Not All Child Care Regulations Are Red Tape

Child care is essential for working families – but for parents to feel confident leaving their children in someone else’s care, they need assurance that those settings are safe and healthy. That assurance comes from law. Both federal and state governments set minimum health and safety standards for child care, with the baseline for federal requirements established by the Child Care and Development Block Grant.

During the past year, Head Start has seen proposed changes to regulations that would roll back requirements impacting health and safety, including changes to teacher qualifications and salaries, adult-to-child ratios, and supports for children with disabilities and children under the age of three. If officially implemented, these changes could transform the entire purpose of the Head Start program, changing it to a typical child care structure and removing many of its wraparound services. There are now signs that a continued effort towards red tape reductions may impact the entire field of child care soon through proposed changes to the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF). Not all regulations are created equal. Some exist to verify or enforce paperwork requirements; others exist to prevent the abuse, injury, and death of young children. What follows is about the difference.

Background Checks

In 2014, the requirements for background checks for child care staff members and prospective staff members were updated as a result of the CCDBG Act of 2014. States were given until 2018 to implement these new changes which significantly expanded who needed to be checked, what checks were required, and how often the checks had to occur. 

During the implementation phase, I worked as the Director of Kentucky’s Division of Child Care. At the time these changes were initially implemented, it seemed quite overwhelming. States were developing new technology systems to track a wider range of checks and having to recheck every person currently working in a child care program (some for decades). Child care programs were extremely stressed because the hiring process was taking longer since each background check had to be completed before offering a candidate a position, a wait that could take several weeks.  

Each day I received dozens of emails from child care providers that were overwhelmed with the new changes and were trying to get all of their veteran staff checked after years of employment. I was so frustrated with the system until I began to see failed background checks coming back for early educators that had worked in child care for years and had not been checked since the date of their initial employment. Men and women who had lost custody of their own children due to abuse or neglect were working with our state’s young children, and we had no previous way of knowing. The previous system was clearly not protecting our children. Every child deserves to be cared for by trusted adults who will not harm them, and CCDF’s updated background check requirements have helped to ensure that reality. 

Adult-to-Child Ratios

I don’t know if you have ever been left alone in a room with ten two-year-olds, but I have. A teacher responsible for ten young children must keep them safe, change their diapers every two hours, begin the toilet training process, comfort crying children, help them with meals, plan new lessons each day, observe them on the playground, and speak with their parents each day. This is a hard job, and teachers cannot do it effectively when more and more children are forced into each classroom. 

CCDBG and Head Start have different approaches to adult-to-child ratios. The CCDBG Act allows each state to set its own ratios and they vary widely. For example, Connecticut maintains a 1:5 ratio in its two-year-old classrooms with a maximum of ten students in the classroom. Kentucky maintains a 1:10 ratio for its 2-year-olds with a maximum classroom size of 20 children. In recent years, some states have even considered abandoning mandatory adult-to-child ratios in an attempt to increase the statewide capacity. 

Head Start has an adult-to-child ratio of 1:10 for children that are three to five years old, and Early Head Start has a 1:4 adult-to-child ratio for children under three years old. The proposed changes to the Head Start regulations would drop those ratio requirements, giving states discretion to allow more children per adult. This will be a significant change, and it will be implemented unequally across the nation. 

Although some policymakers may believe that eliminating mandatory ratios will solve their capacity issues, there are significant complications that can arise as a side effect of this change including:

• A loss of staff when the numbers of children in the classroom seem overwhelming, ultimately decreasing child care capacity
• Decreased health and safety in the classroom when teachers can’t properly supervise more children
• Higher rates of teacher turnover and less qualified staff members which can lead to lower quality care
• More children entering kindergarten without the skills to begin learning since they didn’t receive the time and attention previously needed to be prepared

Teacher Qualifications

I have been a director who hired a teacher that never came back after her first lunch break because she realized that she was in over her head. I have also been the teacher who was grateful for her training so that I could manage a classroom of 20 active preschool students. The teachers that stay are the teachers that feel prepared. That training comes from academic coursework, but also from mentoring and experience doing the job and learning from mistakes. We can’t continue to place unprepared men and women into classrooms that cause burnout and turnover.  

Head Start policies require that lead preschool teachers have a four-year degree in a field, and co-teachers in an Early Head Start classroom should have a minimum of a Child Development Associate (CDA) credential. These minimum qualifications ensure that teachers have the skills to appropriately plan curriculum and identify developmental delays as soon as possible. It also helps them to understand what can be expected from young children, so that staff do not become frustrated with developmentally appropriate behavior. If these requirements are repealed, states will revert to the minimum requirements for regulated child care programs. Some states, like North Dakota and South Dakota, will allow children as young as fourteen to start working as assistant teachers in child care, with little to no training. 

Hiring minimally trained and uncredentialed entry level staff members seems like a way that child care providers can save money to meet the bottom line, but there are consequences to these actions:

• Teachers can be easily overwhelmed and leave their positions very quickly. It can end up costing more to repeatedly retrain staff than to initially hire a more qualified teacher. 
• Liability on the child care program can increase. Entry-level staff members may not be prepared to prevent injuries in the classroom. As injuries increase, so do insurance premiums and lawsuits.
• Teachers that are not prepared to work with a classroom of typically developing children are definitely not prepared to support children with disabilities. These numbers have increased to as high as one out of every six children having some type of developmental delay. 
• The number of children with disabilities expelled or suspended from regulated child care will likely continue to increase when teachers do not feel prepared to care for these children.

We do not yet know whether the upcoming proposed changes to CCDF will weaken the training and qualification requirements that the 2014 CCDBG Act established, including minimum annual training hours and the requirement that states maintain a progression of professional development for child care workers. But given the direction of the Head Start proposed rule, it would be prudent to watch for changes that reduce those floors further.

Caring for Infants and Toddlers

I worked for the state government when the 2013 crib regulations were changed throughout the country. Child care programs had to replace all the cribs in their classrooms, and it was a major expense for  providers who were already losing money on infant care. I was guiding programs through this transition, especially when they cried out for additional funding. I was working in the same office when I met a Kentucky legislator whose niece had died in a crib at child care. The infant had been trapped between the mattress and the slats of the crib and suffocated, the exact reason that the federal government changed the regulations. There is no comfort that you can give to a family that has lost a child. Nothing can replace that void. The only comfort moving forward is that no other child or family will endure that agony thanks to the more stringent regulations that were established.

Infants and toddlers often do not have the ability to be independent when it comes to communication, feeding, sleeping, and other daily skills. Adult to child ratios are lower in infant and toddler classes because of this reason. Infant and toddler classrooms must worry about food safety and safe sleep. Also, child abuse rates are higher for the youngest children. Infant abuse cases are 15 percent of all abuse cases, and children two and under are 27 percent of such cases. 

As complicated as it can be to care for infants and toddlers, these are the teachers that receive the lowest wages. With the recent decision to rescind Head Start teacher wage regulations, this pattern will continue. More entry level staff will be offered jobs with entry level wages, and skilled teachers will leave the field in order to support their families. 

If the federal government follows the trend demonstrated in the proposed Head Start rule, then we could see specific CCDF regulations dropped that enforce safe sleep, reduce Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) and Pediatric Abusive Head Trauma (PAHT), and prevent foodborne illness during bottle preparation. 

Although we do not know the timing or the content of the upcoming federal regulation changes, we do know that they will be coming soon. I want to stress that a reduction of paperwork or other policies that allow for increased access to child care could be a benefit to all states.  However, a limited increase in child care capacity is not worth a compromise on health and safety for all children in regulated care. There must be a middle ground. We must find a way to use child care reform to benefit child care programs without losing the regulations that protect our most vulnerable children.