Hampton Roads parents stay vigilant on day care

Many nights, Dana Barker was in tears, worrying whether she had picked the right child care for daughter Amaya.

Her husband, Shannon, felt equally miserable. He wanted to tell Dana she could quit her job and stay home with their daughter.

"But we couldn't afford that," the Virginia Beach mother said.

The Barkers are among tens of thousands of working parents in Hampton Roads who have to navigate the maze of unknowns in the child care industry.

Some choose a large center. Others want a small, home-based day care or a church-based provider. At some point, they all face that moment when they realize they are handing their child over to a stranger.

Even when that decision is behind them, parents learn their job is far from over. That's when the vigilance begins.

Child care over the past 20 years has become an industry that serves hundreds of thousands of children in Virginia, and much of it flies under the radar of state inspectors.

Statewide, about 624,105 children younger than 10 had working parents in 2010, according to the Virginia Child Care Resource & Referral Network. The nonprofit estimates that about 44 percent of those children are in unregulated child care settings.

Blind faith when it comes to any day care setting can be risky.

Between 2005 and 2010,16 children died in child care settings, and a third of those fatalities occurred in South Hampton Roads.

In the 2009-10 fiscal year alone, more than 100 cases of child abuse or neglect have been substantiated.

The largest number occurred in unregulated baby-sitter settings, and two South Hampton Roads cities topped that list - 15 in Virginia Beach and 10 in Norfolk.

For a while, the Barkers were able to rely on family members for child care. When that was no longer possible, they turned to a private sitter who had been recommended by a friend.

Amaya was crawling by then, and the new parents noticed when they picked her up that she was often dirty. After she got sick with a respiratory virus, they decided to make a change.

The Barkers borrowed money from their family to put Amaya in a new church-run child care facility, Wave Children's Learning Center in Virginia Beach.

It had all the bells and whistles, including a webcam in classrooms and an electronic security system, she said.

But it turned out the Barkers needed a password for the webcam, they said, and the director was never there when they called for it. When Dana finally got a code, it didn't work, she said.

The center called often because Amaya was crying and the staff wanted Dana to come and get her.

"I didn't have a fussy, finicky child," she said. "I was paying all this money for day care, but they were telling me I had to come and pick her up."

Then one day her husband found Amaya strapped into a chair while the other children played across the classroom.

It looked as if his 16-month-old child was getting a timeout. Shannon asked why she was strapped to the seat, he said, and a staff member told him Amaya had done it herself.

He didn't buy it. He left with his daughter and got angrier the more he thought about it.

The Barkers decided to go with their instincts and take their daughter out of the program.

"But you know, we still questioned ourselves after that happened," Dana Barker said. "Is this really what happened?"

Karen Wilkins, director of Wave Children's Learning Center, said she wasn't there when Amaya attended more than five years ago and can't speak for what happened.

However, according to records The Virginian-Pilot obtained through a Freedom of Information request, staff members in the toddler room confirmed to a state inspector in February 2006 that children were "placed in timeout in a chair with a seat belt while the chair is facing the corner of the classroom."

The licensing official reported that the staff were told not to "use the chairs with the seat belts for timeout purposes."

Wilkins said that today, staff members do not draw attention to negative behavior and that timeouts would be counterproductive.

Regarding issues with the webcam, Wilkins said some parents have problems trying to access it and that often their personal computer is to blame. The center's information technology staff member tries to help.

Wilkins said she knows parents have "searched high and low" for child care when they come to her and that some will have concerns and questions.

"They are going to be more on the defensive side by nature because they're good parents," she said. "That's OK. My job is not to be on the defensive."

When a national child care organization reviewed Virginia's child care laws this year, the state earned a D.

Still, the grade placed Virginia 14th overall on the list, and its child care laws are not unusual, according to the National Association of Child Care Resource & Referral Agencies. The organization reviewed child care laws and regulations in all states and concluded that many, including Virginia, do not go far enough in monitoring child care.

The organization found that of the 13 that outranked Virginia, eight require all child-care providers to be licensed.

Only three states, including Virginia, fully met the association's standard for inspections - at least four a year, including health and fire safety inspections.

The association wants all states to require licensing and regular oversight for all child care providers. But for all the advocates for more scrutiny, there are just as many, if not more, who argue against it.

Typically, opponents of government intervention worry about two issues that increase child care providers' costs, said John Morgan, executive director of Voices for Virginia's Children. They are regulation of the staff-per-child ratio, and the training and education required of staff members.

Morgan said both standards are relatively weak in Virginia, but that for now, child advocates are working just to keep them from going backward.

Toni Cacace-Beshears, president of the Virginia Association for Early Childhood Education, agrees the standards are lacking.

It takes hundreds of hours to become licensed as a cosmetologist, she said, but the state mandates only 16 hours of training annually for staff members in licensed child care programs. Licensed home-based providers need only 12 hours.

State legislators also have found the issue prickly.

Del. Kenneth R. Plum, D-Reston, doesn't think it's realistic or fair to expect parents to police their child care the way a state official would.

He likens it to a shopper buying milk without any assurance that health and safety standards are in place.

If you "prepare food and serve it in a restaurant, someone looks over your shoulder."

Plum doesn't see child care as less vulnerable to risk.

"You can't pass it off and say it's up to the parent to do that," he said. "If that be the case, then we could pass off all these things."

Plum cited a mindset "on the part of some very conservative folks that children should stay at home and be cared for by their mommies."

Over the years, that staunch segment of the child care industry has succeeded in "beating back any kind of improvement in child care regulations," he said.

More than 30 years ago, religious-affiliated child care centers won a battle to be exempt from licensing. The fight was cast as an issue of separation of church and state.

Today, some church-run centers opt for licensing anyway, but a growing number have taken the exemption route. In 1980, the state counted about 22 exempt facilities. Today there are about 156 exempt centers in South Hampton Roads alone - about one-third of the total child care centers in the area.

To be eligible for the exemption, a religious institution must prove nonprofit status and sign a form agreeing to follow certain requirements. Those requirements are not as extensive as standards for licensed centers.

Typically, licensing inspectors stay away from unlicensed church-run centers unless they receive a complaint.

Sometimes the complaints are deemed invalid. Regardless, inspectors often find other violations while they are there, and some, the reports show, are troubling:

- In Chesapeake in 2010, two children, ages 2 and 6, were observed unattended in a church center's parking lot in temperatures below freezing. The staff did not know they were there until family members arrived and brought them inside, according to the department report.

- In Virginia Beach in 2009, a 4-year-old was made to stand alone, crying, outside a classroom door that led to the parking lot. The temperature was about 59 degrees, and the child did not have a coat or sweater.

- In Hampton in 2006, inspectors reported that 10 children were left unattended in a child care van while the driver went into a store.

- In Richmond in 2008, inspectors concluded that strips of masking tape had been placed on the lips of four preschoolers and longer strips around the wrists of one child.

More recently, licensing officials looked into a report of a 17-month-old child who, on Sept. 29, wandered from the Larchmont Baptist Infant Care Center in Norfolk.

After talking to staff members, inspectors determined that the child had been left on the playground when the rest of the class went back inside. When his mother arrived two hours later, she was told her husband had picked the child up, according to the report. When the mother got home and realized that wasn't the case, she went back to the center, and the director called police.

The child was found "playing in the street about four houses" from the center, according to the same report. Inspectors found that the fence enclosing the playground was made of orange snow fencing that had begun to sag. The report stated that the playground was "about a half a block from a busy four-lane highway with a speed limit of 55 miles per hour."

Inspectors found other violations, too.

Two staff members did not have completed background checks, and only seven of the 28 children present the day of the inspection had immunization records on file.

An infant was observed napping in a crib with a pillow considered a suffocation risk, and the inspectors "learned that staff are frequently observed talking and texting on their cell phones when children are outside playing."

In addition, the religious exemption for the facility had expired four months before the incident, and the church that sponsored the center had folded Sept. 4. The child care management had not informed state licensing that it was no longer sponsored by the church, according to the report.

The center is now closed.

After leaving the church-run facility, the Barkers found a private sitter they loved.

But the woman kept children only through age 3, so it wasn't long before they were back in the child care maze.

Because their daughter was older, they tried a larger center again - a licensed Virginia Beach facility called Barefoot Kids.

Barker noticed a man she thought was the teacher's boyfriend often hanging around the classroom.

"I thought, 'If all these teachers have background checks, what makes it OK for you to be here all the time like this?' " she said.

One day, her daughter told her the man had changed his clothes in the back of the classroom. Barker mentioned it to another parent with a child at the center.

The director, Barker said, called to apologize and told her the teacher had been reprimanded. To Barker, that was an admission that it had happened and that the teacher was not fired.

"That's when we were like, 'We've had enough.' "

They didn't leave right away, but they did look at their finances, she said. They decided if she went part time at work and her mother watched Amaya, they could make it without child care.

At $160 a week, that was a cost savings in itself.

Jenifer Barefoot Gresham, director of the center, said she remembers the incident vividly because negative feedback is rare. She said it wasn't the teacher's boyfriend but her husband and that he had a background check as a military fireman and inspector.

Gresham said the couple had children at the school and that he volunteered there.

Gresham looked into the incident, she said, and learned that he had gone into a separate, locked room - to change into his uniform for work, as she recalls.

She said she talked to the teacher "about the importance of how this was misconstrued."

Gresham said she understands that parents are not there to see what's going on and that staff members need to be careful that nothing occurs to allow "any kind of skepticism."

"I think parents have to put a lot of faith in us because we have their children eight to 10 hours a day, so if they are complaining or they bring up issues, it is only because they have their children's best interest at heart," she said.

Gresham said they strive to let parents know there is an open-door policy and that they, too, have the children's interest at heart.

"Then you quickly form a partnership."

Amaya is 8 now, and the Barkers no longer second-guess their child care decisions or worry that they over-reacted to issues.

"I tell the girls at work, don't feel that way," she said. "This is your only child. You have to make sure this is right."

Janie Bryant, (757) 446-2453, janie.bryant@pilotonline.com