princessbride6205
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- May 8, 2006
- Messages
- 2,291
I'm in need of opinions, as I'm really torn about what to do. The budget question is at the bottom, but I'll need to give a little back story first.
We decided to look for new daycare after we found out that our provider has been on Facebook all day while the kids are there. The quality of care has been slowly declining for months - more TV, fewer planned activities, no more crafts, stopped providing breakfast, etc. Cutting breakfast was supposed to be so they had more craft time. We've talked about the TV and there is always an excuse and a promise to watch less. So basically she is providing a low level of supervision while the kids do whatever they want.
This is a home daycare with 4 school-agers, my 2.5yo child, a 3yo boy, and the provider's own 2 preschoolers.
Back to the Facebook problem...
Our provider friended me on Facebook a few weeks ago. I didn't think anything of it until she started popping up in my news feed a lot. So I clicked on her name to see what else she's been posting. What caught my eye first was that she was posting lots of links and articles of what I would consider somewhat crazy political views. That made me a little uncomfortable, but I've known for awhile we don't share the same party affiliation, and didn't worry too much about it. Then I saw the time stamps on all these posts. It was about every 15 minutes during daycare hours. It still makes me feel a little sick to my stomach. I kept hitting the "Older Posts" link - and after spending an evening on that, only made it through 3 days worth. So this is definitely a pattern and not just one day. About 1/2 of her posts are about needing motivation and wanting her FB friends to send her jokes, and the other 1/2 are the far end of the spectrum political stuff.
We feel that this is beyond just talking to our current provider to fix. We'd like DD to be somewhere with a little more structure and a little more educational. So we did a whirlwind online search for a new place, called to see who had availability and went to 3 interviews last week. We decided on our new place and can set our start date any time between now and the end of April.
Now for the money/budget question...
We had to pay for our final 2 weeks when we started with this provider, so that in case we just left with no notice, she would already have that two weeks' pay. So I do not owe any money for leaving with no notice. However, we could still take DD there for the next two weeks without paying anything else. This would be a savings of $280 (140 per week).
In addition, our provider owes us for sick days she has taken. She/we keep a tab of the number of sick days she takes, and she's supposed to only charge us half price for those days. We've never cashed this out (stupid on our part, I know). We have online billing through a national childcare company, so there is the standing invoice and weekly amount deducted from our account. It is not simple to change this amount each time our provider takes a sick day, so that's why we decided to just keep track and be paid later. This should come out to about $140 as well. If I ask for this before I tell her we're leaving, she's going to try to just credit us. If I ask for this afterwards, I doubt I'll ever see the money.
Would you feel comfortable leaving your child in the current situation after giving 2 weeks notice? I don't think it's an unsafe environment, and I would hope the provider could be professional. I would tell her we were switching to a preschool, so maybe she wouldn't take it as badly? But I realize this may not be a good idea. Or should I just give up on the money already paid? (Not money related, but also still trying to figure out how honest I want to be when we leave.)
How would you handle the sick time reimbursement?
I don't want to just walk away from $420 (280 prepaid tuition, 140 sick time), but I'm having trouble figuring out a good way to handle this situation.
We decided to look for new daycare after we found out that our provider has been on Facebook all day while the kids are there. The quality of care has been slowly declining for months - more TV, fewer planned activities, no more crafts, stopped providing breakfast, etc. Cutting breakfast was supposed to be so they had more craft time. We've talked about the TV and there is always an excuse and a promise to watch less. So basically she is providing a low level of supervision while the kids do whatever they want.
This is a home daycare with 4 school-agers, my 2.5yo child, a 3yo boy, and the provider's own 2 preschoolers.
Back to the Facebook problem...
Our provider friended me on Facebook a few weeks ago. I didn't think anything of it until she started popping up in my news feed a lot. So I clicked on her name to see what else she's been posting. What caught my eye first was that she was posting lots of links and articles of what I would consider somewhat crazy political views. That made me a little uncomfortable, but I've known for awhile we don't share the same party affiliation, and didn't worry too much about it. Then I saw the time stamps on all these posts. It was about every 15 minutes during daycare hours. It still makes me feel a little sick to my stomach. I kept hitting the "Older Posts" link - and after spending an evening on that, only made it through 3 days worth. So this is definitely a pattern and not just one day. About 1/2 of her posts are about needing motivation and wanting her FB friends to send her jokes, and the other 1/2 are the far end of the spectrum political stuff.
We feel that this is beyond just talking to our current provider to fix. We'd like DD to be somewhere with a little more structure and a little more educational. So we did a whirlwind online search for a new place, called to see who had availability and went to 3 interviews last week. We decided on our new place and can set our start date any time between now and the end of April.
Now for the money/budget question...
We had to pay for our final 2 weeks when we started with this provider, so that in case we just left with no notice, she would already have that two weeks' pay. So I do not owe any money for leaving with no notice. However, we could still take DD there for the next two weeks without paying anything else. This would be a savings of $280 (140 per week).
In addition, our provider owes us for sick days she has taken. She/we keep a tab of the number of sick days she takes, and she's supposed to only charge us half price for those days. We've never cashed this out (stupid on our part, I know). We have online billing through a national childcare company, so there is the standing invoice and weekly amount deducted from our account. It is not simple to change this amount each time our provider takes a sick day, so that's why we decided to just keep track and be paid later. This should come out to about $140 as well. If I ask for this before I tell her we're leaving, she's going to try to just credit us. If I ask for this afterwards, I doubt I'll ever see the money.
Would you feel comfortable leaving your child in the current situation after giving 2 weeks notice? I don't think it's an unsafe environment, and I would hope the provider could be professional. I would tell her we were switching to a preschool, so maybe she wouldn't take it as badly? But I realize this may not be a good idea. Or should I just give up on the money already paid? (Not money related, but also still trying to figure out how honest I want to be when we leave.)
How would you handle the sick time reimbursement?
I don't want to just walk away from $420 (280 prepaid tuition, 140 sick time), but I'm having trouble figuring out a good way to handle this situation.
