St. Albert has a new daycare centre after Little Einsteins Childcare officially opened in Grandin Park Plaza on Saturday.
Located in the space formerly occupied by Albert’s Restaurant, the centre can handle 125 children, including 22 to 25 babies and 15 of school age. The centre had been caring for 55 children in temporary space in the mall for the past several months and have another 15 registered following their grand opening on Saturday.
The owners are Curtis and Louise Stewart, a St. Albert couple who have been operating daycares for about five years in the Edmonton area. They have 11 other centres. The new St. Albert location is more than twice as large as they usually take on in a new centre.
“We just found from our own initial surveys that there is just no space available in St. Albert,” said Curtis.
“We got so many inquiries for baby spaces, we doubled our baby size.”
Alberta experienced an intense childcare crunch when the economy was booming due to an influx of people moving to the province and a rise in birth rates. While the crunch has been easing in Edmonton, St. Albert has fewer spaces per capita and the demand is still strong, Stewart said.
The main challenge to creating day care spaces in St. Albert is finding affordable space, said Stewart, who spent about a year searching for a space to lease.
After settling on Grandin Park Plaza, he has invested more than $400,000 into the space, of which $111,000 comes from a provincial program to create day care space. Stewart thinks the day care is a good fit even though mall owner Amacon wants to eventually redevelop the site.
“There’s over $400,000 spent in there to open the doors. We wouldn’t have done that if we didn’t think we were there for the long term,” he said.
Tricia Cunningham of Sigis Childcare Society welcomed another player to the local day care sandbox.
“It’s a good thing. It just eliminates people having to wait for childcare spaces,” she said. “The need for childcare has always been a really strong need for St. Albert.”
She’s still operating at capacity and keeping a wait list.
“There seems to be still a lot of people moving into St. Albert and looking for care,” she said.
There is a particularly strong need for infant spaces, said Michelle Radey, executive director of St. Albert Daycare.
She doesn’t offer infant spaces but her wait list is still 150 names strong.
Another pressure in childcare during Alberta’s boom years was staff turnover. This prompted the provincial government to provide workers with better pay and training opportunities. The result is that childcare is a more attractive profession with reduced staff turnover, Radey said.
“It’s definitely retained the people who maybe thought they were going to leave,” she said.
The target for the Creating Child Care Choices program was 14,000 spaces in three years. The program is nearing the end of its second year. It had created more than 9,000 spots as of last May, said Cathy Ducharme, spokesperson for Alberta Children and Youth Services.
“We’ve had a tremendous response,” she said. “We’re never ever going to get rid of all the waiting lists but there’s definitely a lot more vacancies across the province.”
