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Notes -
I have never seen a school, preschool or day care in which it was not painfully obvious if there were kids around.
Relatedly, I know for a fact that one of the ones my kids went to had a ton of fraud going on. Employees paid partially under the table to maximize government benefits. There was a system where some of the parents got this card from the state where they were supposed to swipe in to prove they dropped the kid off, but most of them just left it with the employees to bill the government for extra days. Owners were a pair of rich Indian women who bought the place as a net-loss vanity project - and still ran it as a scammy money laundering front.
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