Issues day cares and schools face

Day Cares Centers within the United States are facing a myriad of problems, not only do they face uncertain funding, low staffing, lack of security and a myriad of other problems, but they have to confront the problem of under enrollment and competition against privately held day care. The following analysis will examine issues that are present within day care centers and a critical assessment of whether or not they will be successful.

One of the fundamental problems that Day Care Centers are confronted with is chronic under funding. Funding for day cares typically come from several different revenue streams. They receive local, regional and federal level funding as well as through fees paid by parents of their children. The current funding problem occurs because funding for Day Cares are not well regulated and organized. The government policy in Title XX is to issue block grants to states to administer costs of Day Care Centers. The problem with this policy is that it does not place any limitations or regulations upon states, nor do they consistently audit their funding strategies. The result is that funding is usually unequally distributed to different school districts by the state, which usually effects lower income areas rather than high income areas. In addition, Child Care is viewed on all levels of government as an expendable cost, and as a result it is often the first thing gets cut when there is a budgetary constraint. The result is that Day Care Centers not only face chronic under funding, they often cannot accurately forecast budgets because their funding can be changed from year to year.

Having in adequate funding is a major problem for Day Care Centers, it implies that they will not be able to provide many of the essential needs that parents and children have, nor are they able to offer many alternatives in education. Under funding implies that they have little to no budget for recreational activities or art classes. Which ultimately impacts the quality of the education of children at Day Care Centers, therefore a solution must implemented to recover this problem. Since funding comes from both federal and private sources, the only solution is to change the way that governments budget to ensure that Day Cares are adequately provided for. Budgets should be created in such a way that all local, regional and national level obligations are met on a consistent basis and that accountability is key within their budgetary distribution. What this means is that state governments must equally distribute their funds to school districts and have a clear documentation of how they distribute resources. Only in this way will they be able to decrease the level of problems caused by unequal wealth distribution. On a privatized level, parents need to understand that Day Care Centers are extremely expensive and they not only need to increase their personal contribution but also motivate the community to raise money for their schools. Getting parents involved at the funding level will be crucial to make up for shortfalls within Day Care Centers.

Another problem that derives from under funding is that the administration of Day Care Centers are always overwhelmed. Budgetary constraints limits the number of administrators that Day Cares can employ, as a result, the principal often must where multiple hats and take on many duties that should have been delegated. They spend much of their time dealing with "front end" issues such as unhappy parents and the personal needs of students, rather than focusing specific administrative goals and visions, such as increasing the overall quality of instruction. Lack of administrative support ultimately means that there is a lack of leadership at the intrinsic level that takes away from the ability of Day Care Centers to be growth organizations. They are always reactive in their administrative practice rather than proactive.

Changing the course of administration is extremely difficult this is because at a core level, good administrators are extremely rare and oftentimes do not want to take on a position such as Day Care Supervisor. Since the monetary incentives as well as the job incentives are usually lacking within these positions, having the ideal administrator at this level can be very difficult. Schools with very strong funding sources will be able to attract the best administrators. There are many mechanisms that can be used to decrease the amount of work that administrators will have to perform, primarily they have to gain the active involvement of the community at large. Volunteers can serve many of the duties that the administration currently handles. The only way to leverage the community to help is if there is active advertising of the Day Care Center's needs to parents and the community.

Recent concerns raised about security points to another problem area with schools. Security at the Day Care level is extremely important because children have no mechanisms to protect themselves nor have the clear judgment to avoid strangers and suspicious activity. It is up to security guards to be attentive and ensure that children are watched after and that they do not commit any actions that are extremely dangerous. However, because of chronic under staffing as well as poor funding, security guards not only few and far between they also have little to no motivation to attentively perform their jobs. The crossroads of these problems means that security guards often do not do their jobs, they fall asleep on their posts and allow strangers to walk in and out of school buildings. Steps need to be take to rectify this problem, primarily by focusing the search for security guards and also providing better support for their services. Supervision is also very important to ensure that they are adequately attending to their jobs. The use of professional agencies or outsourcing of security may be one of the most viable options for Day Care Centers. There are now many aggregating Day Care Centers that operate at a fundamental level to help security. If Day Care Centers use these agencies rather than attempting to hire and supervise their own set of security guards they might be able greater security and also lower their internal costs.

The inevitable result of having the above problems with Day Care Centers is that attendance within schools is becoming dangerously low. Many times this is because Day Care Centers have become the last resort for parents who are too busy with work to take care of their children. When they have the option of taking care of their children, they choose not to put them in Day Care. Thus children chronically miss classes and seldom do they attend school on a daily basis. Not only does this take away from the ability of the administration to adequately help children learn, but it also distracts teachers and the administration who must deal with the logistical nightmare of knowing which students are in or out of school. It also impacts the funding that the Day Care Centers receive because the majority of funding policies have to deal with how many students are attending at any given time.

Parents need to understand that the quality of their child's education will only increase at Day Cares if they proactive help the situation rather than reactively attempt to fix it. In order to do this we have to engage in helping these institutions change how they function and thus severely increase the leverage that we hold on them as an institutional force as well as a social responsibility. Parents will be able to put more trust into the school if instead of taking their children out, they become involved in fixing the problems that they notice within the Day Care Centers. Creating the motivation to do these tasks can be extremely difficult, but it is not only their responsibility but also their goal to change the overall institutions that their children belong to.

The lack of unity within Day Cares at the administrative, educator, and parental level also results in lower educational benefits for children who attend. Children who come to schools come from a variety of backgrounds. Some come from backgrounds where parents have consistently educated them from home, while others come to the school with little or no previous education from parents. The result is that everyone within any given Day Care Center class are at different levels within their educational process. Since Day Care Centers have an administration that has little or no capacity to provide standardization nor organization, the implication is that they have little or no ability to change their inherent organization to fit the needs of specific children. The result is that educators many times have to attempt to educate many different children at many different levels of education, which presents a significant problem for educators. They have to make very hard choices about their curriculum because they will constantly be worried that some students are bored if the curriculum is too easy, and other students are far behind if the material is too advanced. It essentially puts them into a position where they cannot satisfy the majority of student needs.

In order to solve this problem a clear strategy for how to place students into different classes and programs needs to be initiated. At the administrative level, there needs to be an organizational mechanism that creates several different classes with students within each class being educated at different paces. At the same time, there needs to be a standardized testing mechanism at the early level to determine which students belong at certain levels. The reason that this is crucial is that students need to learn at the natural pace that they are accustomed to. The only way to do that is if they are truly inspired by what they are learning. Furthermore, the expansion of curriculums to a wide variety of disciplines will ultimately help these Day Care Centers to expand on other aspects of its problems. Primarily, if there are different levels of education, parents will be much more inspired to bring their children to school because they feel that there is a value advantage at Day Care Centers that their children cannot learn in their own homes. The only way to achieve this is to produce various funding mechanisms. Currently, the under funding of Day Care Centers presents this from becoming a reality.

The low quality of current Day Care Centers due to the restraints mentioned above have also demotivated parents from becoming actively involved at the Day Care level. At the core level, the reason that Day Cares are valuable is to free up the time for parents to work or perform their other duties. Since parents are already busy without having to concern themselves about the actual operational level of Day Care, it requires a tremendous effort on the part of the administration to get parents involved. This also means that there has to be specific causes for which parents want to get involved in, the most significant of which is how children are actually getting taken care of at the Day Care Centers. Therefore, there are several barriers that are both organizational and institutional that prevents parents from getting extremely involved at Day Care Centers.

At an organizational level, parents do not have the motivation to help because administration does not make it clear that their help is crucial for the success of the Day Care Center. Furthermore, even those parents who are very concerned about their children's education have little or no means to help at Day Care Centers. The administration does a poor job of having specific duties that parents should be involved in, and therefore there are inadequate instructions on what specific duties parents can help support. The consequence is that few parents on an organizational level want to help because of they believe their efforts are either wasted or they do not actually know how to get involved.

At an infrastructural level, parents are just much too busy. They not only have to worry about their children's behavior outside of Day Care Centers but they have work themselves, the consequence of the combination of these two factors is that they limit their ability to participate on behalf of the organization itself. The inevitable conflict means that parents feel no obligation to help the Day Care Centers, and instead attempts to focus on their child's education outside of these institutions.

The only way to get parents actively involved at Day Care Centers is if fundamental changes are made at the administrative level to teach and educate parents on the importance of their involvement. The administration must increase the value proposition they provide to parents. Parents must feel that their contributions actually help their ultimately goal of improving the education and care of their children. If the administration can do this, then parents will be more motivated to get involved at a grassroots level.

The problems at the Day Care level extends not only to the organization and overall administration but at a classroom supervision level. Understaffing not only extends to the overall administration but also to teachers as well. Which means that the ratio of educators or supervisors to children is extremely high, thus contributing to the lower quality of supervision for children in general. Furthermore, supervision at this particular level is of a much lower quality than should be expected at this level of education. Since teachers at the Day Care Level are paid a ridiculously low salary, many times they are the least qualified individuals to teach children at this particular level. The implication is that they lack the proper training to educate children and also to manage classrooms. This leads to lower quality supervision at the classroom level and disrupts the learning process of children. The combination of this problem and the overall understaffing within each classroom also implies several problems. It means that children are not being supervised properly which could lead to dangerous and harmful activity. Second, it decreases the level of education for children because teachers are more concerned with the behavior of students rather than their educational process. Overall it decreases the confidence of parents that their children are being well taken care of at Day Cares, which ultimately decreases the trust level placed within these institutions.

Changes at several levels much occur in order for this problem to be mitigated. First, higher qualifications and standards for teachers within these institutions are a must. The only way to accomplish this goal is to increase the funding within Day Cares so that they have the monetary ability to offer higher compensation and competitive wages to attract high quality teachers. The ratio of teachers to students must also be lowered dramatically to ensure that all students are receiving adequate support as well as supervision. Again this particular goal requires significant funding. However, for trust between parents and administration to be established it is a necessary first step.