Like many of the youngsters in their care, the operators of Montreal’s daycare centres will be taking baby steps as they reopen Monday.
“The government has given us very specific guidelines and there are four phases to the reopening,” said Yasmine Ghandour, one of the founders of Orchard House, which has centres in N.D.G. and Pointe-Claire. “We’ll start off with 30 per cent of our normal capacity and every two weeks it will increase — to 50, 75 and, finally, 100 per cent.
Ghandour said there will be some structural changes that affect daily operations.
“Our teachers will be wearing PPE when they are indoors, and we’ve put away things like dress-up clothes and cuddly toys,” Ghandour said. “We’ve been making individual blocks of Play-Doh. We have to be aware of social distancing, but that’s less of a problem, because we’re a Montessori-based school and our classrooms are structured for individual instruction.
“We have a group of women we call our helping hands and they’ll be looking at longer hours,” Ghandour said. “They help with the cleaning and there will be more emphasis on making sure everything is sanitized at least three times a day.”
The schools are equipped with state-of-the-art ventilation systems and have added UVC lights to help disinfect classrooms and material.
Ghandour said parents had a wide range of responses to reopening.
“It went from ‘What time are you opening Monday?’ to ‘Absolutely not until we have a better idea of what’s happening.’ ”
The schools maintained communication with their teachers through regular Zoom gatherings, and the educators were on hand Friday for a briefing on the new regulations.
Ghandour said there have been a few hiccups.
“The government was supposed to provide us with PPE, but they said it won’t be available until next week,” she said. “But we already obtained some of our own, so we’re prepared.”
And then there’s the question of meals prepared in what Ghandour described as Orchard House’s gourmet kitchen.
“We take pride in the food we serve, but when the virus shut us down, we took all the food we had on hand and donated it to the food bank,” she said. “It’s going to take a couple of days to get supplies in, and until then the children will have to bring their own food.”
Daycares are only one of the services that will be allowed to open Monday as Montreal moves closer to normalcy.
Other services available are dental care, physiotherapy, osteopathy, occupational therapy, chiropractic care, massage therapy, psychology, optometry, acupuncture, naturopathy, homoeopathy, podiatry, career guidance, social work, marriage and family therapy, sexology, nutrition, speech therapy and audiology.
And while Montrealers have to wait until June 15 to get a professional haircut, pet grooming will also be available Monday.
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