ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, July 8, 1996 TAG: 9607080142
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
AS RECENTLY as 1993, Virginia's laws governing child-care facilities were among the weakest in the nation. The General Assembly, responding to criticism that it was allowing unsafe, unsanitary conditions to persist in many such facilities, passed a series of reforms to be gradually implemented.
With the last of these going into effect last week, the most significant change is that unlicensed day-care providers can keep no more than five children. Previously, they could keep as many as eight. The new limit is an improvement.
Meantime, however, the quality of child care in Virginia is threatened on four fronts.
First, the state remains woefully short of resources to enforce the standards it has set for child-care providers, both unlicensed and licensed.
Private, home-based day-care providers may, for instance, voluntarily register with the state - which means they attest that they follow a checklist of health and safety regulations. They can promote their registration status as assurance to parents that they meet state standards. But it's basically a good-faith promise, with little or no monitoring by the state to ensure that the promise is, in fact, being kept.
Don't get us wrong. There are many, many conscientious, safe and stimulating child-care providers who do an excellent job. Parents ultimately are the best judges of quality in any case.
Still, it's worrisome that, today, the Department of Social Services has only 48 workers to inspect licensed home day-care centers, which in 1993 were keeping more than 600,000 kids. Just since January, the number of these facilities in Virginia has grown from 965 to 1,283.
This points to a second threat to the quality of child care: Rising demand for care could undermine quality if it overwhelms existing capacity.
The state is mounting an ambitious welfare-reform initiative that will send more mothers into the workforce. Not only will this mean greater demand for accessible, affordable child care - without a proportionate increase in state monitoring and enforcement of standards. It also means state officials may be tempted to push day care as the employment of choice for mothers taken off the dole. It's a convenient option, but some of these mothers aren't the best candidates for taking care of children.
Which points to a third threat. The Virginia Department of Social Services, now overseeing distribution of federal funds for child care, is quietly proposing changes in licensing rules for child-care providers that would weaken quality in terms of training standards for workers and the required ratio of staff to children.
It is amazing that, just as demand for subsidized child care may be about to surge, state officials want to lower standards. But, of course, this is not a contradiction: It is presumably why they want to lower standards.
Which in turn points to a fourth threat. This is not a new threat. It has been around in Virginia and elsewhere for a long time.
It is the massive neglect of child care among the public's concerns - as if early years of kids' development weren't the most decisive. As if what happens to children, day after day after day, watched over by the lowest-paid workers in our society, sometimes in stultifying environments, has no bearing on children's long-term prospects - and ours.
LENGTH: Medium: 61 linesby CNB