A 6-year-old girl was left in a park after a day camp outing. Staff members couldn’t explain a baby’s serious head injury. A stray pill wound up in a child’s mouth.
And there were several teachers working in classrooms who had not been fully vetted to confirm they were fit to be around the children in their care.
These were among the health and safety violations New York City inspectors found at Bright Horizons, the child care giant, over the past two years, according to documents The New York Times obtained through public records requests.
These previously unreported incidents are part of a pattern of problems at Bright Horizons centers that was first made public by The Times this month. The issues signal a potential reason to be concerned about the company’s agreements with corporate clients and the city’s Education Department, which has paid Bright Horizons over $100 million in the past five years to provide pre-K and 3-K programs.
A criminal case connected to a Bright Horizons center in Manhattan, near Columbus Circle, has already cost that location its city contract, and the city has taken the rare step of moving to close that center permanently. The company has city contracts for programs at 20 other centers.
As Mayor Zohran Mamdani pushes to expand free child care, Bright Horizons could be in line to receive even more city money, despite documents showing that it repeatedly put teachers in classrooms without completed background checks, and that staff members failed several times to follow emergency policies when children were hurt.
The city insists that its oversight procedures for child care providers are the strictest in the United States. Families have until Friday to sign up for the city’s pre-K and 3-K programs in the fall. More than 75,000 families have applied, and all will receive a spot, officials said.
“Every provider undergoes a rigorous vetting process,” Mr. Mamdani said when asked about Bright Horizons at a news conference the day after The Times’s report earlier this month.
As part of what the mayor has called a “redoubling” of his administration’s focus on keeping children safe, officials said on Tuesday that the city was reviving a requirement that day care centers prominently post so-called performance summary cards that include a 12-month inspection history. The rule was suspended during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“As the city works to expand universal child care, ensuring families have peace of mind that their child is in a safe and caring environment is part of that work,” Sneha Choudhary, a spokeswoman for the mayor, said in a statement.
In light of the recent reporting, an analyst on a Bright Horizons investors’ call this month asked Stephen Kramer, the chief executive, about health and safety protocols. Mr. Kramer said the company was focused on “delivering high-quality care and education for families.”
“When we have any incident at a center, we take it incredibly seriously,” Mr. Kramer continued, adding that the company had “strong retention of families in our centers” and “stability in our client base.”
“We feel confident in our position at this point within the New York City market,” he added.
Bright Horizons runs more than 60 programs at about 40 centers in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. Any family can use its services, but the company focuses largely on providing regular and backup child care for employees of over 1,000 corporate customers, including The Times. It was one of two child care providers picked in 2024 to run a pre-K and 3-K extended-day pilot program for the city, records show.
But as the city funding allocated to Bright Horizons has skyrocketed — from about $700,000 in 2020 to more than $30 million in each of the past three years — there have been several health and safety violations at its centers. The most serious complaints from recent years do not appear to involve taxpayer-funded child care programs, but some other programs held at the same locations have been cited.
The 6-year-old who was left at a park for 20 minutes, in August, was participating in a day camp on Manhattan’s Upper West Side run by a Bright Horizons subsidiary. The city’s health department temporarily shut down the camp. Company officials said the incident was unacceptable and that the two counselors responsible for the campers had been fired immediately.
The child found with the pill was enrolled at a Bright Horizons center connected to NYU Langone Health. A teacher noticed “something other than food” in the child’s mouth in January after staff members “failed to monitor the classroom for potential health hazards,” an inspector wrote. Company officials noted that the inspector said Bright Horizons had followed protocol in calling poison control and getting emergency care for the child. The officials could not immediately say what type of pill was involved.
The child with the head injury, who was 14 months old, may have fallen at a playground and was taken to the hospital in an ambulance, company officials said, adding that the child was still enrolled at a Bright Horizons center.
“We understand that any incident affecting a child can be incredibly distressing, and we make it our absolute priority to address every incident carefully and comprehensively,” Trent Duffy, a Bright Horizons spokesman, said in an email. He added that the company was “committed to continuous improvement” and had appointed a new leader for its New York operations within the past year.
There are about 2,300 child care centers in New York City, and about 6,700 child care programs based in homes. About 120 health department staff members are responsible for inspecting them all, health officials said.
The health department requires all employees at center-based programs to go through city background checks. The programs must also meet fire and building codes and ensure proper staff-to-child ratios, which vary by age group, among other safety requirements. Bright Horizons officials said the company uses a third-party provider to conduct its own background checks in addition to those the city requires.
Permits for the programs are good for two years, and each center is inspected at least once a year, according to a health department compliance guide. Centers are subject to unannounced inspections, including those based on complaints. Violations can lead to fines.
A program can be closed immediately if there is “a clear and imminent risk to children’s health or safety” that cannot be fixed within 24 hours, the guide says.
In the 2025 fiscal year, which ended June 30, the health department conducted 8,392 inspections of group child care programs of all kinds, 13 percent more than in the previous year, according to the most recent Mayor’s Management Report. The increase was mostly driven by an expansion of the department’s inspection staff, the report says.
Some of those inspections, and several conducted since then, found at least eight instances in which Bright Horizons centers had teachers, other staff members and, in one case, an assistant director working with children without having completed the city’s comprehensive background checks.
A Bright Horizons official said that all of the cited employees had passed the company’s own background check and most had been cleared by the city to work in at least one company program or center, though not the ones where they were working at the time of the inspections.
When it comes to the city’s pre-K and 3-K programs, parents may have few or no alternatives to the centers where their children are placed. The application lets families list preferred sites, but high demand can push them elsewhere.
The health department’s NYC Child Care Connect site provides access to inspection records, an opportunity for comparison shopping and a sign-up for notifications about specific centers.
When parents enroll a child at a center, they are supposed to get information about supervision and attendance policies, emergency procedures, and how illnesses and injuries are handled. They are also supposed to have unrestricted access to their child at all times.
The newly redesigned performance summary cards required by the city should be posted at or near center entrances soon, officials said, and any centers that do not have theirs posted by July 1 face a $500 fine.
As for Bright Horizons, which had just under $3 billion in revenue last year, the complaints it has racked up since 2024 have led to more than two dozen summonses from the health department and about $17,000 in fines issued by the city’s Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings, documents show.
Still, asked on the investors’ call how the company might fit into Mr. Mamdani’s plans for expanding free child care, Mr. Kramer sounded bullish.
“We certainly have a good and ongoing relationship with the folks that manage those programs,” he said, and “a good sense of how this may unfold over time.”
Shauntel Lowe contributed reporting.
Ed Shanahan is a rewrite reporter and editor covering breaking news and general assignments on the Metro desk.
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