To show Parenthèse readers how parents from across the province contribute to their school community, we’re publishing “portraits” of parents who commit themselves in various ways to the community.

My name is Marie Perron and I have three children: Samuel (age 7), who attends l’école des Pionniers-de-Maillardville, and Amaya (age 5) and Océane (age 2), who attend Les P’tits lutins child care services, located in the school.

Since September 2014, I’ve been the President of Les P’tits lutins child care and preschool, a non-profit society serving families in the community.

Why I decided to get involved:
I wanted to get involved in the Francophone community to surround myself with a group of people from my culture, so as to better share it with my children; and to help our Francophone community with the challenges related to being a minority group in an English-speaking environment.

What I love the most about our Francophone child care centre:
I like to see that parents are involved, and that they want to help their children develop in their Francophone culture. Not only do our child care services respond to a very important child care need for parents, but because they’re offered in French, they introduce French at an early age, and therefore increase the probability of the children excelling in more than one language. I like the unifying effect of what we do: we’re all working to improve the children’s experience and well-being. As a result, many new friendships are created.

A dream that I hold for my children:
I want them to grow up being proud of their Francophone heritage, and to be able to express themselves and travel in French.

A proud achievement:
The last months have been very busy for our society. Obtaining an additional daycare licence, only to repeat the exercise a few months later so that the services could be moved to the new building for l’école des Pionniers-de-Maillardville, required a lot of work. We managed to do this while causing only minimal disruption of services to the parents and children.