Home-based daycares in financial limbo as families pull kids out

With more families keeping their kids home during the COVID-19 pandemic, many home-based daycare providers are falling through the cracks because they don’t qualify for emergency benefits or wage supplements.

Carla Myers has been running a daycare from her home in Regina for about six years and has many connections to the daycare community.

“One of my friends actually, she lost all of her daycare families and she received zero money (on April 1) when all fees would normally be due,” Myers said.

Speaking to all of her friends and contacts in the daycare community, Myers has heard the same concerns.

“Lots of them are terrified about how they are going to pay their bills and they’re frustrated for the lack of support and lack of answers that we’ve been given,” Myers said.

While some have chosen to close down to protect their own families from exposure to the virus, those staying open are asking families to pay fees even if they are keeping their kids home.

“We do not feel good about charging families if their kids aren’t coming but it’s a double-edged sword,” Myers said. “It’s something that we have to do in order for our doors to remain open, otherwise we might not survive this at the end.”

Myers has been lucky so far, with one family choosing to keep their child in her care because they work in essential services and another family agreeing to continue paying fees.

Concerned about the livelihood of so many of her fellow daycare operators, Myers spent last week on the phone calling the provincial government’s new dedicated business help hotline.

While she credits workers for being supportive and calling back quickly, they have told her there’s nothing they can do to help.

“It sounds like they know just as much as we do and when they try talking to their counterparts at the federal government, they say that we don’t qualify for the Canadian Emergency Response Benefit or the wage subsidy because we are considered an essential service and we have not been mandated to close,” Myers explained. “So until we are mandated to close we don’t receive anything.”

Myers said until daycares are ordered to close, the people who run them have no options and are in financial limbo.

“I would love it if they could give us a wage supplement like the one they’re doing for businesses with employees — something similar like that where they can supplement our wage if we’ve lost families due to this or if our families have had to pull their kids so we don’t have to charge them because this is a hard time for everybody,” she said.

Myers is calling for help from either level of government through a wage subsidy option for lost income or to allow those who close daycares to access the emergency benefit.

In an email to 980 CJME, the Saskatchewan government did not respond to specific questions about financial options for home daycare operators, saying only that child-care operators continue to provide a vital role in supporting communities at this time.

“Child-care facilities, including home-based, are autonomous and make decisions that are in the best interests of their organizations,” a government communications official wrote.

“We are aware of some licensed child-care facilities choosing to close on their own as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We respect the decisions that these licensed facilities are making.”

The government said it would continue to provide a normal level of funding to licensed daycare facilities and licensed home daycares through the month of April regardless of whether they are open or closed. The province will be reassessing the situation in the future.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an amended version of the story, with the correct spelling of Carla Myers’ name.