EXCERPTS
The school year had barely started when I was reminded of how maddening it is to be a parent.
I bumped into a woman who I had met years earlier when our children attended the same daycare. Turns out this woman had been fencing with the Winnipeg School Division to get her children bused to and from the daycare she uses before and after school. She was keen to tell me her story because she knew I fought the same battle four years earlier.
At the heart of the matter is a horribly outdated WSD policy that requires families to live at least 1.6 kilometres away from their school to qualify for bus transportation. In the days when the majority of parents stayed at home, it was sensible to put a limit on access to division buses.
But what if you need transportation to and from a daycare? Although the policy never envisioned child care, the same restrictions apply. The division doesn't seem to realize that one of the reasons families put children in care before and after school is because they are working and cannot take time off to drive them back and forth.
Rather than dealing with a modern reality, the division blindly applies the 1.6-kilometre rule to daycares. Many families are left scrambling to get kids back and forth from school.
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I had pause to recall this maddening experience while reading news coverage of Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty's attempts to implement a new system of early-childhood education and family supports.
McGuinty has introduced plans for full-day kindergarten along with programs that will transform schools into 12-month-a-year learning, community activity and family support hubs. These hubs would offer everything from prenatal nutrition to teen counselling.
Not everyone likes McGuinty's plan, but it does advocate for a more co-operative, comprehensive approach to providing the services and supports that modern families need.
Right now, schools, daycare centres, community centres and family-support programs operate with little regard to one another. Sometimes that means they work at cross purposes or duplicate services.
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There are glimmers of hope. Here in Manitoba, the province found money to keep core-area schools open in the evening to create a safe place for unsupervised children to play. It's a good program, but it is sad that more of this kind of co-operation doesn't exist.
It is unclear whether Ontario will succeed with its approach.
McGuinty is shackled with an anemic treasury that has trapped him between critics who believe he is doing too much and those who believe he is not doing enough.
However, at the heart of McGuinty's initiative is a good idea. Namely, that all those involved in helping educate and care for our children should be reading from the same page.
- reprinted from the Winnipeg Free Press