Excerpts
A mother of a four-year-old autistic child says there's a shortage of daycare facilities for neurodivergent kids in Regina, leading to a risk of exploitation and discrimination.
Taniel Fiddler said she found a licensed subsidized $10-a-day day care spot for her son Hudson Fink and that everything "was fine until he was diagnosed" with autism.
Fiddler said the daycare owner texted her saying that for Fink to keep the spot they would need to up the fees to $600 a month and reduce the hours he could stay there. Fiddler said she was told that money was to be sent to the operator's personal bank account.
Fiddler complained to the Ministry of Education. She said the daycare later shrugged off the incident as a language barrier issue.
"The text was pretty clear to me. Send me $600 to my cash account, like to my personal e-mail. That's not a language barrier. That is full on exploitation," she said.
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Fiddler said she pulled Fink from that daycare in September of last year and enrolled him in a preschool through the province's Early Learning Intensive Support (ELIS) Program, which supports young children who require intensive support.
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Now, Fiddler has enrolled Fink at Sash Labelle Early Learning Centre, a facility in east Regina, but he can only go there for for three hours a day. It means a lot of juggling schedules, but the family is happy with the facility.
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Grace Onjaro, owner of Sash Labelle Early Learning Centre, said she was shocked when she moved to east Regina two years ago and was unable to find anywhere to take care of her children.
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Onjaro said the centre has some parents who have told her about booking spaces at other facilities before their children were born.
"But as soon as they mentioned that their children had special needs, they lost those spots. Those are the type of parents we have right now. Parents who are like, where do I go when I booked this three years ago, and now because my child is autistic, I cannot be taken in?"