HELP ON THE WAY
Leaders promise action after News report
STATE, CITY and federal officials reacted with promises of immediate reform and increased resources Thursday after a Daily News investigation revealed hidden dangers in city day care centers.
The promise of sweeping reform unfolded like this:
Gov. Cuomo announced plans to push legislation that will improve day care safety, starting by making it easier for parents to see the track records of the city’s 11,513 day care providers.
Mayor de Blasio said he would hire 35 more health inspectors, immediately launch a major crackdown on repeat-offender providers and create ate a new unit dedicated to shutting ng down illegal day carere sites popping up around the city.
Bronx state Sen. Jeff Klein called on n the legislature to pass his bill implementing a lettergrade system for day care similar to the one the city now us- es for restaurants. “If it’s important nt that we know how dirty or clean our restaurants are, why not how safe our day care is?” he asked.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) fired off a letter to the Senate appropriations commit-tee, citing The News’ investigation. She demanded increased federal day care funding. “State and local governments need additional funding to step up inspections of licensed day care providers and investigations of complaints about poor quality and dangerous conditions,” she wrote.
The dramatic response came after The News began publishing a two-part investigation on the city’s troubled day care system.
On Thursday, The News revealed a system that allows egregious incidents at day care centers to remain hidden from view.
The News obtained records via the Freedom of Information Law detailing dozens of horrendous incidents, including five child deaths and eight kids seriously injured since 2013.
Day care providers are often caught trying to take care of too many children with inadequate and incompetent staff, and parents can’t see what’s happening at these places because the city and state keep separate data on inspections and don’t make details public when a provider’s license is suspended or revoked.
The News also found that providers are often able to continue operating despite repeat violations by simply paying minor fines and promising to clean up their acts.
The state Office of Children & Family Services Acting Commissioner Sheila Poole announced “a comprehensive series of legislative proposals to improve child safety at state-regulated day care providers.”
“We need legislative action to provide the state with the aggressive enforcement tools needed to move quickly and decisively against anyone who should not be in the business of caring for young children,” Poole said.
Cuomo’s legislation would create a “comprehensive registry of all state-regulated and city-regulated child care programs in the five boroughs.”
The two systems would be merged so parents can see both state and city violations in one place. The News showed how this could be done by posting a merged database Thursday on nydailynews.com.
The legislation would also for the first time post revocation and suspension documents that spell out in clear language dangerous incidents, state officials said. That information is not readily available to the public, but The News obtained more than 800 pages of those documents through the Freedom of Information Law.
And the Cuomo bill would move to increase penalties for state-regulated providers cited for “serious violations,” and it would increase from two to five years the moratorium for reapplying after a license suspension.
De Blasio’s health commissioner, Dr. Mary Bassett, and deputy mayor for health Herminia Palacio said the city has tried before to get the state’s data and they were grateful to hear about a planned merger.
They promised health inspectors would launch a “round of enhanced inspections” starting Friday targeting providers with repeat violations.
“We’re working on making the information more userfriendly so that parents aren’t sifting through compliance inspection reports,” Palacio said. “Our goal here is to give parents the information they can use.”
Klein’s letter-grade system, proposed in a bill he filed in November, would assign grades to all licensed day care operators based on the number of serious inspection violations.
“If you have a lot of public health hazards, you should get a failing grade,” Klein said.
If all licensed day care centers were required to post the letter grades, Klein argued, it would logically be easier to spot the unlicensed businesses.
State and local governments need additional funding.
SEN. KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND