More State Stuff

Here’s an article (free registration required) from California that makes living in Indiana “the place to be.”

It suggests that childcare inspections be posted with letter grades. That’s not a bad idea, but their inspections only come ever five years. Ours are every year or more.

In truth, parents should do their own inspections. Every parent should make him or herself at home in childcare. Go to the kitchen and grab a cup of coffee. Use the bathroom. Stick around and talk. What do you see?

Childcare can be a dirty place. If you have one child or two who are home four hours in the evening before they go to bed, consider 30 to 40 children playing inside and out. Now YOU have to clean that up. Feed 30-40 at once and consider the mess.

Inspectors rarely provide childcare at all. What they are looking for are once again state standards: Are the temps in the freezers and fridges on target, and is the place relatively clean? On a morning that is a paper mache morning, it’s kind of hard to tell.

Tables are a big deal in childcare. The treatment of tables is tantamount to incensing an altar. If the inspector arrived while the kids were all sitting on the tables taking a safari with their feet up because a giant anaconda was about to suck someone in, would the inspector truly understand?

Jeff writes:

A bit of advice I could offer would be if you hear the toilet flushing multiple times, check it out very quickly. When our son was a couple years old this happened. When I finally went to see what was going on, I discovered he had plugged the toilet with a whole roll of toilet paper and water was flowing over the sides of the bowl and leaking into the basement.

If you don’t think this is a daily occurrence in childcare, you need to visit more often.

The state is eager to rate, score, test, and admonish childcare all over the nation, but the criteria are always askew. Childcare is like a home. Sometimes it's neat and clean and sometimes it's not. It depends on what is going on.

Getting to know your childcare is the best source of inspections there is.