ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, January 18, 1997 TAG: 9701200073
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: RICHMOND
SOURCE: ELIZABETH SIMPSON LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
A governor-appointed council has made adjustments to controversial regulations on day care in response to public outcry.
The Child Day Care Council restored the teacher-child ratio for 4-year-olds back to one teacher for every 12 children, a change from the 1-to-15 ratio the council proposed in October. The council kept the proposed ratio - one teacher to 15 children - for a ``balanced mixed-age'' group of 3-to 6-year-old children.
The council also added a requirement that lead teachers who don't have a high school education, college credits or home school education must have one year of supervised experience in the classroom. The one year of experience is an addition to the previous proposal, which required those teachers to have 24 hours of training at the center.
Critics of the council's proposed regulations, however, said Friday's amendments do not go far enough. The latest proposals still do not require a lead teacher to have a high school education, a requirement of current standards. Also, the proposed regulations still lack requirements that a center director have a college degree or 48 semester hours of college education, which are also part of current standards.
The council has been charged with streamlining state regulations for day care centers. While the council has proposed many changes to the code, the two areas causing the most concern are educational requirements of teachers and center directors, and teacher-child ratio.
The proposed regulations have caused so much concern on the part of parents, teachers and child care advocates that legislators have filed two bills to freeze current regulations concerning educational requirements of staff and teacher-child ratios. Council Chairwoman Sharon Jones said she wanted the council to consider Friday's changes because of the amount of public comment already received.
Carole Whitener, state president of the Virginia Association for Early Childhood Education, said the changes don't go far enough. She said if center directors aren't required to have any type of college education, it will be hard for them to give one year of quality training to teachers who don't have high school diplomas.
``It's not an improvement,'' Whitener said. ``If you don't require any training by anyone with some kind of expertise, it's not answering the problem.''
However, several council members said they believed that the quality of day care providers did not rest on formal education.
``The issue here is maturity rather than the level of education,'' said council member Brad Marrs. ``I wish you could pass a law that says, `Only hire good people,' but we can't.''
He said requiring certain education standards takes away the trust in a center director to hire quality people. He said rather than having the state ``micromanage'' the day care industry, parents should be responsible enough to assess their children's teachers, and change centers if they don't like the staff. ``Parents are not idiots,'' he said.
But council member Sharon Williams said parents do not always have the option of moving from one center to another to find quality teachers.
The amended regulations will now go to the state's secretary of Health and Human Services and the Department of Planning and Budget for review. Once the reviews are complete, the regulations will be published in the Virginia Register of Regulations, which begins a 60-day public comment period on the regulations.
Public hearings will be conducted throughout the state during the public comment period.
If passed, the two bills being proposed by legislators to freeze current education and staff ratio requirements would make it impossible for the council to drop the educational requirements for center directors or to implement its 1-to-15 teacher-child ratio for balanced mixed-age groups.
LENGTH: Medium: 74 lines KEYWORDS: GENERAL ASSEMBLY 1997by CNB