Tristan’s on his third day of senior kindergarten, and I’m only now getting around to memorializing it on the blog. I didn’t even go… I sat here in my office and watched the clock tick and imagined the nanny walking the boys over there, then pictured him in his new classroom with his new teacher for two and a half hours. At least Beloved was off early enough to pick him up. Ah, mommy guilt, will you never leave me in peace?<\/p>\n
The good news is, he loves school now more than ever, even though his dearest chum from last year is now in a different class. I’m reserving my opinion on the new teacher to see if we make it past last year’s 8-day milestone <\/a>before the first parental conference, but it’s looking promising (touch wood) so far.<\/p>\n Speaking of kindergarten, there was an article <\/a>in the Ottawa Citizen <\/em>this morning about a local woman who chose to keep her four-year old daughter in daycare full time rather than send her to junior kindergarten because she couldn’t get into the on-site before- and after-school care program at her daughter’s school. The article notes:<\/p>\n The kindergarten programs in the English school boards in the city are only 150 minutes per day, and trying to tease together day care arrangements for such young children can be a logistical nightmare for working parents and disjointed for their young children. So more and more are choosing the O’Brien option — pulling the plug on junior kindergarten altogether and keeping their school-aged children in their regular day care for another year.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I’m now so jaded to the whole daycare thing that my first response to this article was, “Yeah. And?” I mean, I’m happy to see anybody shedding light on the ridiculous hoops working parents have to leap through as we navigate an increasingly ludicrous daycare system. But honestly, it would have never occurred to me to actually keep the boys home from school, no matter how high-quality the day care. The responsibility of getting Tristan to and from school was just another in the long list of conditions we set on any potential caregiver. <\/p>\n What I wish the article had mentioned was that even if you do manage to find a caregiver (licenced or not) who will shuttle your kindergarten student to and from his or her 150 minutes of school per day, you’re still paying full price for that day’s care. Rightly so, of course, because the caregiver can’t fill that spot while your child is away, and the afternoon senior kindergarten from 1:00 to 3:30 really is smack dab in the middle of the day. <\/p>\n But even if you’re willing to pay a full day of fees for what may be just a half a day of care, depending on the child’s schedule, it’s still the least of your problems. You’ve got to find someone in your school district, and someone actually willing to escort your child back and forth. Most likely, the caregiver has to bring the rest of the entourage with her for every drop-off and pick-up, despite the weather. No wonder caregivers are reluctant to take on kindergarten students.<\/p>\n The article also notes that less than half of the English-language schools in our boards (we have two, Catholic and public, and then another two French boards) have daycare centres. I wonder how they categorize our school, which has before- and after-school care — starting at age 6 and up. Even if I wanted Tristan in before- and after-school care, it’s not an option. And you know what? I’ve got both boys on a waiting list for when it does become an option for us… in 2010. And given the fact that the article says almost one thousand students currently remain on a waiting list for on-site before- and after-school care as of right now, I’m not banking on that as a guarantee even when Simon and Tristan are both over six years old. (To say nothing of the player to be named later.)<\/p>\n The article ends with this “what can you do” shrug:<\/p>\n This leaves parents in the same predicament as Ms. O’Brien and her husband — wanting to send their children off to junior kindergarten this week, but finding it has become an unrealistic option. In their case, they’re just happy their school-age daughter has a spot in such a great day-care centre.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Based on the neighbourhoods, schools and daycare centre described in the article, I can guess that the family in question are likely fairly well off, relatively speaking. The article also mentions many families choosing Montesorri over public kindergarten, which is quite expensive and STILL requires some extra before and after school care, at an added cost.<\/p>\n I know that we were quite lucky in that money wasn’t a huge obstacle for us in finding adequate care, but we did have to more than double<\/em> our monthly daycare costs to accomodate both the nanny and Simon’s nursery school fees.<\/p>\n What about the families that don’t have the luxury of throwing money at the problem?<\/p>\n It’s just another example <\/a>of how wretchedly the daycare ‘system’ (such as it is) in Canada is broken.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Tristan’s on his third day of senior kindergarten, and I’m only now getting around to memorializing it on the blog. I didn’t even go… I sat here in my office and watched the clock tick and imagined the nanny walking the boys over there, then pictured him in his new classroom with his new teacher … Continue reading “Back to school and other thoughts”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-working-and-mothering"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/981","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=981"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/981\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}