LAKELAND - The St. Paul Family Day Home Society is expanding to Bonnyville and Cold Lake after the day homes group in those communities shut down, leaving providers and parents in crisis.
Under Alberta’s Early Learning and Child Care Act, day home educators can provide care for up to six children, not including their own. Licensed day homes work with an agency and have access to provincial childcare funding and early childhood educator wage top-ups. Unlicensed day homes are not monitored, and do not receive funding from the government.
Barbara Rideout is one of the day home providers in Cold Lake who was impacted by the closure of Bonnyville Play & Learn Family Homes, the agency that had been managing the licensing checks and funding for Bonnyville and Cold Lake.
“We sat down for a dinner with our agency and all our providers and were told the board had put in a cease letter on our behalf and we no longer had funding as of March 31,” said Rideout.
She said the information they received was pretty limited, “but they made it sound as though we haven’t had a board for a very long time. The providers were very upset by that,” said Rideout.
Another provider in Bonnyville, Lisa Zelisko, said they were told the board was “non-functioning” due to a lack of volunteers.
For the day home providers and the families they provide care to, the closure of the agency was a crisis. If they didn’t find a new agency right away, they would lose access to the Alberta childcare funding, which pays approximately two thirds of the monthly fees for full-time care, leaving parents with a flat fee of $326.50 per child.
Danika Poulin is the director at St. Paul Family Day Home Society. She said they were approached to see if they could take on the homes currently working with Bonnyville Play & Learn Family Homes when that group made the decision to shut down in early March.
“At this point, we’ve taken on five homes. We have another potential home in Cold Lake and we’ve sent out extra applications as well in the general Lakeland area within the past couple of weeks,” said Poulin.
According to Poulin, the agency is providing the same services to their new homes in Bonnyville and Cold Lake that they do for the homes in St. Paul and the surrounding area.
“We do most of the paperwork. They are required to do certain things like report their attendance so we can claim their hours of care, and then they have other requirements like the menu and the activity planning and all that stuff. But whatever needs to get sent to the government, that's us that do that,” said Poulin.
Nancy Hite, another provider in Bonnyville was caught in the crossfire. She made the decision to return to the Bonnyville agency in the November and spent the winter doing the necessary paperwork and upgrading the safety measures in her home to meet the licensing requirements.
“I was told at the beginning, [they were] going to wait until [changes to Alberta child care funding] flips over . . . So for me, I was in, but I wasn’t with the agency, so I was left really stressed,” said Hite, who found out about the closure by text message.
Hite said she was very thankful the other providers made sure St. Paul Family Day Home Society knew who she was and kept her in the loop as things were being figured out.
Hite, Zelisko and Rideout all had high praise for Poulin and the staff in St. Paul.
“I was at it for three months trying to get everything organized, and she did my house and the four other houses in . . . 17 days. They’re incredibly hard-working ladies in in St. Paul, they were amazing,” said Hite.
Rideout said she was impressed with the level of transparency in St. Paul and with the app the agency uses for tracking attendance and meal plans.
“They really are our heroes,” said Rideout.
Attempts by Lakeland This Week to reach out to Bonnyville Play & Learn Family Homes were unsuccessful, but in a brief statement posted to social media, the agency said, "Thank you to the many families that trusted us with your little ones. We took this job very seriously and every day did it to the best of our abilities."
