Children in some of Toronto's poorest neighbourhoods will be among the first to benefit from all-day kindergarten.
The Toronto District School Board released a list Friday of 75 schools it is recommending to the province for the full-day program, many of them in low-income areas where there is a greater need for affordable daycare.
A few of the schools are likely to get bumped from the list when the ministry identifies the final roster in mid-January. The board's proposal includes 209 classrooms, but the ministry's will include only 190.
Karen Grose, the TDSB's system superintendent of programs, said the board considered a set of criteria outlined by the ministry, including the availability of ready-to-use space, pre-existing daycare programs and socioeconomic measures, to identify the 75 schools.
About 35,000 children across the province are expected to start full-day kindergarten next fall, and the lists provide the first glimpse of which schools could be the first to offer the program, which will be rolled out to more and more schools over the next five years. This year, the ministry mandated that a portion of the schools serve low-income neighbourhoods where there is a high need for affordable daycare.
Trustee John Campbell said three of the four recommended schools in his ward are in such high-need neighbourhoods. “These are neighbourhoods with less-well-to-do families that don't have school-based daycare accessible to them right now,” he said. “This is an important service to parents in those areas.”
The fourth, Humber Valley Village Junior Middle School, near Islington Avenue and Eglinton Avenue West, isn't necessarily a high-needs area but benefited from space availability and the board's efforts to suggest geographically dispersed sites.
Once the ministry returns a finalized list for the 2010 rollout sites, Ms. Grose said, she and her colleagues will begin identifying sites for 2011.
“We're going to start right away on identifying schools for Phase 2,” she said. “This really is the beginning of a really important program.”
The full-day learning program is based on a model put forward last spring by former deputy education minister Charles Pascal that would pair teachers with early-childhood educators in the classroom throughout the school day, and provide extended hour programs to parents for a small fee.
Critics such as the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada have said the program will be too costly for a province in the red, and that the real cost of full-day kindergarten will double initial estimates, reaching $1.8-billion annually.
