Questions people telephone about

Yes, and this is one of the few places offering it properly. We take hourly and drop-in children at $28 an hour with a two-hour minimum, booked against a place that is genuinely free on the day. The limit is not commercial: our Health Code permit caps the number of children who may be on the premises at any moment, and that cap counts children present rather than children enrolled — so an hourly child occupies a permitted place exactly as a full-time child does. That is why we can rarely take a same-morning call, and why anybody advertising unlimited drop-in availability in New York City is describing something the permit does not allow. A first hourly session also needs the full health form and immunisation record, which takes a few days rather than a few minutes.

Ours is $475 a week for infants, $425 for toddlers, $395 for twos, $365 for preschool and $345 for pre-kindergarten, full-time, with all meals included and no separate curriculum charge. Published surveys put centre-based infant care across Queens at roughly $1,700 to $2,100 a month and toddler care at $1,400 to $1,800, so we sit inside the normal range rather than below it. The reason infant care costs most is arithmetic rather than luxury: the law allows one adult to four babies, so you are buying a quarter of somebody's working day.

Possibly not, and you should check before you pay us anything. New York City offers free, full-day 3-K and Pre-K for All to every resident child of the right age, regardless of income or immigration status. For the 2026-2027 year children born in 2023 could apply to 3-K and children born in 2022 to pre-K, with applications open from 14 January to 27 February 2026. Families still pay us for those ages when they need hours a free place does not cover, or when they could not get one, and both are legitimate reasons — but starting the conversation anywhere else would be taking your money for something the City would have given you.

In New York City it is the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, under Article 47 of the City Health Code — not OCFS, which regulates centres in the rest of the state. Every permitted centre is inspected at least annually and frequently twice a year, and the full inspection and violation history is public through Child Care Connect and the City open data portal. You can look up any nursery in this neighbourhood, including this one, and see the date of every visit and whether anything found was open or corrected. We would rather you did that than take our word for anything on this website.

In New York City the Article 47 rule is one adult to four infants aged birth to eleven months in a group of no more than eight; one to five for toddlers of twelve to twenty-four months in a group of no more than ten; and one to six for children of two to under three in a group of no more than twelve. Staff counted in the ratio have to keep direct line of sight and constant competent supervision at all times. Those city numbers are stricter than the state ones that apply outside the five boroughs, which is why a ratio table you found online may not be the one that governs us.

Yes, and so does every other legally operating nursery in this state. New York requires every child in day care to be immune to diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, measles, mumps, rubella, polio, hepatitis B, varicella, Hib and pneumococcal disease. There are no non-medical exemptions in New York — the religious exemption was repealed in 2019 — and a child who is behind must have at least the first dose of everything required within fourteen days of starting. A genuine medical exemption from a physician is the only exception, and it is rare.

We will ask you to collect them, and we would rather be plain about the threshold now than argue about it at two in the afternoon. The published triggers are a temperature at or above 100.4 degrees, vomiting or diarrhoea, an undiagnosed rash, or a child who is simply too unwell to take part in the day. There is no sick room here and there is no version of this where we keep a feverish child so that you do not have to leave work — a nursery that would do that for you would do it for the family whose child infected yours.

You can apply, and you should, but you deserve the current picture rather than an encouraging one. New York's Child Care Assistance Programme reaches families up to 85% of the state median income, but NYC ACS paused issuing vouchers to income-eligible families who are not on Cash Assistance in May 2025, and the waiting list passed seventeen thousand children in early 2026. Families receiving Cash Assistance still qualify regardless of income and are not on that list. Sunita helps families with the paperwork either way, and will tell you honestly which of those two situations you are in.

It depends entirely on the room, and the honest answer for the infant room is usually between nine and fourteen months. A waiting list is not a queue that moves at a steady rate: places come free when a specific child leaves a specific room, and the family who fits that gap in age and days gets it. We tell you where you sit and we tell you when you move, and we do not take a deposit to hold a position on a list, because a list is not a product.

The same as on paper, and you should distrust any nursery that answers this question with a better number than the law requires without explaining how it pays for it. Ratios are a floor, not a target, and a centre genuinely running below the legal ratio is either charging accordingly or funding it from somewhere that will not last. What we will tell you is that the ratio holds through lunch, through nap and through the last hour of the day, which is when it most often quietly stops holding elsewhere.

Yes, in every room where the age makes that normal, and moving up a room is never conditional on it. Toilet learning here follows the child rather than a deadline, and we will not tell you your two-year-old is ready because the next room has a space. Nappies and wipes come from home; everything else is ours.

We tell both families the same day, in the same words, without naming either child to the other. Biting is close to universal somewhere between one and two and a half, it is communication rather than character, and it is our job to work out what the child was trying to say and give them a faster way to say it. What we do not do is exclude a toddler for it, and what we will not do is pretend it did not happen because the conversation is uncomfortable.

Yes. A parent or guardian may come into their child's room during the session at any time without warning us first, and you do not need a reason. We ask you to sign in at the desk because the Health Code requires us to know who is in the building, not because we need notice. If a nursery you are considering will not put that in writing, ask them why.

No to both, and neither is a gap we are planning to fill. Night child care requires its own separate permit under the Health Code and we do not hold one, so we are not legally able to offer it — a nursery offering overnight care on the same permit as its daytime programme is worth asking about. Care for a child too unwell for their usual setting is a different service with different staffing, and we are not it.