Day care dilemma

BOISE – Twenty-five years ago, when a day care operator was convicted of molesting two young girls in his care, the city of Coeur d’Alene decided not to wait for state laws regulating child care centers.

The city passed its own licensing ordinance in the wake of the “Busy Bee Mini-School” case. Six other Idaho cities – Boise, Chubbuck, Jerome, Lewiston, Moscow and Pocatello – followed suit.

But now, when a problem operator turns up and the city refuses a license, the operator can just move outside city limits. “As a member of the Coeur d’Alene city child care commission, I have seen operators that couldn’t operate under the basic health and safety requirements the city of Coeur d’Alene has in place – so they simply move out of the jurisdiction and continue to operate,” said Doug Fagerness, director of North Idaho College Head Start. “This is not an issue of local control. This is a responsibility we share as a civilized state.”

Fagerness compares the issue to restaurant health inspections. Idaho doesn’t order its residents to eat out or decide what type of cuisine they can seek out in restaurants. “But what it does do is give them some reasonable assurance that somebody with expertise in sanitation was looking in the kitchen” to make sure safe practices are followed, he said. “It seems to me that that’s a very close parallel to child care licensing.”

Organizations ranging from child advocacy groups to care providers to business groups have been pushing the state Legislature for the past three years to enact new child care licensing laws in Idaho, to require criminal background checks for all providers and set minimal staffing, health and safety requirements. The state licenses centers that care for 13 or more children and certifies those caring for seven or more. But there’s no regulation of those caring for six or fewer kids.

“The danger is someone taking care of children who’s not licensed, or has no background, (who) could abuse a child, or there could be an unsafe facility and some kind of terrible accident could happen,” said Rep. George Sayler, D-Coeur d’Alene. “There are no fire or safety requirements for the smaller facilities, no background checks. The potential for something bad happening is certainly there.”

Last year, a House committee killed the bill by one vote, with several of its members saying they oppose child care and believe mothers should stay home with their children.

Just days after that vote, Idaho was ranked last in the nation for its regulation and oversight of child care, in a survey conducted by the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies.

Cathy Kowalski, public policy chairwoman for the North Idaho Association for the Education of Young Children, said, “We hope that the public outcry from the legislators’ response from the last session will help our legislators understand the needs of working parents.”

Parents throughout the state wrote letters to the editor and spoke out “in complete disagreement with their representatives on the importance of child care and the importance of the health and safety of their children,” she said. “So my hope is that those legislators are listening, because this is an election year.”

The state Department of Health and Welfare has no statistics on abuse or other problems in Idaho child care centers. “We don’t know,” spokesman Tom Shanahan said. “If something does happen there, it just goes right to the police.”

Fagerness said, “We only see the stuff that makes the newspapers.” But he said unskilled, overwhelmed providers who don’t intend to abuse children are doing things like leaving groups of infants lined up in mechanical swings to keep them quiet, rather than interacting with them and attending to their basic needs. “Is that abuse? Well, it depends how much you know,” he said.

Idaho Gov. Butch Otter isn’t a fan of regulation or licensing, but he told The Spokesman-Review he thinks staffing and safety standards and criminal background checks are reasonable.

“I think the Legislature will continue to look at that,” Otter said. “When they see a need, there’ll obviously be some compelling arguments for that need.”

The governor added, “If you’re setting some standards of so many children per person and so many exits, you know, safety and those kinds of things, I can understand that.” Requiring criminal background checks for providers, he said, “makes sense to me.”

But, he said, “We don’t cure all the problems by licensing.” The governor said he thinks Idaho parents “go through a form of licensure themselves, if you will, through their investigation and finding out who’s running the place and those sort of things.”

Fagerness said active parent involvement and voluntary programs to improve the quality of child care in Idaho are great. “But we have to have a regulatory floor – we’ve got to close down the places that are harmful to children.”

With Idaho’s strong growth, many of its young parents are newcomers, he said, who assume the state regulates the basics. “Many are shocked to find out that we don’t,” he said.

Plus, in rural areas, parents’ choices can be very limited when it comes to child care, Fagerness said.

According to the Idaho Association for the Education of Young Children, about 4,000 child care programs are operating in Idaho, and more than half aren’t licensed.

The organization estimates that 62 percent of all Idaho children under age 6 are in out-of-home care for at least part of the day. For children from birth to age 3, it’s higher – 75 percent.

Sayler was the lead sponsor of last year’s child care licensing bill, along with 10 other co-sponsors from both parties and both houses of the Legislature. This year, he said, he may let other lawmakers take the lead, and the bill may start in the Senate rather than the House. “If we can get it through the Senate and get a good, strong vote there, that might put a little more pressure on the House,” he said.

Sayler said he’s been hearing from employers, parents and others who want something done. “There’s a lot of interest in it. I’ve had quite a few people asking about it and had e-mails about it from around the state.”

Fagerness noted that Idaho’s Legislature is one of the oldest in the nation. Some older lawmakers, he said, “haven’t experienced first-hand or even through their children the pain and anguish of trying to find care for your child when you have to work outside the home.”

He said, “We have some wonderful caregivers in Idaho, unquestionably, and I’m very proud to be associated with them. That’s the good news. The bad news is that most of our children aren’t in them. We don’t know where most of our children are, and we have no way of knowing if they’re being cared for by people that have any interest in mind other than warehousing children and collecting money.”