HOUSTON -- It happened in just a matter of minutes: a child kidnapped from a day care center.

“I heard it, and I was horrified,” day care co-owner Helen McWilliams said.

McWiliams saw it all unfold on the news.

“Unacceptable, absolutely unacceptable,” she said. “It should never have happened.

“Thank goodness it was a good ending; it could have not been,” McWilliams said.

McWilliams worries about such things as the co-owner of two Pearland day care centers.

“I absolutely know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, this is my calling,” she said. “This is what I love to do.”

Records indicate in the Houston region, her Stepping Stone Learning Centers are rated among the best.

She has security measures she uses to keep her kids safe.

“As a mother and a grandmother, I know how parents feel when they drop their children at any daycare that they are going to be there when they come back, and that it’s a safe comfortable building,” McWilliams said.

Inside her day care, monitors help keep an eye on the kids in each room, and parents must sign in and out.

“Now everyone before they can even work in a day care have to be criminally checked and fingerprinted by the FBI,” McWilliams said.

But not every day care center plays by those rules.

“Just as restaurants have a set of codes to meet, day care centers have a set of codes to meet as well,” Charlene Warfield said.

The Department of Family and Protective Services monitors day care centers in Texas, and 11 News found the worst violators in the region.

On the list: PYOC Learning Center in South Houston. It’s located inside Windsor Gardens Apartment Complex. It’s on probabtion after last summer an inspector found “sufficient evidence a disabled child was physically abused by a caregiver."

Also on the list is St. Ann’s Daycare Center on Creekbend in southwest Houston. Among its violations: a child was transported to the wrong school and lost for four hours, and background checks on all workers were not performed.

“A history will tell a lot about a person,” investigator Warfield said. “If they have a criminal background, a felony that prohibits them from being in a center.”

Others on the probation list with multiple violations: Dawning Years Academy on the southeast side; HCC Child Development Lab School in downtown Houston; Little VIP Academy in the Third Ward; Pilgrim Lutheran in southwest Houston; and the 5 plus 2 Child Learning Center in Pearland.

So now the question: How can these centers on probation stay open? Shutting them down is not so simple, and by law, they all get a chance to correct their errors.

But some violations just can’t be erased.

“Essentially our parents and our children are our first regulators in day care center seeing what is going on and reporting any concerns,” Warfield said.

Concerns that could put a child’s saftey at risk.

In the end, McWilliams said parents are the first line of defense.

“When you go to a day care, you should show up,” she said. “That’s how you see how they really are.”

She also said parents should do their homework and research a potential day care center. 

“You can never be too secure,” she said. 

Especially when the life of a child is at stake.