BOISE - Amendments to a long-pending day care licensing bill have cleared the Idaho House.
The amendments raise the threshold for licensing from day cares with four or more unrelated children, to seven or more unrelated children. They maintain, however, the requirement for criminal background checks for workers at day cares with four or more unrelated children; they also make an array of other changes to the bill, SB 1112a, including adjusting fees and eliminating requirements for continuing education.
Rep. George Sayler, D-Coeur d’Alene, told the House, “SB 1112a is intended to provide additional safety to children in Idaho.” With the amendments, he said, the bill is “not all that I had hoped for,” but, he said, “It will nonetheless make significant progress to protect the safety of those children.”
The amended bill still needs final passage in the House as amended, and concurrence from the Senate to the House amendments. But today’s movement on the bill was the first in a month.
This is the fifth straight year Sayler has tried to get the measure passed; Idaho currently has no regulation for small day care operations, though some Idaho cities have such regulations. Outside those cities, small day care operators currently need not even get criminal background checks.
About the only hangup in the House debate was when Rep. JoAn Wood, R-Rigby, expressed fear that a clause including misdemeanor injury to a child among crimes preventing people from being licensed as a day-care operator might go too far.
“Children fall and hurt themselves all the time in day cares,” Wood told the House. “For instance I know of where a child might fall from a swing or a slide or some kind of equipment in a day care.”
Rep. Bill Killen, D-Boise, an attorney, responded, “To be culpable you have to willfully cause or permit the injury to occur. … It’s not unintentional, it’s not mere negligence. It’s willful. It’s a very high standard.”
The bill passed the Senate on March 12 by a 30-5 vote, but got hung up in the House Health and Welfare Committee, which is dominated by social conservatives who long have opposed state day care licensing.