By Dan Laxer
The Suburban

It started with an anonymous complaint.

Now, one of the most unique and most loved preschools in Montreal is being threatened with closure.

The Little Red Playhouse is not a CPE in the usual sense. It is one of only a handful of places that offer services to kids who are not neurotypical, and who don’t fit in elsewhere. Founder Sharon McCarry explains that because of the services it provides and the specialists who work with the kids there, it falls outside the government’s current definitions of early childhood educational facility. Hence, there is no actual license for what The Little Red Playhouse does. That anonymous complaint – just like the kind that one might make to the OQLF – led inspectors from the ministère de la Famille to pay McCarry a visit at her home, accusing her of operating an unlicensed daycare.

McCarry’s own son, now 21, has autism. As a child he had been rejected from several schools, different Ys, and even church community groups until she took him to the Little Red Playhouse. It had been operating as a nursery school for years. McCarry was able to bring her son there a couple of days a week. In 2008 she took it over out of sheer desperation, and turned it into an inclusive education centre open to other kids with autism. They started providing art therapy, slowly adding on Social Skills and Applied Behavioural Analysis (ABA), bringing in occupational, speech, and music therapists, and others, all supervised by a behavioural consultant.

McCarry’s facility has been through this before. The government had made an exception for her in the past so that she could continue to operate. Needless to say, she was not expecting a visit from government inspectors.

Ten years ago McCarry had lobbied three ministries – education, family, and health, asking that they “recognize our model,” and to effectively create a new type of license “to replicate what it is we’re doing, because the outcomes that we were having were exceptional.”

It has always been difficult for neuro-atypical kids and their families to get the help and services they need in Quebec. Right now, McCarry tells The Suburban, there more than 5,000 kids on waiting lists in the West Island and the Sud-Ouest. Many of them end up in schools or daycares that simply cannot accommodate them.

In Quebec a regular daycare cannot have more than 20 percent special needs kids. McCarry says she doesn’t want to have to revert to the accepted model and have to severely reduce the number of atypical kids The Little Red Playhouse serves.

She enlisted the help of three Liberal MNAs – Jennifer Maccarone (Westmount–Saint-Louis) and Elisabeth Prass (D’Arcy-McGee), both of whom have kids with special needs, and Désirée McGraw (Notre-Dame-de-Grâce).

Maccarone has been in contact with Minister of Families Suzanne Roy, and Prass has been speaking with social services minister Lional Carmant. He knows about the Little Red Playhouse, Prass says, and is presumably on board with its model. The goal is to get Roy and Carmant to work together on a pilot project for facilities like The Little Red Playhouse. “The government is not providing the services,” Prass says, “these daycares are.” In the same way that Quebec has been leading the way in daycares for 25 years, Prass says, this would be another opportunity to do the same where facilities like McCarry’s is concerned.

McGraw is also lending her support. The Little Red Playhouse is a pillar of the Montreal West community, she wrote on X. “With so many kids on waiting lists we need more specialized pre-schools like The Little Red Playhouse, not fewer.” n