Enrollsmart Childcare, Preschool and ECE Technology Blog

The Car Seat Problem at Medium-Sized and Small Childcare Centers  by Jim Shields @enrollsmart In medium-sized and small childcare centers, parents are transporting their children back and forth from home in a variety of ways.  We witnessed it over the years.  For example, a parent and his children may ride the bus to the childcare center to drop off in the morning but, an aunt may be picking the children up from the center by car that evening.   In my experience, even when parents ride the bus or get a ride to pick up or drop off their children, they often leave a car seat so that another person can transport their children (relative, spouse, friend). Car seats are always a good thing for safe transportation. Storing them at your center may be necessary to support your families, however, it's not always such an easy thing and, here's why: Pests - We (literally) had to halt service to a customer once because everything they brought from home was infested with in

2 Reasons Waiting Lists Are A Myth For Medium-Sized and Small Childcare Centers by Kimberly Newman @enrollsmart In the childcare business, we often hear talk about "waiting lists" and centers being "full." Though I understand the concept of a center being "full," I never really understood the reasoning behind a medium-sized or small childcare center saying it has a "waiting list."    First, let me clarify one thing, yes, a center can have a "waiting list" for infant care.  Infant care is always in high demand.  In fact, we viewed our infant space as our "anchor" space because available infant space was often the key to attracting multi-child families. Fast forward to today and, with the current cost of childcare, it's pretty safe to say that many families will try to avoid having more than one child in childcare at a time; at least that's the trend we've seen. Now, as far as a waiting list goes, even

3 Reasons Your Childcare Center Needs Social Media Policies for Parents and Staff By Kimberly Newman @enrollsmart When we operated our childcare centers, social media was on the rise.  We became well-versed in the use of social media and online reviews because we could see the coming impact that these two phenomena would have on our business.  Today, there is no escaping social media and online reviews; they are everywhere. We knew that we could not fully control how social media impacted our business but we learned from experience why it was important for us to have clear policies and practices around social media for both our staff and our clients. One unfortunate experience comes to mind when I think of why we developed our social media policy:  We had a staff person who took photos of a couple of children and posted them on Facebook.  Now, apparently, this staff person had gone to school with the father of the children and, he would pick them up from one of the centers