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After finishing her 3-to-11 p.m. shift at Accucaps, single mom Christine Winter drives to CAW Community Child Care to get her four children - sleeping on small cots in dark, quiet rooms - for a hushed drive home and a tuck-in.
It's a daily ritual - essential to her keeping a job and getting quality care for her kids - that's been upended with Wednesday's announcement the daycare will close Sept. 30. The Winters are one of 173 families with 244 children at the daycare who will be scrambling to find a replacement. It's one of the few daycares in the region that offers nighttime service.
"Now they're closing, we're going to have lots of problems," Winter said as she dropped off Piper, 2, Gavin, 7, and six-yearold twins Broden and Hailey. "We've got a lot of changes to make."
Parents say they were shocked and upset to learn of the pending closure, happening because of declining enrolment and the demise of funding from the Big Three auto firms that have largely subsidized it since it opened 23 years ago.
"I don't know what I'm going to do, there's not much daycare in the city that has these hours and if I don't have daycare I can't work," said Lachanta Whited, who's been taking her daughter Jai-La, 5, to the centre for 18 months. She works various shifts at a local factory. Some days she needs to drop Jai-La off at 5: 30 a.m., other days she works a 2-to-10 p.m. shift.
"They keep closing these daycares down," Whited said, referring to the closures in recent years of City of Windsor daycares and the daycare at St. Clair College. "And they wonder why people are on welfare, when there's no place to take their kids."
Hotel-Dieu Grace Hospital nurse Lara Belanger said she's shocked and devastated by the announcement. She's been taking her son Stone, 4, to the centre for two years. She and her husband work shifts, so the CAW centre gave them flexibility and a high-quality setting that allowed her son to flourish. "We're scrambling right now to figure out what we can do," she said.
Thanks to the rollout of fullday kindergarten, the days of packed daycares with long waiting lists (the CAW centre used to have 300 on its list) are gone. Daycares contacted by The Star Wednesday said they have vacancies for September. Laurie McLeod, a supervisor at Delta Chi daycare, which does not offer night service, said flyers were being prepared to distribute to families offering a five per cent discount.
Two daycares that do offer extended hours are the ABC Day Nursery on Jefferson Avenue and Olivia DiMaio with locations in LaSalle and Lakeshore. Both have spots available, though it's unknown if there are enough to accommodate all the kids displaced by the CAW closure. "We're willing to help as much as we can," said ABC supervisor Diane Pettinato.
The CAW daycare has 59 staff - a mix of full-time and part-time - who'll be losing
"We're still numb," said Anna Angelidis, the centre's executive director.
"It's a sad day for parents, it's a sad day for working families."
Being a union-founded centre, ECE workers were paid good wages, about $26 an hour, she said, which is well above the industry average in Ontario of about $15." It's a good wage and they deserve to make a good wage," said Angelidis. "It's just unfortunate we can't continue with that."
Running an extended-hours daycare also drives the cost up, she said. The cost per child at the CAW daycare amounted to $100 per day.
Big Three workers would pay about $45 daily for a toddler with their employer picking up the difference, but in recent years the companies have withdrawn much of their funding as fewer and fewer employees used the daycare, said Angelidis. Because of staff reductions, workforces are smaller and older, with few workers having kids young enough to use daycare. There are currently just two Ford kids at the daycare.
"Demographics have changed in the auto industry and demand for childcare is dramatically reduced," she said.
In 2010, the centre opened its doors to non-Big Three families. Many of those get government subsidies to help pay for daycare, but the numbers are still low - at 84 per cent capacity.
The going rate charged by other daycares in this area is in the $40-a-day range for toddlers.
Most to blame for low enrolment is the rollout of full-day kindergarten, Angelidis said. That cuts out the kids in the older age range who require a 10-to-one or even 12-to-one student-to-teacher ratio, compared to infants who require three-to-one and toddlers who require five-to-one ratios.
-reprinted from the Windsor Star