Child care in focus during wave of Central Okanagan daycare facility announcements

Child care in Kelowna, B.C., came into sharp focus this week, as more spaces came available to families who have been struggling with a dearth of day and after-school care options.

The area, which some estimate has a wait-list for child-care spaces 8,000 deep, saw two big child care-related announcements from Grace Lore, minister of state for child care, on Thursday.

The first was at Anne McClymont Elementary, where new, on-site child care opened, much to the relief of area parents. Those spaces are among nearly 600 located at seven schools throughout Kelowna, West Kelowna and Lake Country.

To date,  approximately 250 spaces have opened, while 350 are scheduled to open this winter and next spring.

“Six hundred and two spaces I think is incredible for our families,” Delta Carmichael, secretary-treasurer from Central Okanagan Public Schools, said. “I’ve been told we have over 8,000 children on wait-lists in the Central Okanagan and so the need is there and we are going to try and support as much as we can.”

Farther from the schoolyards, however, is a bit of a Canadian first also aiming to alleviate some of the strain on caregivers.

Lore announced at the Kelowna Airport YMCA Child Care centre that children living in the Kelowna area now have access to child care there.

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The province, in partnership with the City of Kelowna and KF Aerospace, developed the new standalone child-care centre located at the Kelowna International Airport that can accommodate 86 children aged five and under.

The City of Kelowna received approximately $3.8 million in ChildCareBC New Spaces funding to build the facility, operated by the YMCA of Southern Interior.

Sam Samaddar, chief executive officer with the Kelowna airport, said it’s a boon to the area workforce.

“There are very few daycares that are actually on airports within North America,” Samaddar said.

“So in my travelling that I’ve done around North America, I’ve actually been asking how many people have daycares on their facility…. When we talk about issues on things like recruitment, these are the kinds of services workers who want to work at the airport need. And so that’s where the genesis of this idea came.”

Kelowna’s airport-centric child-care facility will cater to the employees who are part of the airport campus, Samaddar said.

“When we looked at KF Aerospace, which has over 1,000 employees, and is the largest private employer in town, that’s what this is about,” he said.

Samaddar said he’s always been bothered that women in aviation all of a sudden have to stop their work in the field because they can’t find child care that allows them to continue to pursue their careers.

This facility will change that, he said.

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“During lunch, they can come and visit their child. So it’s very near to my heart,” he said.

Samaddar said he’s been made aware, through talking to his colleagues who are women in the aviation industry, that this is an example of what should be done at other airports around North America.

Samaddar said the spaces made available have not yet been fully snapped up but it’s very close.

Grant Stevens, chief corporate services officer at KF Aerospace, said they were thrilled to collaborate with YMCA and the Kelowna airport to establish this new and urgently needed child-care centre.

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“Not only will this centre enable us to support our employees with young families by providing quality, on-site daycare options, but we’re proud to continue investing in the local community in Kelowna,” Stevens said.

Since 2018, through the ChildCareBC New Spaces Fund, more than 33,000 new licensed child-care spaces have been funded in B.C., with more than 1,700 of these spaces located in the Kelowna area.

Applications are still being accepted for the 2023-24 ChildCareBC New Spaces Fund from public and not-for-profit child-care operators and providers, and Indigenous governments, and will be until there is no more budget.

While these new spaces should help address some of the need, it’s long been cited as a cause for concern in the Okanagan.

The Childhood Connections Centre published a report in 2021 saying the need was significant. Using information from the 2016 census, the centre said there were more than 18,000 children aged nine and under in the Central Okanagan and at that time only 6,000 child-care spaces were available.

Wait-lists, at that point, were two years for infant and toddler and infant spaces and a survey of parents showed that 40 per cent in the Central Okanagan did not have the child care they needed.