Child Care Records Now Updated Online

There are few things more important in life than ensuring the personal safety of our children. That's why choosing a child-care center - in essence, entrusting the well being of our sons or daughters to what could be virtual strangers - can be such a harrowing experience for parents.

On Sunday, The Telegraph published a front-page story detailing efforts over the past year by the state Bureau of Child Care Licensing to improve its regulations and to make child-care center inspection reports more easily accessible to the public over the Internet.

This report followed up on a four-day series of articles we first published in July 2006 titled "Who's Watching Your Child," an award-winning examination of state inspection reports covering 188 licensed child-care centers in Greater Nashua. At that time, we discovered there were 425 critical violations on file against 111 of these centers.

Just as importantly, the series was accompanied by an online database on our Web site (www.nashuatelegraph .com) that contained access to the actual inspection records of these centers over the past 18 months, information still not available on the state's Web site.

As a result, parents were able to determine for themselves whether any violations existed at a particular center during that time period. They also had access to that center's written response and whether the state was satisfied the violations had been corrected.

The original series was sparked by the arrest of a 22-year-old child-care worker on molestation charges at a center in Nashua. After we first reported the story, we found that the state didn't make it particularly easy for anyone to access those public records.

At that time, if a parent wanted to view inspection reports, he or she was encouraged to first call the bureau. An employee would provide some basic information about the center in question over the phone, at which point the caller could then decide whether to request a copy of the documents through the mail.

After The Telegraph first began reporting on the molestation story, Gov. John Lynch ordered the bureau to make a list of the violations available online within 30 days. Since that time, the bureau has made it possible for parents to go directly online to request that a copy be mailed to them.

The bureau eventually hopes to install the necessary software that would make it possible for citizens to view the actual reports online, similar to what The Telegraph made available in July 2006 and then updated for this past Sunday.

Today, the complete set of our stories and the updated online search tool are available at www.nashua telegraph .com/childcare. There, citizens can search more than 170 state-licensed child-care centers in 15 Greater Nashua communities either by name or by town.

For example, a search for "Nashua" brings up a list of 58 child-care centers. In each case, the name of the center is accompanied by street address, maximum capacity, the types of licenses held and whether the state has cited the center with any critical violations in the past 18 months.

Selecting a specific center brings up additional information, including a link to the actual state inspection reports, as well as a Google-powered locator map.

Providing this kind of information to our readers is in keeping with one of our most important missions here at The Telegraph: serving as a community watchdog.

The fact that our initial inquiries about state-inspection records in February 2006 led to an order by the governor to make at least some of this information available to citizens online is a testament to the importance of this role.

Full article available at the Nashua Telegraph.