On June 15, a dinner was held in honour of the four women who have successfully completed a year-long Early Childhood Education (ECE) program at Cache Creek Elementary School (“Child care certificate program”, The Journal, May 12, 2016). The program was a partnership between School District No. 74 (SD 74), Make Children First (MCF), and Vancouver Community College (VCC). The four graduates are Shauna Laskey, Jolene Peters, Rosie Peters, and Becky Spreng.
Deanna Horsting, the local MCF coordinator, says that she saw a need for the program, in light of the lack of daycare and qualified ECE graduates in our local communities. “We have no daycare, so people are quitting their jobs, or leaving their community, or leaving their children in sketchy situations,” she says. “I realized we had to get daycare in our area, and looked at different ways to support that.”
What it came down to, she says, was getting local people trained as early childhood educators. Horsting contacted Greg Howard at SD 74, who put her in touch with Karen Miller, who is the SD 74 Careers and Transitions coordinator. “We found that the best fit for a partnership was Vancouver Community College, so we publicized it, spread the word, tried to get people to sign up.”
The program started in September 2016 and ran five days a week from 9 a.m. until 2 p.m. at Cache Creek Elementary School. “Four awesome ladies made it right to the end,” says Horsting. “They can work in daycare and pre-school, and in Strong Start and Head Start centres.” She admits that a challenge is that each of the graduates first needs to complete 500 hours of work, under the supervision of someone who has their ECE qualification, in order to be fully licenced and signed off.
She adds, however, that the 500 hours can be completed where and when it is convenient for the students. “They can do weekends, evenings, two weeks at a time, and it can be volunteer or paid work.”
Course instructor Kat Moss, a VCC outreach program instructor from Kamloops, says that the program is a little bit of a pilot project. “Part of the reason the project came here is because of the lack of ECEs in the area. That provides complications. But we were able to provide consistency, which is best, as the supervisor can establish relationships with those taking part in the course.”
Shauna Laskey says that she has always wanted to do something like this. “I couldn’t pass up the opportunity.” She admits, though, that the course was challenging for the four who made it through to the end, as they all have small children; in Laskey’s case, one in school and one in pre-school.
“I had the support of my aunt, Kim DeCook, who looked after the children; and my husband Tyrone looked after them while I was doing homework in the evenings, sometimes until 2 a.m.” During her year of course-work, Laskey also supervised a before- and after-school program at Desert Sands Community School.
“The course was amazing. Kat had so much life experience, and it shone through. I learned so much.” Asked what she hopes to do, Laskey says “I’ll look for the right opportunity, or create something different.”
Rosie Peters says she has been working with children since she graduated high school, at the daycare and after-school programs run by the Nzen’man’ Childhood and Family Development Centre in Lytton, where she lives.
“I’ve been talking about this [the ECE program] for a long time, and was going to move to Merritt to go to the Nicola Valley Institute of Technology. Then I heard about this course, and knew I wouldn’t have to move away from home.”
Peters—who, like Laskey, has two young children—says that she had to find someone to take her children to daycare and school every morning, and that family stepped in to help. “I could pick them up after school.”
She is back at work at Nzen’man’, working with children aged three to five, and says she can get her 500 hours of supervision at the centre. She plans on going back to school to get the education needed to work with special need children.
“It was a great experience,” she says of the course. “I’m glad they brought it to a small community.”