Thursday, May 15, 2003 | 11:24 a.m.
Nevada doesn't do as much as most other states to ensure that children are safe at day care centers, studies and experts say.
When it comes to child care staffing ratios, Nevada has some of the loosest regulations in the nation.
Nevada also ranks low in the number of licensed child care centers and in children served by government-subsidized child care, according to national comparisons. A state study last summer found that there were at least 6,000 children on waiting lists for child care.
And Nevada is near the bottom in the percentage of children enrolled in preschool overall and in Head Start, which includes a preschool program.
Those are all indications that Nevada is not doing enough for its young children, experts say.
Child-to-staff ratios are viewed by child care advocates as a key indicator of quality care. The higher the number of children per staff worker, the less chance those children will receive the individual attention they need.
Eva Essa, a University of Nevada, Reno, professor of human development and family studies and author of a study last year on child care in the state, said Nevada regulations should be amended so that the number of children per staff worker is reduced.
"We don't look good in terms of ratios when you compare us with other states," Essa said. "Our regulations are very confusing. In fact, they're really strange."
As an example, one Nevada regulation requires at least one caretaker for every six children ages 2 and older. Another regulation requires one caretaker for every eight children between 18 months and 3 years old, except that "if there are more than six children in the facility, there must be at least two caretakers on duty."
"The more confusion we have in our regulations the more it can (obscure) what you can get away with," Essa said. "That's one of the things that makes us look bad because when Nevada is compared with other states they take a look at our worst-case scenario."
That's what the Wheelock College Institute for Leadership and Career Initiatives in Boston did last year when it compared child-to-staff ratio requirements in Nevada child care centers with the other 49 states. Wheelock found that Nevada was one of 30 states with a child-to-staff ratio of no more than 4-to-1 for infants up to 9 months old.
But the college also found that Nevada was:
Lack of caretakers
Geneva Boley, who operates a home-based licensed child care facility in Las Vegas but has also worked in larger day care centers, said her experience was that some didn't have enough caretakers. She also said some of the state's ratios might be too high.
"The difference it makes is in the individual attention for each child," she said. "There can be problems if there are a lot of kids in diapers. There are the lunches and that's a big job, too. If you're by yourself, you could have a big problem."
"Nightmarish" is the way Denise Tanata, policy analyst for the Nevada Institute for Children at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and the mother of a 7-year-old in day care, recalled an experience at a facility her daughter used to attend.
"I had an experience about four years ago when I walked in to pick my daughter up and the (child care attendant) was on a table sucking a lollipop with about 20 kids in the room," Tanata said. "They only had the one adult, and she was not watching them. She didn't even notice me walking into the room. Several parents had complained about that teacher and they (facility officials) fired her the following week.
"You don't need a teacher for every child, but one person can handle only so many children. If you're sitting in a room with six toddlers, your eyes can't be on all of them. Children need individual attention because without that they enter kindergarten without the skills that they need."
Finding quality child care in Southern Nevada is difficult, according to Sheila Abrahamsson, mother of twin 6-month-old daughters and a child abuse prevention program manager at the Southern Nevada Area Health Education Center. Abrahamsson said she looked at 10 centers and two in-home facilities but liked only one establishment.
"The other 11 places I did not feel comfortable putting my children in," Abrahamsson said. "I had child safety concerns and a sense that those facilities weren't as clean as they could have been or that there were too many children and not enough supervisors.
"At one facility, I went to one of the restrooms and saw a worker not wash her hands and then pick up a child. My husband and I went to another place and were supposed to meet with the executive director. Instead, we got a worker who had been there only two days and didn't have the knowledge to answer our questions."
The hardship parents endure trying to find a quality facility is why Las Vegas child advocate Louise Helton said she was disappointed with an April 15 decision by the Clark County Commission to eliminate a child care center rating system because of budgetary concerns.
"It's very important for people shopping for day care," Helton said. "It's like buying something that has the Good Housekeeping seal of approval."
Tanata and Abrahamsson both said child care could be improved in Nevada by lowering child-to-staff ratios. Abrahamsson said she would like to see ratios of no more than three children for every caregiver for children up to age 2, 4-to-1 for children ages 2 to 3, and 8-to-1 for children ages 3 to 5.
Paula Hawkins, chief of the state bureau for child care, said she didn't think there was a "great difference" between Nevada staffing standards and those of other states. But she said the state Child Care Board, which approves licensing regulations, is to review another study this year being compiled by UNR that will compare Nevada's staffing ratios to those of other states.
"We're also looking at increasing training requirements for providers of child care from 12 hours to 15 hours a year," Hawkins said. "We would like to increase our standards for our child care workers. We would like to require CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) training. We also want to implement symptoms-of-illness training and reporting of child abuse and neglect.
"This would ensure that our child care providers are more competent."
Varied standards
Clark County and Las Vegas are considering lowering child-to-staff ratios for centers in their jurisdictions. In Nevada, cities and counties can adopt more stringent licensing requirements than those set down by the state.
"One of the problems in Nevada is that you have different standards in the counties and cities," Tanata said. "You can have one child care center that follows one standard and a child care center across the street that follows another."
Bobby Gordon, Clark County's social service manager, said the county was prompted to look at staffing regulations after observing classrooms of 3- and 4-year-olds.
"Some teachers were able to handle the kids and some weren't," Gordon said.
In Las Vegas' case, the concerns have centered more on child safety. Jim DiFiore, its business services manager, said his office has fielded complaints from parents about injuries suffered by children in child care, but he wouldn't say how many complaints have come in.
"We haven't had major changes in our child care codes in 20 years," DiFiore said. "This area is growing by leaps and bounds, and it was time for us to take a look at our child care standards.
"Many of our complaints about child care facilities involve children not getting the attention they deserve or getting injured because of a lack of supervision. The injuries have been cuts or scrapes or something as serious as a broken bone."
The flip side of that argument is that an increase in staffing requirements would drive up the cost of care by as much as 50 percent and force many parents to use unlicensed child care alternatives. So said Gary Vause, owner of the Lit'l Scholar Academy preschools and child care centers in Southern Nevada and board member of the 7,000-member National Child Care Association, a trade association based in Conyers, Ga.
According to Essa's study, roughly half of all Nevada child care centers charge at least $126 a week per toddler. A 50 percent increase would drive that charge to $189 a week.
"Right now we have a lot of parents who tell us they can barely afford child care," Vause said. "If we had to increase staff, there are those parents on the margin who would be priced right out of child care. They could go to a grandmother or an aunt, but they could also go to places that are unlicensed and uninspected, the 'unlicensed underground.' We'd be driving them right out of licensed child care."
Vause said he didn't believe that current staffing ratios were causing problems in Nevada's child care industry because he has not heard such complaints from parents. But he said that forcing centers to hire more workers could dilute the experienced staff because owners would have to take on more entry-level employees.
"Instead of spending our money on better education and wages for current staff, it would be spent on lower end, minimum wage staff and that would hurt quality," Vause said. "Right now one of our biggest needs is qualified staff. We lose people to the school district or the gaming industry, usually because they have higher pay and benefits."
A 2000 Bureau of Labor Statistics' survey ranked Nevada 22nd with average child care employee wages of $7.62 an hour, compared with $7.30 nationally. Nevada preschool teachers placed 40th with average wages of $8.26 an hour, compared with $9.28 nationally.
Essa said both sets of wages are much lower than warranted, given the importance of child care.
"These are terrible wages for people who do important work," she said. "Would you want to live on $7.62 an hour?"
Another problem Essa's study revealed is that Nevada is one of the few states to have no requirements on the number of children that can be grouped in one room.
"Most states regulate group sizes just as they do child-to-staff ratios," Tanata said. "In Nevada you might have a room of 25 or 30 kids with a lead teacher and a few assistants, but the kids are not getting the quality education they deserve when they're in such large groups."
In examples of other areas related to child care and preschool where Nevada ranks low:
DiFiore reacted to those rankings by saying that it was possible that the numbers of child care centers and homes have not kept pace with growth, given the fact Nevada has the nation's fastest-growing population.
"My impression is that we probably don't have enough facilities," he said. "I can tell you that the number of people moving to Las Vegas and the number of new child care facilities in Las Vegas have not grown proportionally."
But Hawkins said those rankings were meaningless because the more important statistic is the number of child care positions available at those facilities. She said that Nevada had 46,179 positions in 2002, compared with 42,317 the previous year, and that there is no shortage of child care based on availability.
Nevada was ranked as having the 10th most generous annual income requirement -- $33,576 -- to qualify for subsidies, based on a one-parent family of three. But Nevada also had the nation's second-highest annual co-pay requirement -- $3,636 -- for a family of three at 150 percent above the federal poverty level.
State child care coordinator Gerald Allen said that "several hundred" Nevada children remain on waiting lists for subsidized child care.
"That could have something to do with limitations in our budget," Allen said.
But, he said, in recent years Nevada has stepped up efforts to subsidize the poorest families. Nevada offers full child care subsidies for children at or below the poverty level and these children make up 53 percent of all Child Care and Development Fund recipients in the state, Allen said.
Kathleen Biagi, Nevada's Head Start collaboration director, said that Nevada gets only enough funding from the federal government to serve 23 percent of Nevada's financially eligible children. With more than 2,900 children currently enrolled in Head Start, that means at least 8,700 others in the state are prevented from participating in a program that is filled on a first-come, first-served basis.
Biagi blamed the federal government, which she said has a funding formula that is at least 20 years old and hasn't properly accounted for Nevada's growth. To make matters worse, she said, there isn't federal money available to serve rapidly expanding populations such as Nevada's.
"The system hasn't been able to keep up with the need," Biagi said. "Because our population growth is far exceeding the funding formula, we don't have as much money coming into this state as we should."
Essa said the low level of federal funding Nevada receives for its Head Start program likely contributes to that ranking, as does the state's transient population and 24-hour work force.
"Some people figure they will only be here a short time so they don't put their child in a program," Essa said. "We also have a lot of people in the service industry and many of them may be putting their children in unlicensed care. Our service industry is a 24-hour industry, so we have more parents working evening shifts so they may be leaving their children with relatives or friends instead of in group care."
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