Workfare Plan Stretches Child Care Thin

WAUSAU, Wis. —  Adrian McCord’s 7-year-old son just wouldn’t listen, and he poked another child. So his teacher at the SunBurst day care center imposed a novel punishment.

“The teacher asked, ‘How would you like it if the rest did this to you?’ I don’t know what my son said, but the teacher proceeded to hold my son’s arms down and let 60 kids hit and pinch him,” McCord said.

“My son came home and told me that he told the teacher it hurt and he was crying. The teacher said it didn’t and continued to hold him down.”

This would be just another day-care horror story if it were not part of a dismaying pattern in a state that has set the standard for sending welfare recipients back to work: Complaints about day care centers in Wisconsin have increased markedly over the last decade.

And now, faced with the prospect of finding child care for 60,000 more youngsters whose mothers are about to enter the work force, the state is making it easier to become a child care provider, allowing some people without training to enter the field.

Child welfare advocates are worried. “We are really scared about what is going to happen to kids,” said Mary Babula, program director for the Wisconsin Early Childhood Assn., representing teachers, family child care providers and administrators. “Monitoring [of] the new child care system may be inadequate.”

More generally, whatever happens in Wisconsin may be a harbinger of what will happen nationwide as more welfare recipients get jobs.

Wisconsin has cut its welfare caseloads in half over the last four years. It requires most welfare recipients to work within two years and places a lifetime, five-year cap on welfare benefits.

Under the plan, about 45,000 welfare recipients, besides working for benefits, must also help pay for their child-care and health costs. The state is spending millions more on subsidized child care.

But there are problems. An Associated Press review of customer complaints made against Wisconsin’s licensed child care centers found that 759 were filed last year, nearly triple the number filed a decade ago. That increase has generally outstripped the growth in licensed child care facilities, which more than doubled during the decade.

Complaints filed against unlicensed day care facilities--Wisconsin permits those who care for three or fewer children younger than age 7 to operate without a license--were also up. In 1996, 598 complaints were filed with the state, up from 317 in 1987.

“We are alarmed about the number of complaints. It is an alert to us that there can be a serious problem,” said Patty Hammes, director of the state agency that regulates day care.

There are among the complaints minor matters--a dirty refrigerator at one center, for example--but there also are nightmares. One parent discovered that a convicted sex offender was looking after her daughter. Another said a syringe fell out of her infant’s snowsuit--the work of a careless caregiver who was a diabetic, it appears.

There was the 2-year-old who was treated at a hospital after older children beat him up, and the mother who reported finding her screaming 2-year-old daughter strapped in a highchair.

McCord, mother of the child who was beaten by his classmates with the help of his teacher, yanked her son from the center in Monona and complained; the teacher was fired. But the boy’s injuries--physical and mental--could not be dispelled so easily.

“It was a long time before he could trust a teacher. It took a year for me to convince him that not all teachers were like that,” McCord said.

Currently, licensed day care providers must undergo 40 hours of training and 15 hours of annual refresher training.

To meet the expected demand of children of parents leaving welfare for the workplace, the state has added a new category: “provisional certification,” under which a person can care for up to six children without any training.

Further, the state will subsidize these children cared for under “provisional certification”--a departure from the old rule that the state wouldn’t pay for child care if the caregiver had no training.

Wisconsin’s child-care oversight is better than that in many states, but it is “still bare minimum” and inadequate to assure quality care, said Babula, the Wisconsin Early Childhood Assn. program director.

Still, Working Mother magazine has identified Wisconsin as one of the 10 best states for child care, based on its evaluation of quality, safety, availability of care and the state’s commitment to children.

And the state has taken measures to improve. In 1993, Wisconsin had 49 people to inspect child care and residential care facilities for adults, not including nursing homes. Last year, there were 47 inspectors for child care programs alone--and the state added 13 more this spring.

But the complaints are still troubling. A complaint against a child care provider is a “significant symptom that something is amiss,” said Ellen Lubell, communications director for Child Care Action Campaign, a New York-based child-care advocacy organization.

“What you are dealing with are the nitty-gritty safety and welfare issues,” she said. “You haven’t even gotten to the educational issues. In fact, child care is education, or should be. You would not want any complaints in your child care center.”