By Taylor Chartrand

Locals believe $25-a-day child-care should be expanded in Alberta

Jan 18, 2019 | 1:02 PM

Medicine Hat, AB – After seeing firsthand how successful the $25-a-day childcare has been, a few local residents are saying the program should be offered province wide to all daycare providers.

The Government of Alberta launched the pilot program in 2016, with 22 Early Learning and Child-Care centres offering $25-a-day care in the province to young children.

The program was then extended, adding an additional 100 centres to its list in April of 2018.

4 of those centres are right here in Medicine Hat and include: Mother Nature’s Preschool, Pitter Patter Child Development Centre, Family YMCA John Millar Child Development Centre and the YMCA Crescent Heights Child Development Centre.

“We’re just so fortunate that the government is providing this,” said Pitter Patter Child Development Centre Director, Khirsta Mcdowall. “It’s a great service and certainly takes a burden off both the parents and us as a centre.”

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Mcdowall explained this program has created quite the buzz in Medicine Hat.

“Subsidized parents pay $4 a month and non-subsidized parents pay $500 a month maximum. The average parent pays roughly $1,000 for quality child-care in Medicine Hat. Because of that, we had a waiting list a mile long. We take phone calls, but we don’t really keep a waiting list anymore.”

Mcdowall said Pitter Patter currently serves 40 families, which adds up to roughly 55-60 children on a full and part-time basis.

“We were fortunate that Herald School was able to offer us a room, so we were able to accommodate a lot more families than when we were running privately. Now we’re able to take infants, which we wouldn’t have been able to afford to do before. This way we are able to offer more parents childcare or our waiting list would be a lot longer.” 

In addition to offering cheaper services, Mcdowall said this has also helped their day-to-day operations.

“Because we can only charge so much to parents, we are not able to pay staff what we’d like to pay them. With the $25-a-day, we’re able to have our base wage higher that what minimum wage would be because of the grants. So, we’re able to offer our staff above minimum, where sub-centres wouldn’t be able to do that at this point.”

One of the parents who was able to access the $25-a-day child-care was Ashley Dasilva.

“I save roughly $400-$500 a month by accessing this program,” explained Dasilva. “Quality childcare has declined with a lot of places closing and the fees continually rising everywhere else. It’s amazing to have a facility like this at such a low cost.” 

And if it weren’t for the low-cost, Dasilva said her options would be limited.

“I might not have been able to come back to work if it wasn’t for affordable child-care here. It was a great opportunity for myself and my son.”

Dasilva believes this option should be available to all Albertans.

“Absolutely I do. It’s hard nowadays to afford child-care and this would be an amazing opportunity for families all across Alberta. At this point, we’re just very lucky to be able to access such a great program.”

After operating under this $25-a-day child-care since September of 2019, Mcdowall echoed Dasilva’s comments.

“The fees just keep going up to the point where they’re not affordable,” said Mcdowall. “I think if the grant comes available to anybody, it’s a great opportunity and they should apply for it.”