Kansas used to do a much better job than Missouri of regulating child-care centers. But the state really can’t make that claim anymore.
The same legislative tinkering with the rules has affected the state’s oversight of child-care operators. And this session, more tinkering is going on with some proposed bills potentially dangerous to child safety and health.
Lawmakers in both states have written laws that dictate the way centers and home providers can operate, and the rules they write are lax.
In Missouri, they have put the wishes of interest groups — providers, companies running child-care operations, religious organizations — above children’s safety and health. Child-care centers in religious institutions, for example, largely aren’t regulated as to staffing and discipline.
It’s legal in Missouri to crowd children into a home because state regulations exempt a provider’s children and other relatives from the limits.
Children are at risk when there are not enough adults to watch them. And forget educational experiences in such an environment.
In Kansas, lawmakers are moving in the same unfortunate direction.
Recently, the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies gave Kansas a zero score for oversight of homes that care for children. Several proposals that would add to this troublesome record may fly out of the House Federal and State Affairs subcommittee meeting scheduled for today.
They would:
•Allow child-care homes to take in more school-age children before and after school, and on non-school days.
A licensed Kansas home can have up to 10 children, depending on their ages; a registered home can have six.
The bill would allow a provider to accept double the usual number of school-age children she has.
The addition of more children could affect the quality of care for infants, toddlers and preschoolers at that home.
One child-care provider who opposes the legislation wrote this to a lawmaker:
“I know that even with my 22 years of experience, I could not provide quality care to the extra children that would be added to a group of 10 children of all different ages.”
No kidding. It would be dangerous for children in the care of one adult. The state should never let that happen.
• Allow cities, counties and school districts to regulate child-care providers, rather than requiring providers to follow state rules.
This would be an invitation for spotty rules and even spottier enforcement of them.
Child health and safety would depend on a particular county or city’s ability to pay for inspections and regulation. It would not be in the interest of having safe, clean facilities.
• Require those who inspect homes to jump a number of hurdles that boil down to being nice to those they regulate.
They would tie the hands of inspectors in some cases.
It is silly to try to put into law rules of behavior by the state’s child-care licensing representatives, many of whom are actually trained city or county health-department workers.
If there is a problem with treatment of a provider, then the rules should govern what comes next and how that should be handled.
Courtesy belongs under a regulatory framework, not cemented into the state statutes.
In addition, lawmakers are considering an exemption from licensing for centers run by schools — as if schools shouldn’t have to follow health and safety rules.
These proposals would set child-care regulation back a good bit in Kansas. Some lawmakers expect that parts of the different proposals will be put into one bill when the subcommittee meets today in Topeka.