Merging junior kindergarten into school system would help children, expand ECE access: advocates | CBC News

The Jimmy Pratt Foundation is calling on the Newfoundland and Labrador government to merge junior kindergarten into the province’s school system, which it says will better support children with affordable care and expand capacity for early childhood educators.

The Department of Education is already rolling out a pre-kindergarten program it launched in 2022, but foundation executive director Kim Dreaddy wrote in a letter addressed to Premier Andrew Furey that the program is falling short — currently serving less than 20 per cent of eligible four-year-old children.

“Under this new program, there have been 600 spaces that have been created now for 4,000 four-year-old children. So the goal is 3,000 spaces by March 31, 2026. We feel it’s pretty unlikely that that goal is going to be reached,”  Dreaddy told CBC News on Friday.

Dreaddy said junior kindergarten in the public school system would allow more children to access early childhood education. Ontario, Nova Scotia and the Northwest Territories have already done so, she said, with promising results.

She says it would cut down the number of children who live in what is known as a ‘child-care desert’ — a postal code area with more than three children for every licensed child-care space.

Research from May 2023, showed nearly 80 per cent of the province’s children live in a child-care desert.

“We’d be providing sustainable [and] affordable solutions. So that’s ensuring that no family are left behind, parents can remain in the workforce. So there’s significant economic benefits associated with this model,” Dreaddy said.

“Expanding education, including junior kindergarten, is a really powerful lever for poverty reduction and economic growth, and of course that affects everybody in the province.”

Dreaddy said the province considered adopting junior kindergarten into the school system as far back as 2017, but said there was a change that led to the pre-kindergarten program.

She believes there is capacity within the education system to have four-year-olds included, particularly in rural areas.

Care spaces need keep expand, advocacy group says

Meanwhile, another advocacy group is calling on the province to expand upon the $10-a-day child-care model and the recruitment and retention effort of early childhood educators.

“It allows parents to do essential work,” Erin Cullen, a member of ABCs and ECEs, said Friday.

“We need to keep it, we need to stick to it, we need to continue with the plan. How do we get more spaces and more people attracted to this profession? ECEs are absolutely the key to unlocking spaces,” she said.

Newfoundland and Labrador has 10,900 spaces available under the $10-a-day plan, according to a news release issued Nov. 4.

Another 2,100 are in development.

The province also helped launch a benefits plan for educators working in regulated care, but Cullen says the prospect of pensions in other provinces are dragging people away.

The number of children in care is also outpacing the number of $10-a-day child-care spaces, Cullen added.

She says it needs to be addressed to help parents who are struggling to find care.

“We need to get every child from Nain to St. Shott’s access to high-quality early childhood education.”

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