When Graci Moore, a designer for Ralph Lauren who was living in France, moved back to New York for work in March, one of her most pronounced culture shocks, she said, came from the long waits to enroll her 2-and-a-half-year-old son, Zachary Viger, in youth programs. Day care was one of the worst.
“People laughed at me,” she recalled this week. “They said you have to sign up two years in advance for a preschool.”
Ms. Moore did luck out, it seemed, when she found Parker’s Place, a preschool near her home in Park Slope, Brooklyn, that was scheduled to open in the fall. Things did not work out that way, because of the owner’s problems negotiating the permit process for day care centers, which I wrote about for this week’s City section. The school has been closed since Oct. 16 after an inspector from the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene found it operating without a license.
Ms. Moore, like several other parents I spoke with, is supporting the school and hopes it will reopen soon. Good child care is hard to find, they said, and one reason is that the city’s rules for opening and operating a day care center are more stringent than for most types of businesses. For one thing, applicants have to secure a change in their site’s certificate of occupancy from the Department of Buildings, a process that can take months.
One of requirements that has proved trickiest is that day care centers must have two separate exits (or “means of egress,” in city lingo) onto the sidewalk. The rule applies to “family day care” centers, smaller facilities run out of their operators’ homes, too, and enforcement was intensified in November 2005 after the city’s Health and Fire Departments and the State Office of Children and Family Services met to clarify their policies.
Dozens of family day care centers shut down after that move, but press officers for the city and state agencies say strictness is warranted because the rules’ primary aim is to protect children. That November 2005 reassessment of the rules, in fact, came in the same month that the owner of a Forest Hills day care was sentenced in the death of a 6-month-old baby who suffocated while in her care. Health Department inspectors visited the center, Devlin Day Care, on a different matter less than an hour before the child died, in fact, and had earlier shut down another, unlicensed center that the same operator was running across the street, but they did not address overcrowding at Devlin.
Under the circumstances, then, Health and Buildings Department representatives bristle at the suggestion that they should go easy on operators like Deborah Capone, the subject of my dispatch in the City Weekly this week, who they say had a center open illegally. And this year the city has also moved to close a loophole that exempts religious preschools from the regulations. (The city’s Board of Health eventually decided [pdf] that such facilities should be regulated as schools, not as day care centers. “The Health Department determined that school-based prekindergarten and kindergarten programs should be regulated as schools, and not as child care services,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the health commissioner for New York City.)
Still, operators say that the various regulations on day care sites can severely limit their options, and that the scarcity of appropriate places, combined with high rents, has led to a day care shortage, as New York magazine chronicled in a February article.