What Records Must a Daycare Preserve After a Child's Injury in Colorado?
The video, reports, schedules, and licensing records that decide daycare injury cases, and how Colorado parents can demand them before they disappear.
By Adam Fonta, Lionheart Injury Law | Updated July 11, 2026 | 5-minute read
When a child is hurt at daycare, the facility controls nearly every piece of evidence: the cameras, the incident report, the staffing schedule, the employee files. Parents get a phone call and a one-paragraph summary. This guide explains what actually exists, what Colorado law lets you demand, and how the preservation process works, drawn from how we investigate daycare injury cases and Aurora.
Why Daycare Evidence Disappears in Days
Surveillance systems at child care centers typically overwrite on 7-to-30-day loops, and nothing legally freezes that footage until someone puts the facility on notice. Staff turnover in the industry is high, so the aide who saw what happened may be gone in a month. And incident reports get written by the facility, for the facility; the first version, before anyone anticipates a claim, is the honest one. Every week of delay costs evidence that cannot be recreated.
What Records Should Parents Request?
In writing, and promptly:
- Surveillance footage of the room, playground, or hallway, for the full day, not a clip
- The incident report, including every draft and revision
- Staffing schedules and attendance for the room that day (who was present, and what the ratio actually was)
- The employee file of involved staff: training, background check, prior discipline
- Sign-in and sign-out logs establishing timeline
- Prior complaints and incident history for the room, the equipment, or the employee
- Internal communications about the incident (texts, emails, app messages to other parents)
- Your child's full file: enrollment, medical authorizations, prior incident notes
Facilities rarely hand all of this over voluntarily. The point of the written request is to create the record: after it, "lost" footage becomes spoliation, and courts can instruct juries to assume destroyed evidence was damaging.
Who Regulates Colorado Daycares?
The Colorado Department of Early Childhood (CDEC) licenses child care facilities and investigates complaints. Two things every parent should know exist: the facility's public licensing history, searchable through Colorado Shines (inspection reports, violations, complaint outcomes), and the CDEC complaint process, which triggers an independent investigation the facility cannot control. A licensing complaint and a civil claim run on separate tracks, and the licensing file often becomes powerful evidence: prior violations show the facility knew.
How Does a Preservation Letter Work?
A preservation letter (also called a spoliation letter) is a formal demand, sent by counsel, that the facility and its corporate parent retain every category of evidence connected to the incident: video, documents, communications, schedules, personnel files. Once received, destroying or overwriting that evidence carries legal consequences, which is why the letter goes out in the first days of every case we take, before the facility's insurance carrier shapes the story. Parents can send a written request themselves on day one; we follow with the formal demand and the follow-through that makes it stick.
What Do Staffing Ratios Have to Do With It?
Colorado licensing rules set specific staff-to-child ratios by age (for infants, one caregiver for every five children), and ratio violations are the quiet cause behind a large share of daycare injuries: the room was legal on paper and understaffed in fact. The schedule, the attendance sheet, and the sign-in log, compared side by side, prove what the ratio actually was at the moment your child was hurt. That comparison is exactly why those three records sit near the top of the request list, and why facilities are slowest to produce them.
What Should Parents Do Next?
Medical care first, and let the doctor document everything, including your child's account in their own words. Report the injury to the facility in writing (email, so it's timestamped), photograph the injuries as they heal, and make the records request above before the video loop turns over. If anything about the incident suggests abuse rather than accident, the analysis changes and so do the resources involved; our child abuse practice handles those cases with the care they demand.
Deadlines for children's claims work differently in Colorado (they generally extend past a child's 18th birthday, and minor settlements require court approval), but nothing about the evidence waits. A consultation is free, and the preservation letter can go out the same week: daycare injury | daycare injury.
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