How to find day care reports

How to find a day care, or find information about your day care's compliance record, on the Bright from the Start web site:

To find Georgia day cares by name, county or ZIP code, go to http://decal.ga.gov and under "For Families" click "Search for Pre-K or child care." A search page will allow you to narrow your options. If you have trouble pulling up your day care by name, just enter the county name and then find the day care name on the alphabetical list.

After the search generates a list of individual day cares and pre-kindergartens, click on one for basic information about its hours and services. At the bottom of the page you will find links to the licensing and monitoring reports for that day care, and sometimes for complaint investigations. These are PDFs and, depending on your software, they will either open in your web browser or you may have to download them.

Open one and look for rules that have been "not met" or "partially met" on the right-hand side. Then read the description of the violation. Scroll all the way to the end of the document (in many cases, past the point that appears to be the end) and you will often find a chart that indicates the severity of each violation. Violations in the top two rows of the grid indicate the greatest level of concern.

This story was originally published July 4, 2010 at 12:00 AM with the headline "How to find day care reports."