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No two weekday mornings looked quite the same at Bright Horizons Columbus Circle, at least during the two months of 2024 when Michael’s son was enrolled there. The “teachers” who welcomed the 18-month-old at drop-off changed somewhat unpredictably depending on who was on the schedule and had actually shown up for work. Michael can still picture the basement classrooms — devoid of natural light and with few interior windows — used for some of the children, and he can recall one of his son’s caregivers, too. Her name was Tia, and she never smiled, even when he greeted her. “I remember thinking, She doesn’t give off very warm, fuzzy vibes,” Michael says. His son often cried during drop-off and rarely seemed content at pick-up, but Michael attributed the behavior to normal separation anxiety and being around new people. Looking back on it today, though, he has doubts. Everything about his experience at that particular Bright Horizons seems suspect now that he knows that Tia was Latia Townes, whom the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has charged with child abuse.
,When the charges were announced in the summer of 2025, Michael was shocked. “Our son was already gone from that center, thankfully,” he tells me. (The family left when they got off the waiting list at a Bright Horizons closer to their home.) “But we were debating internally, ‘Should we do something? What can we do? Or should we do nothing and just hope that our son is not impacted emotionally in any long-term way?’” The allegations against Townes and two other teachers — Evelyn Vargas, who also supervised Michael’s son and whom he’d thought seemed experienced, and Shakia Henley — are the stuff of parent nightmares. (“Michael,” like most of the parents and teachers in this story identified only with a first name, is using a pseudonym.)
,Vargas stands accused of placing packing tape across the face of a toddler “ear to ear,” covering her mouth and part of her nose, which obstructed her airway, according to the DA’s complaint. When the child started to cry, Vargas is said to have held her up and commented, “Look, she’s turning red.” She is said to have stuffed tissue in the mouth of a second child, at whom she is also accused of throwing a cup, and to have grabbed a third child by the hair and dragged her a few feet, leaving her crying and in apparent pain. Between September 2023 and February 2025, she allegedly dragged a number of other children by the arm, too. Multiple times, according to the complaint, she hit children in the head with metal water bottles and other objects. Allegedly, she repeatedly pushed and shoved children and kept them restrained in chairs for extended periods. She called them names and laughed at them “when they were in distress,” the DA’s complaint says.
,Townes is accused of hitting toddlers in the head multiple times with water bottles and keeping them restrained in chairs. She was allegedly in the room when Vargas taped the child’s mouth closed and laughed as it happened. Henley is accused of spraying a toddler in the face with a cleaning solution.
,In February 2025, an unnamed teacher at the center reported the incidents and the three accused staffers were quickly fired. Bright Horizons then reported the allegations to the city. Henley has since pleaded guilty to her charge of endangering the welfare of a child and in March was sentenced to three years’ probation. A trial date for the cases against Vargas and Townes, who have pleaded not guilty, will likely be set at their next scheduled appearance in September, unless a deal is reached before then. Attorneys for Vargas and Townes did not return requests for comment, and Henley’s lawyer simply noted that he did not recall that his client expressly admitted to the contents of the spray bottle when she entered her plea.
,The city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene suspended the Columbus Circle center’s toddler program in July 2025, but the rest of the classrooms kept operating. Then in October, Bright Horizons told the city that a staff member at the Columbus Circle center had poured cleaning solution into a water pitcher used for preschool students and served it to them at snack time; at least one child drank it. The Department of Education suspended the center’s license to operate universal preschool classrooms, too. Bright Horizons claims the incident was an accident — that the cleaning solution was in a bottle incorrectly labeled with a factory “H2O” sticker and that staff immediately notified regulators and Poison Control. Grace, a former teacher at a different location, told me that the cleaning solution Bright Horizons provides is so harsh that it completely dried out her hands. “There’s just no way that’s a mistake, the bleach is so strong,” she said.
,In the months since the news broke, parents have been baffled by how such heinous acts could have transpired at one of the most well-known, trusted, and expensive child-care providers in New York. Bright Horizons is an international corporation that not only runs more than 1,000 of its own branded day cares but also is the nation’s premier source of employer backup-care benefits, including in-home emergency babysitters. It has 40 centers throughout the city and partnerships with major employers, including Columbia University, JPMorgan Chase, and News Corp.
,I interviewed or corresponded with more than 20 New York parents who sent their children to Bright Horizons as well as with eight former classroom teachers. Plenty of moms and dads tell me they like the chain. Isaac Radnitzer and his wife sent their two sons to multiple locations in Manhattan, including the Columbus Circle branch. His children are older now and only attend backup care, but he says their teachers from toddlerhood still remember them. “They care about our kids,” he insists. Another parent tells me their daughter attended the Columbus Circle location for about a month just after the news of abuse charges became public, then moved to the West 53rd Street location, which she likes a lot. She says she felt reassured about her choice because the director took the time to answer all of her questions.
,But despite these positive accounts, disturbing incidents have transpired in multiple locations, not just the Columbus Circle branch. According to records obtained by the New York Times, there have been 47 complaints lodged against the company with the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. These occurred in more than a dozen of its centers between July 2024 and July 2025. Beyond the Columbus Circle abuse, the complaints include allegations of workers losing track of children, inappropriate discipline, injuries, and at least one severe allergic reaction from inattention to a child’s known allergy. About 40 percent of the claims were substantiated, while the determination in 15 was unclear. The health department has temporarily closed other Bright Horizons centers seven times since 2017, and the city has issued the company about $17,000 in fines as of earlier this year. And yet, through all of this, new families have continued to enroll at a steady clip, lured by the trust that comes from a recognizable name, tuition subsidized by many parents’ employers, and, in some cases, the centers’ extended hours.
,In March 2026, as part of a settlement with the health department and under threat of having the city permanently close the Columbus Circle center, Bright Horizons surrendered all of its permits there and closed it voluntarily. The company says it has reviewed its health and safety protocols and training, implemented a corrective action plan, and appointed a new regional manager and a new national field director. The corporation claims to have strengthened its compliance monitoring and escalation protocols across all of its New York City centers too, adding two roles — a city “code compliance officer” and “code compliance assistant.” It also says that it has increased the frequency of regional managers’ unannounced classroom observations from once a month to once a week and by the fall will install cameras in all New York centers as an added layer of oversight. “We continue to take any ownership and accountability,” said Robyn Carrone, Bright Horizons’ vice-president of operations for New York City, who was promoted to oversee operations here after more than a decade of employment at the company.
,But the question of whether these changes can fundamentally reform systemic dysfunction is still an open one. The uncertainty comes at a pivotal moment for the chain: Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s push for free universal child care is a lucrative opportunity for Bright Horizons. Starting in fall 2026, he has promised, there will be 2,000 new child-care seats for 3-year-olds whose parents sign-up for 3K, and he has vowed to make 2K universal by the end of his first term. Bright Horizons has participated in the city’s universal 4K program since it began and is one of the largest private providers of city 3K and 4K. In the past five years, it has reportedly received more than $100 million in payments from the city for this participation. A company spokesperson said Bright Horizons has already applied to be part of 2K and hired a lobbying firm to help it secure the funding. But is even more corporate day care, particularly from a company with a deeply troubling track record, what New York families want — or is it just what they’ve been forced to accept?
,When Michael and his wife questioned Bright Horizons about what happened in their son’s classroom, the responses were vague and unsatisfying. “We were trying to ask for specifics, and they were like, ‘Oh, we don’t know,’ ‘unclear,’ ‘not sure,’ and ‘maybe,’” he says. He and his wife feel certain that the entire situation could have been avoided had the classroom been outfitted with cameras — a measure they say is standard at many other day-care centers. Without any video evidence, Michael and his wife have been left in a state of uncertainty, watching their child’s development and hoping he has not been scarred in any way. “It’s hard to differentiate what’s typical young toddler behavior versus a sign of toxic teachers. You second-guess yourself in retrospect. You know, Maybe I should have known that he wasn’t happy,” he tells me. He says that he and his wife still wonder, “What could we have done differently?”
,,At the end of 2024, Caroline and her husband decided that their 6-month-old daughter would benefit from socializing with other kids in a day care. Unfortunately, they had few convenient choices. The Bright Horizons center on the Lower East Side was closest to their home, and they were relieved it had space available. Caroline liked that she was familiar with the name and assumed that a large corporation, especially one that partners with the Department of Education, would have solid protocols. “There was a little feeling of I feel like she’s going to be safe because of the chain,” she says.
,At first, their daughter’s three-day-a-week schedule seemed to work well. But slowly, Caroline noticed some issues. The teachers often ran late, and she frequently arrived to find the person at the front desk holding babies on her lap as a stopgap. (On those days, Caroline took her daughter back home until the center called to say that the teachers had made it in.) More than once, she noticed that the infant room contained more babies than she thought was appropriate. And at pickup once, Caroline found one of her daughter’s three bottles for the day sitting in the refrigerator with the full portion of dry, unmixed formula she had spooned in that morning. She asked why her child hadn’t been fed. “Everybody looked at me with a blank face,” she recalls.
,When her daughter turned 1, she was moved to the toddler room. That was when Caroline and her husband started to more seriously scrutinize the care she was receiving. The room had no windows, and the teachers seemed unfriendly and exhausted. Nearly every morning she saw a child fall or hit her child and noticed that the teachers didn’t react. Her daughter also didn’t seem to be intellectually stimulated at day care; amid the chaos of 2-year-olds biting and hitting each other during drop-off, her toddler stood silently observing in a corner. “I really noticed these teachers were not engaged,” she says. “We started calling it baby prison.”
,On the two days each week when her daughter stayed with their nanny, she seemed content, but when she went to Bright Horizons, she threw intense tantrums. “You know your kid, and you know when there’s something wrong,” Caroline said. “All of my alarm bells started going off.” She and her husband discussed moving to another center or school but felt stymied by the commute and weren’t sure if a new Bright Horizons location would be much different. By then, they had lost faith in the entire company.
,Bright Horizons has maintained that the problems at the Columbus Circle branch were due to a few addressable blind spots, but child-care experts say that the root cause is likely its business model. The company was founded in the 1980s with private-equity money from Bain Capital, and the private-equity firm maintained ownership over it from 2008 to 2013. In 2013, Bright Horizons went public for the second time, but Bain held onto about 85 percent of the shares. (Since 2018, Bain Capital has not had any shares in the company.) Eight of the ten largest child-care companies in the country are owned by private equity, as are a number of other child-care chains in the city, including Sycamore Partners’s Goddard School, Roark Capital’s Primrose Schools, and American Securities’s Learning Care Group, which operates Tutor Time, Childtime Learning Centers, and Everbrook Academy. Private equity’s role in the child-care market has been growing; it’s now estimated to control between 10 and 12 percent of the licensed market.
,Earlier this year, Oregon senator Jeff Merkley launched an investigation into private equity’s ownership of child-care chains, noting that companies like KinderCare and Learning Care Group had been cited by state regulators multiple times for health and safety violations and that their growth strategies “appear to coincide with rising tuition costs, workforce strain, and a pattern of safety and compliance issues.” A Bright Horizons spokesperson said the company “spends tremendous resources on supporting and training our staff.” He added, “In a human services environment, there will inevitably be human error, and the true value of an organization is its ability to act and respond quickly to correct any issues and to learn from the experience. We are committed to continuing to devote resources to earn the full confidence and trust in our company and in our operations.”
,As a for-profit business, child care is a tough one. “Most child-care providers are operating on razor-thin margins,” says Melissa Boteach, chief policy officer at the nonprofit Zero to Three. Profit margins are estimated at about one percent for most mom-and-pop providers; they essentially break even, if they’re able to stay out of the red at all, when providing quality care. The costs — employee wages, rent, equipment — are hard if not impossible to reduce, and many are mandated by government regulations. Yet despite these challenges, profit margins at corporate chains are closer to 15 percent.
,The private-equity model requires squeezing as much profit as possible from a portfolio of acquired businesses and then selling them off. In for-profit hospitals, this approach has led to cost cutting while also raising patient bills. Similarly, in a day care, the only substantial way to increase profit is to charge parents more while providing less. “There’s a concern that there might be an incentive to reduce investments in staffing and professional development and quality components,” says Diane Schilder, a senior fellow focused on early childhood at the Urban Institute.
,While Bright Horizons is no longer controlled by private-equity executives, as a public company it still has a fiduciary duty to maximize profit. The company reported $487 million in profit in 2025 (based on a figure measuring operating profitability), up 19 percent from 2024, thanks in part to “tuition price increases and enrollment growth,” according to its most recent annual SEC filing. “Our success depends on our ability to continue to pass along these costs and to control costs,” the filing states, and if it can’t “increase the price for our services to cover these higher wage and benefit costs without reducing customer demand for our services, our margins could be adversely affected.”
,,Although labor is Bright Horizon’s largest expense, interviews with former staffers laid bare that the company’s investment in vetting and training its staff has been inconsistent. The company says it requires new hires to complete a standard 40-hour training program, which includes attending online and in-person classes and observing current employees working with children. But even this relatively meager mandate — five days to learn how to care for multiple babies or toddlers at once — is not always met, former employees tell me.
,On her second day employed by Bright Horizons in Dumbo in 2021, Sophia says she was left alone in a classroom of 1-year-olds. She hadn’t been cleared to be solo in any classroom, nor was her training complete, but two teachers hadn’t come in that day and the center needed eyes on the kids. “The director chose to keep me in their classroom with no assistance or guidance,” she says. “I was way in over my head.” When her colleagues returned to work, she says they barely guided her at all.
,Susan, who worked at the same Dumbo location in late 2021, was hired after one interview. Before she started working, she watched computer training videos on topics like safe sleep and mandated reporting. When she showed up in person, she was told she would be paired with an experienced teacher for shadowing and guidance, but she says the teacher she was paired with was uninterested in training her and spent a lot of her time having what Susan recalls as “inappropriate conversations” with a co-worker in front of the kids. “The people training me were very mean and unprofessional,” she says.
,As weeks and the months passed, she watched the hiring process deteriorate further. People with zero child-care experience were brought on, a few of whom told her that they were just there for the paycheck and would rather be working in another field. Once, while Sophia was preparing lunch for the children, she watched a recent hire ignore a toddler who had hit his head hard on the couch where the new hire was seated. Sophia had to stop what she was doing to help him.
,At the 72nd Street center where she used to work, Nilda Tito says the company routinely hired people with no child-care or even babysitting experience. “Some people didn’t even know how to change diapers,” she said. She told me about a teacher who seemingly came to work smelling of alcohol and either drunk or hungover and who would sometimes sleep in the classroom to recover if the children were napping. Despite her behavior, Tito says, she wasn’t disciplined, and eventually quit voluntarily. (A Bright Horizons spokesperson said they would not allow any employee suspected of being under the influence of drugs or alcohol to work in the centers.)
,Carrone concedes that Bright Horizons likes to consider what she described as “the nontraditional candidate”—that is, someone without much child-care experience. But she also noted that employees can receive funding from Bright Horizons to attain associate’s and bachelor’s degrees in early-childhood education and even a master’s degree if based in New York City. The intention of this program is to minimize employee turnover and even to change the trajectory of the employee’s life, Carrone says. The company says 1,489 teachers, out of approximately 15,000, are currently enrolled in the degree program.
,Four teachers tell me that the understaffing where they worked was so severe that their centers routinely violated regulations, though a Bright Horizons spokesperson said the company “categorically rejects any suggestion that children were knowingly cared for outside required staffing standards.” Child-care providers in the city are required to have a 1-to-4 teacher-to-child ratio (and 1-to-3 in emergencies) for babies under age 12 months; a 1-to-5 ratio for children 1 to 2 years old; a 1-to-6 ratio for children 2 years old to under 3 years old, and a 1-to-10 ratio for children 3 years old to under age 4. These minimums “provide basic health and safety and then also support child growth and development,” Schilder said. Many high-end private day-care centers and nursery schools offer ratios with an even lower number of children per teacher.
,Carrone admits that hiring is a struggle at Bright Horizons, as it is at many day cares in the city, even as the company claims that its centers “consistently meet or exceed” required ratios. “In the industry, it is challenging to make sure that you always have staff if there’s staff callouts,” she says, “especially if everyone wants to go to the bathroom at the same time.” She says every staff member is entitled to an hourlong break, but admits that “there are times where maybe it’s necessary that it’s shorter.” She tells me that Bright Horizons hires additional staff at every center in order to be covered if caregivers are out sick or on vacation and that the administrative staff can also be called upon to step up. Teachers from one center are sometimes sent to an understaffed center to fill in, she adds.
,But former teachers tell me that there was no extra staff available to help them and that administrative colleagues were often reluctant to come into classrooms to offer relief. Sophia tells me that because teachers called out and abruptly quit so frequently, she estimates she watched children “out of ratio,” on average, three times a week. Once, she cared for nine toddlers by herself. On another day, she says she and one other teacher watched 16 kids together. In a photo Sophia shared with me, she is sitting in front of 14 toddlers. Even with a co-worker behind the camera, they were in violation of the city rules.
,Not long after Grace began working at the 53rd Street location in early 2025, she noticed that her classroom fell out of ratio compliance about once a week. She said it wouldn’t take long after the center opened at 7 a.m. for the number of children she watched by herself to exceed the maximum. She remembers one day when she cared for eight infants on her own. “That would give me anxiety,” she remembers. “If you’re out of ratio too long, that’s where incidents happen.” She called administrators to come in and support her, but it could take up to a half-hour — plus repeated asks — for anyone to show up. She once stifled the urge to urinate for three hours. As I spoke to additional former caregivers, I heard anecdotes like this over and over again.
,A Bright Horizons teacher named Mylaecha tells me that in Dumbo, it was so difficult to get someone to relieve her that she stopped asking. “I know how it feels to have to hold your bathroom,” she tells me. Sophia describes nine-hour, nonstop shifts. Often, she would sprint down the hall to minimize the amount of time she left her classroom out of ratio. Even after she eventually left her job there, she had residual bladder pain.
,She showed me a photo she took of a staff schedule from September 2023. Under the lunch-break column, 14 of the 15 teachers working a full day were allocated just 15 minutes off for the entirety of their shift, even though the city mandates a minimum 30-minute break for any shift longer than six hours.
,After a year at Bright Horizons, Grace quit and landed a teaching position in a kindergarten classroom run by the Department of Education. “I feel way more supported,” she tells me. She no longer finds herself in a classroom of children by herself. She now makes $35 an hour — 40 percent more than she made in her last year as a teacher at Bright Horizons.
,Though there’s no way to draw a direct line between harmful or neglectful caregiving and low salaries, former employees tells me that the pay at Bright Horizons contributed to the high turnover and general discontent among the staff. All of the Bright Horizons teachers I interviewed report hourly wages between $17.50 and $25 per hour. (Minimum wage in New York City is $17 per hour.) By contrast, many nannies working in the same residential neighborhoods earn $25 to $40 per hour and are often paid in cash. A 2025 comptroller report found that as of 2023, New York City’s child-care workers had a median income of $25,000 — lower than all other care workers, including health aides and preschool teachers.
,Grace started at $18 per hour as an assistant teacher and ended at $25 per hour as a head teacher after she completed her bachelor’s degree and started her teacher certification. Tito started at $20 an hour. She was promoted from assistant teacher to head teacher, but no raise came with it. When she threatened to quit, she was moved to a universal 4K classroom, but the pay was only $2 more and she stopped receiving pay in the summer because the 4K program followed the school calendar. Susan made $19 per hour in 2021. Sophia said she made about $17.50 an hour in 2022. Mylaecha made $18 an hour as a head teacher in Dumbo in 2021. “Horrid pay, horrible treatment,” Sophia tells me.
,,In my conversations with parents, it became clear that despite the unifying brand name, the quality of Bright Horizons varies from center to center. Sarah Kashani had a wonderful experience when she enrolled her first child at the Bright Horizons connected to the Goldman Sachs office, which she describes as “spic and span.” At Columbus Circle, where she enrolled her second child, she says the stairwell was perpetually dirty, and, worse, some of the teachers weren’t as experienced or warm. (A Bright Horizons spokesperson said its centers follow rigorous cleaning and maintenance protocols.) Even people who raved about Bright Horizons to me also divulged a horror story or two. David had what he describes as a “super-positive” experience sending his child to a Manhattan Bright Horizons from age 7 months to 4 years. But, he says, there was one significant incident in 2024 at his center: A child opened a gate and left an area of the building alone when the teachers weren’t paying attention. When the company self-reported what happened to the city, all the children ages 2 and older, including his preschooler, were relocated to other centers for a month. It was a pain to travel crosstown every day in the middle of summer, he says. Another parent told me that it’s been fantastic sending her two children to two different locations. She loves both spots, even though her newly walking infant hit his forehead on a table edge once during day care. The cut was so deep that when she picked him up, she thought she should have been alerted so she could have taken him to urgent care. Instead, the incident report in her son’s file described the injury as a fingernail scratch, though when she complained, she says the staff were receptive to her feedback. (A Bright Horizons spokesperson said in any incident of a child leaving a supervised area, the company self-reports to regulators and implements a corrective action plan and staff retraining. If there is an injury, the spokesperson said the staff are expected to document the injury, communicate with families, and have the incident reviewed by leadership.)
,In many ways, Bright Horizons has a captive audience, not only of current families but also of those who are financially incentivized to choose it. Some New York parents are funneled to Bright Horizons through their employers. Kashani’s husband worked at Goldman Sachs when their now 15-year-old son needed child care, and sending him to the Bright Horizons at his office building was “heavily subsidized,” she says. Leslie Woodruff wound up at the Columbus Circle center in 2018 because her husband’s employee benefits included ten subsidized days of Bright Horizons care. She had to fill out what she described as “a mountain of paperwork.” In it, she indicated multiple times that her daughter was allergic to bananas and would vomit if she ate one. Yet when the teacher called her for a brief check-in during her daughter’s first day — which also happened to be Woodruff’s first day at a new job — she casually mentioned that the kids, including her daughter, had bananas for dessert at lunch. When Woodruff brought up the allergy, the teacher said she had never heard about it. Livid, Woodruff left work early to pick up her toddler and never brought her back. Despite her fury, however, she gave the chain another shot, lured by ten additional days of gratis child care (thanks to the same employer subsidy) at a Bright Horizons in Grand Central, before switching to a more affordable long-term option. A Bright Horizons spokesperson said the company has updated its protocols for allergy management since 2018 and that since implementing the updates, the number of incidents has “significantly decreased.” For employees of Weill Cornell Medicine, tuition at any U.S. Bright Horizons day care can be had at a 20 percent discount, and employees (including medical residents and students) who enroll at one of the chain’s two centers directly affiliated with the hospital tend to pay even less: The tuition is calculated based on their annual income and their child’s age.
,A quarter of Bright Horizon’s 2025 revenue came from backup-care partnerships with over 1,450 employers, including more than 200 Fortune 500 companies. Hiring a babysitter or dropping off at a center through this program costs parents tens of dollars a day, compared to hundreds without the benefit. While Bright Horizons has competitors when it comes to day care, it has virtually none when it comes to the backup-care benefit. I’ve heard of more than one large New York company that attempted to find a replacement backup-care provider in the wake of the allegations at the Columbus Circle center but none that succeeded. Bright Horizons itself estimates that it has about four times as much market share in the backup-care space than the next largest provider.
,Even the city’s entry system for gratis 3K and 4K seats pushes parents of infants toward Bright Horizons over other private nursery-school programs and smaller home-based day cares. That’s because the city gives families preferential 3K and 4K admission to schools where they are already enrolled. As a result, some parents choose Bright Horizons beginning in infancy to boost their odds of landing a coveted 3K seat years later — and to avoid a commute to wherever the city might otherwise place them. The system is intended to ease stress for young children, but advantages parents of means — and chains like Bright Horizons — in the process. David paid about $3,000 per month, with a corporate discount, when his child was in the 2’s at Bright Horizons, which he says was more expensive than other options in his neighborhood but worth it in order to be prioritized for 3K. As of last year, the monthly tuition at a Bright Horizons in Manhattan was just over $4,200 per month for full-time infant care, according to a pricing sheet shared with me by a parent.
,The Mamdani administration has acknowledged the abuse allegations against Bright Horizons. Its settlement with the company over the Columbus Circle incidents prohibits Bright Horizons from applying to open any new centers in the city before January 30, 2027, although that prohibition won’t impact the dozens of existing centers it already operates or its growth when the prohibition ends in six months. Bright Horizons will not be part of the pilot 2K program rolling out this fall in five high-need, lower-income zones, but the company only has two centers (a NewYork-Presbyterian-adjacent center in Washington Heights and another in Riverdale) in those communities anyway. The mayor’s office also says that it has required Bright Horizons to submit a corrective action plan outlining the cause of past violations and the steps it will take to address them, along with an action plan on how it will respond when employees fail to abide by health and safety rules. “The horrendous abuses that took place under Bright Horizons’s care were nothing short of despicable,” Mamdani said in a statement. “In my administration, as we expand universal child care for all New Yorkers, abuses like this will never go unchecked.”
,Experts warn that when it comes to inviting corporate entities to serve families in an expansive public program, the best time for scrutiny is before the contract starts, not after children are already enrolled. “Afterward, it’s really hard to jump in and correct those risks,” says Amy Matsui, vice-president for child care and income security at the National Women’s Law Center.
,Sarah Kashani and her husband moved out of the city a few years ago and now have a third child who attends a private preschool in the suburbs. When she heard about the allegations at Columbus Circle, she was in a state of disbelief. “I think it’s insane,” she tells me. “If my kid was there I would go nuts. I see the way my children’s other schools have been run and the way my daughter’s nursery is currently run. It really is shocking to me that something like that could happen.”
,When Caroline heard that a teacher in her daughter’s toddler classroom wouldn’t return after her maternity leave and that the assistant teacher was also planning to leave, she and her husband finally decided to withdraw from the Lower East Side Bright Horizons and enroll their daughter at a private center in Tribeca that is 20 minutes by taxi from their home. The school uses a Montessori model of education, which Caroline prefers, and has more experienced teachers. “The tantrums stopped immediately as soon as we took her out,” Caroline says.
,She and her husband have become cautious and skeptical of corporate child care. When they became parents, they assumed most centers would be similar. Now, says Caroline, “we’re not going to take any chances. I just don’t think I’ll ever put my daughter in a chain again.”
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