October 12, 2004
Funds for Day Care Inspections Were Cut, Health Officials Say
By LESLIE KAUFMAN

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For the Record

In the last two years, New York City has cut the amount of money it devotes to day care inspections, and over the last five years it has failed to claim more than $2 million in state money for such inspections, city and state officials say.

In recent weeks, the city has been conducting its own very public and critical assessment of its day care inspection practices in the wake of the death of a 7-month-old infant, who suffocated under toys that other children piled on him at a Queens day care center on the same day that city inspectors stopped by.

City officials acknowledged reducing spending for inspections but said the cuts were not the key to problems with the city's day care inspection system. Rather, an internal report issued last week by the health department found that several other problems - a lack of training, managerial failures and outdated technology - were at the root of shortcomings in its inspection of day care centers.

"There has been some retrenchment in funding," said Andrew Rein, the deputy commissioner for financial and strategic management at the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, whose division was charged with investigating institutional shortcomings that might have contributed the death of the infant, Matthew Perilli. "But when we did our report we found that the issue was not so much money as management, organization, technology and communication with parents."

The city acknowledged cutting back its share of money devoted to inspections after a nonprofit advocacy group, the Citizens' Committee for Children, prepared a report on financing of day care oversight. The report, which used data from the Health Department, said the city had cut $400,000 in spending on inspections over the last two years, from $2.1 million in 2002. The report is to be presented today at a City Council hearing.

"A serious gap remains between the government's best hopes that regulations will keep children safe and the actual level of government funding for quality oversight and inspection activities," said Gail B. Nayowith, the executive director of the Citizens' Committee for Children. "Government funding for quality improvement and health and safety inspection activities has not kept pace with the explosive growth in the number of children served in child-care programs."

The city handles inspections and certification for some 12,593 separate day care operators. Some of those centers are regulated by the state, some by the city. But New York City actually carries out inspections of both in the five boroughs. It is a considerable task, because many day care centers are small operations run out of private homes.

From 1999 to 2004, the money devoted to such inspections increased to $6.4 million from $4.1 million, largely because federal contributions for state-regulated day care doubled to $4 million from $2 million in the same period.

But the report by the Citizens' Committee for Children said the amount of city and state money devoted to inspections was roughly the same as it was five years ago, and had actually been decreasing since 2002, with the increased federal aid not being matched on the local level. The city spent $1.5 million in 1999, $2.1 million in 2002 and only $1.7 million during the current fiscal year, the report said.

In the past five years, the city has failed to claim more than $2 million in state funds to hire inspectors.

While the number of regulated day care operations has dropped in the intervening years - in part because the city has encouraged the use of vouchers for unregulated day care, which is cheaper - the burden of inspectors has not declined.

That is because in September 2000, the state passed the Quality Child Care and Protection Act, which significantly increased the standards for inspection and certification. The act required that half of the day care centers in the city be inspected each year, for example, instead of just one in five.

"They are severely understaffed," said Darryl Ramsey, president of Local 768, which represents the inspectors. "A lot of people are leaving because they are overworked; people are not coming in as quickly as they leave."

The Bureau of Day Care acknowledges that only 129 of its 155 full-time positions have been filled. Sandra Mullin, a health department spokeswoman, said the department had not claimed $2.2 million in state funds in the last five years - including $800,000 in 2001 and $364,000 in 2003, state figures show - because of its chronic inability to fill staff positions.

"Any unspent money has to do with hiring issues, and that is part of the management problems we've been talking about," she said.

Those low staff levels mean that regardless of any emergency visits inspectors might need to make, they are already backlogged on regular certification inspections, the Citizens' Committee for Children found.

Roughly 3,000 of the day care operations overseen by the health department have expired certifications or are awaiting certification. Although no one can say how many have expired certificates and how long they have been expired, the Citizens' Committee report provides an educated guess.

The report examined 90 applications for permits with city in 2003. It found that only 7 percent were for new providers of day care, while 91 percent of applications were from providers who remained in business even though their certifications had expired. Seventeen percent had permits that expired as far back as 2001, the report said.


For the Record: Oct. 13, 2004, Wednesday