3 Things To Focus On When Choosing A Daycare Center For Your Child To Attend
Are you getting ready to choose a new daycare center for your child to attend? Here are a few important things to focus on while comparing your options:
The Daily Schedule
It is important to ask the prospective daycare centers you are considering sending your child to for a daily schedule that they utilize as the guide for their instruction, activities, and other aspects of day-to-day care. Are nap times included in the daily schedule? If not, you may end up dealing with a grumpy kid every day after you pick them up from daycare. When are mealtimes scheduled? Is learning time structured or just implemented whenever possible throughout the day? What kinds of activities will your child have an opportunity to participate in on a given day? How much free time is scheduled for each day, where there isn't much structure for the children to follow? You should know everything that goes on throughout a typical day just by looking at the daycare center's schedule.
Non-Teaching Employees
It should be easy to learn about and get to know the teachers and administrators at a daycare center, but what about all the people who work behind the scenes? There are people who work behind the scenes to clean the daycare center, make food for mealtimes, and fix repairs as necessary, among other things.
You should know about these people just like you know about the teachers. How does the daycare center vet these employees? Which of these employees, if any, may come into contact with your child at any given time? If you don't know who will be in contact with your child, you can't do your due diligence to ensure optimal safety.
Visitation and Pickup Policies
It is also crucial to find out what the visitation and pickup policies are for any daycare center that you consider sending your child to. If the daycare center has an open-door policy, they can't possibly ensure that strangers won't show up to contact children in the center for some reason. Everyone who visits the center should have a familial or guardianship relationship with one of the kids attending the school and should sign in and sign out as they come and go.
Also, there should be pickup policies in place to ensure that only authorized individuals are able to pick your child up from the center at any time. You should be able to provide the daycare center with a list of approved people in your life to pick your child up for convenience or emergency purposes, and then the daycare center should verify that any person picking your child up is on the list and can prove who they are.
For more information, reach out to a local daycare center.