Safety Is a System: How a Goddard School Runs It Daily

A daycare safety checklist is the first step. It covers the building: gate latches, outlet covers, extinguishers, the first aid kit. Safety itself is a set of daily routines that someone has to run in every room, every day.

Physical safety is the part everyone sees. The rest is quieter. Children are counted when they move. They go home only with adults their parents named. The day follows a pattern a three-year-old can predict. We've opened and operated 21 Goddard Schools, and our training for new owners opens with safety for exactly this reason.

Why isn't a daycare safety checklist enough?

A checklist describes a building at one moment. A licensing visit sees one day. A child who starts in the infant room and stays through pre-K spends years in the building, and every one of those days has a drop-off, a pickup and many moves between rooms.

So we teach safety in layers. Physical safety is one of them. The others carry as much weight:

• Emotional safety, because a child who feels known by the adults in the room is easier to keep safe
• Predictability: the day runs in an order children can learn
• Belonging, where every child has a place in the group and an adult who knows them
• Transitions that are planned and counted
• Secure entry, so only expected adults get through the door
• Privacy for a family's information

A school can pass every item on a physical checklist and still be weak on the rest.

Predictability gets the least credit. In a May 2026 article from Harvard's Center on the Developing Child, chief science officer Lindsey Burghardt said "fostering stable, predictable developmental environments is one of the most important things we can do."¹ In a classroom, that looks like the same order of events each morning, the same signal before a transition and the same teacher at the door.

None of this makes the checklist optional. Inspectors look for every physical item, and a school that misses them has a problem no routine will fix. Get the checklist right first. Then build the routines on top of it.

The daily routines behind a safe school

Most of the safety work in a school is repetition. The same handful of routines run every day, and each one has a rule behind it. In Pennsylvania, many of those rules are written into 55 Pa. Code Chapter 3270, the regulation for child care centers.

Supervision is the base layer. Pennsylvania assigns each staff person specific children, and "the staff person shall know the names and whereabouts of the children in his assigned group."² The staff:child ratios in § 3270.51 apply on top of that, on the premises and on trips.

Pickup has its own rule. Under § 3270.117, a child goes home only with a parent or "an individual designated in writing by the enrolling parent."³ When a parent calls to name someone new, the school logs 5 items: who called, the date and time, who is picking up, who took the call and who released the child.

It's slow on purpose.

Entry is the routine families notice first. Goddard lists controlled entry systems, playground cameras, visitor policies and gate alarms among its security measures, along with daily playground inspections.⁴ The equipment helps. What makes it work is staff who don't hold the door for someone they don't recognize.

What happens when children move between rooms?

Transitions are where a system shows its gaps. A class lining up for the playground, a group coming back from lunch, a child walking to the bathroom: each move is a moment when a count can slip.

The federal Head Start program's November 2022 guidance on active supervision is direct about it. Staff "account for all children with name-to-face recognition by visually identifying each child" during transitions. They count often, and the guidance calls counting "especially important during transitions when children are moving from one location to another."⁵ Its worked example has two teachers counting before they leave the playground, counting again in line and taking a final count back in the classroom.

Three counts for one walk down a hallway sounds like a lot.

It takes seconds, though, and it turns "I think everyone's here" into a number two adults agree on. Predictable routines make transitions calmer, too. Children who know what comes next move with less confusion, and a calm line is easier to count than a scattered one. A teacher who isn't chasing a wandering child can keep their eyes on the count.

How does an on-site owner hold the standard?

Pennsylvania names who is responsible. The fire drill rule says "the Director or designated staff person who is responsible for compliance with this chapter shall conduct fire drills." The same regulation requires drills at least once every 60 days, a different imagined fire location each time and a written record of the time, the location, the evacuation time, the staff and the number of children.⁶ Goddard goes further and states that its schools run monthly fire drills and quarterly emergency drills.⁴

Rules like these only hold when someone checks them. That's the on-site owner's job. An owner who is in the building can walk a transition and watch the count happen. They can read the drill log and see whether the evacuation time is drifting up. They can pull the pickup log after a busy Friday. Dina Speranza, our co-founder, is the on-site owner of our Cranberry Township school, so this is a standard we run ourselves.

That said, there are limits. No owner can stand in every room. The system has to work when the owner is on a tour or in a meeting, which is why the routines are written down, trained and repeated until they don't depend on any one person.

Drilling more often has a trade-off too. A monthly drill costs class time and some calm, especially in the infant and toddler rooms. Schools that drill more often than the minimum accept that cost in exchange for more practice.

Frequently asked questions

What should be on a daycare safety checklist? Start with the physical items an inspector will look for: exits, latches, outlet covers, extinguishers, first aid supplies and playground surfaces. Then add the routines: name-and-location supervision, counts at transitions, a written pickup list, a visitor policy and a drill schedule with records.

How often do Pennsylvania child care centers run fire drills? Pennsylvania requires fire drills at least once every 60 days, with the imagined fire location rotated so it's never the same twice in a row. Each drill gets a written record kept at the facility.⁶ Emergency drills are required at least once a year.⁷

Who can pick up a child from daycare in Pennsylvania? A parent, or an adult the enrolling parent has named in writing. If a parent names someone by phone, the school logs who called, when, who is picking up and which staff took the call and released the child.³

The short version

A daycare safety checklist tells you what a safe school owns. The daily routines tell you whether it's safe today. If you're weighing a school of your own, look past the equipment and ask who runs the counts, the pickup list and the drill log.

Ask us for the Franchisee Success Kit, or book a free consultation and we'll walk you through how our schools run safety from the first day.