How it works
GoldiCheck pulls inspection reports directly from each state's official licensing database and translates them into plain English. No editorial judgment, no mystery algorithm. The source record is always one click away.
Data sources
Every state licenses and inspects its daycares through a regulator that publishes inspection results. We currently cover:
California CCLD — CCLD Facility Search
California pre-grades every violation itself: Type A means an immediate risk to a child's health, safety, or personal rights; Type B means a violation that, if not corrected, could become that same immediate risk. We never escalate above the state's own grade.
Citations are decoded against each state's published licensing rules, and every finding links back to the official record it came from.
Records are refreshed regularly. The "last updated" timestamp on each facility page shows when we last pulled that facility's record from its regulator — that date, not a promised schedule, is the thing to check.
Tiers
Each facility receives one of three tiers based on the violations in your selected lookback window. The tiers are our opinion, computed from the disclosed criteria on this page and shown alongside the underlying record they summarize. It reads the record in order: the license status, then any enforcement action against it, then the citations. Every facility page includes a "How we rate this daycare" section with the exact criteria applied to that facility.
Clean record
Actively licensed, with no violations in the lookback window.
Watch carefully
Violations are on record. Worth discussing with the facility directly.
Serious concerns
Violations at the regulator's own most serious grade, where it grades severity — or, where applicable, the state has taken an enforcement action. Consider these carefully before enrollment.
Violation severity
Where the regulator grades violations itself (California's Type A/B, the NYC Health Department's hazard levels), we use the regulator's own grade and never escalate above it. Where the regulator doesn't grade (Illinois, New York outside NYC), we classify each citation by the topic of the regulation cited instead.
We do not discount a citation because it was later corrected — we tier on the history of violations only. That's deliberate, for two reasons.
Correction is expected. Every regulator here requires a cited violation to be fixed and follows up. Among facilities still licensed and operating, corrected citations are common — so knowing one was corrected mostly tells you the facility did what was required of it. California's regulator is explicit that fixing it does not undo the finding: a Type A citation issues "even if the violation is corrected on the spot."
Not every citation has a public correction record. Some regulators publish one for most findings, some for almost none, and even where they do there are findings the record never resolves either way. Discounting only the citations that happen to carry a correction would penalize every facility that fixed a problem and had no public record to show it. That would be a discount for paperwork, not for care. Most citations are eventually fixed; the facility can tell you the result.
What we are not
GoldiCheck is a transparency tool, not a certification program. A "Clean" tier means the state record shows no violations — it doesn't mean we have personally visited the facility or evaluated the quality of care. Always visit in person and review the original state record (linked from every facility page) before making decisions.