Supporters of a bill to strengthen regulation of day care providers said they hope there is enough time remaining this legislative session for a newly appointed conference committee to finish its work on the measure.
Hearings by the House Health and Human Services Committee – and some backroom negotiating – have given Rep. Brenda Landwehr, R-Wichita, a House position on the Senate-passed bill. A House-Senate conference committee headed by Landwehr, chair of the HHS committee, and Sen. Jim Barnett, R-Emporia, chair of the Senate Public Health and Welfare Committee, is set to meet at 12:30 p.m. today.
But Shannon Cotsoradis, chief operating offer of Kansas Action for Children, the nonprofit organization leading the lobbying effort for the bill, said negotiators will need to work quickly.
“The clock is ticking. We hope that the conference committee can complete its work quickly to make sure that this gets done this year,” Cotsoradis said.
The bill – Substitute for House Bill 2536 – would for the first time require registered day care providers to be inspected and licensed. Currently, registered providers pay a $5 fee and open their doors. About 2,500 of the approximately 6,700 day care facilities in the state are operated by registered providers.
To manage the workload and the cost of expanding inspections, the Senate-passed bill would establish a “risk-based” system. The state and entities it contracts with for inspections would concentrate on bringing all the registered facilities into compliance. Licensed facilities initially would be inspected less frequently unless they had a history of problems.
House negotiators are expected to argue that the Kansas Department of Health and Environment should be allowed to charge higher licensing fees so the state can afford annual inspections of every day care facility.
Rep. Mike Slattery, D-Mission, is among the HHS committee members who favor raising fees to ensure annual inspections.
“They (day care centers) use the inspections as kind of a badge of honor to show how well they’ve done,” he said. “We don’t have to raise fees a lot to ensure that providers would be inspected on an annual basis.”
Cotsoradis said advocates support requiring annual inspections but they’re opposed to another House proposal to strip supervision standards from the bill. They prefer the Senate version, which says that providers caring for active children under age 5 must be able to see them and be close enough to respond immediately to emergencies. If the children are napping, the Senate bill says, providers must be able to either see or hear them and must check on them every 15 minutes.
“We will continue to work for a definition of competent supervision in the legislation,” Cotsoradis said, noting that inadequate supervision has been an issue in several cases where children have died in day care facilities.
The National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies recently ranked Kansas 47th for the strength of its child care center oversight and regulation. In the past three years, according to KAC, 30 Kansas children have died in child care settings and 72 have sustained serious injuries.