The Association of Early Childhood Educators Ontario (AECEO) is the professional association for Early Childhood Educators (ECEs) in Ontario. We support ECEs in their professional practice and advocate for recognition and appropriate compensation for early childhood professionals, so they can provide high quality programs for children and families. One of our ongoing goals is to activate Ontario’s ECEs to engage in leadership and advocacy, challenging  practices and policies that restrict expression and pedagogical potential for ECEs, children and families. In their intellectual and ethical practices with children, families and communities, we believe ECEs are uniquely positioned to imagine and create the world we want to live in. We are thus pleased to announce our partnership with Western University as co-leads for the Provincial Centre of Excellence for Early Years and Child Care and Secretariat. Through this partnership, the AECEO seeks to make public the work and value of ECEs while supporting their pedagogical journey. This not only benefits children, families and societies but also advances the early childhood profession.

In this issue: 

• AECEO welcomes Erin Filby
• Call For Articles for Fall 2019 issue
• AECEO Executive Coordinator’s Update
• Decent Work Campaign FAQs
• Education Consultations: Kindergarten Classroom
• In Response To Bill 66: Restoring Ontario’s Competitiveness Act
• AECEO 2019 Ontario Budget Submission
• Inclusion Is An Experience, Not A Placement (Abstract)
• Profiles Of The Nominees For The 2019-2020 Provincial Board Of Directors

 For this issue, the full publication is being made available to the public.

The Ministry of Education has confirmed that the wage enhancement grant will continue in 2019-20. Also confirmed was that child care spending this year will the same as last year, with the addition of the new tax credit announced in yesterday's Budget.

Many thanks to all who participated in getting petitions signed, emailing their MPPs and raising this issue to the level that the government had to listen! This shows that advocacy campaigns do work and we will continue to fight for a professional wage and decent work in the early years and child care sector and a funded wage grid with a minimum $25/hour for RECEs.

Toronto Star article

With over 12,000 signatures garnered on hard copy petitions in less than a month - and they are still coming in - the WEG Petition initiative shows that overwhelming support for keeping the grant exists in this province. AECEO members, Decent Work Teams, and supporters across Ontario worked hard to gather signatures and spread the word. You have made the petition a huge success! Thank you!

The petition, urging legislators to maintain the $2 per hour Provincial Wage Enhancement Grant, is being presented in the Ontario Legislature this week - so now is the perfect time to keep up the pressure to continue the grant by contacting your MPP directly to reinforce and further support the message.

HOW?

There is an easy 5 minute action that you, your colleagues, friends and family can take to demonstrate to each MPP how strong the support is among their own constituents/voters. MPPs need to hear from you - and they will pay attention if they receive strong feedback about an issue.

Sending an email or leaving a phone message is a quick and easy way to communicate with your elected representative. It can be short and sweet. All you need to say is that, as their constituent, you want them to make sure that the wage grant continues! If you signed the petition or have a personal story to tell you can include that too. Please copy [email protected] on the email, or let us know who you have contacted so we can follow up with the MPP.  If you are looking for a template to copy/paste/modify - the OCBCC has created one: http://www.childcareontario.org/petition_email_template

Support from RECEs who do not currently receive the grant is also important – not only because it is of benefit to fellow RECEs, but because it preserves the concept of government support for wages - which is crucial to our larger goal: the implementation of a funded wage grid across Ontario.

Click here to find your provincial riding and your MPP's contact information.

Imagine the power emails from 55,000 RECEs would have!

#ECEPower #DecentWork #ProfessionalPay

If you will be in Toronto on Thursday and are able to attend the presentation of the petition to the Legislative Assembly please let us know at [email protected].

Association of Early Childhood Educators Ontario (AECEO)

Submission to the Ministry of Finance 2019 Pre Budget Consultations

 We support Registered Early Childhood Educators (RECEs) in their professional practice and advocate for the recognition and appropriate compensation of the profession. RECEs are fundamental to high quality early learning and child care (ECEC) in Ontario.

Summary of Budget Action Recommendations

1. Commit to continuing the $2/hour Wage Enhancement Grant (WEG) and immediately extending it to include RECEs in other sectors including EarlyON staff
2. Develop and implement a publicly funded province wide wage scale with a $25/hour minimum wage for RECEs and commensurate compensation for early years staff, a benefits package, including paid sick and personal leave days; we advise the Government to commit at least $375 million as a first step to establishing the wage scale

Click here to read the full submission.

Application deadline - February 18, 2019

The AECEO is looking for a Community Organizing and Communications Coordinator to assume a leadership role in coordinating and implementing the Professional Pay & Decent Work Campaign initiatives and ongoing communication strategies and events.

Details about this exciting opportunity may be found posted here.

In this issue: 

• Humans of ECE...Share your story
• RECEs share their experience with Decent Work
• Ontario Centres of Excellence for early years and child care
• The Kindergarten Partnership:  From Vision to Action
• Interview with Kim Hiscott RECE, Executive Director of Andrew Fleck Children's Services (Featured article to the public)
• Ontario Centres of Excellence for early years and child care
• The Kindergarten Partnership:  From Vision to Action

We are launching Humans of ECE..share your story on the provincial wage enhancement grant.  Continuing from our Humans of ECEPower campaign we want to hear from you why the provincial wage enhancement grant is important to you.

Write your comments on the template and tell us why you need to keep the provincial wage grant.  Take a picture of yourself holding it and email it to us at [email protected]

We are doing this campaign alongside the petition.  Make sure you print, sign and mail us original copies of the petition.  If you are intererested in collecting signatures in your community to present directly to your local MPP, please email us at [email protected] 

Provincial Wage Enhancement Grant Petition

We have partnered with the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care to launch a petition to continue the Provincial Wage Enhancement Grant to Registered Early Childhood Educators and early years staff in licensed child care.  This funding provides $2 per hour in wage support to many educators and it is critical that it continues.  Funding has not yet been confirmed beyond March 31, 2019.  The future of the grant is in the hands of the provincial government and will be decided by the Ontario Budget this spring. 

The AECEO Board of Directors is very pleased to introduce Rachel Lafferty as the AECEO’s Executive Coordinator.

Rachel Lafferty is a Registered Early Childhood Educator with a Bachelor of Science degree in Biology and Health Science and a Bachelor of Education degree with an Ontario College of Teachers registration in addition to a Master of Education graduate degree with a specialization in Distance Education.

She was the first member of her immediate and extended family to earn postsecondary credentials and did so while owning and operating a small business full-time. Rachel has experience teaching in early learning, elementary school, and college settings. While coordinating an Indigenous Early Childhood Education program for nearly seven years, she wrote ECE curriculum with an Indigenous focus and established successful partnerships with various stakeholders and community organizations. This included the establishment of a partnership with Contact North to provide an online ECE program that would allow students who would otherwise not have the opportunity, due to geographic and other barriers, to earn their ECE credential.

Rachel has extensive experience teaching children and adults in both face-to-face and online classrooms in addition to part-time ECE Professorships in the college system. She believes strongly in professional advocacy and is looking forward to working with the Association of Early Childhood Educators as Executive Coordinator.

Ms. Lafferty currently resides in Peterborough with her spouse and family.

Happy New Year, happy 2019!!

As we reflect on 2018, we are inspired to continue to advocate for the socially important and valuable work of ECEs and early years staff that happens around the province with children, families and in communities.

We have been hearing from ECEs and employers across the Province who are concerned about the Wage Enhancement Grant (WEG) continuing into next year. We understand that the Wage Enhancement Grant is important to the many ECEs and early years staff who receive this funding. We have heard no indication that the Wage Enhancement Grant is cancelled.

Here is what we know:

It's that time of year again! November 27th is Giving Tuesday - a day where charities, organizations and individuals join together to share commitments, rally for important causes, and think about others. Most people know about Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Giving Tuesday allows us to celebrate giving and volunteering.

The AECEO would like to take this time to thank all who have made charitable donations and/or provided support through membership, and the many, many volunteers who have worked with us this year on the Professional Pay and Decent Work campaign. Our campaign has only become stronger  - and will continue to grow - with your support.

“Well educated, well paid and competent early childhood educators are fundamental to high quality early years and child care programs that support children and families across the province … The introduction of Bill 47 and concurrent repeal of critical protections established in Bill 148 is deeply concerning to ECEs, early years staff, and workers across Ontario.

Too many ECEs, early years staff, and Ontario workers continue to face low wages in part-time, temporary or contract jobs without employment benefits, workplace protection or the right to form, and keep, a union. Even with the increasing professionalization of ECEs and the ample evidence pointing to the immense importance of their work for children, families, and society, ECEs have seen a very slow and limited increase in professional recognition through improved compensation and benefits.

The valuable and socially important work of ECEs and early years staff is threatened by persistently low wages and challenging working conditions. The AECEO urges the government to reconsider the decision to repeal workers protections as outlined in Bill 47. ECEs and early years staff across Ontario are calling on the government to fulfill their responsibility to workers, children, families and communities.”

See full written submission here. 

George Brown College, School of Early Childhood planned in partnership with:  Toronto Children's Services, The Toronto District School Board, Toronto Catholic School Board and P.A.C.E. 

Come together with other professionals who work in Kindergarten and School-Age Programs to…

Increase our understanding of "Children's Environment Inquiry: Indigenous

Perspectives Learn more about Food Literacy and what it matters

Explore Digital Literacy; the use of Apps in supporting learning

What we need to know about bullying online and in the playground

As part of the Early Childhood Educators of BC and the Canadian Child Care Federation National Conference in the Spring 2019 they are hosting a Students Voices as Leaders to be listened to. They have created a blog site at http://ececstudentleaders.weebly.com/ and are inviting students, instructors and ECEC field professionals to celebrate the voices of students as leaders. Every few weeks between now and the conference they will post a new question to explore, currently they have posted:

a) why student voices 

b) celebrating student work

I am a George Brown College Student in the Early Childhood Education diploma program, and I have done my third field placement at The Association of Early Childhood Educators Ontario (AECEO). The field placement at AECEO was entirely different from my first two placements in two ways. Firstly, instead of working in an Early Childhood setting with the children, I was working in an office environment. Secondly, the focus of my work was representing registered early childhood educators (RECEs). I chose this alternative placement to gain more in-depth knowledge about the field of ECE, the issues currently being faced by the sector and the role and importance of advocacy in the ECE sector. At the beginning of my placement, I was very nervous and overwhelmed. But, as the time passed and with the support and guidance of team AECEO, I started to understand the different tasks and activities, the AECEO is a part of and lead.

The AECEO Board, Editorial Committee and staff are very excited to present the Fall issue of the eceLINK magazine. 

We have once again partnered with Red River College to offer the Science of Early Child Development’s (SECD) highly-regarded online professional learning workshops to early childhood educators in Ontario. SECD’s engaging, multimedia resources are used around the world by people who want to learn more about the impact of the early years on lifelong health and well-being.

Participants will have online access to all workshop content (videos, readings, links, games, discussions) over a two-week period and have flexibility to work through the materials at times that are most convenient for them. 

These workshops fill up quickly - to avoid disappointment please register as soon as possible.

We are excited to launch our Action Toolkit the Provincial Week of Action is October 14 - 21, 2018. This year's theme is CHAMPIONS FOR CHILDREN in recognition of the essential role that educators play in the lives of our youngest learners. During the Week of Action we want to highlight ECEPower by raising the voices of ECEs and early years staff across Ontario.

We have joined forces with the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care (OCBCC) to make the week
surrounding ECE Appreciation Day, October 14th - 21st, a Week of Action to support educators in their campaign for decent work and professional pay.

Our toolkit is designed to get you started in planning a local action to call for Professional Pay and Decent Work and to show appreciation for all ECEs and early years staff.