When my children were born, I registered on every wait list I could find for child care, and I always wondered if they worked. On the back end, I can tell you that it isn't simple keeping a list up-to-date in Vancouver.
An estimated 21% of Vancouver's under 12 years of age population is being served with licensed child care. Being one of the most expensive cities in the world to raise children because of the cost of living, often families move out of Vancouver. Also, often parents will put their names on multiple lists, so that it increases a wait lists' number. So, what happens?
It is very difficult for any centre to tell a parent when they can expect to get child care. Generally, early child care centres follow the school year. As children get older and go to Kindergarten in September, many centres start to revisit their lists as early as February or as late as May. Families move, or are courting multiple offers from February to May. Some centres, don't bother keeping a list because siblings often fill spaces. Many centres are also unable to maintain or refresh their wait lists due to the sheer amount of paper work involved with operating a centre, shortages in administrative staff or simple lack of knowledge or access to systems to do this.
Some programs are restricted to the number of children they can have by age. There might be 100 infants on a list, but if your licensed for preschool aged children and you have 2 on your list, then you go for those 2. You can see this in the numbers. Last year, I had 233 families on my wait list for 2022/2023 for 8 spots. When I emailed families to refresh the list, 129 re-registered six months later saying they were interested. In that spread, over 75 percent were infants (under 12 months), and I am only licensed for 2.5 - 5 years of age.
So the answer isn't simple, neither is providing accessible, affordable, and high quality child care. If it was simple, we wouldn't be in this situation.
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