New staff member saves Victoria daycare from losing spaces, but struggles remain

A Victoria daycare has bought itself time through a last-minute hire, after nearly being forced to tell two dozen families their children would no longer have a child-care spot. The non-profit group says its position highlights a greater problem in our work force.

“Boy oh boy, this has been a rollercoaster for us for a couple weeks,” says Oaklands Community Association executive director Mira Laurence.

The association’s daycare, Little Acorn, has received three resignations from its early childhood educators in the last two weeks. The association says two are leaving the industry altogether and another is moving to another company for more money.

“We want to expand our child care, open up new spaces, and then we found ourselves in a situation like, ‘Oh my goodness, we don’t have enough child-care workers to maintain the services that we have now.”

Oaklands Community Association notified parents it would be doing a lottery system to decide which of the 43 children got to stay, and which half of families would need to find another option.

“When you get an email in your inbox saying that they’re being forced to reduce numbers, it’s very anxiety-inducing and very stressful,” says Little Acorn parent Chelsey Rossner.

Thankfully, staff managed to hire someone within an hour of running the lottery draw – buying the center time until the end of June to continue recruiting new ECEs.

“We’re not out of the woods yet at all,” says Laurence. “We need some more help to recruit ECEs, to offer a fair wage to everybody.”

The province’s minister of state for child care says the struggle over hiring early childhood educators is a problem B.C.-wide, and the government has been working to resolve it since 2017.

“When I started this work, (the pay) was about $17-18 an hour now to an average of $25 an hour,” says Katrina Chen. “But we still have a lot more work to do to make sure we’re finding every way possible to support early childhood educators – including more than doubling the post-secondary institution training seats for early childhood educators, providing bursaries so they can pay for most of their tuition fees, looking at provincial-nominee programs to encourage newcomers to become early childhood educators.”

Oaklands Community Association has two portable classrooms on Belmont Avenue that are ready to expand its child-care services. The group has approval to add infants and preschoolers and expand out-of-school care. It says ECE positions have been posted for months, but opening of new services has been delayed until management can find people to fill the positions.

“We have families who’ve been waiting for years already,” says Little Acorn’s child-care coordinator Amy Truswell.

“We just can’t offer them spaces, which is really sad. The community really needs child care, especially infant (and) toddler care.”

The organization hopes to open the preschool space in September and hire more to maintain the 48 spaces Little Acorn already has, so it can avoid the potential of another lottery.

“It’s a very demanding job,” says Truswell. “There’s a high burnout rate amongst ECEs, so finding those qualified people who have a passion for their jobs is really important.”