'Long journey ahead' to save Auckland's ECEs following council vote
Friday, 16 December 2022
Any hopes that a proposal to scrap Auckland’s community-owned early childhood education (ECEs) centres would be taken off the table have been dashed following a council meeting on Thursday.
The Kauri Kids ECEs may have been granted a reprieve, but mayor Wayne Brown’s proposed cuts were comfortably voted through to the consultation phase by councillors.
Kaipātiki Local Board member Paula Gillon warns that there’s a long journey ahead for the community if they want to save their childcare centres.
Consultations are not binding, and Gillon fears that the question over ECEs will get lost amid other hot topic issues like raising public transport fares and asset sales.
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“It still depends on the decision maker, so elected officials need to be persuaded. It's our job to get all the information in front of them,” Gillon said.
She said the next step would be to see how the centres could be made profitable so that they couldn’t be said to be a liability for the council.
Parent Alric Wright said that, at a meeting at Howick Kauri Kids, parents agreed they would be willing to pay a bit more if it meant saving a vital community resource.
Wright started a petition to save the ECEs which got a thousand signatures in its first day and had since doubled that.
He said there was a shortage of childcare locally with wait lists of around six months, and it would be hard to find somewhere for his child to go.
“It’s already a stressful time of year and the uncertainty over whether our children will have a centre to return to in the new year is not good.”
But, perhaps the biggest bombshell to come out of Thursday’s council budget meeting was a suggestion from the council that it intended to offload teachers to the private sector.
North Shore councillor Richard Hills asked if the potential cost of redundancies of teaching staff had been taken into account when calculating savings.
Director Customer and Community Services Claudia Wyss said the council intended to avoid that by 'working with alternative providers on transferring staff'. She said there was a worker shortage in the industry.
Transferring staff to a private provider could mean they would have to find a way to make the deal profitable, perhaps by reducing salaries or increasing prices.
Teachers union NZEI president Liam Rutherford said that often private childcare providers were more interested in purchasing land as an investment and a council lease in a community building may not be attractive.
“That they think that they can just pass over staff shows that they don’t understand the sector. It’s a botched proposal that should be taken off the table.”
Rutherford said for teachers to receive “half-baked plans” to scrap their jobs a couple of weeks out from Christmas was “cruel”.
According to briefing documents by council staff, the 10 Kauri Kids centres run at a loss, costing $200,000 a year.
But, staff suggest that if the spaces used by the ECEs were leased to a private enterprise, childcare or otherwise, $1 million in savings could be made.
It's part of a wider package of $130 million in proposed cuts to meet a fiscal shortfall in the council's budget.
The budget is expected to be up for public consultation in March 2023 and councillors will have an understanding of how it will be framed by February.
Only Maungakiekie-Tāmaki councillor Josephine Bartley voted against the cuts. Richard Hills said he knew the community and media “wanted blood on the dance floor”, but he supported the mayor’s right to have a budget consulted.
Waitākere councillor Shane Henderson named it “the death by a thousand cuts budget”.
“And, I fear its cutting through to the marrow.”