Poor Child Care Rating Only Alarms Some Providers And Children’s Advocates Say Changes Needed, But Sens. Crow, Riggs Not Convinced

Day care providers and child care experts aren’t sure what surprises them less:

That Idaho, for the second straight year, ranked among the three worst states for child care; or that state legislators aren’t convinced that’s a problem.

In its fifth-annual nationwide study of child care, Working Mother magazine recently rated Idaho, Mississippi and Louisiana the lowest in the country in four categories of child care - quality, safety, availability and state commitment.

Washington, meanwhile, has ranked two years in a row as one of the best in each category.

Day care providers Thursday quickly pointed to Idaho’s high adult-to-child ratios, its limited start-up requirements and the lack of enforcement of those guidelines as explanations for the ranking.

“It’s appalling and embarrassing,” said Cheryl Stafford, founder of Lake City’s Family Child Care Association. “I think every person should be fingerprinted, licensed, have CPR training. As it is, there’s no monitoring. Nobody comes by to check up.”

Provider Donna Braulick said she thought adult-to-child ratios should be lowered, and that Idaho should steal ideas from other states and “at least be in the top 10.”

But legislators maintained the study is not evidence of a problem. It appeared to judge success based on the number of rules and amount of tax money ear-marked for day care, they said.

Sen. Gordon Crow, R-Coeur d’Alene, said he was awaiting more details, adding he was not “ready to jump off the deep end” and ask for a corrective measure.

“I don’t see this becoming a huge issue based on a national magazine’s study,” he said. “I don’t believe we have everything perfect in child care, but I also don’t believe that Idaho’s a state in which the best answer is always government.”

Crow’s counterpart, Sen. Jack Riggs, acknowledged dangerous or unqualified providers could take advantage of Idaho’s day care system, but said “I’m not hearing about a lot of problems.”

“Personally, I would not want to overregulate or create a bureaucracy just because there could be a problem,” he said.

Shirley Bixby, the director of a child care referral agency in Boise, said that was shortsighted.

“You don’t wait until some child dies after being hit by a car or burns up in a basement to impose higher standards,” Bixby said. “You certainly don’t wait until 50 people die of food poisoning before you impose standards for restaurants.”

Providers have pushed unsuccessfully for years to get lawmakers to beef up Idaho’s regulations.

In fact, only after a convicted child molester was accused of abusing kids in the early 1980s did the state require criminal background checks for day-care providers, Bixby said.

Legislators haven’t ignored the issue.

Earlier this year, Crow helped push through a bill reducing the maximum number of infants per child-care worker from 12 to six, but increased that ratio for children age 5 and older to 18 to 1.

Bixby said Working Mother considered the change only a slight improvement.

“Most states allow only a 1-to-4 ratio for infants,” she said. “The other is just too large.”

She also complained that legislators were too quick to second-guess experts in the child-care field, and too willing to assume everything is fine.

With such limited enforcement, she said, problems might be almost impossible to detect.

“You would have to be really close to some situations to even know about them,” she said.

, DataTimes