WELLINGTON COUNTY – When Luisa Artuso began her role in the Wellington County Children’s Early Years Division 14 years ago, there was already an open file on the lack of available child care in Mapleton.
And the need since, Artuso said recently, has only grown along with the township’s population.
In 2011, the year when provincial responsibilities for child care were moved to the Ministry of Education, Mapleton’s population was pegged at 9,989. Five years later, the township’s population increased 5.4 per cent, to 10,527 residents, according to 2016 census data.
With at least 1,000 children four years old and younger, according to census data, Mapleton has the second-highest population of that age group of all Wellington County municipalities.
But it has no available full-time, year-round and centre-based licensed child care spaces, making it an area with the highest level of unmet licensed childcare in the county.
There is a county-operated childcare centre in Minto, but spaces are limited or waitlisted, and the commute required isn’t conducive with life and work schedules.
An EarlyON Child and Family Centre was opened two years ago in Drayton, but it provides drop-in style programming – not childcare.
“They really do need something local,” Artuso said.
A 2018 Children’s Early Years Division survey of residents with children aged four and under, revealed 56.3% were using “some form of child care” but were not accessing licensed spaces in surrounding municipalities.
“This means that parents in Mapleton are resorting to the only option available to them: unlicensed care,” Artuso asserts in a March 9 report to the county’s social services committee.
It’s a long-standing situation the county and municipality have been working to solve, but solutions are few and far between.
Mapleton Mayor Gregg Davidson said the current provincial funding model and a lack of available public school space in Mapleton are the biggest hurdles to getting a childcare centre in the township.
When the province’s education ministry took over the child care file, publicly-funded centres became bound to schools and the education system at large.
The province provides general operating grants – though not enough, according to Artuso – to the county, which then acts as a “consolidated municipal service manager” charged with disseminating social service dollars from the province.
The education grant dollars are used to subsidize childcare operators, in turn providing some stability to parent fees, but Artuso explained, “There is no funding within our funding envelope from the province for us to build childcare centres.”
Capital dollars are provided instead to school boards for schools, which can have childcare centres attached, but are secondary and subject to available land.
There are occasionally community-based capital funding rounds unattached to schools – the last one brought about Wellington Place in Aboyne, which opened its doors in 2019 – but the opportunities are rare, leaving publicly-funded childcare centres largely dependent on new school builds or retrofitting an existing school.
“If those possibilities are not there, then that stunts the growth of the opportunity to build childcare,” Artuso said.
Last month, the Ministry of Education (MOE) opened a round of its Capital Funding Priorities Program for 2022-23, including capital dollars for child care, with a narrow 21-day window to apply.
Requiring school boards and the consolidated municipal service managers to submit a joint application, the county and Wellington Catholic District School Board (WCDSB) buckled down.
Luckily for them, conversations about linking a new school with a childcare centre in the township had long been ongoing before the intake was announced.
“It was just through a conversation with [WCDSB]; we plan our system together with both school boards actually, and I said, ‘What about Mapleton?’” Artuso said.
An ‘airtight’ case?
That led to the board exploring Mapleton’s viability for a new school during a routine assessment, WCDSB associate director of corporate services Tracy McLennan told the Advertiser in a phone call.
“Our plan had been all along to submit at some point,” she said, explaining the tight application deadline expedited the process.
Mayor Davidson told the Advertiser he and Artuso have long discussed how to get a childcare centre in the township within the system’s constraints.
“If we had not had those conversations, this would never be where it is now,” Davison remarked, adding the township is “very fortunate” the Catholic board wishes to open a school in Mapleton.
Artuso confidently describes the case for a childcare centre as being “airtight.”
Submitted on Feb. 25, the application, seeking $9.1 million, may be the closest the township comes to potentially getting a childcare centre in the near future.
Artuso said it would be a “good news story for the community” should the funding be granted, bringing a 64-space childcare centre to the township with a proposed breakup of 10 infant, 30 toddler, and 24 preschool spaces.
Although the early years director is optimistic about the outcome, she cautioned much still depends on the business case for the education side.
The WCDSB wants to build a 213-pupil junior kindergarten to Grade 8 school in Drayton, servicing Minto and Mapleton.
No location has yet been secured for the proposed school, according to McLennan, who said the board is looking for four to five acres.
“But we do have a couple of locations that we’re looking at,” she said. “We feel confident that that’s not going to be an issue.”
Davidson said the township has helped the board “to locate land of a suitable size within the township” and it’s up to the board to take next steps and work with the respective landowner to purchase.
New growth to support case
The board highlights future growth, at least 2,900 elementary-aged children between Minto and Mapleton, and the limited space of two Catholic elementary schools in Wellington North, in trying to persuade the province in the application.
“We’re really confident that this is a need in the community, both for the school and for the childcare, and it has a lot of support from the community and from the municipality,” McLennan said.
“I’m really confident that the numbers we’re presenting and the case that we’re presenting is really strong.”
Asked how many students leave Mapleton and Minto to attend Catholic elementary schools elsewhere in the county, McLennan admitted it was “a fairly small number.”
“Really the business case is predicated on new growth and not existing students,” she said.
The board projects low and slow enrolment for the first seven years at the proposed school, beginning in 2026-27, when it would loosely be expected to be operational, until maxing out enrolment in 2033-34 for both Wellington North schools and the proposed school, likely to be located in Drayton.
Should the application be a success, the school and childcare centre would operate separately, but under the same roof.
The centre would belong to the school board, but a childcare operator (sourced through a future “request for proposal” process) would cover the operational costs of the centre and pay the school board to use the building.
Some of those expenses would be covered by the county through the province’s operational funding.
Artuso said she’s left a chunk of operating dollars – over $343,000 – uncommitted every year since 2011 in anticipation of a centre one day coming to Mapleton.
Although the uncommitted dollars must be spent each year, they’re given as one-time funding, rather than being committed to any single provider.
Should a new centre open, that would change, meaning the operator could bank on those dollars on an ongoing basis.
Support for new facility
Last month, the township began collecting signatures on a petition for a new school and childcare centre.
Upwards of 150 signatures were collected before an online option was started, gathering an additional 51 signatures as of March 9, according to Davidson.
“We feel that it’s most important to have personalization of this,” Davidson explained, saying the accumulated signatures and submitted letters would be taken to Queen’s Park with the intention of meeting with provincial education officials before mid-April.
Speaking to the childcare centre specifically, Davidson said it would be a “dream for the community” and wouldn’t take away from home-based care providers or a volunteer-led nursery care program already in place at Mapleton Preschool, offering half-day care.
“I know it’s only 64 spaces, but the spaces for infants are very difficult to come by,” the mayor said, adding a publicly-funded, licensed centre would “enhance” what’s currently available and “allow parents an option that they don’t currently have.”
There’s no certain date for when the county and school board will hear back from the ministry, but in a March 14 email to the Advertiser, a ministry official indicated school boards will be contacted about funding decisions in the spring.
Submissions will be evaluated on a set of criteria, including timing and urgency, how much money the ministry has to work with, and the school board’s existing capital projects.
In a prepared statement about the province’s recent education spending in the county, Grace Lee, spokesperson for education minister Stephen Lecce, said, “Our government will continue to invest in building new schools and improving existing schools for families across Wellington County.”
Behind all of this is an upcoming provincial election, which could affect how the ministry’s decision rolls out.
For now, Artuso waits on the edge of her seat, hoping the ministry will approve a “need that’s viable for them and critical for us.”
“Mapleton has always been that one goal that, despite our attempts, we’ve not been able to see it come to fruition,” Artuso said.
“I don’t know what other possibilities will come if this is not approved.
Should the application be unsuccessful, Artuso said the early years division will continue looking for other opportunities.
“We will not give up,” she said.
