Imagine getting a phone call from your child's daycare and hearing these four awful words: “We’ve lost your child.”
Sadly, this nightmare scenario happens all the time. The worst thing about these cases is that they’re nearly always preventable. If every daycare in Texas followed the checklist below provided by our Texas daycare injury lawyer, we would save dozens of lives each year.
Dallas Daycare Negligence Attorneys’ Checklist: 10 Things Every Texas Daycare Must Do
To protect the kids in their care, daycares must:
- Provide reasonable supervision. Kids in daycare should be supervised at all times so that they won’t get lost or hurt.
- Hire plenty of staff. Facilities need to meet Texas’ requirements for an age-appropriate ratio of staff to children and go above them if necessary.
- Properly train those staff members after hiring them. Daycare staff must know how to supervise children, prevent wandering, and react if a child goes missing.
- Keep a documented roster of names and use it for regular headcounts. Headcounts must happen regularly, and simply counting the number of kids present isn’t enough. Daycares must call children by name and ensure every child responds.
- Ensure a second employee verifies all children are accounted for after transitions. If a group leaves a van or heads home from a field trip, one employee should do a headcount. Then, a second employee should do a headcount to ensure that no children are left behind.
- Create a “missing child” response procedure. All staff should be on the same page and act quickly if a child disappears.
- Enforce all safety procedures. Creating procedures like headcounts, double-checks, and staff lookouts isn’t enough; management also needs to enforce them.
- Strategically use locks, alarms, and security cameras. Alarming a door so that it rings when a child opens it could save a life, as could security footage showing where they’ve gone, or the simple act of locking an empty van so children can’t get back inside alone.
- Keep a list of children prone to wandering. Staff should know high-risk kids by name and keep an extra close eye on them.
- Identify causes of wandering and avoid them. Do loud noises or boring activities cause kids to head off on their own? Smart providers will discover and mitigate those risks.
What if My Child is Hurt at a Texas Daycare?
Sometimes, a daycare can check all the boxes and an accident still happens. If your child is hurt at daycare, first, get medical attention for them right away. Then, make sure the daycare has reported the injury and completed an incident report. Finally, talk to a daycare negligence attorney about your options for recovering compensation for medical bills and other costs related to the daycare injury.
Our Texas Daycare Negligence Attorneys Can Help You Through A Daycare Injury
We know how difficult it is to see your child hurt and in pain because of a negligent daycare. Our daycare injury and negligence lawyers at The Button Law Firm are regularly called in on cases where a child is left behind on a field trip, abandoned in a hot van, forgotten and left outside in extreme weather, or wandered off from a group. Sometimes these stories have happy endings, but more often, our clients end up with life-changing injuries like organ failure, brain damage, or heat stroke.
Seeing parents go through these heartbreaking situations has led us to dedicate our practice to helping families get compensation and closure by holding negligent daycares responsible.