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On Monday, the Waterloo Region District School Board announced that all of its before- and after-care programs will run as licenced child care programs under the Child Care and Early Years Act.
This should come as welcome news to parents with children under the age of six as the child care will now qualify for the Canada-wide Early Learning and Child Care (CWELCC) Agreement.
This means the rates will drop this year and are expected to fall to an average of $10 per day by September 2025.
At the moment, parents are paying around $13 in most schools for before-care and around $16 in most schools for after-care.
While the cost is expected to dip to $10 a day on average by 2025, a board spokesperson told Global News that the rate will be reduced by 25 per cent from September through December and by 50 per cent throughout the second half of the school year.
The board says that children who don’t turn six until the end of the school year will qualify for the cheaper child care, although those over that age do not qualify for the discount.
Essentially, the rebate will go to those with kids in junior or senior kindergarten who were born in 2017 and 2018.
Global News has also reached out to the Waterloo Catholic District School Board to see if they are working on a similar move.