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Home-based child care providers face state background checks
Friday, August 03, 2001 By Sally Kalson, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
For the fourth time this year, the Ridge administration has changed course on its policy regarding background checks for small-scale child care providers in the state-subsidized system. But this time, child-care advocates are applauding the switch.
On Tuesday, Welfare Secretary Feather O. Houstoun announced that the department would begin phasing in mandatory child-abuse and criminal background checks this month for providers who care for three or fewer children in their homes.
Anyone who fails to clear the checks will be barred from the state subsidy program, although parents will be able to waive the checks if their children's caregivers are a grandparent, uncle or aunt.
The announcement won praise from Sen. Allyson Y. Schwartz, D-Philadelphia, one of the administration's chief critics on child-care policy.
"This is what we've been asking for ... to protect children by doing criminal and child-abuse background checks, making them mandatory and not paying any provider who doesn't get clearance," Schwartz said.
Not everyone was pleased, though. Sen. Robert J. Mellow, D-Lackawanna, the Senate minority leader, said he was bothered by two major loopholes in the latest regulations.
One is the waiver available to parents using grandparents, aunts or uncles as caregivers. "Family members should not be exempt from such a [background check] requirement, given the fact that they spend the most time around a relative's child," Mellow said.
He also noted that the child-abuse check will only go back five years, which means that a caregiver could be allowed to receive state subsidies if he or she had an abuse charge that is older than that.
The plan, called CareCheck, will be phased in over the next several months, with the state picking up the tab.
Costs are expected to run about $3 million. About 50,000 low-income families in Pennsylvania use their state subsidies to pay relatives or neighbors to watch their children. Houstoun said phasing in the plan would allow the state police and the Department of Public Welfare time to prepare for an influx of up to 150,000 additional child-abuse and criminal history clearances each year.
Neighbor and relative caregivers are legally unregulated, so they don't have to meet the same level of scrutiny as larger-scale providers. But as more children have poured into child care because of welfare reform, concerns have mounted about the safety of unregulated care.
Critics have called it unconscionable to deny the state's poorest children the same protections that others in more costly care receive. But the Ridge administration resisted instituting the background checks, saying that too much red tape would drive caregivers away when the state needs them more than ever.
As the debate continued, Auditor General Robert P. Casey Jr., a Democrat who is interested in running for governor, discovered 22 neighbor and relative caregivers with criminal backgrounds getting state subsidy money. In response, the department has made various attempts to appease critics since February.
First there were to be voluntary checks paid for by the state. Then the checks were to be mandatory, but parents could choose to leave their children with people who had a criminal record and still receive the state subsidy. Then, no one with a criminal history of child endangerment was to be allowed in the subsidy program, but child-abuse checks were to remain voluntary.
Now the matter might finally be settled, with mandatory checks for both child abuse and criminal records for everyone except grandparents, uncles and aunts.
Houstoun said the most recent changes, which her department supported, reflected provisions of child-care legislation proposed by Sen. Tim Murphy, R-Upper St. Clair. That bill did not pass before the General Assembly recessed in June, so the department is implementing the requirements administratively.
Murphy could not be reached for comment.
Schwartz said she would scrutinize the regulations closely when they were published.
"I will want to see the fine print to make sure they're really doing what they're supposed to do," she said.
Staff writer John M.R. Bull contributed to this report.
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