With a daycare center like this that has locations open for 21 years, there are no doubt many happy and satisfied parents. I'm not one of them. On only the 3rd day, my daughter went to daycare in the morning just fine and came home with the flu. She required hospitalization for 8 days for this severe illness and even developed pneumonia along the way. In only half a week towards the end of winter, we received 2 health notices about children in my daughter's room being diagnosed with Fifth Disease and Conjunctivitis. The daycare didn't even send a 3rd notice to inform other parents after we informed the daycare that our daughter was diagnosed with the flu. Needless to say, we immediately pulled her out after she was hospitalized. My hope is my experience can help others to make a more informed decision about childcare and, specifically, this daycare.
My daughter has been mostly at home for her 15 months with occasional days at the backup childcare center at my place of employment with no problems at all. We had been researching daycares in the area, been waitlisted with a couple, and visited NGCC in Westford. Sending our daughter to daycare was more about interaction with other kids, not out of necessity due to work, etc. We felt positive about this daycare after the tour having felt as though we asked the right set of questions. It turns out we didn't inquire enough about this daycare's sickness policy. On her 3rd day, observing the other kids in her room during drop off, another child did look really sick. We trusted that the daycare would keep an eye on this child and call the parents immediately to pick him up. In retrospect, we made a terrible mistake in dropping our daughter off that day. Having visited my daughter a couple of times towards the end of the day, the child that looked sick was still there and the teacher even admitted that the child is very sick. We're pretty certain my child caught what he had.
The issue I have is even with an established sickness policy which we found out about later, this daycare is very lenient it seems. In general, parents drop off sick kids to daycare all of the time because they possibly no choice (I've seen articles with statistics of 70%). We trusted the daycare to not put other kids at risk and, at the expense of annoying parents by calling them to pick up their sick children, do the right thing. What's worse is that certain staff at the daycare basically said that "well, sickness is very common in daycare" and also saying that "we do the best we can." In retrospect, I just don't want my child to be at a daycare that accepts illness as a common foregone conclusion. I want to know that the daycare is always vigilant about this, monitors the cleaning company that comes in at night to disinfect, etc. Do yourself a favor and ask lots of questions about this, make sure you're really comfortable with the sickness policy, ask on average how many sickness notices go out per week during the winter months, etc. My daughter as a young toddler had to confront one of the most serious illnesses, an illness with which many infants have died across the country, because the daycare didn't strictly follow their own sickness policy. I would not recommend this particular daycare to anyone since I just wasn't comfortable with their approach to dealing with sickness and then their commitment to try even harder after being completely non-existent after the fact. read more