MIKE ADLER Oct 27, 2011 - 5:38 PM insideTORONTO.com

Rally at Queen's Park for day care centres facing closure...

Parents were told Nov. 13 could be their last day at Progress Child Care, where enrolment has dwindled even after the city decided in June to send an administrator to help keep the facility near Kennedy Road open.

"Where are these kids going to go?" Janet Sayson, one of the parents, asked during a morning Queen's Park rally organized by the Canadian Union of Public Employees and the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care.

Sayson, who cleans hotel suites, has a fee subsidy at Progress for her two-year-old daughter and her three-year-old son. He learned to read at the day care and is gaining computer skills there, she said.

But if Progress closes, Sayson added, women who have been working will end up staying home, including her, unless she finds an affordable alternative, perhaps hiring a nanny whose services she and her brother could share. "It's not easy to put the money together."

Meanwhile, the Bond Child and Family Development Centre, a United Way agency, has sent notice to the city it must close on Dec. 15, though its acting executive director Jessica Quaile said the facility's board and staff - now down to seven employees - still have hope the facility will reach its 75th year.

"We're going to fight all the way to the end," she promised.

The centre, in the Metropolitan United Church near Yonge and Queen streets, is equipped with a Snoezelon room, a multisensory space designed in Switzerland to calm children with autism.

"It's a very relaxing environment," said Nancy Bokma, a family support worker and resource teacher at Bond who is helping remaining parents find similar programs in the area.

Managers of both child cares blame cuts in subsidized spaces for their disappearing enrolment.

Two years ago, Bond's executive director Rosemary White told a city committee her operation, which serves people from Regent Park and St. Jamestown, was threatened with closure because it had lost spaces subsidized by the province and city.

Members of the centre's community board, she said, were "emotional because we could not see any way out of this."

At Progress, which is carrying a $100,000 debt, only 13 workers remain out of 25 employed earlier this year, said Maria Wishniowska.

Because of a freeze on subsidized enrolment, the only children Progress can take are infants and toddlers, and the room for them is full, she said.

Meanwhile, the centre must continue paying $12,000 a month in rent, and garage and bake sales haven't changed the financial situation that much, said Wishniowska.

Only a few parents with children at Progress, located in the Glamorgan area, are paying a full rate - and only because they are waiting for a subsidy themselves, she added.

Calver, co-ordinator of the child care coalition, said the province could stop the closures - and many others she predicted are coming in the city - with emergency funding and measures in the next budget.

"No municipality can solve this crisis without provincial funding," she said, because so many parents can't afford to pay the full cost of day care.

Toronto-Danforth MPP Peter Tabuns supported Calver's view, telling the protestors to "keep pushing" and saying the fight to save Progress and Bond "is the fight for every child in this province. The thought that we could lose two critical centres is completely unacceptable," he said.

Aggie Fortier, a spokesperson for the city's Children's Services Department, said Bond's difficulties were related to the centre's status as nursery school offering half-day programs when parents increasingly want full-day care.

The facility needs renovations to get a license to expand, said Fortier, adding in August the city briefly stopped approving admissions to Bond after the centre gave notice it would close.

Bond retracted that notice in September, she said.