and La Verendrye, where parents will continue to provide low-cost care.
All of the costs and inconvenience have been concentrated on parents at La Verendrye. Not knowing where your child is going to school next year is only part of the equation: it is whether they will have child care at all, or whether you will have to make job arrangements or cut your salary to care for them, or spend thousands more a year putting in them in care.
$15-a-day care is supposed to be cheap, but it is $300 a month and $3,000 during the school year - for one child. For many parents, that is more than they pay in school taxes.
That is the kind of money that all-day kindergarten could help save parents. But it is not going to French Milieu schools, it is going to Harrow and Earl Grey, in part as an incentive to shore up flagging enrolment.
In many ways, the WSD is having to cope with failures elsewhere. In this case, it is the fact that today, it is almost impossible to raise a family on one income. If nothing else emerges from this debacle, it should be the lesson that not having child care can make or break a school, but it can also make or break a family.
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