A Director’s Role is Critical to Childcare Center

As the director of a childcare center, you play an important role. In fact, you play many important roles and ultimately are the glue that keeps the whole operation together. It can be exhausting work, but with the right tools and the right team, you can see the important impact your work has on your staff and the families you serve. Childcare center directors are critical to childcare centers for operating a successful facility.

Hiring and Teacher Orientation

The director will complete resume evaluation, interviewing and onboarding of new teachers. These are the individuals who will both educate and provide care for the children of your center. They must meet stringent criteria and pass a background check and fingerprinting to make the cut to serve your children. Teachers are the backbone of a childcare center, so this selection process is extremely important. The director ensures they shadow the right teachers and receive the right mentorship along the way to their new career with your childcare center. The director shepherds the teacher throughout their time at the center to ensure long-term success and fulfillment from their jobs.

Annual Reviews and Ongoing Feedback

As described above, directors are responsible for the hiring and onboarding of new teachers. They’re also responsible for the ongoing reviews and feedback to these teachers. Teachers are a great asset and having to regularly replace them is a waste of time and effort. By ensuring strong retention policies, a director can provide parents a consistent experience of working with the same teachers throughout their child’s time at your center. The role of the childcare center director includes having regular discussions about career goals and job satisfaction with teachers to provide them a platform to share their thoughts more often than the classic annual review process allows for.

Learning Plans

Childcare center directors play an important role in setting forth lesson plans. While teachers may oversee the day-to-day planning for their classroom, the director often sets forth the benchmarks and learning objectives for those classrooms. This is important to set expectations for parents and to have something to measure children on as the school year progresses. Learning plans should explain where a child is expected to be at the start of the year, what they should know by year’s end and an outline of how they’ll get there.

Creating a Positive Culture is Critical to Childcare Centers

Each day, parents hug and kiss their children goodbye, entrusting them to the care of your teachers and staff. The director ultimately sets the culture of your daycare business. Each morning, the director hustles from classroom to classroom ensuring all is well. The director then greets parents and children to ensure they feel welcomed and appreciated. To get a full view of this activity throughout the day, read our blog post “A day in the life of a childcare administrator.”

Long-term Planning

From enrollment to class graduations and moves, a childcare center director is crucial to the long-term planning of a childcare center. These tasks can be eased with childcare software, like iCare Software’s administrative tools. From managing part-time enrollments to reporting dashboards, the software makes the director’s role more manageable and less time-consuming. Childcare center directors hold an important job. It isn’t always easy, but it is certainly rewarding as you get to watch young children thrive, learn and grow on a daily basis.