Childcare director evaluation: a performance review form owners can use

A director is scored on the program, not on classroom technique.

The owner or board reads records only the director's position produces — enrollment against the capacity on your license, the inspection record your state agency keeps, the staffing trend, the budget, and what enrolled families do — and rates how well each one was managed over the review period.

Six areas cover the job.

Enrollment and the waitlist. Children enrolled on set measurement dates against your licensed capacity, the waitlist trend across the period, and how many enrolled families stayed.

All three come from your own records with dates attached.

If you meet an industry rule of thumb that sets a target occupancy percentage for centers, our research found no primary source behind any fixed target — measure against your own capacity and your own prior years.

The licensing record. Inspection results and the correction status of anything cited, read from the record your state child care licensing agency issues.

The board's row asks whether the record was managed and reported honestly — not whether the program "passed," because compliance is decided by the agency on its own authority, never by this form.

Staffing. Turnover and retention computed from your own records — departures per period over your average staff count, tracked the same way every cycle — not from any national figure.

Add whether open positions were filled and whether rooms stayed covered as scheduled, and whether staff files and required training records were kept current for everyone on the schedule.

Budget performance. Revenue against plan, personnel costs against plan, and purchasing against budget, each read from your own books.

If you meet a rule of thumb that assigns personnel a fixed share of a center's budget, our research found no primary source behind any fixed share, so the comparison that belongs on this row is against your own plan and your own last cycle.

Family satisfaction and retention. Survey results, the complaint log, and re-enrollment — the behavioral measure that either confirms or contradicts the survey.

Families are your center's customers, and this row reads the relationship from the operator's side; the mechanics are in the feedback section below.

Program quality. Pull the summaries from the teacher evaluations your director ran during the period — whether they happened on schedule is itself a director outcome.

If your program is a Head Start grantee, federal monitoring already produces classroom scores you can put in front of the review: ACF observes a random sample of a grantee's classes and averages the domain scores across them (45 CFR 1304.16) on the three CLASS Pre-K domains used in Head Start monitoring — Emotional Support, Classroom Organization and Instructional Support (45 CFR 1304.11).

Those scores belong to Head Start's federal framework; a private center is not measured by them, though the practice of summarizing classroom observation results travels to any program.

If you are still defining the role rather than reviewing it, start with our guide to hiring a director — the scope you set at the search stage is the scope this form scores a year later.

This sample is built to be copied into a document or spreadsheet: a header block, a rating key, one row per outcome area, comments, and signatures.

Score the director against the duties in your childcare director job description — the role they were actually hired to carry — and hand them a blank copy when the review cycle opens, so nothing on the form is a surprise.

The forms your director uses on classroom staff are separate documents; our preschool teacher evaluation form covers that side.

Rate every item with the same word labels: Exceeds expectations (the record beats the plan, and the difference is documented), Meets expectations (delivered as agreed), Progressing (partly delivered, with the gap identified), and Needs support (not delivered, or delivered without the records to show it).

Centers that score electronically can hang numbers on the labels — the definitions matter more than the digits.

Form part	What it covers
Header	Director's name; program or site; review period covered; reviewer (owner, board, or operations lead); review type (annual, mid-cycle, or end of an introductory period); date
Rating key	The four labels above, defined once at the top so reviewer and director score from the same definitions
Enrollment	Children enrolled on the measurement dates against the capacity on the license; waitlist trend across the period; enrolled families returning for the next year
Licensing record	Inspection results and correction status as issued by the state child care licensing agency; staff files and training records current for everyone on the schedule
Staffing	Turnover and retention against your own prior-cycle trend; open positions filled; rooms covered as scheduled
Budget	Revenue against plan; personnel costs against plan; purchasing against budget
Families	Survey summary for the period; complaint log with resolutions; re-enrollment against last cycle
Program quality	Summaries from the teacher evaluations the director ran; for a Head Start grantee, the classroom scores federal monitoring produced
Staff feedback	Aggregated themes from the staff-input instrument — themes, never quotes (next section)
Goals for the next period	Written as outcomes with dates — "waitlist at every age group by spring," not "improve enrollment"
Comments and signatures	A comments box the director controls; director and reviewer sign and date — a signature records that the conversation happened, so add a line to note agreement or disagreement

Score from records with dates on them, not from the week before the meeting.

An area you did not review gets "not reviewed this period" — a blank reads as an oversight, while the words read as a choice — and a rating without a record behind it turns the meeting into an argument about memory instead of a conversation about the program.

Staff input is the row a director cannot write themselves.

The director's leadership shows up in the staff's working day — how schedules are built, how support arrives when a room runs short-staffed, how consistently rules apply, whether communication reaches everyone — and the people on the receiving end can rate that with more information than any file you hold.

A "preschool director evaluation by staff" is that rating, collected deliberately: an anonymous written instrument during the review window, items about the job (support, scheduling, communication, consistency, resources), aggregated before anyone sees it.

Two mechanics keep it honest.

Share themes, not quotes — in a small team, a written comment identifies its author faster than a signature would.

And weight the result as context rather than as a vote: the review decision stays with the owner or board, and the feedback explains it instead of replacing it.

Keep every item about the work.

EEOC-enforced laws bar employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation and transgender status), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information, and bar retaliation.

On a feedback instrument that means rating job-relevant conduct — the scheduling, the support, the communication — never personal characteristics or circumstances, and it is one more reason the instrument stays anonymous.

Family feedback fills the same row from the customer side: a short survey during the review period, the complaint log with how each concern was resolved, and re-enrollment — the measure families cast without a form.

Present the results aggregated, and collect them over the same period every cycle so this year's row compares against last year's rather than against a different season.

Put the director's document on the same fixed cycle as everyone else in the building — the annual written review with a shorter check-in between, applied to every role — because the discipline in our guide to staff performance reviews is what keeps the director's ratings comparable from cycle to cycle too.

A review pays when the key was written before the cycle started.

Decide which ratings move money, write the key down, apply it the same way every cycle, and record the decision — amount, metric, measurement date, payout date — on the form itself.

An arrangement invented after the ratings come back is a negotiation, and everyone in the building knows it.

Pay on outcomes the director can actually move, verified from your own records: enrollment on the measurement dates, enrolled families retained, turnover against your own prior-cycle trend, budget delivered against plan.

Treat the licensing record as a qualifier you verify from the agency's record rather than a lever you pay on — it is a floor the program stands on, not an outcome a bonus should push around.

And be careful paying directly on staff-feedback scores: an anonymous instrument can start measuring something else once money hangs on it.

Whatever the bonus, it rides on the base.

In BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics for May 2025, education and childcare administrators, preschool and daycare (SOC 11-9031) earn a U.S. median of $59,300 a year ($28.51 an hour), with the 10th percentile at $38,580 and the 90th at $98,240 — a national distribution for the occupation as a whole, not a recommendation for your market.

Our research found no national figure that sets what a director bonus should be, so treat the size as a design decision priced against your own budget and the base you already pay.

Sizing that decision against the base, deciding whether the director is salaried or hourly, and understanding what a bonus does to payroll are compensation questions — our guide to how much to pay a childcare director covers the structures, the classification test and the tax treatment.

Wage-hour questions belong with the Department of Labor or employment counsel, and bonus tax questions with your payroll provider, before you announce an amount.

This page is employer information, not licensing or legal advice. Inspection results, staff records and training requirements belong to your state child care licensing agency — confirm current requirements with the agency rather than treating any form, including this one, as the standard; wage-hour questions go to the Department of Labor or employment counsel, and payroll-tax questions to your payroll provider or tax advisor.