Quebec School Day Care Week should give us the opportunity, as a community, to highlight the quality of the work and daily dedication of nearly 22,000 educators and technicians. These provide, as the pandemic has revealed to us, constant support for work-family balance and, above all, nourish the overall development of our children by allowing them to grow up in a safe and stimulating environment.
Posted at 12:00 p.m.
But even “essential”, this service continues to bear the brunt of a lack of understanding and recognition within the education network. Several hundred thousand children use the childcare services of our elementary schools. They do not deserve such collective disinterest, at an age when their development is so crucial.
Already, in 1996, the Superior Council of Education (CSE) sounded the alarm: the child no longer seemed to be so much at the heart of the priorities, childcare services being offered, within our primary schools, although more to “help out” the parents than to ensure the educational development of these children. However, they can spend four hours a day in daycare services, 200 days a year. Then, in 2001, it was the turn of the Auditor General of Quebec, who brought to light the lack of important data on the management and financing of childcare services. The CSE did it again in 2006 with the tabling of a comprehensive report on school daycare services, which led to the creation of a national committee bringing together all the stakeholders in the field… whose recommendations, however, did not not taken into account by the Ministry.
That said, this work has shed light on the fact that the Ministry of Education, in addition to having little data allowing it to know whether these services are adequately funded, gives school principals the possibility of drawing in service budgets to pay for unrelated expenses. Budgets, it should be remembered, are largely made up of financial contributions from parents.
By tabling, last month, a draft regulation aimed at improving childcare services in schools, the Minister of Education, Jean-François Roberge, missed an extraordinary opportunity to strengthen these essential services for the Quebec society.
This proposal for a regulation sadly misses a fundamental reflection on the role of childcare services in schools, as well as on the means to be granted to them.
Thus, it is surprising that there is no measurement concerning the ratios of children placed under the responsibility of educators or any particular attention to the impacts caused by the integration of 4-year-old kindergartens, subject to the same ratios of 20 pupils for an educator – it is 10 in a CPE, for the same age.
It is equally distressing to note that the draft regulation does not propose any appropriate measure with respect to the supervision of children with disabilities or with social maladjustments or learning difficulties. Faced with the need to define real educational objectives for school daycare services, Minister Roberge’s draft regulation unfortunately remains silent.
It is high time for the Ministry of Education to show leadership in organizing a real collective reflection on the school daycare services that we want to establish. In such a case, daycare staff will be there to find courses of action that will better meet the needs of children and parents in Quebec. Let’s hope that the political will is there too.
* Co-signers: Denis BolducSecretary General of the FTQ; Linda TavolaroSecretary General of the Federation of Public Service Employees (FEESP – CSN); Eric PronovostPresident of the Federation of School Support Staff (FPSS – CSQ); Patrick GloutneyPresident of the Canadian Union of Public Employees of Quebec (SCFP Quebec); Pierrick Choiniere-LapointeExecutive Director of the Union of Professional and Office Employees (SEPB – Quebec); Cristina CabralPresident of the Union of Local Service Employees 800 (UES 800)