If you tell me about your child, I’ll send you a shortlist.
Most parents I talk to are stuck in one of four places. They’ve been at their daycare a year and something feels off, but they can’t tell if it’s the school or just the season. They’re moving to a new city in three months and have no idea where to begin. Their child is aging out of one program and into another — infant to toddler, toddler to preschool, preschool to pre-K — and the school they trusted suddenly doesn’t fit anymore. Or it’s their first time. The baby is coming, the search is starting from scratch, and the things you’re supposed to know about ratios and accreditation and licensing tiers were never explained to anyone.
If that’s you, I’d like to help.
Here’s what I do. You tell me a little about your situation — where you are, your child’s age, what’s working, what isn’t, what matters most to you. I take that and go research the schools that actually fit. Not a generic list pulled from a directory. A small, deliberate set, chosen with your specific child and life in mind.
For each school, I read the licensing file, the inspection history, and the records of how each violation was resolved. I look at staff ratios, teacher tenure, and what programs actually pay their teachers — not just whether they hit the posted minimum. I pull pricing and hours, find the philosophy in their own words, and check the waitlist situation. Most of what I know to look for came from spending weeks meeting with programs in person and talking with administrators — asking why their tenure numbers look the way they do, why they pay teachers what they pay them, what’s actually behind a clean inspection report and what’s behind a flagged one. Teacher tenure tells you whether your child will bond with someone who’s still there in six months. Teacher pay tells you whether the program is built to last. Inspection findings are useful when you read past the headline — sometimes a program with one corrected violation is safer than one with none.
Then I write you my honest take — what’s strong, what’s weak, what I’d ask on a tour, and how the schools compare to each other side by side. I include a recommended visit order, because the order you see them in changes how you feel about all of them. You get the whole thing as a PDF. Five business days, start to finish.
I should also tell you what I won’t do. I won’t pick a school for you. That isn’t a hedge — it’s the point. The strongest predictor of how a school actually works for your child is the quality of teacher–child interaction — how engaged the teachers are, how they respond when a child bids for their attention, how warm and expressive they are in the room. The research is consistent on this. Classroom observation frameworks like the CLASS instrument (widely used in early childhood research and state quality rating systems) and the long-running NICHD early childcare studies all find that caregiver warmth and responsiveness predict child outcomes more reliably than ratios, credentials, or curriculum can. And you can only read those qualities from across a room. The data I compile is a signal — important, useful, sometimes decisive — but it isn’t the whole story. My job is to do the signal-gathering for you, as efficiently as I can, so your tour time goes to the part no data replaces: standing in two or three classrooms and watching how teachers actually treat children. Fifteen minutes of that tells you more than any spreadsheet can.
Before any of that, I’ll send you the first school for free, fully written up, so you can see what you’d be getting. If it’s useful, the rest follows. If not, no harm done — keep the writeup, we go our separate ways.
The process is short:
- You tell me your situation (the form below — five minutes).
- I send the free preview within 48 hours.
- You decide whether to keep going.
- I send the full shortlist five business days later.
A bit about why I do this. I started Shortlist because I couldn’t find good information when I was looking for childcare for my own children. State inspection PDFs, scattered Google reviews, marketing pages that all sound the same. I built a public database to fix it — and the parents who reach out to me directly always ask the same question: can you just tell me which one to pick? Almost — what I can do is take a field of fifty options and cut it down to the handful worth your time. The decision still has to be yours, but I can make sure the homework is done. I’m not paid by any school. I won’t include a place I wouldn’t send my own child.
One thing worth saying out loud: I use AI tools I’ve built and refined over the past few months running the public database. They help me pull and structure inspection records, staff data, and pricing from the public sources I trust — work that used to take hours per school. What AI can’t do is the judgment layer: knowing what to flag in an inspection report, what a teacher tenure number means in a particular city’s labor market, which philosophy claims hold up under a tour. The interpretation, the comparison, the verdict, and the visit order — those are all me. Using the tools is how I can do this carefully and still finish in five days.
I cap myself at five a week so I can actually do the work properly. If the form below resonates, fill it out and I’ll be in touch.