Just as there is a great need for housing in Canada, there are also not enough child care spaces.
According to Statistics Canada, nearly 26 per cent of all parents were on a day care waiting list in 2023, up from 19 per cent in 2022.
The situation is especially dire in small and rural communities, which lack the extensive social services infrastructure of bigger centres.
“Quality child care supports a strong economy and work force development,” said Colleen Sklar, CEO of JohnQ Public, a working group of municipalities and First Nations in Manitoba.
With the help of funding from the Manitoba and federal governments, JohnQ Public has developed an innovative solution to the day care problem that it hopes can be replicated in other parts of the country and in other applications.
Through JohnQ Public’s building arm, JQ Built, the group has developed a model it calls “day care in a box.”
It contains templates and tools to help small communities make a proposal to local councils, apply for funding, issue a request for proposals as well as other technical details.
JohnQ Public has also developed a building model.
Each day care facility is partially prefabricated and trucked to the community in question, where it is assembled into the finished product.
The design is portable enough to be shipped to remote communities in northern Manitoba where there is a large and growing demand for child care facilities.
Construction of the buildings began in January 2023; the first one opened in July 2023.
As of July 2024, 14 day care buildings had been built and installed. The rest are scheduled to be completed and in place by October 2024.
In 18 months, 22 day care centres with 1,718 child care spaces will have been built.
In April 2024, “day care in a box” won this year’s project of the year award from Project Management Institute Manitoba.
The design-build team for the project is Pretium Projects Ltd. of Winnipeg.
“We took the pre-fab floors, walls and roofs built by Holz Constructors and assembled them onsite according to our design,” said company president Justin Bova. “The panels were shipped on trucks to the sites, where they were assembled in two days. Then we took another week to make the structures airtight.”
Bova said it took six months to build and assemble the day care centres instead of the usual 14 months.
Holz Constructors Inc. pre-fabbed the floors, walls (complete with the envelope) and roof assembly.
“We didn’t build the trusses,” said Ted Geddert, the Winnipeg company’s founder and president. “We purchased the trusses and assembled them into panels at our shop and shipped them to site with sheathing and overhangs installed.”
Geddert said the project team didn’t encounter any major problems.
“The usual weather challenges – wind, rain, snowstorm – or sites where you can get stuck, or faraway sites where accommodations are hard to find and resulting shipping challenges due to distance,” he said. “We overcame them by lots of planning and sticking to load sizes that could be shipped conventionally, so that no pilot cars were required.”
The architect of record on the day care project is Chagas Architecture + Development Inc. in Winnipeg.
Pedro Chagas said the day care centres he designed come in two sizes: 6,000 square feet for 74 children, and 9,000 square feet for 104 little people.
“Pre-fab was the best approach for the project, which was to design and construct a large number of buildings of the same basic design in a short period of time,” said Chagas.
Chagas said the project was a success because it was collaborative.
“Imagine a project timeline of 100 per cent,” he said. “We moved all of the team’s knowledge and experience to the first 30 per cent of the project, instead of the traditional approach of spreading our knowledge over 100 per cent of the timeline.”
Sklar said JohnQ Public was founded in 2017 “to bring communities together to share ideas, capacity and resources, and to deliver strategic infrastructure and services in communities large and small.”
JQ Built was created in 2022 to test a new way to deliver community infrastructure.
“We look forward to replicating this model, not only on child care facilities, but also to tackle shortages in housing,” said Sklar.
In fact, JohnQ Public is now in the process of creating JQ Home.
“We are planning to build nine or 10 cluster communities of 60 units of affordable seniors’ housing using a collaborative approach with modular construction,” said Sklar.
This is a fascinating project but as a long-time early years person I have a number of questions. It seems as though the structure and space considerations have been taken into account, and probably comply with your childcare legislation regulations. Running the centres is another story. Attracting good staff is always a challenge. I don’t know about your legislated requirements, but I do know a little about what constitutes high quality programs and high quality caregiving. There are measurable characteristics that include staff credentials, pay, ratios, space, PD, resources, leadership systems etc. However the core of quality lies in relationships, and for babies and toddlers a primary caregiver model and organization to facilitate sensitive transition from home. Play is not only a vehicle for learning, but it’s the world in which young children make meaning. I hope your programs will reflect this and respect children and their families.
I think you might want to work to counter the reflexive actions of many okd-timers and academics who will question quality before they’ve even had a peek at what is inside the box. This time you don’t want them to be thinking about only what is outside the box!