Never had this happen before... What do you do when a parent does not pick up their child anywhere near the assigned pick up time AND their phone goes straight to voicemail? She's not calling back and her emergency contact is not answering either. Let me correct that. The emergency contact (mother's boyfriend/partner) hung up on the staff and hasn't answered the phone again. Has anyone had this happen? And what do you do if you continue to have no contact? She was supposed to be here at 6:45am (child arrived 8:45pm) and in a few minutes we will receive our morning children and be out of ratio

Reply

Do you have the name of her employment? Look up the phone number and call her work number. And keep calling the boyfriend.

Did she end up picking up?

Reply

Do you not have a procedure for this? In our state, we are to have a procedure, in writing for being unable to contact parents and all emergency contacts, also included is a time frame for pickup & what happens if there in no contact with anyone after a specific period of time, and when local authorities and social services are called.

For me, I have after 30 minutes of no response from a parents, I move on to emergency contacts. I will keep attempting contact to all numbers provided, every 20-30 minutes for 1.5 hours. If no contact, then I call the local police station AND report it to social services. My licensing guy said I was abnormally lenient i my policy, but satisfied the licensing rules & regs.

Reply

When that kid does get picked up, I would demand another emergency contact person who is reliable. The fact that this guy hung up on you is unacceptable. And if you go over ratio, that person would be charged a heavy fine with a notice of suspension, that if it should ever happen again they will be immediately terminated.

Reply

Do what she said. You never know - Parent could have been in an accident. Night shift people are more prone to falling asleep at the wheel unfortunately.

You need more than one emergency call person and in this case several since you can pretty much write off the one.

Hope everything is OK.

Reply

I actually realized I had no policy for not picking up (never thought that would end up happening) and will edit my handbook to reflect it!

She ended up picking her up one hour later... She was charged the $1 per minute late fee and reminded that there will be an additional charge if she repeats this behavior.

We thought about the fact that she may have gotten (God forbid) into an accident or something may have happened to prevent her from calling and that's why we tried her emergency contact. So we will definitely require an additional contact since he was no help : )

Reply

What was her excuse? Did she say anything at all? I would surely have addressed the hang-up by her BF as I find that rude and disrespectful.

I am curious though as to mom's words/excuse for her lateness.

I mean I fully understand that things happen sometimes but the no call/no communication would set me off....

Reply

@ Blackcat: Oh I was pretty pissed this morning, especially because I was really close to being out of ratio with the expected arrival of my 3 daytime children. In PA we can take 3 children without a license, and I hold fast to that ratio! Now, she claimed she told us she was picking her child up at 7:30am. But ummm, no she did not. I know this because I was the one she spoke with and she was supposed to pick her up at 6:45am. She is our regular on the weekends and asked for a random drop in overnight, for which she was charged a little over half of our usual $15 per hour drop in rate since she was full time on the weekends. What she did not do when she came in (I was not here, my staff were) was put her drop in and pick up times on the calendar so there would be no misunderstanding. So in the future, everyone knows that even if a regular does a drop in, it should be written down by the parent upon drop off.

Reply