Learning Depot

This daycare started on a high note for me. It was difficult to leave my 6 week old son with strangers, but I had to return to work and this daycare was recommended to me by another mom. About a month into my son’s care at Learning Depot, one of the girls in the daycare room told me that her boyfriend was starting work at my job. I am a manager and he is my employee. A few weeks after he started work, I noticed a drop in the quality of care my son was receiving. He would come home in onesies soaked in spit up and in dirty diapers. I made sure he had spare outfits, but they didn’t bother to change him. On multiple occasions he was sent home in another child’s diaper when he had plenty in his cubbie and in his diaper bag. I brought this up to the teachers and to a director but they seemed to blow me off. Finally, I showed up earlier than they expected one day and found my son in the exact place I had left him 6 hours earlier, covered in spit-​up. I started packing up his stuff only to find that they had taken some of his wipe refills (labeled with his name) and written another child’s name over his name. I was very upset by this point both with the level of care given to my son and by the waste of items that I purchased for my son. I blew up at the teachers and directors because by now, this had happened too many times without resolution. The girl whose boyfriend is employed by me rolled her eyes and shoot her head at me. At that point I was done. I want to know that my concerns are respected. I have to be my son’s advocate because he can’t speak for himself. I told another director again what my issues were. She said «the girls who don’t have kids don’t understand how to treat babies sometimes, so sometimes the kids end up not getting their diapers changed» and «we have a lot of babies right now and some things are getting overlooked». I appreciate the honesty, but that doesn’t reassure me about the level of care these kids are getting. On top of everything else, when I got home after telling the director everything, I unpacked my son’s diaper bag and found that they had fed him two bottles that belonged to another child. Unacceptable.
My personal problems aside, most days when I would walk in there would be multiple babies crying, unattended and being ignored by the girls working. It’s heartbreaking to watch another mother’s child come crawling or toddling to you in tears (when that child doesn’t know you at all) and the teachers are sitting and ignoring them.
I know this was terribly long, but if I was a mom selecting a daycare I would want to know.