YMCA temporarily closes school-age program

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This article was published 09/02/2022 (1505 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

YMCA Brandon is no longer running its school-age child-care program due to ongoing renovations at the Y Downtown Early Learning Centre.

While the school-age program is usually hosted at the Y South Early Learning Centre, those spots are being taken up by pre-school children who can no longer attend the YMCA’s downtown location, which is undergoing construction to add 12 infant spaces and 36 pre-school spaces.

The construction project officially began last month and is expected to wrap up by September 2023, according to a Jan. 26 letter signed by Brandon YMCA CEO Lon Cullen.

“Although this is exciting news as it will create much needed child care spaces for the community, sadly we must close our school age program during the construction period,” Y South director Deb Berry wrote in a Jan. 24 letter addressed to parents, explaining that Jan. 28 would be the final day for the program.

In a followup conversation with the Sun, Cullen estimated the temporary shuttering of the school-age program will impact around 20 local families, who will need to find alternative accommodations for their kids during certain holidays or weekdays when they don’t have to attend school.

While Cullen admitted this is not an ideal situation for those families, he said the YMCA will still be able to supervise school-age children through their day camps that take place during the spring and summer holidays.

“With the school-age program, we have an alternative where we can provide … day camps. With pre-schoolers, we have no alternative,” he said, explaining why the younger children were prioritized for those spaces at Y South.

One local parent, who wishes to remain anonymous, told the Sun the abrupt closure of the school-age program left him scrambling, since no other affordable child-care programs for his children were available in Brandon.

With a professional development day scheduled for Friday, this parent said he and his wife are being forced to shuffle around their work schedules to make sure their children are properly supervised.

“That’s kind of hard on businesses, too,” he said Monday.

There is a significant price difference between the YMCA’s school-age program and its day camps, which adds another wrinkle for the affected families, he added.

However, Cullen told the Sun the local YMCA also provides subsidies for families who are struggling to afford programs like day camps.

While the temporary closure of the Brandon YMCA school-age program only impacts a small group of people, Manitoba Child Care Association executive director Jodie Kehl told the Sun it is part of a broader problem, where child-care spaces are becoming increasingly scarce.

Even though the province’s online child-care registry is no longer operational, Kehl said around 16,000 children were on the waiting list in 2018.

The list has only grown longer during the COVID-19 pandemic due to a variety of factors, including a continued lack of funding, according to Kehl.

“In Manitoba, not-for-profit licensed programs get their revenue in two ways: they get an operating grant from the province of Manitoba, that grant has been frozen since 2016, and they get parent fees. And parent fees have actually been frozen since 2013,” Kehl said Wednesday.

“So essentially, this is starving the sector because all other expenses … are rising dramatically right now.”

Although there are some reasons to be optimistic about the future, she said.

Last week, federal and provincial government officials announced they are expanding eligibility for their child-care subsidy program, which will allow the average Manitoba family to save 30 per cent on out-of-pocket child-care expenses.

While this announcement represents a continuation of the agreement signed last August — where both levels of government swore to provide $10-a-day child care in Manitoba by March 2023 — Kehl said certain shortcomings still need to be addressed.

This is especially true for school-aged children, since the major reductions outlined in the bilateral agreement only apply to children up to the age of six.

“So in order to address some of those systemic school-age specific problems, we would be calling upon the provincial government to ensure that they are off-setting and investing in that component of the system because the reality is that children don’t stop being children at the age of six,” she said.

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