Staff at Scarborough's Progress Child Care Centre will go to work on Monday, but there is no guarantee that they will get paid.
Having run out of money, the centre's board of directors told staff on Thursday that it would shut its doors at the end of the next day unless the City of Toronto stepped in with emergency funding. That funding never came, but the centre's staff have agreed to go to work on Monday - without pay, unless the city provides them with funding to tide them over - so that the nearly 100 children and infants that attend Progress's two locations have a place to go.
About 100 parents, children and community members gathered at Progress's main location on Glamorgan Avenue on Sunday to rally for the centre. Mayor Rob Ford and Scarborough-Agincourt councillor Norm Kelly were invited, but did not attend.
The centre's staff and board of directors say they need emergency funding from the city to stay open. But the city says there's simply no emergency cash available, lest they take away from the child-care subsidies used by more than 24,000 Torontonians.
At the Sunday meeting, Progress employees and their supporters argued that the city should step in and provide the funding anyway because the structure of the city's child-care subsidy program is such that they have continually received less funding than requested.
"We've all thrown in our commitment to keep this centre open in the short term, but absolutely no one has given us any guarantee that we're getting paid," Robert Fletcher, treasurer of Progress's board of directors, told The Globe at the Sunday meeting.
"The staff said they cannot imagine not being here for the children that they've looked after, in some cases, for six, seven years," said Janet Teibo, the local co-ordinator for CUPE local 2494, which represents workers from 26 different child-care centres in the city, including Progress.
"They are doing it with the hope that the mayor and the city and the province will do the right thing and come up with some emergency funding. It's not a lot - we just need a little bit of breathing room so we can figure out where we stand."
Staff, Ms. Teibo said, "are not coming in for free. Their hope is that they will be paid."
If they can't get emergency funding, she said the staff will soon have to re-think their options.
Progress's board of directors met with city officials Friday morning, who offered assistance to review the centre's finances and find efficiencies, should the centre's board decide to keep it open. However, they refused to offer financial assistance.
One-time emergency funding, Ms. Teibo said, would, give the centre steady enough footing to go through its books with the city.
Elaine Baxter-Trahair, Toronto's general manager of children's services, said on Friday that such a thing is simply not possible. "We don't have any emergency funding," she said. "It all goes to subsidies."
About 90 per cent of the children at Progress had child-care funding from the city, Ms. Baxter-Trahair said. Child care is subsidized on a per-child basis, meaning the municipal government funds the child, not the centre, allowing the child to attend a child-care centre chosen by their parents.
Funding exists for about 24,000 children and infants to have subsidized daycare in Toronto, Ms. Baxter-Trahair said, and subsidies roll over to waitlisted children whenever subsidized children leave the system, such as to go to kindergarten. About 19,000 children and infants are waitlisted for subsidies in Toronto.
However, Ms. Teibo said that at Progress, subsidized children who left the centre were not always replaced by other subsidized children. This created a financially awkward situation in which staffing costs remained the same - there is a minimum number of staff required per number of children - as funding began to dwindle.
Progress has two locations: One with about 90 young children at 3 Glamorgan Ave., and a much smaller second centre nearby on Kennedy Road that focused on infants and toddlers. "Progress 2," as it's called, is licenced for 21 infants and toddlers, but as of Friday only had seven enrolled. Ms. Teibo said that there was a waitlist to fill the spots in Progress 2, but that the infants and toddlers could not enroll because they were also still waitlisted for city subsidies.
Many parents in the area require the subsidies to get their children into daycare centres like Progress; the surrounding community, said Ms. Teibo, is a "high-need, low-income" area.
The board of directors at Progress filed to receive subsidies for more children, Ms. Teibo said, but always received less than it applied for. Staffed for optimal enrolment, Progress's funds began to run dry.
Ms. Baxter-Trahair told The Globe that if the Progress board of directors does not keep the centre open and accept the city's offer to "find efficiencies," the city would immediately begin to search for alternative care for the centre's roughly 90 city-subsidized children "on a priority basis."
The City of Toronto began to work with the child-care centre in March when its financial troubles became apparent; it recommended Progress close the smaller location as a way to cut excess costs from the whole operation. Ms. Teibo, though, said that the infant-and-toddler centre provides a vital service to the local community.
Ms. Baxter-Trahair said that Progress had some debt and that her department had encouraged the centre to work with creditors to develop payment plans.
Children at the centre were also eligible for provincial child-care subsidization. The Ministry of Education, which oversees child care for the province, released a short statement Friday which said that those families who get subsidies at Progress will continue to receive them, and recommended that parents contact the City of Toronto or visit Ontario's Licenced Child Care website to find alternative care.
The funding discrepancy at Progress is part of a bigger problem with the distribution of Toronto child-care subsidies, said Ms. Teibo. "There are 200 daycares in the city that are in this type of crisis," she said. "We just might be the first one. We're going to see this over and over and over again."