7:30am, hit Columbia Heights to vist Centronia, a childcare center with strong Hispanic influence where I hoped to play the "I'm Latin too" card to get some interviews: The front desk lady, a sweet Central American girl, was very polite but absolutely blunt in telling me that she would not answer any questions until she received expressed authorization from the Executive Assistant, who was in charge of communications with University students. She suggested that I call her after 8:30 when she usually arrived, but I insisted I would wait for her. The front desk lady didn't take her eyes off me every time a staff member walked by to make sure I didn't try to interview them.
9:00am, Radhika, Executive Assistant finally shows up: After waiting 1.5 hours and doing some research about her background on my phone while I waited, Radhika answered a few general questions and explained that the center is a non-profit organization that serves low income families, 80% of which receive government subsidies to pay for daycare services:. http://vocaroo.com/i/s1roYgviXv5Y
Radhika said she had only been with the center for 6 months and would have to refer me to other employees to get my questions about Admissions answered. She asked for my contact information to get back to me later, but I insisted to try to speak with Admissions staff for a few minutes. She kindly ceded and took me to the Admissions office, where I spoke with 2 staff members, Gabriela and Yashira. They explained that parents don't pay to be on the wait list, that their wait list can be 1 to 2 years long (about 100 families), and that it is longest for infants because of the small number of infants they could accommodate while complying with regulations and maintaining a safe staff-baby ratio. They also said that they spend a lot of time on the phone answering inquiries or calling parents when a spot opens up, often having to make several calls if the parents have already found a different center or solution. They said that it would indeed be very helpful for them to know which parents are still "active" on the wait list and have not enrolled their children in other centers. They tried obtaining this information before by mailing a form that included an extra stamp for parents to send back a confirmation of their active status on the wait list. However, of approximately 700 forms they mailed, they only received about 125 back. She also talked about other pain points that Spanish speakers will be able to listen to from this recording: http://vocaroo.com/i/s0jBmAgDp5Ok
10:00am, I get kicked out of a daycare in Adams Morgan: While I waited for Radhika to arrive, I made some phone calls to other neighboring daycares. I got in touch with an employee at Jubilee Jumpstart in Adams Morgan. She was the Manager of Development and Communication at the daycare and she said she would be happy to meet me to answer my questions. So I walked to Adams Morgan to be greeted by a not so friendly front desk lady. When I told her that I had an appointment with Stephanie Thompson, she said that she was aware, but that Stephanie had realized that she wasn't the appropriate person to answer my questions. The receptionist suggested that I call in to make an appointment with the Director who would be back in the office the next day. I explained that I had a couple of very simple questions to make, but she was getting very impatient. When I asked if I could ask her a couple questions, she said "I'm going to have to ask you to leave now, you are not authorized to be in our premises." So that was that.
10:30am, metro to L'Enfant Plaza to meet a friend with a contact at Bright Horizons: My friend was caught up in a meeting though, so I waited in the cold for 45 minutes. While I waited I got a phone from my husband's former colleague's brother in law, who owns a daycare center chain and I had emailed the night before. I thought I wouldn't hear from him, but gladly he called and said "I got you appointments with the Directors at 2 of my centers in Bethesda. Can you make it here within the next hour or so?" Of course, now that I was 5 minutes away from getting introduced to someone else at Bright Horizons. "I can be there at 12pm, would that work?" He agreed. I finally meet my friend and walk over to the Department of Energy, where the Bright Horizon's center is housed. He quickly introduces me to the Assistant Director and gets back to work. Marjorie was very friendly and she answered all my questions with a few interruptions as she attended parents' phone calls. She explained that her biggest pain point was perhaps dealing with the unpredictability that working with children and parents implies (e.g. not knowing when parents will drop off/pick up their kids within the contracted time frame and having 20 kids dropped off at the exact same minute one random day). This unpredictability, she said, results in a lot of teacher overtime, which really affects the center's budget. Regarding their CRM system, she explained they currently use Bright Star, which she thinks works fine but has plenty of loopholes. They use a different IMS for their waitlist to communicate with other centers, but she didn't find it useful and still relied on big old binders, where she kept tabs for each wait list (one for each government agency's employees and age range). She also explained that she would like to have more visibility into which parents are still interested in a spot and that currently the only way to find that out is by calling each parent individually when a spot opens up, which can be very time consuming and inconvenient when they are trying to fill a spot quickly. This center charges $150 to be on the wait list but the fee varies across Bright Horizons' centers. She expressed the following, however: "I wouldn't make the wait list public because, I've learned, parents need to know just what parents need to know": http://vocaroo.com/i/s1p2LU2osk1n
11:45am, metro to Bethesda to visit Children in a Shoe: Evidently, I was half an hour late to meet the director of one of the centers of Children in a Shoe. Mary Alice seemed very busy and yet she was wonderful--being introduced by the center's owner helps. She explained that Children in a Shoe serves affluent families in Bethesda and that their rates are such that they don't need to charge for wait list fees. Like the other centers, they have a very manual process to populate and update wait lists consisting on a bunch of huge binders with simple forms for each child that applies. The form itself is very basic (contact info, child age, and preferred start date), but they like to add several details to the margins of the form such as (sent flowers today, seems like easy-going parents, or difficult couple), which they take into consideration when a spot opens up. She said she would be interested to see any solution to the wait list challenge and that her biggest pain point was the lack of time to attend to all her tasks and responsibilities, especially with the unpredictability that Marjorie had described.
12:45pm, walk across the street to visit a second, separate Children in a Shoe Center: There I spoke with Ira, the Director of that center, who confirmed Mary's views and gave me a copy of a wait list application form. She said that she, and other Directors, had recently suggested that a single person be in charge for the wait lists of all the centers to take that time-consuming task off the directors' plates. Finally I met Jon, the owner of Children in a Shoe. He continuously emphasized how important it was for him to keep Directors, the backbone of the organization, happy. He said very clearly, however, that he wasn't very interested in changing the wait list system. He thought it was a tool that worked fine and that he liked to have full control of it without giving too much transparency to parents, because transparency could generate more questions and more dissatisfaction. He also appreciated the fact that people saw the daycare as a sought-after center. He expressed that challenges such as payroll and enrollment (a universal CRM system across all centers) were the most important operating challenges he currently faced.
1:30pm, grab lunch and metro and GUTS back to Georgetown to debrief with the team.
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