The Ontario government will provide financial assistance to daycares as they lose students to the all-day kindergarten program, and will allow schools to finish out their contracts with independent childcare providers.

The announcement came yesterday as the legislature passed a law that will require school boards to offer full-day learning to 4 and 5-year-olds and Education Minister Leona Dombrowsky promised to give schools a little wiggle room to finish out pre-existing daycare contracts.

“We recognize that there may be boards who perhaps have contractual arrangements, or whatever, and that they require some transition time and we will make accommodation for them for a short period of time,” she said.

Meanwhile, millions of dollars will go toward helping daycares cope with a shrinking base of clientele. A little over $5-million in operating subsidies will be dispersed to daycares next year, as the early learning program is launched in about 600 schools. The annual subsidy will grow to a peak of $51-million over the 5 years that the program is rolled out to more than 4,000 schools across the province.

“These are new dollars to stabilize childcare as a result of the 4 and 5-year-old who will be moving from childcare to the education system,” said Minister of Children and Youth Services Laurel Broten.

An additional $12-million will be doled out to non-profit daycares to help them renovate their facilities and gear them to younger children.

The full-day learning program will be optional to parents and available everywhere by the fall of 2015. It will pair teachers with early-childhood educators in the classroom throughout the school day, and provide extended-hour programs for a small fee.

via www.theglobeandmail.com

B.C. should follow Ontario by implementing early learning classes or suffer heavy social and economic damage down the road.

That was the message from experts at an early care conference at SFU's Wosk Centre for Dialogue on Tuesday — the same day that Ontario passed a bill to implement North America's first full-day early learning classrooms for four-and five-year-olds.

Dr. Charles Pascal, special adviser on early learning to Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, told conference delegates "there is a big social and economic payoff" in investing in early learning.

University of B.C. Prof. Paul Kershaw presented his new study on "developmentally vulnerable" children, which shows 29 per cent enter kindergarten in B.C. at a learning disadvantage. The study calls for a $3-billion per year investment in early learning and support of young families in B.C.

Vulnerable children come up short in 104 benchmark tests taken in kindergarten, measuring physical, social, emotional and language skills.

The vulnerable "are much more likely to enter the criminal justice system," suffer poor health, drop out of school and underperform in Canada's economy, Kershaw said.

Kershaw calculates that neglecting to reduce the "child vulnerability debt" will cause B.C. to forgo 20 per cent in GDP growth over the next 60 years, which amounts to trillions of dollars wasted.

The study followed 140,000 children from across B.C. over 10 years.

via www.theprovince.com