ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, October 11, 1996 TAG: 9610110038
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
GOOD DAY care is not baby-sitting.
It is not merely supervised play time. It is not herding offspring of working parents, with the sole purpose of keeping the lambkins out of traffic and away from electrical outlets.
Yet one might suppose these to be the minimum needs of Virginia's toddlers, judging by proposed changes in the state's day-care-center regulations.
The Child Day Care Council was charged by Gov. George Allen to streamline the rules, with the usual administration objectives: lifting burdens, freeing businesses and "the lives of Virginia's citizens" from excessive government interference - worthy goals to be sure.
But parents of preschoolers should be less than grateful at the prospect of being "freed" from the assurance that licensed day-care centers will be operated by educated professionals, with staff enough to give youngsters the attention they need.
The council proposes to eliminate such "burdens" on day-care operations as requiring that the person in charge of a classroom be a high school graduate; that a center's director have a college degree or 48 semester hours of college education; and that the staff-student ratio for 4-year-olds be no higher than 1-to-12. The proposed regulatory changes would raise the maximum number to 15 children per staff member.
These changes, council members say, will remove barriers to establishing new day-care centers - centers that will be needed when welfare reform is fully implemented throughout the state.
No doubt.
But Virginians can ill afford underfunded welfare reform that removes supports for the poor while failing to break the cycle of poverty that ensnares a portion of American society in a cross-generational underclass. One key to breaking that cycle is quality early-childhood education.
Standards that require little more than warehousing won't ensure that children in these crucial developmental years are learning the skills they need to be successful in school and later in life.
Families of the newly employed will not be alone in feeling the adverse impact, either. Lower standards will make state licensing less meaningful to working parents of every class when they are searching for good day care. And parents will have a harder time finding the quality they are looking for if lower-paid, uneducated workers become the norm in a field already woefully underpaid.
Simply having an education doesn't guarantee that a person will work well with children, the council's chairwoman says in defense of the lower educational standards.
Again, no doubt. But having an education does not preclude such ability, either. What children in day care need is a caregiver who is both good with children and well-trained in early-childhood development. They need stimulation, skill development, active learning.
Amid growing recognition of the earliest years' importance for everything that follows, Virginia is proposing to dumb down standards for early- childhood education. What a disgrace.
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