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[quote=Anonymous]
Centers

Clean and secure, although the Crystal City playground is horrible! Walk out before opening hours before Marie Bennett randomly goes out to pick up cigarette butts. Put a cam out in a tree and look how often anyone wipes down playground equipment, even when children have diaper leaks. For the money, you are essentially paying the extra for a caged, concrete area with cheap, synthetic equipment and padding.

Curriculum and Atmosphere

Looks great on paper, but I've randomly shown up to critique at times. Employees were playing parents against fellow employees who reported them for infractions. One very tall employee in the toddler room regularly had blow-outs with other women, once towering above a Panamanian employee in a very aggressive manner. It was common practice for a few employees to create false stories based on gossip ("She want you babby daddy, girl!" was what one mom told me a todder's teacher stated). Randomly show up a few times a month for lunch to ensure that the employees aren't eating all of the catered lunches that are supposed to be for the children.

Ask longterm employees you believe you can trust (maybe Raquel in the Infant room) if they can tell you how many times a child wandered off on walks unnoticed. Ask them if they know how many times someone who works in the building offices around the center has brought a child to the center who wandered out the back door past the break room and assistant director's offices. Ask the center if they mind showing you the digitized files of incidents, including employees who were physically rough with children. Ask the center how many times an infant, a baby, or a toddler was left on a changing table as an employee or even Marie Bennet has walked away to get something. While no child has ever fallen off a changing table that I know of, it's still a concern.

Don't lose sight of the fact that Bright Horizons is a for-profit business. They have shareholders. If profit isn't so important to BH, if parents and families really do come first, ask them if they mind putting together a parent support group with [b]parent members only [/b]who take turns doing parent inspections. Ask them to stop using diluted bleach (do doctors' offices clean with bleach? No) and fork out money for peroxide to clean toys and tables after meals. Check to see where toys are made: for the price you pay, why should the few toys BH has be made by countries with no standards of care? Look how often puzzles with bright shiny paint are made in China. Ask how often area rugs are steam cleaned for sanitation. Ask them to allow a $90 mobicam installed in your child's classroom, so you can look at your child from your phone or computer (with downloaded software). Quiz your child to see if they know what the letter 'A' is if their curriculum says they are learning the letter 'A' that day. Ask that employees hired by BH have stable employment histories, periodic testing for TB and other conditions, termination policies if an employee regularly has problems with fellow employees (3x), etc.

In case you haven't caught on to BH CC and the large windows, consider a nanny cam on a diaper bag or thin digital recorder sewn into the underside of a bag. The teachers hold your child up in the window and warmly smile at parents while making nasty comments about lack of tips, parents who refuse to donate books to the classrooms, lack of gifts on teachers' day or Valentine's Day or Christmas, etc. I guarantee that you will at least hear a teacher comment that a particular parent just drove up, as the teacher scrambles to pick up that child and bounce them merrily on her knee. They'll dazzle you with little toddlers drinking from cups like grown ups and seated in tiny people furniture or group activities like Ring Around the Rosy.

BH could be a great place if they didn't have indicators of morale problems, also, such as extremely high turnovers. I would ask BH if they'd mind hosting a parents' town meeting  where they agreed to discuss how many employes they've had in their brief time, as well as explain why their hiring practices couldn't screen out undesirables and keep the good employees.

After a couple years with the BH, I decided on going through a nanny service with background checks and employment references. [/quote]

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