Higher standards urged for day care

04/27/2005

Jean Hopfensperger, Star Tribune
April 27, 2005

Legislators need to take a hard look at Minnesota’s standards for licensing day-care facilities and at the system that allows most ex-offenders to work or be present in child-care settings, a coalition of groups urged Tuesday.

“We know that problems exist in the child-care system; it’s unfortunate that it takes tragedies to get the public’s attention,” said Margaret Boyer, director of the Alliance for Early Childhood Professionals.

Boyer was speaking at a news conference in Minneapolis.

The conference was called by Minnesota’s leading organizations representing child-care providers in response to a report on child-care licensing in Sunday’s Star Tribune.

Boyer’s alliance was joined by the Minnesota Licensed Family Child Care Association, the Minnesota Association for the Education of Young Children and the Minnesota School Age Care Alliance.

Although the organizations have worked together in the past, Tuesday’s news conference was their first joint action, officials of the organizations said.

First, they said, the public should know that most day-care providers are in the profession because they love kids and that serious problems are rare.

Second, child-care providers have been advocating for stronger training and licensing standards for years, they said. But they said legislators have been eroding programs that once improved day-care quality.

Minnesota, for example, used to have a tiered system for reimbursing providers. If a day-care facility earned national accreditation, it could receive a bigger state reimbursement for child-care subsidies. But Minnesota ended that system two years ago, said speakers at Tuesday’s news conference. That means that a day-care provider who is a high school dropout gets reimbursed at the same rate as one with a master’s degree in child development and national accreditation, they said.

Another problem is the focus of Minnesota licensing, which is more on the day-care facility rather than the person running it, they said.

“They [licensers] look at plastic covers for electrical outlets, where you keep your poison, if you have gates, if you have a back yard with a fence,” said Boyer.

She said they should be focusing more on questions such as: “What do you know about child development? What is your experience with children? What kind of day care are you going to provide?”

And Minnesota clearly needs more child-care licensers so they can monitor homes more frequently and be more helpful to providers, said Beth Mork, director of the Minnesota Licensed Family Child Care Association. Home day-care providers often work in isolation and can benefit from more advice and support, child-care experts have said.

“I was a licensed provider for 27 years, when there were more licensers and they spent more time in [day care] homes,” Mork said. “You can’t be a support [to the day-care provider] when you have such a big caseload.”

The group offered a list of recommendations that members said they will present to legislators, including tightening the process for giving variances to ex-offenders seeking to work or live in child-care facilities and strengthening criminal background checks.

They also called for more state funding for a program that recruits and retains high-quality child-care providers, and an end to the freeze in reimbursement rates for child-care subsidies

“When dogcatchers make more money per hour than trained child-care providers, then something is wrong,” Boyer said.

Although it’s late in the legislative process to make such changes this session, the group said it hopes to work with legislators who hold hearings on child-care licensing in the future. It also hopes to tap the growing interest in early childhood education at the Capitol.

“I look forward to the day when proposals like this are responded to the same way as a proposal for a Twins stadium,” said Bryan Nelson, board president of the Minnesota Association for the Education of Young Children.