Do not take our word for it
Go and read our inspection record
Every permitted nursery in this city has a public history of inspections and violations. It takes about four minutes to read, it is free, and it is worth more than this entire website.
Our inspection record is public. Read it before you trust this website. Every permitted centre in this city has a public inspection history — the date of each visit, the violation category where anything was found, and whether it is open or corrected — published through Child Care Connect and the City open data portal. It is free, it takes about four minutes, and it will tell you more than a tour will. Read ours, and read it for every other nursery on your list. One caveat worth carrying: corrected means an inspector confirmed a fix on a later visit, not that the habit behind it changed.
A nursery website is a document written by the nursery. This one included. Everything on it has been chosen, phrased and photographed by people with an interest in you enrolling, and no amount of plain-speaking on our part changes that structural fact.
The inspection record is the opposite kind of document: written by somebody with no interest in the outcome, on days nobody chose, and published whether the centre likes it or not. If you only do one piece of research about any nursery in this borough, do this one.
What is published, and where
DOHMH publishes the inspection and violation history of every active, city-regulated centre-based programme through Child Care Connect, and the same underlying data is on the City's open data portal covering roughly the last three years. Both are free and neither requires an account.
For each visit you get the date, and where the inspector found something, a violation category and a status of open or corrected. Violations carrying potential penalties go to the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings, where they are either sustained or dismissed, and that outcome is part of the record too.
You can search by name or by address. Doing it for every centre on your shortlist, in one sitting, is the single most useful hour of research available to a parent choosing childcare in New York City, and almost nobody does it.
How to read it without panicking
A centre with zero violations across three years is rarer than you might expect, and a small number of corrected administrative findings is normal rather than alarming. What you are looking for is pattern and severity, not the presence of any entry at all.
Categories matter more than counts. A missing document is not the same kind of thing as a supervision failure, and treating them as equivalent will lead you to reject a good centre over paperwork and accept a worse one that happens to file well.
Repetition matters most. The same finding appearing at successive inspections is telling you something a single entry cannot: that the correction did not hold. That is the pattern worth asking a director about directly, and a director who cannot discuss it calmly has answered your question.
What corrected does not mean
Corrected means an inspector confirmed on a later visit that the specific thing found had been put right. It is a real and useful fact.
It does not mean the practice behind it changed permanently. A gate that was propped open on the day of an inspection and closed by the follow-up visit generates exactly the same record as a centre that changed how it thinks about the gate. The record cannot distinguish those and neither can we pretend to.
So use the record as a question generator rather than a verdict. It tells you what to ask about on the tour, and the quality of the answer you get is itself information.
Ours, and what it would say
This is a demonstration site for a nursery that does not exist, so there is no record to look up and we are not going to invent a clean one. A page claiming an unblemished inspection history for a fictional business would be precisely the kind of thing this page exists to warn you about.
What we will commit to is the posture: if you ask us about anything in a record, you get the finding, the date, what we changed and whether it has recurred, without you having to ask three times.
In order
How this works in practice
Search by address rather than by name
Names change, marketing names differ from permit-holder names, and a centre under new management keeps the address. The address is the stable identifier.
Read three years, not the latest visit
The most recent inspection is a sample of one. The pattern across several is the actual signal.
Separate paperwork from supervision
Both are recorded. Only one of them is about whether somebody was watching the children.
Look for repeats
The same category appearing at consecutive inspections means a correction that did not stick, which is a different and more serious thing than a one-off.
Bring it to the tour
Ask directly about anything you found. You are entitled to a straight answer, and how it is given tells you as much as what is said.
Questions we are actually asked
Go and read our inspection record — frequently asked
Where exactly do I look?
Child Care Connect on the NYC Health Department's site is the front door, and the same data is published on the City's open data portal if you prefer to search or download it in bulk. Both cover active city-regulated centre-based programmes.
How far back does the record go?
The published dataset covers roughly the last three years of inspections and any associated violations at active programmes. Older history is not routinely published.
Does every violation mean a fine?
No. Violations subject to potential penalties are referred to the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings, where they are adjudicated as sustained or dismissed. Others are recorded and corrected without a financial penalty.
Is a centre with violations a bad centre?
Not necessarily, and treating it that way will mislead you. Look at category, severity and repetition. A centre with two corrected documentation findings is not comparable to one with a repeated supervision finding, even though both have entries.
Should I ask about what I find?
Yes, and directly. The most useful thing about the record is that it gives you a specific, verifiable thing to ask about instead of a general impression, and it lets you judge the answer against something you already know.
Read next
Related reading
Tuesday and Thursday mornings, while the children are here
Come and see the room
A tour here happens during a session, in the room your child would actually be in, at the time of day they would be in it. You meet the person who leads that room rather than only the director, and you see the noise and the mess that are genuinely there. It takes an hour. If your child is three or four we will ask whether you have applied for free 3-K or Pre-K for All before we quote you a rate, because a good many families should not be paying us at all.