About CheckTheDaycare

Where the records come from

Texas Health and Human Services Commission, Child Care Regulation, which licenses and inspects child care in Texas, publishes its operations, inspections and violations on the state open-data portal. We pull that data every day for the nine counties of the Houston area: Harris, Fort Bend, Montgomery, Brazoria, Galveston, Liberty, Waller, Chambers and Austin.

We do not inspect daycares. We do not score them. We do not add findings, adjectives or opinions. What you read on a facility page is what a state inspector wrote, with the date, the severity the state assigned, and the correction the state recorded.

What the words mean

• Violation. A minimum standard the inspector found was not met on a visit. The state writes a sentence or two describing it; that sentence is the record.
• Severity. The state grades every violation High, Medium High, Medium, Medium Low or Low. We call the first two high risk and count them separately, because that is the split the state itself uses.
• Corrected. The state records when a violation was fixed, and whether it was fixed while the inspector was still on site. We show both.
• Never inspected. Some operations, mostly listed family homes, have no inspection on record. We show that as exactly what it is. It is not a clean record and it is not a bad one.

How the comparison works

We compare daycares by high-risk violations per inspection, not by the raw number of violations. A large center inspected twenty times will always have more findings on paper than a small home inspected twice, whatever the quality of care. Dividing by inspections removes that. Each facility page says how many out of 100 daycares in the same county it does better than, by that measure.

How the site is paid for

Two ways, and neither one touches the record.

• The summary on every page is free. The full report, with every narrative the inspector wrote and the complete correction history, is $12, once.
• Daycare owners can claim their page and pay for a Featured placement and a Book a tour button. Featured placements are always labelled, and a Featured daycare’s violations appear exactly as every other daycare’s do. More for owners.

We take no referral fees and are not paid when a family chooses a daycare. That is a deliberate difference from placement services that present themselves as free advice while being paid by the facilities they recommend.

If something is wrong

If a record on this site does not match the state’s file, email chris@securelayerhq.com and we will check it the same day. If the state’s own file is out of date, the correction has to be made with Texas HHSC; it reaches this site on the next daily refresh.