Today I learned that state Rep. Scot Fitzpatrick (R-158), who represents predominantly rural Barry County, is sponsoring a bill, HB1355, that would exempt day care businesses in similar counties from state regulation, while allowing the local jurisdictions to enact alternative rules should they feel the need for any regulation. To put this in perspective, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that “all but six of 56 child care deaths in Missouri from 2007 through July 2011 occurred in unlicensed home day cares.” Recently, one of those deaths, that of baby Izabella Moore, has been in the news as her parents seek to unseal records pertaining to her death in an unlicensed Perry County day care facility in which fourteen children were left in the care of one adult. Indications are that the child was left unattended in a basement for several hours during which time she died. Not surprising given those circumstances, though the fact that the unlicensed day care in question is still operating is indeed perplexing.

But Rep. Fitzpatrick does actually have an reasonable case to make:

The way Fitzpatrick sees it, most child care providers in his area cannot afford to come into compliance with state licensing standards.

He said they lack the staff to meet state standards for adult-to-child ratios. He said they can’t survive under the state’s enrollment limits, which cap their number of paying clients.

He’s right. Barry County, which is typical of many rural Missouri counties, has a poverty rate of 18%; the median household income is about $38,000. Women make up half the population and it’s likely, given the economic make-up of the county, that many Barry County mothers have to work if the family is to survive. It’s also likely that many of those families can’t afford to meet the costs for quality child care – which, in turn, means that there will be few day cares that offer such care.

Nevertheless, if Rep. Fitzpatrick is right about the conditions that lead to substandard child care operations, he is not right about the remedy. Wouldn’t this be the time to propose beefing up state child care assistance? It is certainly true that Missouri hasn’t been overdoing such assistance:

Unfortunately the State of Missouri has one of the weakest Child Care Assistance Programs in the country.  Missouri’s eligibility requirements for Child Care Assistance are among the most stringent of all the states (you have to be poorer than families in all but four other state to qualify for assistance in Missouri) and the state’s assistance payments are the lowest.  In Missouri child care providers are reimbursed for providing services at only about half the market rate.  The federal standard for reimbursement of providers is at 75 percent of the market rate.  Missouri has not increased its child care reimbursement rate since 1999.  […]

It is equally true that, as the Missouri based Vision for Children at Risk (VCR) notes, that quality child care “is critical to the development and well-being of children,” a fact that affects the well-being of our society as a whole. The VCR also adds that the purpose of state funded child care assistance is “is to enable families to gain employment and remain employed” while securing acceptable care for their children. I may be wrong, but I think I’ve been hearing lots of Republicans gassing on and on about how the poor have to work. Why then make them choose between the well-being of their children and the need to feed them? Could it be because nobody thinks these folks matter? Rep. Fitzpatrick’s legislative remedy certainly implies that poor people in poor jurisdictions don’t deserve quality care for their children.

Rep. Ftizpatrick is, however, willing to go out on a limb to provide relief to one class of Missourians, namely the wealthy. He was vigorous in his defense of last year’s misguided and ultimately defeated tax cut for the rich, HB253, and will undoubtedly be hitting the hustings to campaign for this year’s variant of tax relief for the rich and connected. That he can do so while throwing up his hands, saying nothing can be done about poverty and the state of child care for the poor except relegate their children to the type of day care that might be the norm in a third world country says volumes about the type of country that Republicans want us to become. If I didn’t think it was hopeless, I’d say somebody ought to describe the benefits of progressive tax reforms to the Representative while disabusing him of some of the rightwing trickle down mythology that allows the wealthy to make out like bandits at the expense of the rest of us.

One last fact that should excite wonder: Barry county votes overwhelmingly Republican and it’s more than likely that Rep. Fitzpatrick’s disdain for the children of his constituents will be spun as concern for their plight – and most of them, desperate to get along during hard times, will go along with the spin. Lots of them will also think that he’s right to go after taxes – even though many of them will end up on the short end of the stick. Because P.T. Barnum was right: there’s a sucker born every minute.    

The phrase “for the children” has entered the realm of parody in our popular culture. We smile knowingly when in films and TV comedies a sleazy scamster uses the “for the children” plea to manipulate emotions and disguise self-interest. Nevertheless, cynical comedy aside, we all also know on some deep level that this comedic trope only works because the welfare of children is really, truly paramount – so much so that our concern becomes easy to exploit.

The Missouri legislature, however, has had a different take. Here, for the past few years at least, “for the children” has meant doing your bit to protect fetal life, living children be dammed. The last chair of the House Standing Committee on Children and Families, Rep. Cynthia Davis, was up-front about her anti-abortion priorities. Fortunately, the term-limited Davis is now history, and it’s possible that the new committee leadership may be willing to consider engaging  with the needs of Missouri’s real, fully-developed children.

And not a moment too soon. As a recent series of reports in the St. Louis Post Dispatch make clear, Missouri’s under-regulated child daycare system could use some TLC from the committee. The series, which explores the issues surrounding the accidental deaths of more than 40 children in unlicensed daycare settings in Missouri over a relatively short span of time, exposes a lax system with little accountability. Sadly, past efforts to correct these failings have been opposed by conservatives who, while children are dying, argue that efforts to regulate providers are too intrusive.

At least partly in response to the Post Dispatch reports, the House Standing Children and Families Committee has scheduled hearings to guide corrective actions. If the hearing that took place in Kansas City recently is indicative, according to committee member Rep. Jeanette Mott-Oxford (D-59), there may be some hope for improvement.

Given the clear evidence of the need to update daycare regulations, two bills that have failed several times in the past, known popularly as Nathan’s Law and Sam Pratt’s Law, might possibly make it through the legislature. Among other provisions, these bills would address the ratio of children to caregivers, and permit the State to investigate and shut-down unlicensed daycare providers who are facing criminal charges.

Senator Scott Rupp (R-2) has combined the two into one bill, SB 339. When it comes to child care at least, Rupp seems to march to a different drummer than his GOP primary opponent, Cynthia Davis, who was instrumental in obstructing passage of Sam Pratt’s law, named for a child who died while in daycare. Davis is notorious for her statement that it was “a ‘souvenir’ bill designed to soothe his grieving family.” In contrast, Rupp states that:

I want Missouri parents to be certain that when they go to work or attend to personal business, their children are in the best hands possible.

Welcome as these changes might be, they would, however, only begin to scratch the surface of Missouri’s child care needs. As Mott-Oxford reports, the evidence is clear that ensuring quality child care will require more than just tightening standards for daycare providers.

Prior to the Kansas City hearing, Mott-Oxford and her committee colleagues boarded the Operation Breakthrough “City You Never See” bus tour. Operation Breakthrough is a non-profit Early Head Start/Head Start organization that has been helping meet the child care needs of low-income, working Kansas Citians since 1971. The bus tour provides an educational opportunity that enables participants to learn about the lives of families in areas of the city where “children stand in line for food, where working parents desperate for shelter break into abandoned buildings, where Missouri babies born into poverty struggle to survive.”

As you might imagine, the stories our legislators heard on the bus tour offered powerful testimony to the fact that Missouri not only needs to make child care safer, but must also insure that quality day care, tailored to meet the developmental needs of its clients, is more widely accessible.  Mott-Oxford suggests four legislative actions that she believes would achieve that goal:

First: Expand eligibility requirements for child care assistance.  The sate currently offers subsidies to working parents who are at or below 127% of the federal poverty level; the national average for such assistance is 185% of the poverty level. Mott-Oxford advocates for revising the way we determine the poverty level. She points out that we use a measure developed in the 1950s and 60s that is based on the cost of food; 60 years later, such a measure is no longer realistic as other expenses, housing and health care, for instance, stand in a different ratio to the cost of food than they did in the past.

Second: Reimburse child care providers at the market rate. We all know that we only get what we pay for, and we can’t expect to get good child care providers for a pittance.

Third: Offer support to day care providers to enable them to obtain training that will, in turn, allow them to offer a better product, one that will merit higher pay.

Fourth: Fund outreach to increase participation in the Parents as Teachers program.  

Mott-Oxford’s H.B. 583, which was introduced last session, would have addressed the last three points; sadly it didn’t survive the session. We can only hope that the time has finally come when Missouri’s lawmakers will be willing to address the welfare of its most vulnerable citizens. In Missouri 212,369 children live in poverty. As the Operation Breakthrough Webpage eloquently notes:

These children are full of potential. With the right start they can absolutely become the fireman who comes to the rescue, the chef who feeds the town, the lawyer who fights for what is right or the doctor who saves the day. They can be contributors to the community.

The elephant in the room, of course, is that serving the potential of these children will cost money – money that the state does not have and will not have as long as the legislature will not address the issue of revenue.  In the next few weeks, I hope to write in greater detail about the related issues of poverty and taxation in Missouri.