Day Care - When the News Media Misses the Story

3 New Studies Assess Effects of Child Care - New York Times

While I made numerous whistle blower reports to the State Auditor in Washington State in 2005 and testified to the legislature, this November 1, 2005 New York Times article was published regarding child day care studies.

I'm interested in how information is presented. As I've blogged previously much information, the most vital information parents must have to make day care decisions has not been put on the Department of Early Learning (DEL) website, their Facebook page or their blog, DEL Connect in the State of Washington. Other agencies that are funded by your tax dollars such as the Child Care Resource and Referral agencies have no access to the state records on licensed day care facilities.

Reading this article a major aspect of the story not addressed is the adults who have complete control over the children who must be in day care so their parents can work.

From reading this article I see no mention of the government's role in licensing daycare homes or centers. I see no mention and I take it no study of the day care home providers as well as directors, supervisors and teachers in day care centers was done, only a study looking at children's behaviors.

Or at least the behaviors of the children who did not die from being in day care.

Sociologist Judith Wrigley pulled together a database covering 1989 to 2003 and "found 203 shaken-baby deaths in care in a private home and not a single one in a child care center."

Professor Wrigley found risks of injury and sexual violation were both highest in a family day care home. Day care centers had "the highest rate of near-miss incidents, as when a child wandered off onto a highway, for instance, or was left in a van." We know today that little ones dying from heat stroke in a van has jumped dramatically from 2005.

"We really need to begin to look more carefully at what is going on among the children in child care," said Deborah A. Phillips, a professor of psychology at Georgetown University."

She's blaming the children? There is no mention of what is going on among day care staff and the government child day care licensing managers. The adults?

In order to do stellar research you have to frame the question, have a hypothesis by which you frame your research.

When Professor Wrigley discovered their was no safety data for her to review that might have been the wake up call as to the research question. Why weren't unelected state government bureaucratic managers keeping data on children injured, maimed and those that died in licensed day care?

That's the portal question.

Washington Parents for Safe Child Care in Washington was instrumental in getting the Office of Family and Children Ombudsman (OFCO) created in 1996 to have an objective and independent investigative agency on problems such as child who die in foster care, under child protective services and/or child welfare divisions and in daycare.

It didn't take many years before that government agency (OFCO) stopped mentioning managers in their child death reports. And all their investigative work documents are kept secret, even from courts of law.

That office was sent some or all of the whistle blower documents I gave to the State Auditor in 2005.  Mary Meinig, the director never called me in for an interview and never completed an investigation. When I made a public disclosure request to see what had been sent to her, I was told by law she did not have to reveal that information. 

One important action the State Records Retention Committee took in the last year is to order all licensing files where revocation, denial and suspension action had been taken to be scanned in and sent to the Washington State Records Retention Committee to be kept for thirty-five years.

I've put out the question: Will those records be studied and researched? What are the patterns? What did managers miss? What were the licensing failures?

Who's going to do the research, who is going to study the managers charged by law with protecting your children?

If I find more recent follow up research I'll let you know.