The facility is a very gloomy and closed-off space, despite the colorful decorations and stickers on the door. The day care is essentially one long hallway with cement walls and a number of wooden doors, which remain closed. There is no natural light and no glass to allow parents or the management to see what goes on in the classrooms or to see what the teachers are doing at any given moment.
The front doors remain open and unlocked all day long and anyone can come and go from the main entrance or into the classrooms without question. They require a sign-in and sign-out sheet, but without someone manning the front desk at all times, they have no real way of knowing who is coming/going in and out.
There is no webcam or Internet monitoring available for parents to check-in with their children throughout the day. Parents and workers are not required to remove their shoes or wear shoe covers when going in and out of the nursery. There seems to be no policy in effect whatsoever to curb the sharing of germs---to include having us all use the same pen and sign-in binder, which is presumably touched by every parent (and we've seen children signing it too) throughout each day.
When we first started attending, all of the cribs were touching each other from wall to wall with no space in-between. The appearance of the nursery mats and equipment was beaten up and dirty, with the swings (only 2 in the room) being so low on batteries that they did not work properly or at all. We often observed the staff manually pushing the swings because management did not provide the correct number of batteries. On more than one occasion we found other workers mopping directly next to infants who were laying on boppies on the floor, or we found the smell of bleach/cleaning chemicals to be pretty overwhelming for little noses to be breathing.
In addition to clothing, bibs, bottle parts, and blankets getting mixed up or going missing on a regular basis (despite being properly labeled), we were told one of our bottles marked "Breast Milk" was given to another parent to take home by accident one afternoon. This made us wonder if the correct bottles were being fed to our twins throughout the day, which is even more of a concern when it comes to breast milk.
The most alarming factor was the number of children which were consistently packed into the nurseries with only one full-time teacher present, to include mixing ages from 6 weeks to over 12 months in age. The allowance of "drop-ins" is a convenience for some parents, but can be a nuisance to those who pay for full-time slots and wonder if their children are getting the adequate care they deserve. There's no way one teacher can keep track of 7+ kids, with 3-4 of those children already on the move and the rest being infants.
It was common practice for us to find other infants sharing the same cribs as our twins--without changing the crib sheets between uses. We were called to pick our son up early one day and we found another child wrapped in his personal blanket, in the crib regularly used by my son, on the same sheets used by my son. The teachers dismissed my concerns by saying that the management approved putting that child in my son's crib and allows for children to use the same cribs on a regular basis. In addition, this was an infant we had never seen before. Shortly thereafter our twins came down with a serious cold and we kept them out of the facility for over a week. read more
