Day-care owner Ginger Wood-Oguno packs spray bottles filled with cool water on the van that Educational Excellence Academy uses for field trips during the warmer months.
She doubles — and sometimes triples — the teacher-to-child ratio on trips, and she has extra drinking water on hand to keep children well hydrated.
The Department of Human Services' strict transportation rules keep Wood-Oguno and other child-care providers on high alert. At any moment, an agency inspector could show up unannounced to evaluate transportation safety.
"It's a challenge," Wood-Oguno said. "In the summertime, they do the unannounced inspections and look at things like the cleanliness and safety of the vehicle, and the recordkeeping which shows when children got on and off the vehicle and how many times you check attendance."
This summer, the state is boosting the number of inspections to help prevent child deaths associated with transportation.
Inspectors will visit the state's 3,400 centers — 60 in the Nashville area — that are licensed to transport children.
The state began cracking down hard on providers that are licensed to transport children after four children died in day care vans in Memphis from 1997 to 2003. Nashville's last death of a child in a hot vehicle was in 2003, when a woman left her 22-month-old son in her car outside the day care she operated.
"It's all about safety," said Michelle Mowery Johnson, director of communications at DHS. "In the summertime, people tend to be out of a routine, especially on field trips, and they forget. We've found children left in cars. Serious things can happen."
Vehicles heat up quickly
Within minutes, the inside of the car can become a deadly environment for a child, even on days when temperatures are in the 60s, said Jan Hull, an adjunct professor of meteorology at San Francisco State University.
"People don't realize how hot cars can get," said Hull, who began collecting data in 2001 on hyperthermia deaths of children left in vehicles. "On an 80-degree day, the inside of a car after 10 minutes reaches 99 degrees, after a half-hour reaches 114 degrees, and after an hour 125-130 degrees."
Hull studies, tracks and posts the data on his Web site, www.ggweather.com/heat.
He said when children's body temperatures reach 104 degrees, they experience heat stroke, and at 107 degrees, their bodies start shutting down.
An estimated 36 children die every year in the United States from heat exposure inside a car.
There have been five deaths in 2008, the most recent of which was last week in Boone, N.C., where a 9-month-old girl was left inside a car on a 73-degree day, Hull said.
Mowery Johnson said Tennessee's inspectors would be looking for anything that could harm a child during transport, as well as safety procedures to get the children off and on the bus.
Drivers must be current on training and background checks, transportation logs should be accurate, vehicle inspections and maintenance should be current, and seat belts must work, among other criteria.
Any red flags during the inspection can lead to warnings, probation or a license suspension. Last year, DHS warned 80 providers, and six voluntarily suspended their licenses after violations were found.
"Transportation is a high-risk part of this industry," Mowery Johnson said. "We need to be vigilant as a regulatory agency and child care providers need to be vigilant as well."
Wood-Oguno, whose provided care since 1991, knows it will take a lot of work and vigilance to keep the children safe and be up-to-date on DHS requirements, but she's not deterred from taking field trips.
Full text available at The Tennessean.