BURST
Eighty families are scrambling to secure child care after the sudden closure of an outdoor preschool in Langley weeks before school was scheduled to return.
“It’s been devastating,” said Ashley Lindbo, whose seven-year-old son attended the Langley Forest School for the last few years.
“He’s in his last year there, so it was emotional to begin with. He’s going into Grade 2, and not having that break from mainstream school is going to affect him dramatically.”
Langley Forest School was founded in 1985. In 2014, it shifted to forest-based programming that focuses on child-led and play-based learning completely outdoors. It operates out of Williams Park and South Langley Regional Park. Its indoor address is listed as Fort Langley Community Church, which is about a 10-minute drive from Williams Park.
Carol LaJeunesse, the school’s president, said the school was shut down by Fraser Health earlier this month after it determined the school’s community care facility licence had expired because the school had not operated at its Glover Road church building for 12 consecutive months.
LaJeunesse said she has tried to speak with Fraser Health to get clarity on how regularly the school needs to use the indoor space, but so far the conversations have not been helpful. She said in the last school year, the school used the indoor facility at the church once a month.
“I registered everybody in January, February, March, April for this coming up school year, and then pulled their first month’s tuition, which Fraser Health knows that’s how we function. And then while we were on holidays, we got this letter telling us our licence is expired,” LaJeunesse said.
In a letter to parents on Tuesday, LaJeunesse said she is fighting to keep the school open but has had to lay off 10 staff due to the loss of its child-care spaces that were supporting 80 families.
In an emailed statement, Fraser Health said a community care facility licence “must be attached to a facility that the program operates from” and the facility “must be available for use during the hours of operation of the program.”
Fraser Health said: “In this case, the community care facility licence was associated with the Glover Road (church) premises. Fraser Health’s licensing team determined that the premises was not being operated as a community care facility and was not being used by Langley Forest School as the facility from which its child-care program operated.”
Fraser Health said the licensing requirements do not preclude child-care programs from holding outdoor activities; they just ensure children have “access to an appropriate and safe facility when they need it.”
It added that the expiry of the licence does not mean the school has to shut down, and Fraser Health’s licensing team was available to work with Langley Forest School to be licensed once again.
LaJeunesse said support from Fraser Health and the Education Ministry has been lacking. She said the school needs to find a building close enough to a forested area to maintain the school’s objective. And she is not certain how often the school would need to be indoors to meet Fraser Health’s criteria.
In the meantime, families are in limbo.
Lindbo’s son is on the autism spectrum and was nonverbal when first entering preschool. The traditional indoor classroom setting was not for him, the family quickly learned, so they enrolled him in the forest school instead.
“At first, he was a bit hesitant, stayed in his stroller a lot and they totally allowed that. There weren’t any issues with it,” Lindbo said. “And slowly, as it went on, he would get out of his stroller and he would join the group, and that was just so amazing to see as a parent of a child who stands out. He just thrived, and you could see he just felt so comfortable.”
Lindbo said the situation is “mind-boggling,” given the high demand for child care.
“I know, luckily for me, I do have the backup of having a mainstream school. But parents who have their children ready to go to preschool have set their work schedules accordingly, now have to find child care,” she said.
Another parent, Dani Wall, says the news has been really hard on her family. Wall’s two-year-old son was on the waitlist for the school and her daughter was meant to start her second year next month.
“I just told her that the school was closed, and she’s heartbroken. She is so sad, and she doesn’t understand why,” Wall said, tearing up.
“She’s like, ‘I like outside better. There’s room for us to run and play, and I see all my friends.’ The school has been incredible. She is definitely more confident than she was at the start of the last school year.”
Wall only trusted a handful of family members with her daughter before putting her faith into the forest school, she said. The family ended up falling in love with the environment and built trust with all of the staff.
Wall has been able to find an alternative forest preschool option in Abbotsford, but the opening is only for one day a week. The Langley school would have taken her daughter three days a week.
“She’s going into kindergarten next year, so I wanted to prep her for being away that extra bit of time. One day a week isn’t anywhere close to the same, and it’s a shorter program because Langley Forest School’s the only one that I found when I was looking into the schools, that was four hours,” she said.