A Scarborough daycare suddenly shut its doors Friday evening, leaving some 90 children without care.
The Progress Child Care Centre on Glamorgan Avenue, near Markham Road and Eglinton Avenue, said that underfunding forced the centre to shut down after 30 years of service.
The subsidized child care centre caters to low-income Scarborough parents with children between six months and six years of age.
Parent Krysta Therault learned her daughter would be without a daycare when she dropped her off at the centre Friday morning. She found a row of note attached to cubby holes inside the classroom.
"Do you know how many children there are in there that need daycare?" a tearful Therault asked CTV Toronto. "I need daycare for my daughter and now I don't have anywhere to send her."
The Progress Child Care Centre has had financial trouble for months, and now owes more than $100,000. The centre's board had hoped something could be done to save it but has run out of money.
Many parents are unable to afford to send their children to daycare anywhere else. And with the centre closing without notice, those rushing to find another spot for their children were facing impossibly-long waiting lists.
CTV News has learned that the city has asked for a financial audit of the daycare centre and offered to help by sending staff to look over the centre's finances, but says it is not up to them to provide funding for a daycare that they do not run.
The daycare centre has invited Mayor Rob Ford to attend a meeting this weekend in the hopes that funding can be found to keep the centre operational.
Ford and local councillor Norm Kelly were called to a parents' meeting on Sunday afternoon as part of a last-ditch effort to keep the centre's doors open. Twenty-five childcare workers are also set to lose their jobs.
Progress employee Maria Wisniowska said workers were told Thursday evening the facility would be shutting down and were left to break the news to parents Friday morning.
"Parents had no warning," Wisniowska said. "We had one parent crying this morning that she was going to lose her job, because when she told her boss that she needed to stay with her kids on Monday, she would be fired."
NDP MPP Peter Tabuns blamed Premier Dalton McGuinty for the closure on Friday, claiming the Liberal government has left daycares "chronically underfunded."
"Now, with four and five year-olds leaving for full-day kindergarten, child care centres across the province are in danger of closing," Tabuns said in a statement, calling for Ford and McGuinty to find a way to save the centre.
