By Kathryn Carlson
The children get up from their small wooden cots, brush their teeth, eat breakfast and strip their bed linens before heading off to school.
But these children aren’t at home or at a friend’s place for a sleepover — they’re waking up in the carpeted gymnasium of the only overnight childcare facility in Ottawa.
Many parents who send their sons and daughters to The Children’s Place on Carling Avenue work overnight or weekend shifts. They are mostly employed as nurses, bus drivers, police officers, cab drivers, doctors, retail representatives, or bartenders.
The Carling Avenue location is the only centre in the city that offers flexible care to these parents working non-traditional hours and is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 364 days a year — closing only for a 36-hour period from Christmas Eve until Boxing Day morning.
The Children’s Place is booked solid and there are still more than 100 parents on the waiting list who need extended care for their children.
Ottawa Centre resident Suzette Barret waited a year before she was accepted for the extended care program on Carling Avenue.
The mother of two says that if she hadn’t found the Children’s Place three years ago, she would still be using home care and her six-year-old and 10-year-old sons wouldn’t be able to interact with other children while she’s at work.
“I also like that I don’t have to commit to a certain number of hours per week and I think that there should definitely be more of these centres in Ottawa,” says Barret.
Jane Joy, chair of the City of Ottawa children’s services division, agrees that there is a need for more facilities such as the Children’s Place and says she’s heard from many parents who are frustrated with the lack of flexible care centres in the Ottawa area.
“More and more, there are single-income and two-income parents who work non-traditional hours,” says Joy.
“I think there’s a lack of extended-care services because it’s simply more difficult to provide. If agencies can fill their spaces during the day, then why extend their hours if it’s going to take so much effort?”
But Terry MacIver, executive director of The Children’s Place which offers care to children aged six weeks to 12 years, says she doesn’t understand why other childcare centres in the city don’t access the non-traditional market by offering more flexible services.
“What are these other centres doing? They say they’re community-oriented, but why aren’t they servicing the community?” she asks. “Some centres say they don’t have the money but you tell me how we can handle all this.”
MacIver opened the first Children’s Place location in Kanata in 1981 with the intention of offering overnight services. However, she quickly cancelled the night-care program and now uses the facility for extended care until midnight Monday to Friday.
“There simply wasn’t the demand for overnight care in the area,” she says.
Six year later, MacIver started offering night-care services at the Carling Avenue location.
This centre can accommodate 65 children at any one time and can take in up to 20 children overnight.
On any given evening, about 40 children stay until 9 p.m., an average of 20 children are picked up around midnight, and about five to 10 children stay overnight.
“We always try to accommodate any parent who asks us for help and we simply don’t know how to spell ‘no,’ ” says
MacIver.
MacIver recently put forward a proposal to the City of Ottawa to buy another building in the Carling Avenue area because she wants to develop a program designed specifically for school-age children.
“If there’s a need out there and nobody’s going to do anything about it, we’re ready and willing to take a shot at it,” says MacIver.