Child Care Facilitiy Inspections in LIC

Overview

I recently had to choose a child care center for my child.  It was a difficult decision because I find it worrying to leave my little one in a stranger's hands.  Additionally, since there are so many young families and children in the neighborhood it can be difficult to secure a place for child care at the last minute.  So I set about doing some research on the child care facilities in the neighborhood.

Child care is something concerning every working parent, so it can be difficult to find objective information.  Some people love their child care provider and others harp on any flaws.  Among some neighborhood moms, there was gossip surrounding scandals involving some of the local child care centers.  To reduce bias in my research, I decided to drive my analysis using data provided by the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygene (DoHMH).  The data is available here.

Analysis

To do the analysis, I filtered on the two major Long Island City zip codes: 11101 and 11109.  Then I created 2 Tableau worksheets for a high level summary and a detailed view.  Then I stacked the two on top of one another, so you can select items in the summary view to make the detail appear below.

Summary section

By clicking on the number of violations, you can see the detail of each violation below.

Showing detail for Bright Horizons Critical Violations in 2018

If you want to see all critical violations, you can select the entire column.

My intention was to create a tool that is more intuitive to use for local parents than trying to parse through the original data set.

If I were to make further improvements, I would try to make the violation colors easier to see.  Tiny numbers can get washed out in the white background.

Analysis

Using this tool I was able to find some local day care centers had some serious violations, like not performing background checks on their teachers.  Thankfully the center closest to me had no major violations so I enrolled my child there. 

One possible flaws with my conclusion is the center I chose is one of the newest, so it's possible they don't have any violations simply because they haven't had enough time to be discovered.  With this tool, I can check back later to see if any new violations have been reported.