That’s really the best arrangement. Sounds terrific! I wish more schools had that as their official policy.

That was the best move we could have made. Three children and seven years later, we still use that daycare/preschool/after-school center. And the baby teacher postponed retirement for a year so that she could take care of my last baby.

If the director can’t talk to you, she does not deserve your business. Goodness knows we pay enough for the service!

My state (MI) dedicates a portion of its website to listing the current status of the licenses of all the licensed day cares. (It’s under the Department of Human Services for MI, and it’s clearly titled “Statewide Search for Child Day Care Centers and Homes.”) The site also shows if there are any special investigations against a particular day care, and the list of day cares is searchable by zip code or county. I’ve used it to narrow the list of day cares and preschools I want to visit.

I think it’s important to check into the license status of a day care because what you hear on the street is not always the whole picture. For instance, my town’s newspaper holds a kind of People’s Choice vote every year. If you drive through my town today, you’ll see at least three signs celebrating the winning day care/ preschool, but if you look it up on the state’s website, you’ll find that their license is currently on probation because of a whole host of problems, including safety issues.

So, for me, that’s the first step. The second step is visiting the places and listening to my intuition. A little over two years ago, I visited the child care center my daughter is at this morning. I was looking for day care, and I really loved this place but couldn’t afford it then. When I began looking for a preschool earlier this summer, I discovered that in the two years since my first visit, the center has had no new violations or special investigations by the state. This said a lot. Then, when I visited, I found all the same full-timers there from two years ago. Yay! (Part-timers will have a higher turnover rate, especially if they are in college. The director I talked to told me that all of the part-timers there are studying Early Childhood Education, which is cool.)

Intuition continues to play a role after enrollment, too. If something strikes you as odd, maybe something is up. Test it. My daughter used to attend my town’s People’s Choice day care. Every day I’d show up and her daily record had been marked “Today I was happy”, never anything but “happy.” That didn’t match what I saw at pick up (she was often crying at pick up, even when I was unexpectedly early), and it did not match up with what caregivers in other rooms reported to me. The day care was convenient and well-recommended, but it was not a good fit for my daughter.

I dreaded the transition to another day care, but in the end, the difficulty of the adjustment period was worth it. I moved her to a home day care considerably farther away, but it’s been worth it because she has loved it there. Now let’s hope this new preschool is a good fit…