THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, January 18, 1997 TAG: 9701180373
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ELIZABETH SIMPSON, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: 70 lines
A governor-appointed council has made adjustments to controversial day-care regulations 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 its proposed ratio - one teacher to 15 children - for a ``balanced mixed-age'' group of 3- to 6-year-olds.
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 don't 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, 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 teacher-child ratios and educational requirements for teachers and center directors.
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 ratios and educational requirements. Council chairman 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 ``micro-manage'' 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 proposed bills would make it impossible for the council to drop educational requirements for center directors or implement 1-to-15 teacher-child ratio for balanced mixed-age groups.
KEYWORDS: DAYCARE REGULATIONS DAY CARE GENERAL ASSEMBLY
PROPOSED BILL