Dear Parents,

In the Infant and Toddler rooms crawling infants will get the tops of their shoes blackened from crawling on the carpets.  We own a commercial grade carpet steamer and use it more often than what COMAR regulations require, however this will potentially happen when our crawlers are on the carpets that we walk on each day in our street shoes.  When they go outside and crawl we understand this can happen and realize there is little we can do.  When we are indoors we certainly can take measures to reduce the instances of this happening.

Our infant room staff is directed to bring in a pair of indoor slippers they use when in the classroom.  They remove their shoes outside of the room and place the slippers on before entering the room.  Whenever they go outside of the classroom the slippers are replaced with their street shoes in an effort to keep the rugs in this room as clean as possible.

We ask that each of you do the same.  In the event that you cannot remove your street shoes and replace them with a slipper prior to coming into the room we further ask that you telephone the teachers prior to entering the building so they can prepare your child to hand him or her over to you at the classroom door. 

If you do not have slippers and cannot get someone on the telephone it would mean we are on the playgrounds in which case we would ask that you come through the preschool classroom to the playground to see the staff directly so they may enter the infant rooms on your behalf.

It is imperative that the soles of these slippers be clean at all times when walking on our classroom carpets.

Please keep in mind that it is a violation for anyone other than the babies to be without shoes on the day care floors.

The use of disposable booties or slippers is a common practice in child care infant and toddler programs.  We do not believe that it should be necessary for you to have to pay the increase in fees to cover disposable booties; therefore, we feel the use of slippers provided by each of you will resolve this problem.  Each family has a bin outside the infant room door with the child’s family name on it to store the slippers and your street shoes in.

We wish to thank each of you for assisting us in keeping a clean environment for the babies.

Sincerely,

Tana L. Hill, M.Ed.

Director