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Your Daycare's Emergency Plan Says "Contact Parents." With What?

What California actually requires in a disaster plan, why your phones die exactly when you need them most, and how to build a parent-contact system that survives the emergency.

By Eshan de Silva · August 17, 2026 · 8 min read

Every licensed childcare center in California has a disaster plan in a binder somewhere. Most of them read fine. The trouble is in the detail nobody tests: the plan says staff will contact families, and it doesn't say how, from which phone, using which list — or what happens when the answer to all three is "the thing that just stopped working."

If you run a center in Los Angeles, Oxnard, Ventura, or Azusa, none of this is hypothetical. Wildfire smoke closes centers. A Public Safety Power Shutoff takes out a block for a day. An earthquake doesn't have to be big to knock your internet offline for an afternoon. In every case the licensing requirement is unchanged, the parents are calling, and your ability to respond comes down to infrastructure decisions you made months earlier.

What California actually requires

The governing rule for child care centers is Title 22 of the California Code of Regulations, section 101174 — the Disaster and Mass Casualty Plan. It's more specific than most directors remember:

• Designation of administrative authority and staff assignments.
• Plans for fire, flood, and earthquake — including fire safety procedures and exit routes.
• Transportation and safe facilities to relocate children to.
• Supervision during evacuation — and contact after relocation. This is the clause this whole article lives under.
• A means of contacting local agencies, including the fire department, law enforcement, and civil defense.
• Procedures for evacuating nonambulatory children.

On top of the written plan, you must instruct all staff and volunteers — and children, where age and abilities permit — on their responsibilities, and conduct disaster drills at least every six months. Drill documentation stays at the facility for at least a year. Drills don't have to involve off-site travel or actually calling local agencies.

The state publishes an optional template, form LIC 610, Emergency Disaster Plan for Child Care Centers. You aren't required to use it, but the plan does have to be in writing and readily available. LIC 610 is a useful checklist regardless, because it forces you to name the staff member responsible for emergency communications — which is exactly the person everyone forgets to name.

Where the plan quietly fails: the phones

Most centers swapped copper phone lines for VoIP sometime in the last decade. It was the right call — cheaper, rings on mobile, voicemail lands in email. But it changed your failure mode, and most disaster plans were never updated to match.

The FCC is blunt about it: VoIP service may not work during a power outage or when the internet connection fails or becomes overloaded. Your desk phone is a computer that needs a switch, a router, and a live circuit. Lose one and the phones are dead — including outbound 911 from the front desk. Two things follow:

Put your network gear on battery backup. A modest UPS on the router, switch, and modem keeps phones and Wi-Fi alive through short outages, which are most of them. It's inexpensive and almost nobody does it.

Verify your registered 911 address. The FCC requires VoIP providers to collect your physical location before activating service and to give you a way to update it. If your center moved, opened a second site, or ported numbers, the address dispatchers see may be stale. Checking takes ten minutes and it is the highest-consequence item in this article.

Build a three-layer contact stack

Assume each layer fails and the next one catches it. Write all three into the plan by name.

• Layer 1 — Broadcast. A group text or push notification through your childcare management app, sent from a staff mobile on cellular data, not center Wi-Fi. Texts get through congested networks far better than voice, and one broadcast beats forty calls. Pre-write four templates: evacuating to relocation site, sheltering in place, closed today, all clear.
• Layer 2 — Direct calls, split up. Divide the roster by classroom so calls happen in parallel. Each teacher should be able to reach their own families without going through the office.
• Layer 3 — Paper. A current printed roster with parent and emergency-contact numbers in the go-bag. Paper needs no power, signal, or password. It's also personal information, so treat it that way — locked when not in use, replaced on a schedule, shredded when superseded. More on that in our childcare data privacy and Title 22 guide.

Decide now who is authorized to send the broadcast, and make sure at least two people can. During an actual evacuation the director is counting children, not drafting messages.

Your contact list is the real weak point

The failure we see most often isn't the network. It's a phone number that changed in March and was never updated, an emergency contact who moved out of state two years ago, or a family who exists in the billing system but not in the app the teachers actually use. Three fixes:

• One source of truth. Pick the system that owns contact data — usually your childcare management platform — and make every other copy derive from it. Two half-maintained lists are worse than one.
• Verify on a cycle. Ask parents to confirm numbers at enrollment, at re-enrollment, and once mid-year. A two-question form takes thirty seconds and catches most of the drift.
• Export on a schedule. Regenerate the paper roster monthly, not whenever someone remembers. Put it on the same calendar as your drills.

Know who's in the building — in under a minute

Evacuation becomes a counting problem instantly. You need to know right now which children are present, which staff are on shift, and whether the plumber who arrived at 9:40 is still inside.

Paper sign-in sheets can answer that, but only if somebody grabs the clipboard on the way out and it was filled in properly. A digital check-in system answers it from any phone, including from the sidewalk, and it covers visitors and contractors — the people most often missed in a roll call. SenLobby.ai keeps a live on-site list from the same check-in data you already collect for daily sign-in and pickup, and our sign-in/out and pickup security guide covers the licensing side in detail.

Whatever you use, the test is simple: can a teacher standing in the parking lot, on their own phone, with the center Wi-Fi down, see who was inside? If not, that's your next project.

The records you'll need after you leave the building

Relocation means operating without the file cabinet. At minimum these should open on a phone: child rosters with allergies and medical conditions, medication authorizations, authorized-pickup lists, emergency contacts, staff contacts, and your relocation site addresses and agreements.

Cloud storage handles this well, with two conditions people forget. Someone besides the director needs access — if the only account that opens the folder belongs to someone stuck on the 101, you've built a single point of failure. And test it on a phone, not a laptop, because that's the device that will be in someone's hand. Keep a printed packet in the go-bag anyway, for when cell service is saturated. If you're still moving off paper generally, our going-paperless guide covers the whole transition.

Drill the communication half, not just the evacuation

Twice-yearly drills are already required. Most centers practice the walk to the meeting point and stop there. Add ten minutes on the communication side and you'll surface the real problems:

• Send a test broadcast to a staff-only group. Time it. Did everyone receive it?
• Have a teacher pull the child roster on a personal phone with Wi-Fi off.
• Pick three families at random from the paper roster and confirm the numbers are current.
• Unplug the router for two minutes and note what actually still works.
• Confirm the backup senders still have access and remember the steps.

Write the results into your drill documentation alongside the evacuation notes. It's the same record you already keep for a year, and it turns a compliance exercise into something that improves the plan.

A reasonable 30-day version

• Week 1. Verify the registered 911 address on every line. Confirm the written plan is current and names who owns emergency communications.
• Week 2. Put a UPS on the router, switch, and modem. Name your single source of truth for contact data and note where the stale duplicates live.
• Week 3. Write the four broadcast templates. Name two backup senders and confirm they have access.
• Week 4. Print a fresh roster for the go-bag, run the communication drill above, and put both on a recurring calendar — monthly for the roster, twice yearly for the drill.

None of this is expensive. It's about ten small decisions that nobody owns, which is precisely why they stay undone. If you'd rather not own them either, this is the kind of quiet background work EDCON's managed IT and device management handles for childcare centers across Los Angeles, Oxnard, Ventura, and Azusa. For centers affected by regional emergencies, the California Department of Education also maintains guidance for Southern California wildfires worth bookmarking alongside your licensing contacts.

Common questions from childcare directors