Are these things normal for a daycare/preschool?

I’d look for another daycare where you could pick them up at the same time. You don’t want this crazy pick up schedule long-term.

I agree there should be a switch, at least for your son. Perhaps there is something suitable nearby? Then you might be able to swing the routine without having to relocate your daughter.
Your feelings are completely understandable. My daughter’s grade school constantly had me feeling like just a spectator in her life; a spectator with lots of money to spend on raffle tickets for multiculteral night.
They have a lot of kids though, which means a lot of employees. With lots of employees it is much more simple to have as little variance as possible.
Don’t be afraid to voice concerns, and offer suggestions, but don’t be surprised at the times it goes nowhere,

Locally you wouldn’t be able to find anything with that cheap a penalty for late pick-up. The cheapest is $10/minute late.

How long will it be til your son can move to a 5 day a week schedule? would you move both kids to a different daycare/pre-school?

It’s a question of teacher: student ratio.

When I was teaching daycare, under 18 months had a 1:4 ratio. At 18 months it was 1:6. At 24 it was 1:12. When they turned 3 it was 1:18.

The ratio applies with the youngest kid in the room.

So, yeah, there are often kids who were “older” than their age group, but we didn’t have the staff necessary to legally move them to the next room. One kid under 2 in the 2 year old room would change the whole teacher ratio.

@BellaB We could probably move him to 5 days now, but just haven’t decided it’s the way to go, primarily because of the class.

We wouldn’t pull my daughter out at this point. She’s been with the same group of kids for almost 4 years and starts Kindergarten in August. So we’d be looking at two school drops anyway.

ETA – we just pick both up at 4 on MWF, instead of making two trips. It’s just tough to get away at 3:30 consistently.

@seek – I thought that might be it, but it looks like Texas uses the middle child as the age of the group. It could still mess things up, but I doubt we’re going to throw them off very far.

And the ratios seem to be 1:5 for kids under 18 months and then 1:9 for kids up to 2 years. Wouldn’t that help staffing instead?

Source

Looks like there is a “group size” rule that affects ratios as well.

0–11 months has a limit of 10 infants.
12–17 – limit 13 children in the group.
18 – 24 – limit 18 in the group.

If his age is low enough to bring down the “specified age” of the group, that will affect the legal ratio.

It looks like in Augustthey will change him up? If that’s true, I would suck it up for the next few months. Personally, i know kids are all over the map developmentally until age 3 at least so that wouldn’t concern me as long as he is getting stimulation at home. Is he happy where he is? That and safety would be my major concerns at that age.

If you are still concerned perhaps a child care provider in a home setting would work for him until August.

Thanks again. I spoke briefly to his teacher today and she’s going to do a written assessment of where he’s at and share that with us. At least we’ll see what they’re seeing.

@janbb – he’s a pretty happy little guy, but for a long time we’d drop him off into a 8 seat highchair in the morning with kids who were just learning to sit up, and pick him up when he was the only one walking around playing. When they first gave him a table to sit at, he’d sit there all by himself. It’s better now that most of the kids are walking, but he’s not as verbal as his sister was and I think not having peers to talk to is at least part of it.

4–5 months still seems like a long time to just wait it out. That may be the best solution, and may be what we do, it just doesn’t feel right.

@funkdaddy in my experience second children and particularly boys are often less verbal initially, but I do understand your concern.

Any chance of my second suggestion- five months with a child minder?

@funkdaddy boys generally aren’t as talkative as girls at this age. I wouldn’t read too much into his talking or not at this point.

I know two two year old boys, who are very well developed for their age, yet neither of them will say a word. But they each know how to get their point across anyway!

@janbb – My wife works F-Sun and takes him on days when he doesn’t have school. I work at home about 50% of the time as well. So having him at the house would have a lot of other implications. He gets a lot of time with us already.

He seems to get the concepts for words pretty easily, and I can teach him a word or two in a weekend, which he seems to retain. (asking for foodjuice/milk by name, pointing to nose/ears/mouth, asking to be picked up/set down/walking/hug etc.) It doesn’t take much, but I think it’s like going to Spanish class vs. spending time in Spain. I’d rather he had someone to talk to.

Boys just seem to be different when it comes to talking. We’ve got neighbour boys who play together for ages without talking to each other. Almost all of the anecdotal experience re delayed language development in my circle is… boys are slower/boys don’t want to talk/boys don’t want to read . There are exceptions to each one of those, but when someone starts talking about a non-chatty/non-reading kid, I expect it to be about a boy – and it most often is.

It’s not that they can’t learn, they just seem to have a different sense of urgency. Most often the problem seems to turn back to people talking for the kid (not sure why people seem to enable boys in this way more often) with docs/specialists coming back with – make him use his words.

I used to work in a day care center and it seems like your child should be in the toddler room. What I learned when I worked in one is that some day care centers move children up according to ability, and some go strictly by age. I would think as a customer, which is what you are, you would have or should have some say so about your child and how his day goes.

I’d have a meeting with the head of the center, if I were you. You might get farther than just meeting with the teacher, whose hands are tied as to the rules of the place.

Appreciate all the suggestions and definitely keep them coming, just to give a rundown of what we’ve done up until now. I didn’t include originally because of the length and it’s just not that interesting.

When he was put in the class last August, my wife brought up that we expected him to be in the next one to one of the office folks (kind of an assistant principle?) who said she understood why we would think that, but we should see how it goes for a bit and she’d be open to moving him up. Totally understandable and we tried to go in with an open mind. It’s not like any of the classes are “bad”, just different set ups.

A couple months later, brought it up again with the same person, she said she’d look into it.

Shortly after, one of the parents who is on “the board” approached my wife and mentioned she’d heard my son was moving to the next class (with her son), it was news to us. So my wife went to the office and asked about it. Was told by the director those decisions shouldn’t be shared from the board and they’d need to have a talk about that. My wife felt like she got the other mom in trouble.

Nothing happened so a couple of months later I wrote an email to the director. She responded that she really didn’t like to interfere and we should talk to the teacher directly. Ok.

Talked to the teacher, she said we really needed to sit down and have a full discussion “if we were unhappy”. Tried to explain it wasn’t that we were unhappy, just looking for the right fit.

Set up a meeting time, my main question for them was how the current class was better for my son than the next one would be. She really took it as a rejection of her personally and said she’d guarantee he was ready for the next class and that was the best benefit he could have. She suggested an assessment as a next step.

That was late January and haven’t gotten anything as of yet, so asked about the assessment this morning. She said she’d go ahead and do it then share it with us when it was done.

My wife is just done and angry. I don’t see anything to be angry about but it feels like time to do something if we’re going to. I’m just not sure if this is just the norm, so wanted some other perspectives with more experience on this sort of thing.

Sounds like your requests keep slipping through the cracks. If you want to keep working with them, insist on a date by which your request will be completed. No more “we will look into it” crap. If they can’t agree to that much, it’s time to move on to a facility with higher integrity.

It’s also possible your daughter isn’t getting the best care either, only you just don’t know about it yet.