As the province moves deeper into its pandemic recovery, more importance has been put on child care and daycare. With essential workers back to work and others moving back to full time or office work, daycares needed to be ready for the new challenges of COVID-19 before anyone else.
Erin Cosford is the director of Kiddie Korner Day Care and said the daycare was handling the return well. The daycare is back to running at full capacity this week. Kiddie Korner was closed from March 19 - April 19, then open for only 16 students for a few weeks. The centre’s operations expanded to 24 kids, then extended further earlier this week. The centre can now host 33 kids.
“I think parents were still very cautious,” Cosford said.
“We did have some kids we did take on - some essential hospital staff children and things we normally wouldn't have had. That was more what actually filled up the daycare. Lots of our families were very, very cautious in the beginning.”
Cosford said the biggest difference is when families drop off and pick up their kids. The daycare asks screening questions to ensure no one sick enters the building and staggers drop offs so only one family is inside at a time.
“There's nothing that the kids are allowed to bring into the daycare,” Cosford said.
“No show and tell, kids’ lunch doesn’t even come into the daycare, we leave those all in our boot room. We sanitize everything as it comes into the center.”
“Our parents have been really responsible that way and that if they feel that their child is unwell in any way, they've just been calling us and saying, ‘Oh, they've got a runny nose today, I'm going to keep them home.’ They've been really, really, way more than before, responsible about making sure that their kids are healthy before coming into the center.”
Cosford said there are some positives coming out of COVID-19 changes. Students have more individuality and responsibility with their supplies, as sharing is limited to prevent the risk of transmission.
“With any job you kind of just get into that, ‘This is the way it's been for a long time,’ [mentality],” Cosford said.
“We've also noticed that the kids have become way more responsible because they see [things] as their own… I think that there is some positive that's definitely come out of that new normal as well.”
The entrance procedure takes on added importance as inside the school, since while class sizes and group activities are kept to a minimum, social distancing is impossible to enforce in preschool-aged kids.
“You can't police kids 24 hours a day and we certainly can't be putting masks on a three-year-old,” Cosford said.
“We do have procedures in place that if we felt a kid was sick, we do have PPE [personal protective equipment] gear in here and things like that.”
Cosford said parents have embraced the changes and are following the rules carefully. No student has been turned away feeling sick and parents have been quick to keep kids home if they show the mildest of symptoms.
“It's been a lesson, even for influenza, because if something gets into the daycare, it runs,” Cosford said.
“A lot of these things will be incredibly great for the daycare, all the changes that we've made of being extra cautious.”
The daycare was also given a boost by the provincial student jobs program. They were able to hire a student to take on the extra challenge of cleaning, freeing up staff for their regular childcare duties.
