Jrr Child Centre
School in Toronto

John Ross Robertson Child Centre was founded in 1985 as a non-profit, school age day care centre for Grades 1 to 4. It was located in various buildings and portables until 1992, when the present facility was completed with the help of government funding. The expansion has provided valuable early childhood education services to more people in the John Ross Robertson Community than ever before, moving many people off waiting lists and into a program space. Today the JRRCC is licensed to serve 84 daycare children plus another 48 Nursery school children who occupy the space when daycare children are at school. We then increased our school age capacity from thirty to sixty and within a year filled our capacity. At the same time, the school age program space was doubled with the addition of the upstairs lunchroom, a facility shared with the school. In 2003 the child centre expanded, doubling the number of Kindergarten children served from ten to twenty, with a licensed capacity of twenty-four. Over time, some junior kindergarten children were also admitted to make up shortfalls in school age numbers and eventually the kindergarten group became a separate unit. In 1991 the program was expanded to include a small component of Senior Kindergarten children but was licensed primarily as a school age facility. These children are now part of our overall school age program that includes children from Grades 1 to 6 playing, sharing, mentoring and learning from one another. In the early 1990s the Centre became one of ten pilot projects for Grade 5 and 6 students known as ''Ten Plus'' to address the issue of care for older children. This initiative pre-dated our own Provincial Government's plan to expand childcare availability over the next ten years and has maximized our use of space at John Ross Robertson School.