Developing Your Child Care Staffing Plan

Staffing your child care program appropriately is one of your most important tasks; it is what allows your staff to provide the best possible care for the children and keeps your budget in-check.  Understaffing, aside from being illegal, stresses staff and significantly decreases the quality of care you can provide.  However, overstaffing can kill your program just as quickly by bankrupting you.  

Most Child Care Licensing agencies want to see a staff schedule as one of the requirements for initial licensing and during subsequent visits.  And, most of them like to see just a simple list like: 

Name	Position	Room	Shift	Break
Julia Jones	Teacher	Preschool 1	8:30-5:30	12:30-1:30
Megan McNeil	Teacher	Toddler 2	9:00-6:00	1:00-2:00
Tanya Tate	Aide	Toddler 2	9:00-12:00	n/a

This is nice and clear, so I can see why Licensing analysts like it.  But, I can’t use it to plan my staffing and most of the staffing managers with whom I speak can’t do it either.  I have to be able to “see” it.  So, I have always used a planner like this:

As much as I like this style (and need it), it was always a pain to format each individual cell, then reformat each time my schedule changed.  Finally, after years of spending way too much time planning my schedule, we developed what we call the “Visual Schedule”.  On this schedule, I can now input my staff’s schedules in the simple list format that Licensing likes, then “see” it represented visually.  We have recently made this product available on our website.  Find our “Staff Planner” at:  http://daycaretools.com/DaycareProducts.aspx#Personnel

Misty