Good morning.
I am here as a representative of the Coalition francophone de la petite enfance du Manitoba, a coalition of partners that provides programs and services to families of children aged zero to six. We are not responsible for child care centres, but rather for supporting parents. The steering committee of the coalition is composed of the Division scolaire franco-manitobaine, the Fédération des parents du Manitoba and the Société de la francophonie Manitoba. There are also round tables where all of our provincial partners can sit to deliver programs and services to families. One of the coalition's major projects is the early childhood and family centres, the ECFCs, which are resource centres for parents. There are 16 ECFCs in Manitoba. Five of them are in urban areas, the others are in rural areas.
We currently receive funding for 11 of these 16 ECFCs. We had to stretch the funding. We are applying for grants in a number of places to meet the needs, because the communities have asked us. We recommend that the federal government give us money so that we can continue our project. Five school communities are still waiting for an ECFC. There is a lack of funds, and families are clamouring for an ECFC in their community. The remaining five communities are also the communities that are a little further away from the urban area and have more needs than many others.
We also have a staff shortage. We want our ECFC staff to have a level two early childhood education, to start with, because we also provide support to parents. We would also like to increase the hours of work for these coordinators, who work 20 to 30 hours a week, depending on the region. A region that has a coordinator working only 20 hours a week can't offer as many programs and services as another. We recommend receiving funding to improve this. Also, we can't offer pension or benefit plans to our staff. For the last six years, salary increases have been non-existent. The funding we receive has been stable since 2009 with no cost of living increases, among others. Everything increases, except funding.
We also have a good problem. The ECFCs attract families to the school division, which increases the number of students. This means that, at the moment, there is a lack of space in the schools for ECFCs, although the school division is trying to support us as much as possible.
There is also a serious lack of programming for exogamous families, since the bulk of our users come from exogamous families. We only have a small number of programs for this clientele. We must improve that too.
Finally, there is a great lack of funding for early childhood assessment and research. We have had ECFCs in francophone school communities in the province since 2004, and we know that our programs have a great qualitative effect. Yet research doesn't show it. We have a lot of data that we could use to complete the research, to prove that it is important to invest in early childhood and that we should continue to do so.
Thank you.