CHAT News File Photo

By Teagan Rasche

Limited options for children 5-10

Parents scramble to find last-minute childcare this week with school postponed

Jan 4, 2022 | 4:55 PM

MEDICINE HAT, AB – Classrooms across the province sit empty this week after Alberta Education Minister Adriana LaGrange announced heading back to school will be delayed a week due to the Omicron variant.

The announcement was made last Thursday and didn’t leave much time for parents to figure out what to do. They are in a tough situation, scrambling to find childcare options for kids too old for daycare but too young to stay home alone.

On social media, some parents are frustrated but others had a variety of plans, including staying home from work themselves, hiring babysitters and relying on family friends and grandparents.

One local mom hired her family’s regular babysitter for the week to look after their five-year-old daughter. While she isn’t panicking about childcare this week, she understands others’ anger.

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“There’s hardly anything in Medicine Hat for kids to do on their breaks,” Rebecca Zimmer said. “No day camps, no nothing so it’s a struggle for us.”

Daycares have also been impacted by the last-minute postponement of going back to school.

Next week, schools will be provided with increased support of 8.6 million rapid tests and 16.5 million medical-grade masks.

At Mother Nature’s Preschool, director Jennifer Paul says they wish the same supports were available to childcare providers as the kids they work with are not eligible to be vaccinated yet.

As for the impact this week, Paul says attendance is down due to parents staying home taking care of their older children who aren’t eligible for daycare.

When the minister of education made her announcement, Paul said daycares were told to pick up the slack but there are two issues with that.

“The majority of the programs in Medicine Hat are not licensed to take children over five so we would be in non-compliance of our license if we said ‘yeah for sure’ so that’s a huge issue,” Paul said. “Another issue is space with our license capacity because we only have so many spaces. To add siblings, a lot of us would be over our license capacity.”

Paul says it’s important for daycares to keep COVID-19 out, otherwise staff and the shortage of workers means they’d have to close.

LaGrange says she will provide more information before Thursday.