Yesterday was not a good day. I woke up this morning still fuming about it.Our church has a daycare facility (3 star, I might add) :) and we had our first regular visit from DHS (governing state agency) since our director change in December. Now understand, our previous director had been with us 3 years when she left. Our new director, although she has been a teacher with us for three years under the previous director has never been in a leadership position. So it has been a huge change for our new director. And on top of all that, the leadership styles between the two are completely different.
So...for the past three months our new director has been trying to get stuff straight. She's pretty detail oriented and probably pushing the line on being a work-a-holic, therefore she's has spent LOTS and LOTS of extra hours trying to get everything lined out (oh, and did I mention that day care workers are seriously underpaid???). Well, according to what happened yesterday none of that was good enough. Yesterday was the first time in three years that we have had a visit that lasted for 3 1/2 hours and according to her she wasn't done, but was going to go ahead and leave because "we were sick of her being there". WOW! One other time we had a new DHS person come with her supervisor and they were there 2 1/2 hours, but they were done. The supervisor was training the new DHS person and I guess they chose our facility to do it. I would take that again any day over what we experienced yesterday.
Don't get me wrong. The DHS worker wasn't ugly, she was professional in her duties, she wasn't even cold or uncaring. My complaint does not revolve around her attitude. My complaint revolves around the extent to which she judged our facility. Now, I'm a very black and white person, and I have no problem with following the rules which is what this lady is requiring, but yesterday she judged whether or not we had met EVERY rule in the entire book without exception. And if our new director didn't know that it was a rule we got wrote up for it. That's my problem. It's not like my new director hasn't spent nights at home with the licensing manual trying to catch everything that needed to be done. Admittedly she missed some things, although she has corrected sooooo much. But again, it wasn't enough according to yesterday's visit.
It would have been much better for the DHS lady to go through things and help our new director get it straight by pointing out the things she had missed, rather than writing us up for every little detail. I could see if she had been to our facility before and asked for things to be corrected and then came yesterday and nothing had been done. You know, it's one thing if our children's care was being compromised, if our facility was unsafe, if our teachers were providing inappropriate care. That's not the case. We were being wrote up over loop holes and details. I'm just not okay with that. The system is warped. I'm angry.
