Funding for Early Childhood Educators: Addressing Ontario’s Shortage of ECEs and Fair Wages

Early Childhood Educators that are currently in the field include licensed daycares, before and after school programs, programs/clubs/services seeking ECE’s, and soon to be Kindergarten classes in the next 5 years. Funding for Early Childhood Educators is the issue that needs to be looked at and revised. OCBCC “Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care” held a press conference at Queen’s Park on October 27th, 2010 to address the issue of Ontario’s shortage of ECEs.

Tracy Saarikoski, President of the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care said “At my child care centre, we have lost qualified early childhood educators to jobs in the retail sector where the pay was higher. We need to make sure we can pay our qualified early childhood educators a decent wage so an early childhood educator can work in the job she was trained for and loves, and still be able to provide a decent income for her family. ” This basically means that the time and effort put into the ECE program at colleges is a waste of time and money because the field is not offering fair wages to support it.

If retail stores are offering higher wages that almost anyone can walk into, then what does this mean for the field? It could mean less ECE teachers will be in the field, which means staff ratio to children will be lower. In other words it will be very difficult to find child care for children because there are not enough ECE teachers committing to the field. Then, if it progresses this far, parents and caregivers will have no option but to find private, unlicensed care which may not be the safest solution for children.

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The “Occupational Standards for Early Childhood Educators” describe the knowledge, skills, and abilities early childhood educators (ECEs) need to do their job effectively. ECE teachers need to keep updating their specific qualifications in order to stay in the field of work. In order to achieve current and accurate knowledge and skills, it has its own cost. Some fees and classes are funded through a person’s workplace and/or the specific organization that could be offering funding. Other educators are not this fortunate and funding comes at their own cost.

On a more positive note, the government is creating a new program; full-day early learning and care for ages four to five years, but they have not done enough to increase the amount of qualified ECE’s that are already in the field to transfer over into this new action plan. A solution to this would be higher wages, or the government’s future plan may fail. The government needs to act quickly in order to increase the college’s ECE programs and raise wages or the new action plan for full-day early learning and care program will not work and community-based child care programs will not succeed.

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