Hello,

I am currently in the start up process of opening a daycare for children with a focus on children with special needs. (Business Planning and finding out if there is a need.) My current career is in mental health. I really am looking for feedback regarding if there is a need for such a facility? Possible challenges? Feedback from parents of children with special needs (Autism, Down Syndrome, Asperger's, etc.) would be great. I know raising a little one can be difficult and daycare is always scary so I want to learn as much as I can to provide exceptional care and allow moms and dads to leave their little one in our care with no worries.

Thanks for any guidance.

Reply

I imagine that there would be a great market for this. But you should also research inclusion. Special ed classrooms in public schools also have tuition paid typical peers to be a role model for the others. Personally, I would just keep the daycare small and awesome. Have a great environment and program for special needs kids.

The hard thing is that IDEA means that you can't charge extra for sped kids. I'm not sure how you would pull that off. Autism and ADHD can be hard.

Most sped kids I've dealt with are hard because they are physically strong and active, but mentally making immature choices. It's hard when a big, strong six year old has the judgement and impulse control of a two year old.

Reply

Another hard thing is for parents to get the discipline right. It's hard for families to know what to expect from their mentally disabled kids. So sometimes they aren't getting as great discipline at home as they would truly be able to live up to, if that makes sense.

I'm putting out all my concerns here. But I don't mean to try to put you off. If you charge a higher rate BUT IT'S THE SAME FOR EVERYONE you may find that you get just a few clients who make your business work financially with less children in care.

Another thought is to aim for sibling pairs where one is typically developing but the other is disabled. I am sure that there are many parents who would pay the extra for both children to be in your care, but only one had the struggles. This could be especially good if the older sibling is the typical sibling. Sometimes they are awesome at knowing what "works" with the disabled sib.

Reply

Would it be profitable? Special needs may end up needing a much lower ratio of adult to children. Some kids may need a 1 to 1 ratio. If you can't charge more how can you afford to provide that level of care?

Reply

You can't charge more to special needs families than you do for regular families but if the program only accepts special needs families then they could charge those families whatever they want.

I would thing the ratios would definitely be less but I am also thinking the staff would need to be highly trained and of course be paid more because of that.

I think finding, training and keeping staff will be the hard part.

Reply

You don't have to take certain kids if your facility isn't equipped to deal with that particular problem. The government expects more from a large center when it comes to providing accommodations, but in a small setting, we aren't breaking the law by not taking on kids we're not set up for. For example, my home has too many stairs to take on a child in a wheel chair or a blind child (I guess). I'm not expected to remodel my home to accommodate that. But I can't charge extra for taking on a high-functioning child with Down's syndrome or Autism.

Reply

Thanks soooo much for the feedback and I think you posed some great things for me to think about and definitely did not discourage me. I agree without a doubt the staff will need to be paid well but also extremely well skilled in the area of developmental and intellectual disabilities. I also like the idea of taking in siblings. As someone who aided in ABA services for children with Autism I did often find myself sort of watching siblings during my sessions. I'm leaning towards an emphasis of the capability of taking care of special needs but being accepting of normal functioning children. Like you said similar to schools that have special classes. My goal would also be to help parents learn to deal with struggles they may be having at home as well as preparing the child for school and socializing when necessary.So we would go a little bit deeper than your typical daycare in this sense because we want to be sure that anything we implement can be carried out when the child leaves. Consistency is key with this population. Again I'm open to feedback and I love to bounce ideas around.

Thanks!

Reply