Instead of upper managers following the laws DEL managers manipulate not only parents and grandparents who want their children safe as well as the public at large; DEL attempts to manipulate the public through their representatives and senators in the state capitol in Olympia. Washington. If the legislature passes a law DEL decides whether they "want" to comply or not.
At least one key player in the House in particular has gone along with protecting the DEL managers and that is Representative Ruth Kagi.
As an investigator, analyst and expert witness on Washington State's Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) and the Department of Early Learning (DEL) this is my review and opinion of what played out since six month old Graham Hazzard's death in 2001 and then four month old Eve Uphold's death in 2013.
Children die. Parents make a noise. The parents ask law firms to help them. The media responds. The legislature responds. The bureaucratic managers lie. The outcome? More protection for the unelected bureaucratic managers in the system is the outcome. More secrets get buried so parents won't know the real histories on child day cares.
In 1911 the father of scientific management, Fredrick Winslow Taylor wrote: "In the past the man has been first, in the future the system must come first..."
Over one hundred years of the system building and building and building with its confusing jargon, its mind numbing procedures, sleight of hand by adding to all ready existing laws little subsections to the law to undermine the intent of the laws, bills to undermine we, the people's children and their families.
Maybe critical mass moment is building to where we go back to we, the people have oversight over their government? As more and more parents and grandparents understand the machinations of the government agency they are more in a position to protect the children the unelected government will not protect.
Four month old Eve Uphold died in the same day care in 2013 where six month old Graham Hazzard died in 2001. Eve's parents attempted to get justice through the legal system, the media popped in then DEL director Bette Hyde and Representative Kagi whose district the day care resided in saw the opportunity to use Eve's death to do, in my opinion, two things.
Rep. Kagi needed to look good, kind, responsive and protective to a constituent in her district thus the the bill got floated out in the 2014 session and when it failed to pass put it into the 2015 legislative session. It would look like DEL now could take a look at these deaths and figure out why children die in day care.
DEL upper managers and Rep. Kagi told the public and their fellow legislators last year they just figured out that DEL cannot review their agency's performance around dead children without a "law" telling them to do so. A falsehood longer than the length of Pinocchio's nose.
DEL under the governor's office for nine years JUST realized last year after Eve died they "couldn't" review deaths in licensed child day care in the state of Washington?
It doesn't pass the logic and intuition test of we the people.
It doesn't pass the Pinocchio smell test. DSHS and DEL both have very very long noses.
Last year the bill was killed in the senate after the senate committee concerned about children's health and safety heard testimony. I testified the bill at its core was a way to cover up managers' failure of duty that led to harm to children in licensed day care.
After my testimony, Amy Blondin from DEL testified. A senator asked Ms Blondin about my "cover up" testimony. What was that? Under pressure Amy blurted out the truth. Amy said that DEL "essentially" didn't want to be in the position of "building a case against ourselves". In other words, "cover up".
Contacted in 2014 when the bill first got floated out by Channel 13 Fox TV reporter, Dana Rebik, I gave her an hour taped interview. I gave Dana copies from my files to show the documentation I had and my opinion the bill was only to protect managers in the future when the next child dies.
I could tell immediately, Amy didn't like my analysis. My take is she or her producer all ready had decided the happy ending to this tragic story would be and that was on the order of ..."child fatality review bill passes, now children will be protected." Fox TV would look like a hero.
Channel 13 never allowed my expert testimony at the hearing as well as OFCO (office of family and children ombudsman) director Mary Meinig's expert testimony to the House to get to we the people, on the air waves owned by we the people.
When I heard Mary Meinig's testimony that day she said probably a significant number of so-called SIDS deaths were not SIDS but "gentle suffocation" due to unsafe sleep practices I told my colleagues sitting next to me Mary would be gone shortly as director of OFCO. This year Mary is no longer the director.
The Four Estate abdicated their duty to we the people as well seemingly to carefully only use only the information state government managers (and Kagi) wanted; that's my take unless corporate media can tell us why and how they ignored pertinent records, documentation and testimony.
My thirteen years as a day care licensor and my seven years as a national expert on child day care safety laws; my knowledge and expertise, parents weren't allowed to hear, to consider, parents weren't allowed to know there was more information out there they could consider about why children die in day care; to give them information in their decision making around using day care.
Why the media goes along with the unelected government's agenda is a whole other report I will make at another time.
In the middle of this story the day care where the reporter's children were cared for was suspended then Dana, the reporter, became the powerless parent who could not get information from DEL as to why it was suspended and if anything happened to her children or if her children saw anything. I told her if DEL wasn't talking to her it was probably a sexual abuse allegation. I got the documents and yes that is what it was.
I talked to Jonathan Martin, a Seattle Times columnist for an hour on the phone last year. He'd also had children in day care and had seen things. I felt bad; I depressed him more with my information. He wrote a fairly good column about the day care situation. Then the Seattle Times allowed DEL director Hyde to rebut. I wrote a rebuttal to her op-ed piece and the Seattle Times told me they wouldn't print my rebuttal. I knew then DEL and Rep. Kagi would float that bill out again this 2015 legislative session. Bette Hyde prefer to be called Dr. Hyde.
Makes me think of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde a nightmare scenario that has happened to other parents whose children died in day care. One of the providers who murdered a child and went to prison for it, the ex-provider wrote a letter to day care licensing telling the department they must look at the emotional stability of applicants before giving them a license that a law needed to be passed about that because in the privacy of these family homes, the isolation itself, there needs to be a thorough investigation of the applicant's stability or don't give them a license. What the ex-provider, now prisoner didn't realize was we had and have such a law, the unelected government managers disregard that law. Ask Rep. Ross Hunter he saw the documents for himself in 2005.
I made a public disclosure request for Amy Blondin and Robert McClellan emails. I made a request to know how much the taxpayer was paying them for their salaries, just salaries not all of the benefits as well. Bob was Amy's boss. Bob's salary was over $100,000.00 a year and Amy's was close to that.
When I got the emails it showed them laughing at my request to know how much taxpayer money they made. Bob joked to Amy that he was just glad to see that he made more than her. In another email Bob asked Amy if she was busy. She said, "Nah, I'm bored."
Bored and raking in taxpayer money and benefits; it is the life of an upper unelected bureaucratic manager in our state government.
Dana Rebik did another story on day care and it was getting closer to the truth which I thought was good, but still not utilizing the documents I gave her. The very next day she told her viewing audience that it was her last day with the station. She was gone.
This year the "Child Fatality Review" bill was floated out again. Who is gone from DEL this year? Amy Blondin and Robert McClellan are gone, Amy and Bob gone. I watched Rep. Kagi on TVW and saw and heard her lie to we, the people and to her committee members when in response to a question she told them and the public there had been no opposition to the bill last year. She sort of threw off a comment and a non-verbal like the Senate just hadn't voted on the bill last year like they messed up, "skipped it".
Why are Rep. Kagi and DEL continuing to try to get this bill passed? I'm getting the runaround from the House Counsel Andrew Logerwell who is protecting Rep. Kagi and not releasing her emails, the we, the people emails from her taxpayer paid for computer related to child deaths in day care.
House lawyer, Logerwell, is telling the public Rep. Kagi who is paid to work as a citizen legislature on behalf of the citizens who under the Washington State Constitution do not give up their sovereignty and oversight on our government, that citizens don't have a right to know how and what manner Rep. Kagi does her job that Kagi job is secret; and the public doesn't get to know what comes through her state computer. It’s a secret.
DSHS public disclosure co-coordinator, Kristal Wiitala and DEL public disclosure Wendy Bennet are also giving me the runaround and not complying with the Public Records Act. I let them know I am gathering records and documents for the senators and representatives who need them as they are considering this bill, so please be prompt.
DEL, DSHS and Rep. Kagi don't care if the records are for the citizen legislature or the public if it might expose the truth to the public so they don't comply with the law.
While attorney Andrew Logerwell and Rep. Kagi continue to hide records related to this bill there are other records I obtained that tell the story. From the records I found on line and an email from Paul Smith who is the bureaucratic manager, managing the DSHS child fatality reviews I got a lead.
In 2011 "someone" or "somebodies" got the DSHS child fatality review bill revised. It is now written in such a way that DSHS reads it that they CAN'T do fatality reviews anymore on children who die in day care. At least that's their interpretation.
Why? I made a public disclosure request to OFCO to gather that behind the scenes history. They are dragging their feet as well. If you read the various unelected government managers' responses to a public disclosure request they don't want you to have their "dragging their feet" communication about "locating" records that will take "90 days", you'd think they were going on Safari to Africa to find "Mr. Livingston" rather than go to the "search" feature on their email accounts, type in the keywords and hit "enter". A thirty second endeavor, but for them it takes "90" days. 30 seconds in real time they turn into 90 days if they don't want you to have the records.
Here's the why, in my expert opinion, why this "child fatality" bill came about in 2014.
DSHS did a fatality review on a death in day care in 2010. DSHS exposed DEL's poor functioning as an agency. DSHS noted in their report that basically day care licensors were all freaked out about the "investigating" piece of their jobs when a child dies in a day care home. DSHS made recommendations about that as well as suggesting DEL train its licensors on safe sleep practices for babies.
Why were licensors freaking out about conducting "investigations"? I found that in my records this weekend. In late 2007 going into 2008 a husband of a provider got angry when DEL observed violations of licensing regulations. I have all the emails. The husband confronted DEL.
DEL’s response reminded me of R2D2 whirling around with its lights blinking and beeping away wildly. "Investigation"? "Inspection"? "Interviewing"? "What do we call it?" “Lions, tigers and bears, oh my!”
From the emails you see upper DEL managers madly search through their dictionaries to figure out, "what can DEL do?" “What do we call it, what we do?” It's panic city from reading the emails. The Keystone Cops on parade. It was like (I'm capturing the energy coming off the page of these emails) "quick take the word investigation out of all our documents, do it now!"
That's 2008. Since I worked as a licensor for thirteen years my take on what happened down the river is the licensors felt the upper managers panic and licensors all started whirling around like a bunch of R2D2s. "What we are supposed to do?!!" The entire mission tools of day care licensing just got changed?" "What do you mean use the word "inspection"?"
The licensors don't get the fine details as to what played out with the wildly spinning around R2D2 upper managers and the angry husband. The managers mush around trying to explain that we do "inspections" not "investigations". Most licensors don't know the upper managers had just been taken to the woodshed by an angry husband so are confused as to what the panic is but they feel it.
What is the result? Less oversight which has continued from the 2001 era to the present in that poor investigations and sometimes non-existent investigations by the day care licensing agency has always done whether you call the agency DSHS or DEL. In 2000 we got topnotch national state of the art investigation training, the best training I ever got in DSHS (it was through a lawsuit settlement I was told); everyone in DSHS who had the job description of social worker 3 (which licensors and supervisors were).
The upper managers quickly changed that excellent training to retraining everyone into being bad investigators. It was something to see. The upper managers immediately dropped off the first step in doing proper investigations. And as they say it was all down hill from there.
Then in early 2011 as the new DSHS revision to "their" "child fatality review" law was making its way to victory in the House and Senate what happened? There was another day care death. What was the DSHS review on this day care death?
Nothing, no recommendations even with the information that there were prior problems in the day care of the provider sleeping infants in car seats (the slumping over is an unsafe sleep position, the reason providers are not allowed to sleep infants that way, we called it "container care").
Thus from 2011 to 2013 DEL upper managers went (again my take on their feelings from having been a 13 year witness on the inside watching them) "whew, no more worries that DSHS child fatality review teams will be criticizing us and telling us what to do!" "Don't you dare tell us how to do our jobs DSHS!"
DEL in 2011 made no move in to take over those "death reviews". You'd think Rep. Kagi would have noticed that there would be no reviews on day care deaths as that bill came through the committee she chairs. Right? So why in 2014 did Rep. Kagi drop this bill?
Four month old Eve Uphold died in 2013. The parents took legal action. The media was contacted. They found out six month old Graham Hazzard died in the same day care as Eve in 2001. I think the day care was in Rep. Kagi's district so the media contacted Kagi.
Now DEL found itself in no man's land. DEL just wanted DSHS off their backs. "Hey, don't criticize us." Now if the law had stayed the same DSHS would have reviewed Eve's death. And they would have found their review of Graham's death in 2001. The spotlight would have been burning into the functioning of day care licensing now under governor's watch for the last eight years.
DSHS and DEL do not "need" a law to investigate the performance of their agencies. These fatality review laws are a scam and a scheme to hide the failures of duty by these upper managers on down the taxpayer feeding chain that is the unelected state bureaucracy.
And voila in 2014 we had the DEL child fatality review bill pop up in the House. The important piece to this legislation is, of course, the parents or anyone who has information that DEL violated the law would never get to talk to a "death" committee. Mail anything to them? Those documents are shielded and cannot be used in a court of law unless, of course, DEL wants to use them in a court of law against a licensed provider then we the people will be allowed see them.
Even in DSHS and with OFCO fatality reviews all the documents are exempt from the public, from we, the people having oversight on our government and the safety and protection of our children. The "child fatality review" laws from the get go were laws to shield upper unelected managers. In the beginning before the law like in the 1994 "Manson Family" child death report where four babies died in one licensed home, managers actions in the story were noted. In the beginning with OFCO managers were mentioned. By the mid-2000s if you read the child death reviews it starts to look like that DSHS and DEL simply have no one managing the agency only those stupid line workers who didn't know what they were doing (it would be how it looks to we, the people reading these "reports").
This has been the end run maneuvers of two government agencies full of upper managers who will not protect children. It is as upper manager Amy Blondin testified a means to cover up the unelected government managers failures in the event of children dying in care whether in child protective services (CPS), in foster care or in day care.
As from 1911 Frederick Winslow Taylor's "the system must come first" the system continues to get worse as a result the legislature has to spend copious amounts of time in an attempt to micromanage the agency "one law at a time". The legislature's oversight? Only getting these bogus "child fatality review" reports created as Amy said to essentially make sure they don't build a case against themselves.
In Rep. Kagi's case she's fully involved and supportive of the unelected upper managers in DEL.
Other representatives and senators have taken right action to hold the managers accountable but Kagi from her chairmanship of the house committee charged with the oversight of protecting the public and in this case children; Rep. Kagi's actions show protecting children is not her priority.
There is a law where agency managers can be charged with failure of duty. When has that law ever been enforced?
There is no law that says "Hey, you upper DEL managers can't investigate how your agency performed their duties related to this child's death." There is no such law. There is a law that states managers must manage the agency with "efficiency, effectiveness and economy". Hurt, traumatized, maimed and dead children don't meet that requirement of law.
Per the RCW duty to perform that law captures that it was a must that DEL have investigated the death of four month old Eve Uphold in Rhonda Hopson's family home child day care in 2013. Where is that report? It had to have been done. I made a public disclosure for it. Where is it?
That investigation and report is what we, the people insist be produced today. There is no need for HB 1126.
Ten years ago in an email dated April 17, 2005 the day care licensing director at that time Rachael Langen wrote to a national expert on day care licensing about OFM (office of Financial Management doing a review):
"Child suffered traumatic brain injury after being thrown to the ground by family home provider. Licensing had a pretty spotty history of visits and there were questions about case actions. Lack-of follow thru on case was a big deal. Provider had been licensed for 13 years and licensing problems were since the beginning...there were lots of clues to poor quality of care...Case had media attention but because of the tort settlement got the state's risk prevention team's attention."
"Loss Prevention" is or was in OFM. I can't tell from their website today and there is no phone number listed so I could call them. I found the below "performance" report on DEL. From what I see OFM is more interested in tracking how many folks clicked into DEL's website then tracking the health, safety and well-being of children in day care.
OFM has a graph on tracking when complaint investigations were closed. There are no graphs on tracking enforcement actions. No graphs on how many children were hurt or died in licensed child day care.
OFM use to do reviews on children hurt and/or who died in day care as you can see from director Rachael Langen's email comments. Are they still doing that?
Here's the "performance" report on DEL for 2011-2013.
Over and over again we see state government not taking enforcement action on day cares that have long histories of violations let alone just a few big violations.
From the introductory comments regarding the report linked below:
"Licensing regulations are focused on the safety and health requirements that serve as the
foundation from which quality learning opportunities can be built. The Department of Early Learning is responsible for licensing over 7,700 child care homes and centers providing child care for 180,000 children. Licensing staff offer orientations for providers, process background checks, inspect, issue licenses and monitor facilities, complete complaint inspections, and take corrective action as necessary."
http://ofm.wa.gov/budget/manage/perfrept/1315/357pm.pdf
Enforcement action is not corrective action. Parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles need to know the unelected upper managers in government has no interest in protecting your children who are in licensed day care.
The documents, records, the actions by such folks as Rep. Kagi and upper administrative manager Amy Blondin are the evidence you can see; that their work and the taxpayer money they live on very comfortably is no guarantee they will perform their duties as required by law.
If you can figure out any way to stay home with your little ones until they are old enough "to tell" please try to do so. If you can't ask many many direct and difficult questions of your day care provider. If she at all acts defensively or you sense her anger at your questions get your children out of there.
The DEL website is a scheme and scam to get the public to believe all is well when it is not. The most terrible information is not on there. A provider can be found guilty of child abuse under RCW 26.44 and still keep her license and you won't know about it because DEL does not put that information on their website.
If you call in directly and ask about complaint history DEL will not give you the complete history. Make a written request for the whole provider's file. Don't fall for "Can I help you narrow your request down?" That's how they figure out how to be able to hide stuff legally with their interpretation of how you "narrowed down the request". Once you get that and you would like me to take a look at the file I will. Send me an email and we can go from there as to how I might help.
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