Across the country, teachers and other staff in child care centers (as well as in many industries) are falling ill to COVID-19.
Beyond worrying about the health of staff and students, this situation puts daycare owners and directors in the difficult position of figuring out ways to find fill-ins for staff who are sick or under quarantine restrictions.
Navigating a sudden, and unpredictable, staff shortage is made even tougher due to ongoing staff shortages at child care centers and the difficulties retaining and attracting employees.
That means finding a way to continue to keep your doors open and stay within student-to-staff ratios, all while ensuring the quality of care you offer stays high.
Now is the time to leverage Procare Solutions to help you handle a myriad of manual tasks and free up time better spent supporting your staff.
Let’s look at how a few of our tools can simplify managing your child care center in these stressful times!
Plan and Share Lessons
When a teacher is absent, a classroom routine becomes disrupted. So having a way to share lesson plans is vital.
With preloaded state and Montessori learning standards, Procare Solutions makes it simple to create child care lesson plans. You can customize assessments, track student progress as well as save and manage your lessons.
With Procare’s lesson-planning feature, you have the ability to create and easily share lesson plans, which makes the day go smoother for a substitute teacher or staff member who’s helping out and in unfamiliar territory.
And the children in your care will respond better to the change in routine when some parts of their day remain stable.
You can manage categories while creating or editing a lesson. Here are a few examples:
The tool also allows you to select a lesson category to categorize your lesson plan. New lesson categories can be added and current categories can be edited or deleted.
Most importantly, it’s easy to use. To find a lesson plan, you can use the search field or use the filter option. Lessons can be filtered by rooms, labels or lesson category.
And you can even share lesson plans for at-home learning!
Maintain the Correct Staff-to-Student Ratio
When a teacher calls in sick, it quickly can become difficult to make sure staff-to-student ratios are not exceeded.
Procare’s updated dashboard allows you to quickly review capacity and ratios for all rooms at your center, as well as assign capacity to rooms to ensure compliance with local regulations.
Track the staff-to-child ratio for every room at your child care center and get notified with Procare’s smart alert system if the ratio is off.
Simply configure your ratio by room and day or time. Never worry about going out of ratio and know that you’re staying ahead of licensing compliance needs.
And this feature can serve you down the road as well – it also allows you to better analyze which rooms have the most openings to help drive financial decision making!
Allow Contactless Check-In
The more ways you can prevent the transfer of germs to keep everyone in your child care center healthy, the better! One way to do that is through contactless check-in for students AND staff.
This feature allows parents to check in their children using the Procare app without entering your building or by scanning a code once inside.
Each school and child care center uses a unique QR code that can be displayed on a tablet, computer, smartphone or printed on paper.
When parents arrive, they simply pull up the Procare app on their phone, select the QR code icon and scan. After scanning the code, the parent will be able to check in their child directly from their phone.
This technology allows your teachers and other staff to sign in and sign out easily and quickly using a tablet at your center or their own phone – and timecards automatically are updated!
Let Procare Help Manage Your Staff
Software tools offered by Procare Solutions help you properly manage your staff, both when you’re dealing with the daily crises in keeping your center staffed during a pandemic and during times of more normalcy.
Using software helps staff manage many aspects of their day so they can focus on the work they love – caring for children.
And it simplifies your job too. With Procare’s staff management tools, you can maintain payroll records, calculate paychecks and generate reports and insights for your back-office needs. The software enables you to quickly calculate staff time card hours, deduct withholdings, pay employees with direct deposit, accrue vacation and sick time hours and ensure you maintain state compliance!
Sign up for a free demo of Procare today to see our solution in action!
