By Don Urquhart, Times Chronicle
Osoyoos has a new childcare facility – Dharma Kids Centre – after a young couple from Burnaby moved to town bringing with them experience, enthusiasm and lots of fresh ideas.
Meagan Lorente and her partner Jav Somji moved to Osoyoos in the waning days of summer and in a serendipitous moment while house hunting stumbled on a house that was perfect for a childcare facility.
The pair also run a successful child care facility in Burnaby that was originally started by Somji’s mother over 30 years ago with the over 100-child centre now being operated by Lorente and Somji.
Like many, the couple has been vacationing in Osoyoos for years and in more recent times had been toying with the idea of moving here. For the most part the key driver was lifestyle Lorente says. “We want to have a slower pace, we want to be in the smaller community and contribute, so it’s more than just business for us because we want to do something as well in the community.”
The location where they have established the childcare facility, which opened on Oct. 17, came about as much by chance as anything. “We were house hunting and we came across this property, it wasn’t actually by design. It was just kind of serendipitous,” she adds.
She notes that it is typically a challenge – especially now given the housing crisis – to find suitable locations. This one at 8507 74th Ave. virtually ticked all the boxes for the duo. And believe it or not, they say Osoyoos real estate is actually “somewhat” affordable with Lorente quickly adding that this is through the lens of the lower mainland.
Dharma Kids Centre. Don Urquhart photo
“It’s interesting because I guess for us we kind of get labelled as ‘from the coast’ so for us from the coast perspective we look at Osoyoos and it’s actually kind of affordable,” she says with a wry laugh.
Lorente says substantial due diligence went into the process before they decided whether or not to press ahead. A couple of factors were important in green-lighting the project and this included the Osoyoos Elementary School with decent numbers of children in each birth year, alongside the fact there is only one other fully licensed childcare facility in Osoyoos, the Osoyoos Childcare Centre.
While Dharma is now the second fully licensed childcare facility there are two other day homes in which childcare is provided out of individual’s homes, but these are limited to seven children each.
“Our capacity is up to 18 meaning we’re about half full right now, so we’ve got space for kiddos,” Lorente says. Their facility is aimed at the two-and-a-half to five year old range.
Another part of their due diligence was whether or not they would be able to find teachers for the facility. In that regard they probably should consider themselves lucky in that they were able to find two qualified and very experienced teachers.
One teacher was even local, while the second from Edmonton had been yearning to live in Osoyoos for some time and was more than happy to make the move.
A key aspect of the Dharma Kids Centre is that it is not simply a “play-based” learning child care.
“We want to do more than childcare. We’re a big advocate of early learning so we specifically focus on the preschool category because we want to support them to be ready for school.”
For children this means not just learning how to write their name and letters and things like that but goes beyond, to emotional development and social skills, which Lorente notes are “huge at this age”.
As an example she points to aspects like “learning how to share, how to make new friends, learning how to help someone when they’re upset – these are all different skills that factor into each other, so that’s our big focus because we want to create a well-rounded program.”
“We pride ourselves on being foundational skill-focussed so these are the literacy and writing skills along with the free play opportunities, and the social and emotional development.”
And because they also have an “occasional child care” license they have flexibility to offer some unique child care services that help fill the gap from lack of babysitters and costly babysitting services.
“Currently we are doing year-round childcare for 2 1/2 to 5 and then what we’re going to add is weekend classes, so things like art classes, and different extracurricular activities because there seems to be a need,” Lorente says.
In the summertime when there’s visiting families they are also planning on offering options for occasional care so that parents can drop off their kids for three hours while they do a wine tour.
“We’ve already discussed the idea with our neighbours who operate wine tours,” she laughs. They’re also looking at evening classes in order to enable date nights for parents. “These are the sorts of things we’re excited to do beyond just the child care. It’s rare to find these other things, especially in a small community,” Lorente notes.
Their timing in opening the facility was perhaps also serendipitous as the Province just recently announced a significant increase in government subsidies for families of children aged 0-K. These subsidies, which come into effect this coming December 2022, go straight to the child care facilities so that parents don’t need to apply.
Lorente says the subsidie s are game changing because effectively the subsidy is jumping from around $100 to $400 a month. This means in the case of their facility nearly a 50 per cent reduction in fees from $850 to around $400.
And this is clearly only the beginning for the pair, as Lorente says, “the one thing we do have in the back of our minds, I don’t know when or if we can even do it, but we have thought about infant-toddler – it’s a massive category for child care.”
There is a “massive need,” she says but it also has unique challenges covering basically from birth, but generally about one year old up to two-and-a-half to three years old. The challenges include much higher certification requirements for teachers and smaller capacities, capped at 12 children.
The best part is, they already have a whole bunch of names on a wait list.
“Being day one, we’ll see how it goes. We’ll make sure this one has what it needs,” before looking to expand, Lorente highlighted.
“Like I said, it’s more than just business. It’s supporting the community, we want that sort of relationship, where it all works together and it’s a win-win for everybody.”
