Nearly a year ago, the Department of Health began listing child care centers that had been cited for certain violations in a weekly “Public Health Report” email. The names of these centers, all of which were written up for breaking at least one of five rules, were displayed temporarily on the department’s website. The violations, which the Department of Health says on its website “may endanger children,” include “failure to maintain the minimum staff-to-child ratio, leaving children unattended, failure to conduct a background check, and lack of CPR/first aid training.”
Department officials said this month that they are moving forward with plans to put information from inspections of all centers online by July 1, 2017. (The state is now required to post inspection results in order to receive child care funding under a recently reauthorized federal block grant.)
The Hechinger Report began collecting the temporary posts about center inspections last January; this database is now available to our readers. You can search our database by center name or city to see if your center is on the list. Please note that the list may not be comprehensive. The information posted by the health department does not include information about whether violations were contested, or how they were resolved. Some child care directors caution that there may be explanations for the violation not captured by just listing it.
For more information, you can request a copy of records of any center from the Department of Health through a written public records request.