Valley parents are choosing daycare with summer vacation starting next month
Apr 11, 2016, 5:00 AM | Updated: 9:54 am
School’s out next month and for many Valley parents that means now is the time to try to find the right summer daycare.
But how do you go about doing that?
“Well the most important thing is to go view the daycare where you want to have your child at,” said
Dr. Cara Christ, director of the Arizona Department of Health Services.
“Make sure you are comfortable with the environment, you know where they’re going to thrive.”
Parents should make sure to ask plenty of questions when they are deciding.
“So they’re going to want to ask especially if their child has a specific health problem or allergy about
how they deal with that,” she said. “You’re going to want to ask staffing ratios, ‘How many kids to
adults do you have and what activities do you offer?”
Dr. Christ suggests asking the childcare facility if they are part of the Empower Program, which she says is designed to teach kids how to live a healthy life as they grow up.
The state health department already monitors childcare facilities to make sure they’re safe.
“We regulate daycare centers and childcare centers,” she said. “So we go out, we look, we make sure they are maintaining adequate staffing, that they’re feeding the children what they say they’re
feeding them, and that they have age appropriate activities.”
The state is there to make sure the environment of child care facilities is safe for children to be in, she said.
“If you go to azcarecheck.com you can look up any childcare or any licensed facility by the state and you can find out the past three years of our inspections,” she said.
