I Have Ten Bosses (A Love Letter to Childcare Compliance)
When I filed the LLC paperwork to start a Montessori school, I paid about three hundred dollars and signed my name. Nobody mentioned that the three hundred dollars did not come with a law degree, and nobody mentioned that I was about to acquire ten bosses.
Here is the current roster: state licensing, the health department, the fire department, the food program, the state workforce commission, Texas Rising Star, our TEFA funding program, our accreditor Cognia, AMI for our Montessori recognition, and United Way for our pre-K partnership. Ten organizations, each with its own rulebook, its own inspectors or reviewers, and its own opinion about how my building should run. The Texas childcare minimum standards alone run several hundred pages, plus an addendum, and here is the part people miss: for licensing and the workforce commission, these are not program guidelines, they are law. I am legally bound to hundreds of pages of rules I was never trained on, because apparently the LLC filing fee covers the dream but not the curriculum.
My ten bosses do not talk to each other, and sometimes they argue through me. Texas Rising Star wants every shelf labeled with a photo, the word, and a matching labeled bin. AMI looks at that and politely explains that we would never, because a prepared Montessori environment is supposed to be beautiful. I get to be the marriage counselor.
A real week in my life looks something like this: an unemployment claim arrives with a fourteen day response window, eight staff members call out across the week, four children go home sick, licensing shows up for a visit, and the health department decides it is also a lovely day for an inspection. I work a full forty hour week and I spend most of it on compliance paperwork, claims, and writing the procedures that keep us inside the lines, which means the woman who started a school to be around children now hardly sees them.
And then there are the complaints. Every provider in Texas knows this rhythm: hold a boundary, enforce a policy, have a hard meeting with anyone, and a licensing report often follows within the week. The complaints tend to come from the same short menu, supervision, handwashing, safety, ratios, because those are the things a person can allege without having seen anything at all. Licensing is obligated to investigate every single report, true or not, and I actually respect that obligation, because if something real happened at a school, I want someone showing up. But an investigation costs the school either way: a lost day for the admin team, interrupted work periods, inspectors questioning toddlers who find the whole thing confusing, and parents getting calls that their child's school is under investigation before anyone knows there was nothing to find. The investigator has up to twenty one days to close a case, and the visit count goes on a public report whether anything was ever substantiated or not.
My favorite complaint of all time: we once received a visit because we were allegedly practicing corporal punishment. The actual situation involved a child having a rough couple of days, a director who redirected him to help her water plants and feed the fish up front, which our older students genuinely love, and a phone call home about the behavior. Somewhere between that phone call and the complaint line, watering plants became corporal punishment. The family, for the record, is still happily enrolled with us.
I am not writing this to complain, or at least not only to complain. Regulation exists because children deserve protection, and I would rather run a school in a state that checks than one that does not. But I think families deserve to know what it actually takes to keep the doors open on the place where their child spends the day, and I think the next person with three hundred dollars and a dream deserves to know what she is really signing up for. She is signing up for ten bosses, several hundred pages of law, and at least one accusation that will be so absurd she tells it at dinner parties for the rest of her life.
I would still sign.