Wonder

Research Outline

Prepared for Jose V. | Delivered March 10, 2020

Best Practices for Running a Day Care

Goals

To obtain information about the problems facing daycare centers relating to daily tasks and best practices in preventing them.

Early Findings

 One of the challenges associated with daily tasks in the daycare setting is maintaining and staying updated with the record keeping of family records which tends to include information such as immunizations and authorized pick-ups for each child.
To prevent errors associated with this record keeping, daycare centers have implemented softwares to counter this, an example of which is Procare Solutions.
Millennial parents want to be 'in the know' at all times but this might be a challenge for daycare staff members since they also have to maintain control of the regular activities. Daycare programs have been leveraging softwares that alleviate challenges associated with communicating with parents and makes it easy to inform parents of "schedules, special events, added programs, tuition, billing, and changes in policy".
One such software is called KidReports. There are also softwares that can be used to increase security in tracking attendance and visitors.
 Establishing rapport with parents and showing genuine interest in their children regardless of their background can also be a challenge as it is personality related for both workers and parents. Despite this however, parents need to feel comfortable with the company and their child/children's caregiver.
Daycare programs are responsible for minimizing health risks on a daily basis for every child. It is recommended that they practice enforcing strict sick-child policies, regularly clean play areas, sanitize toys and implement isolation procedures in cases where a child presents with a communicable disease.
Daily incident reports should be made in the event that a child was abused or hurt. Hardware such as CCTV cameras can help with this.
 Maintaining cleanliness in daycare centers is of utmost importance but this may require additional work for staff members depending on the types of messes made and how often it is done (e.g. "feces smeared on the walls").
Daycare centers can become liable if: they don't provide proper supervision for children (i.e. appropriate staff to child ratio which might vary by state), hire under-qualified staff, there are incidents/ child abuse reported (even if it is based on child's behavior), a child is injured, and license is not in keeping with the federal laws.