Community Care Licensing Division

Community Care Licensing is horrible if you have complaints. I am going to California Conservation Corps this Sunday, 4÷5÷15. They told me that my case for my complaint will be dealt with within 90 days. I only have 5 official days in my area which I will be gone for 1 – 3 years. This case is not being dealt with at all and confidentiality was broken at my placement. The seriousness of this problem is not being dealt with properly and they never follow up so I have to call them every so often. One lady wants to meet with me but this is a couple months after the complaint was put out. The fact that they won’t help us foster youth says that managers of transitional housing for foster youth with a crooked mentality can get away with stealing, harassment, threats, scandalous behaviors, and bribery. They don’t believe the foster youth and we have no probability to them. This makes it harder to get things done and they don’t want to help. I really give them –1 star. The fact that they are the only people that can help a problem and don’t want to is a complete act of heinousness…

Lots of information. Best to come in, don’t just call. Make an appointment!
If you’re looking into finding childcare for your little one, coming here is an absolute MUST. The Bay Area regional office of Community Care Licensing Division has records of all licensed daycares in the East Bay. Within these files you can find paperwork for complaints and safety/​policy violations found at each daycare. While there is never a guarantee that bad things can happen at a daycare that simply aren’t complained about and documented, you can usually get a pretty good idea of how good a daycare provider is through these files.
The best thing to do is to call a couple days ahead of time, and set up an appointment to come in to view files. They only let you view a couple records at once, so hopefully you’ve narrowed down your picks by the time you get to this point. You CAN simply call in and have them call you back with info about your daycare, but when you have them do this, they only go back up to two or three years. If you go in and read the files yourself, you can peruse the ENTIRE record. With one of the places I inquired about, there had been nothing bad in the record for the past two or three years, so with a phone call, I would never have known anything. However, since I was able to read further back for myself, I found an incident that involved the daycare provider being visited by an inspector, during which she lied about being sick, and had put a couple kids in a closet to try and hide them from the inspector. The inspector’s quote was something like she «found children stuffed in a closet with clothes.» WTF? Finding something like that makes the trip down there completely worthwhile.
On the other end of the spectrum, you can get an idea of how a good daycare takes care of its complaints and issues. While some complaints are frivolous, some violations have merit, and you can see how the care provider responded to each plan of correction, and whether or not things were resolved. A good record can go a long way in helping ease your mind about leaving your child with licensed strangers.
Luckily we’ve found an excellent daycare with a good record here, but if we ever need to move or switch daycares for any reason, I will definitely be back to go through files.