I know a pre-tenure colleague who decided not to pay for after-school care this year for her five-year-old in order to save costs. At TDSB, the extended day program costs $34.75 for each school day. As a result, she will forego two of her most productive working hours each afternoon.
Part of the problem is that the University of Toronto’s child care subsidy does not cover any after- or before- school care. The subsidy that was negotiated fifteen years ago will only pay $10 a day for a child who receives at least four hours of child care a day. Families who elect to send their young children to day care from 9 am to noon, before coming home for a lunch and a nap, also receive nothing if they pay an hourly rate. One can only receive a maximum subsidy of $20 a day if the child receives care for at least six hours. Woe is the parent, like I was, who sent the babysitter home when the toddler was down for a long nap after only five hours of support.
Those child care rates were negotiated in 2007 and capped at $1 million. Even though child care costs soared over the past fifteen years, the university administration never raised the subsidy available to faculty with young children, or the subsidy each family can receive per day. Charges for toddlers at the university’s own child care facilities are now about $90 a day!
We need to expand the child care subsidy. I will press the administration to increase the subsidy from $1 million to $1.5 million and ask them to commit to raising the subsidy every-other-year by $100,000, and expand eligibility so that parents can receive subsidies for after-care programs.
I vividly and painfully recall the onerous process of applying for child care on little sleep with a toddler running around at my feet, figuring out how many days each month our babysitter worked for more than six hours, and how many days were missed due to illness or grandparental visits. We can ease the administrative burden on parents by guaranteeing that each child will qualify for a certain amount of assistance based on the child’s age at the start of the year, not the daily hours of care they received in the previous year.
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