There is more to opening a home daycare than buying some toys and recruiting families.
To be licensed in Indiana, home daycare providers must complete multiple training sessions including CPR, First Aid and Safe Sleep, pass a home inspection including a water quality test and have all employees pass a national criminal background check and drug test.
Licensed home daycares can accept federal Child Care and Development Fund vouchers from families who qualify.
Home daycares must pass annual inspections by a state licensing consultant to maintain their license. The inspection is arranged in advance one year, and the next it is unannounced. Homes have varying time frames to make corrections depending on the urgency of the issue.
"These standards are important to ensure that when parents are away ... their children are being cared for in a safe environment," said Melanie Brizzi, administrator of the Indiana Bureau of Child Care. "If there's a greater risk to the children, that has to be fixed immediately. We really judge the risk with the nature of the violation."
A corrected concern still remains on the daycare's inspection report, along with the date the issue was corrected. Violations are permanently entered in a provider's file, and the information is posted publicly on the Bureau of Child Care website, www.in.gov/fssa/2552.htm, for three years.
“As soon as [the inspector] showed me there was a problem, I’ve gotten right on correcting it,” said Marcietta Timberman, owner of Lil’ Mess-N-Gers Christian Childcare, which has accumulated 31 inspection concerns since 2011 and corrected all but three.
Three concerns were noted mid-January, and Timberman is working to resolve not having a well test on file and not having training documentation and a background check on file for the assistant she hired two months ago. The majority of Timberman’s inspection concerns over the years were related to not having required documentation on file, which she says she is trying to improve with help from her new assistant.
“Paperwork is not my strong suit,” she said, adding some of the violations were for missing paperwork for an assistant she ended up not hiring.
Inspection violations can be related to anything from having children improperly covered with blankets during naptime to not refrigerating certain foods like syrup or lacking proper documentation for employees. Licensing consultants will spend anywhere from less than an hour to three hours checking the 116 components of an inspection visit, depending on whether it's a follow up visit and how many adults and children are at the facility.
"I felt like my visits were an appropriate amount of time; they could get a sense of how I did things," said Brizzi, who was a home child care provider for eight years before taking on her current role with the state.
Paths to Quality offers another way to monitor child care providers in Indiana. The voluntary quality rating and school improvement system requires separate annual visits by a third party inspector to make sure providers meet standards.
The system rates providers on four levels: Level One providers meet children’s basic health and safety needs, Level Two is for environments that support child learning, Level Three means providers plan curriculum that focuses on development and school readiness, and Level Four is reserved for nationally accredited daycares.