Idaho’s Day-Care Rules A Far Cry From Washington State System

Cross the border from Washington into Idaho and state child care regulations almost vanish.

An adult can watch no more than four infants at a time in Washington, while an Idaho provider can juggle 12 babies simultaneously.

And even if Idaho providers do break state rules, they have little to fear. The state doesn’t conduct surprise inspections and rarely punishes anyone.

Idaho officials searched their records last week but couldn’t find a single North Idaho day-care provider the state closed since 1994.

By contrast, Washington closed or encouraged the shutdown of about 25 day-care centers and in-home providers in the Spokane area in the last two years.

The striking gap between the two states’ child-care standards was highlighted last month in Working Mother magazine’s annual analysis of state child-care regulations.

“Governor Mike Lowry has made child care a priority, and Washington is focusing on improving both the quality and supply of care,” the magazine reported, ranking Washington among the top 10 child-care states in the nation.

Idaho, though, was chided as perhaps the nation’s worst. Only Louisiana and Mississippi scored as poorly.

“Idaho remains worrisome,” the magazine noted. “Family child care has virtually no standards, and standards for care in centers are poor. It’s the only state in the nation that allows one adult to care for a dozen babies!” The disparity in standards will likely grow before it shrinks.

While Idaho lawmakers resist efforts to better protect children, Washington increasingly tries to weed out bad providers.

In February 1994, Washington decided to make child care a bigger priority and created a separate department called the Office of Child Care Policy.

Tim Nelson became the director for Spokane’s office, which covers much of Eastern Washington. He quickly made it clear care standards needed to rise, and that child care was early education, not baby-sitting.

“He set the standards higher and is giving us the tools to meet them,” said Shannon Selland, a Spokane provider and a member of the Eastern Washington Family Day Care Association.

As Nelson sometimes tells providers, “This is going to be the only childhood these children have, and a lot of it’s going to be in your house.”

Last year, Nelson’s office sprang a safety and health review of the centers and in-home facilities that had received the most complaints from parents.

The surprise inspections led to several closures and uncovered all sorts of alarming chaos and negligence. One visit found children playing on the roof and the provider smelling of alcohol.

A few months later, Spokane County sheriff’s detectives raided a Spokane Valley in-home day-care facility. In the garage, detectives found a methamphetamine drug laboratory.

The woman who ran the child-care center at the home was not arrested, and later tried to get hired by a Spokane day-care center.

Nelson heard about it and sent word that she would never provide child care in the state again.

He also heard the woman’s response: She would just go provide child care in Idaho. Efforts to locate her for comment were unsuccessful.

Idaho’s child-care policy is driven by two competing outlooks; one says it’s time to bring state regulations up to national standards, while the other follows the state’s more libertarian view of rejecting government intervention whenever possible.

A proposal to cut the number of infants that providers can care for from 12 to six was almost booed out of the Senate during the Idaho Legislature last session.

Sen. Gordon Crow, R-Hayden Lake, described it as a “freshman mistake” to even try to pass the bill.

“I didn’t realize there was so much bad blood on this issue,” Crow said.

Idaho’s reluctance to demand better child care is rooted in an old-fashioned sentiment that mothers should be home with their kids, suggests Carol Lindsay, who teaches child development at North Idaho College in Coeur d’Alene.

“Until it becomes a family issue we’re going to be stuck here,” she said of the state’s poor child-care ranking. Lindsay said lawmakers only get interested in the issue when “their children are trying to find child care for their granddaughters.”

If spot inspections were performed in Idaho like they are in Washington, “I think you would be shocked,” she said.

Roseanne Hardin, administrator for Idaho’s division of family and community services, isn’t so sure.

“We have some very, very high quality day cares in Idaho,” Hardin said. She asserts the state’s child care may be improving and points to increases in training and a decrease in complaints received by the state.

Hardin explained that many cities, such as Coeur d’Alene, have opted to impose tighter child-care rules than the state requires.

Coeur d’Alene requires anyone caring for seven infants to register with the state and have an assistant on staff. It also demands that licenses be renewed each year, instead of every two years, and that a criminal background check be conducted on all new providers.

Despite its tougher stand on child care, Coeur d’Alene doesn’t have a single child-care inspector and has not shut anyone down in the past two years.

Idaho’s lack of inspections and regulation means that most of its child-care horror stories surface when a child dies and there is a criminal investigation.

For example, a 6-month-old girl drowned last year in her own vomit at the home of an unlicensed provider in Moscow. Another baby died under the same provider’s care in 1991. No charges were filed in either incident.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Graphic: Washington and Idaho child care rules