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Obviously you won't know until you ask, but i would assume its covid related and only using disposables to minimize risk of germ sharing via kids using each others cups.

Why are you concerned about this new policy? Are you worried about the kids not getting enough to drink? I would suggest raising your concern about the specific worries you have, rather than about the policy in general so that you can work together to find a solution that works for everyone.

@meadow: prior to covid our daycare asked everyone to bring in a water bottle everyday. They started this about a year ago to attempt to create less trash.

Since they’ve reopened they no longer want us to do so and are back to using disposable water cups instead.

We do have to pack a lunch though and can send a water bottle or thermos for them to have when eating lunch.

@meadow: That is really frustrating to not understand the thought process behind the procedure change.

I would also be upset about the water thing, especially given that they will all drink out of identical cups and presumably, will not have as easy ad hoc access as before. My guess is they didn't want to rely on/trust parents to sanitize cups each night.

On the milk front, in my state, if daycare provides the meal, they are required to offer milk to the children at each meal. Is that not the case in your state? You could get a doctor's note if it is important to you.

ETA: I am involved in a leadership role in a daycare. We have not disallowed water bottles from home but we did (FINALLY) decommission our water fountain. Water fountains and daycare aged children do not mix!

@meadow: My assumption was that they didn’t want the kids mixing their cups up.

Can you send milk boxes in for your kids to have with lunch? And maybe a schedule for when your daughter should be offered water?

@muffinsmuffins: One of my kids' schools (there are three of them attending two schools in the same district) has banned backpacks, but made a big point of them having a water bottle for school....that it kind of sounds like they want me to LEAVE AT SCHOOL (?!?) I can't really get my head around this.

@meadow: If I had to guess, I'd say it's three things:
(1) They want to control when the kids eat/drink. Eating/drinking means taking off masks, so they'd like to make sure that happens when the kids are seated and distanced from each other.
(2) They don't want kids leaving drinks around where others could drink from them by mistake or on purpose - this is more likely with a water bottle than with an open disposable cup.
(3) They don't want to have to touch the tops/insides of water bottles to help children refill them.

If the school provides the (disposable) cups, they get given to kids once they are seated, and are disposed of immediately after use, and there's little opportunity for unsupervised sipping (and therefore, mix ups). That helps solve all of the problems.

My 3-almost-4 year old is still having snack at school, but I have been told they'll be having it behind plexiglass partitions, and that the adults won't be handling the kids' food/drinks, so they need to be able to open everything themselves.

Ours has an everything has to be disposable policy. So they give them water in disposable cups, and everything in the lunchbox has to be disposable. I assume bottles for infants are an exception. They also require nap sheets to be taken home and washed every day, any bag that's brought to carry stuff in in has to be washed everyday.

They said the water cups thing is b/c the state licensing body says that every time a child touches their cup, it has to be sanitized before they can touch it again. So it would be literally a ridiculous amount of sanitizing for the teachers to do if they had non-disposable cups. They are also supposed to sanitized a toy after every time a child touches it, which I already don't see how is realistic. The rules about everything disposable in the lunch and taking the nap sheet home to wash everyday are also by the state licensing body. I think a lot of this is basically covid theatre - there are no requirements or recommendations to do anything about the super outdated hvac system, which is the real danger, but constantly cleaning objects people touch I guess gives some sense of doing something...

We opted out of the summer program, so I can't speak to how we dealt with this.