Parents ponder choices

Parents ponder choices
By Dan Hilborn, Burnaby NOW assistant editor
Published Dec. 22, 2002

Quit work or what?
That is the question on the minds of some parents who have children in the Burnaby Association for Community Inclusion child care centres this week, after learning their day care arrangements may be in jeopardy because of provincial budget cuts.
"I can't afford a fee increase," said single mother Cathy Hingston, whose seven-year-old daughter attends before and after school care at BACI's 12th Avenue child care centre. "I already lost almost all of my day care subsidy in April. Without day care, I won't be able to work, so there's even a possibility I may even have to go on welfare.
"This is death by a thousand cuts," she said. "Every time I get a one per cent raise at work, my day care subsidy goes down.
"And I don't even qualify for before and after school care because I make too much money," said the financial service worker who earns about $25,000 .
Of three families who agreed to be interviewed for this story, Hingston has the most difficult child care arrangements.
A resident of the Metrotown area, she and her daughter wake up at 6 a.m. each day to begin their routine. At 7:30 a.m., she drops her daughter off at the child care centre near New Westminster before parking near the SkyTrain for the commute downtown to her job at a financial institution. While mom is at work, her daughter gets dropped off and picked up at school by the BACI employees, then at just before 6 p.m., mom arrives back at 12th Avenue to pick up her daughter and head home, where they have dinner and then prepare for an 8 p.m. bedtime.
"It's a daily grind, and I'm not the only one doing it," Hingston said. "It's hard, and it doesn't leave a lot of time for my daughter and I to spend together."
Another parent who may be forced to quit work to look after her own children is Lesley Lopez, a single mother of three children, who works as a kindergarten teacher.
"I'm very upset," Lopez said. "I think it's terrible. The government is saying that this wonderful new funding formula will create all these new child care spaces, but these excellent centres will be forced to close.
"Sure, I may be able to find new child care, but it won't be anywhere near the quality of what I get at Fairhaven."
And those comments were echoed by Phillip Yu, who said finding quality day care arrangements such as those offered by BACI was not easy.
"My wife almost didn't go back to work because of the day care centres we saw," he said. "A lot of them were dirty or else they just drop the kids in front of a TV."
Yu also disagrees with the philosophy behind the changes. "They're taking the $16/hour jobs away from qualified people and creating twice as many jobs by paying minimal wages.
"That's not creating jobs. That's taking money from one group of people and just giving it to somebody else. At the end of the day, they're just forcing child care workers to earn minimal wage. And I don't think $16/ hour is too much to ask for the schooling these people need and the care that they give."