Private Equity & Child Care
We started touring schools and it's giving Touro, Doordash Klarna, United Healthcare once again...
I feel like Senna was born yesterday, but here we are 19 months later touring pre-schools. Sometimes I tell him to grow slower, but obviously there’s no stopping this kid and I just have to keep my emotions moving at his pace. One thing that helps me block out all the feelings that every thing is going too fast and I haven’t been present enough is that he needs me to look out for him.
So I open my eyes and ears turning my big brain on to look out for danger wherever it could possibly arise. Sometimes it’s a car that tried to run a red light now in the middle of a crosswalk, other times it’s keeping him from eating his soft rubber stegosaurus, and last week it was investigating pre-schools.
The first school we went to in Tribeca was privately owned and started in 2008 by two mothers hosting a Mommy & Me Music Class in a yoga studio. For the non-parents reading this post, stay with me. More than parenting or day care, you will see that this post is about how private equity has gutted every single foundational structure of our country.
In 2011, these two Moms expanded their Mommy & Me Music Class to a language class in a home pod. They created these classes for their own toddlers and four others before opening to the public for over a decade.
When we visited the school, our Tour Guide focused on care, their method, and the results. They walked us through the way their language immersion program worked, showed us teachers with no more than 3 or 4 children at a time, and introduced us to 4 and 5 year old children who could speak two languages.
It was so smooth and reassuring that I figured pre-school had simply gotten better since I was a preschooler in the 80s getting hit with rulers and fed soap at Christian Fellowship. I hated preschool so much that one day I put a bunch of dried corn from our Thanksgiving arts and crafts class in my ear so that I would get attention even if it was medical.
The next day we went to a place called the Goddard School that Natashia and I had walked by several times in our neighborhood. It was a huge facility that looked nice and the Goddard name had me thinking it was a French New Wave Private School with an extra D in its name.
We arrived at this school for the tour and waited about 20 minutes for our tour guide. She ran through the lobby, greeted us, ran out to the other side of the facility, then came back around for us out of breathe. Senna and I were both wearing Knick jerseys celebrating our Game 3 win and the Tour Guide mentioned that she was a Knick fan as well so I forgave the 20 minute wait.
The first thing she mentioned and showed us was the facial recognition system. It was jarring to think about security, school shootings, and AI facial recognition during a preschool tour. Synapses started firing in my brain, intrusive thoughts took over, political views tangled with personal fear, and I was immediately worried about this place.
If you’re interested in the facial recognition security in schools debate, here is an article about why the New York Department of Education has banned it.
The Tour Guide let the door read her face, then led us through another lobby finished with steel moldings, then an elevator, onto another floor with a door that read her face into a hallway with receptionists behind glass that reminded me of the Probation Office I went to get drug tested at every week in Orlando.
She led us to an outdoor patio constructed on the roof of the first floor where about 27 children were running around with 3 Teachers. The Tour Guide mentioned that a Teacher was out sick today which explained the 9 to 1 student-to-teacher ratio. As she was explaining it, a kid got loose and ran straight into the glass with his face. When the Teacher finally got a hold of him, another kid ran into the glass and started banging on it screaming. In the distance was a girl alone near the edge of the patio smiling and waving at us.
The entire place was giving insane asylum and we were quickly ushered down another hallway, which was eerily quiet with several empty classrooms with open doors. Considering how much security there was getting into the building, once we were inside it felt like a building from A24’s Civil War that perhaps used to house children, but was now deserted.
We heard a few cries and screams, which I figured was normal at a preschool, but was absent from the school we visited the previous day. I quietly asked Natashia when the Tour Guide popped her head into a classroom leaving us in the hallway, “Do you remember any kids crying or screaming at the school yesterday?”
“None. This place is terrible.”
“Ok, good, cause I wasn’t sure if I was being OD, but this place feels fucked up.”
They took us to a kids “play area” that was basically a dog run with a beat up plastic basketball hoop that didn’t have water or sand in the base so it kept falling over when kids tried to play with it. There were random foam rolls or pads for kids to play with, but otherwise it was bare. They simply released 20 to 30 kids into this enclosed area with a facial recognition door with 3 Teachers that were completely overwhelmed.
One kid, Ezra, was shaking against the wall chewing his hands for 5 minutes before I had Senna give him his ball to play with. Another kid was crying in a corner looking at the floor with no supervision and the middle was just chaos with Teachers chasing children.
It was bad.
It was so bad that I went home and looked up the origin of the school and discovered that it was a huge company that sold franchises and was acquired by Sycamore Partners in June 2022.