Governor vetoes part of welfare-reform bill before signing into law | The Suburban Times
As a child care licensor inside DSHS I had compelling documents for the fraud unit to initiate an investigation on a licensed family home provider. The Fraud Unit told me by their rules that licensing laws and regulations were immaterial to what they investigated.
If a day care provider was licensed for 12 but had 21 children in care it wasn't fraud. It would only be fraud if she didn't have the 21 children as marked in one little box on a one page form. Providers were and likely still are not required to send in copies of their attendance sheets.
Meanwhile the DSHS (now DEL) unelected bureaucratic managers allowed providers with overcapacity violations to keep their licenses. OVERCAPACITY IS A SERIOUS RISK FACTOR TO CHILDREN IN DAY CARE.
The article states the governor "left the fox in the hen house" by vetoing out the portion of the bill that would allow DSHS line workers to report to an ombudsman in the State Auditor's Office what they see. "Citing what she felt were redundancies in state law", Gregoire rejected a portion of Senate Bill 5921.
There is a whistle blower program attached to the State Auditor's Office and all state employees can make reports to that office. Rather than make another state office or job require the existing agency managers to perform their duties as required by law. State government has been bloating, bloating, bloating up for some decades now and maybe it's all gonna pop.
What gets made to help morphs into the entity it is supposed to change, for example, The Children and Family Ombudsman's Office. In the beginning the investigations of error and omissions included pointing fingers at the unelected DSHS managers. That didn't last long.
A few years back after reading director Mary Meinig's Ombudsman's report on a child death investigation, I wrote her an email that the most obvious problem there seemed to be in the death of those particular children...well...from her report there seemed to be no managers in DSHS.
Totally...no mention that DSHS might actually have managers. I'll find the report and link it in another blog article.
Then a law got crafted whereby the documents collected by the Children and Family Ombudsman's Office all remain hidden and secret even from Courts of Law.
We shall see whether the candidates for governor of the State of Washington, Attorney General Rob McKenna, the Boy Scout and Jay Inslee, the former Congressman (from one of my former home towns) will take on with integrity and transparency this behemoth, the hulking bulking bloated bureaucracy (HBBB).
Privatization won't work because they belly up to the trough of DSHS today and would have to do it tomorrow as well. Back in 2005-2006 when they pulled together one more council to get "public" input, this one about "Early Learning" the chair being the avuncular Bob Watt from Boeing. At one "public" comment period I asked who in the audience was not getting state or federal monies. One person raised their hand.
Child Care Resource and Referral (CCRR), the non-profit agencies that gets millions of taxpayer dollars, the agency you parents out there call to find licensed child care? I see for the King County one parents must pay to get referrals to licensed day care facilities. Parents have been misled into believing because the facilities are licensed that proper licensing, monitoring, oversight, complaint investigations, child abuse investigations and sanctions are done so parents don't have to worry about any of that information.
Child Care Resource and Referrals have NO ACCESS to the information in the child care licensing files kept by the Department of Early Learning (DEL). Some of the CCRR websites don't mention you can file a licensing complaint nor how you would do that. Mentioned are Child Protective Service (CPS) complaints which are different than licensing violation complaints.
As this article also points out it's "a shell game". I see websites popping up where providers advertise and pay $50.00 a year to put out there they are a daycare, although those sites aren't monitoring whether the daycare is legally operating and/or in compliance.
Yet taxpayers shell out millions of dollars to CCRR while they also charge you, the taxpayer/parent, for giving you a provider's name and contact information with NO KNOWLEDGE of the day care provider's licensing history.
What will the candidates who want to replace Governor Gregoire do?
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