Excerpts
A 6-year-old girl was left in a park after a day camp outing. Staff members couldn’t explain a baby’s serious head injury. A stray pill wound up in a child’s mouth.
And there were several teachers working in classrooms who had not been fully vetted to confirm they were fit to be around the children in their care.
These were among the health and safety violations New York City inspectors found at Bright Horizons, the child care giant, over the past two years, according to documents The New York Times obtained through public records requests.
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As Mayor Zohran Mamdani pushes to expand free child care, Bright Horizons could be in line to receive even more city money, despite documents showing that it repeatedly put teachers in classrooms without completed background checks, and that staff members failed several times to follow emergency policies when children were hurt.
The city insists that its oversight procedures for child care providers are the strictest in the United States. Families have until Friday to sign up for the city’s pre-K and 3-K programs in the fall. More than 75,000 families have applied, and all will receive a spot, officials said.
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In the 2025 fiscal year, which ended June 30, the health department conducted 8,392 inspections of group child care programs of all kinds, 13 percent more than in the previous year, according to the most recent Mayor’s Management Report. The increase was mostly driven by an expansion of the department’s inspection staff, the report says.
Some of those inspections, and several conducted since then, found at least eight instances in which Bright Horizons centers had teachers, other staff members and, in one case, an assistant director working with children without having completed the city’s comprehensive background checks.
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