Parents & advocates say child care regulations save lives. Kansas wants them rolled back

This is a repost from the April 3rd Kansas City Star

By Matthew Kelly

At 18 months old, Ava Patrick was smart, loving and fiercely independent. That’s how her mother will always remember her. “She was really kind of dainty, as well, but she made her presence known everywhere,” Alecia Patrick said. While unsupervised, Ava died of strangulation on her rst morning at an overcrowded Olathe home day care in April 2009. When Ava fell o a chair and got her neck caught in the slats of a wooden fence in the basement, no one was there to help. By the time the woman who was supposed to be watching her realized she was in trouble, it was too late.

Ava’s death was one of the tragedies that prompted the Kansas Legislature to tighten child care licensing and inspection requirements in 2010. Lexie’s Law, named after 13-month-old Lexie Engelman, who suffered fatal injuries at a Mission day care in 2004, strictly limits the number of child care hours that unlicensed providers can offer in Kansas.

Those regulations, which child safety advocates say have saved lives over the last 15 years, would be rolled back under a compromise bill that Gov. Laura Kelly has negotiated with lawmakers. The proposal is now tied to Kelly’s plan to establish a one-stop shop for families and child care providers, which would require GOP support. Patrick said combining the two proposals is a dangerous mistake.

“I understand that there’s a shortage in day care providers right now. I understand that day care is becoming quite expensive,” she said. “But I don’t know that unregulated care is the correct response to that. All we’re doing is opening us back up for potentially more injuries and more deaths in those day care settings.”

Compromising on child care

In Kansas, child care providers who choose not to pursue a license are only authorized to watch up to two children they’re not related to for a combined 20 hours a week.

The bill that passed the House last month would double the number of children unlicensed providers can care for from two to four. And it would allow them to watch each child for up to 35 hours a week, or a combined 140 hours.

The measure would also lower the cost of a license, reduce the number of mandatory training hours and allow providers to request exemptions from certain state child care requirements.

“Right now, people who want to open up a child care facility, whether in their home or a freestanding one, you have to jump through so many hoops and there are so many different people who have eyes on decision-making authority that it’s incredibly frustrating and more expensive than it needs to be,” Kelly told The Star in an interview last week.

Kelly wants to create the Kansas Office of Early Childhood, combining programs currently scattered across four state agencies into one new division. To win the support of Republican supermajorities in the House and Senate, the Democratic governor is willing to make concessions that would loosen regulations and expand unlicensed in-home day care options.

The compromise bill would also broaden religious freedom exemptions for all vaccine requirements in child care facilities, applying the standard that the Legislature imposed in 2021 for the COVID-19 vaccine.

“Just the fact that they’re working with us to establish this office is a huge give on their part,” Kelly said, noting that GOP lawmakers are typically “sort of a kneejerk no” to anything that could be perceived as growing government. Her efforts to get an early childhood once passed through the Legislature in 2024 went nowhere without Republican support.

When she was a state senator in 2010, it was Kelly who sponsored Lexie’s Law. As it was then, her goal now is to remake Kansas’s child care system.

Patrick said the child care compromise bill would undo some of the key advances Kelly helped safety advocates make 15 years ago.

“I don’t want to say that I feel a sense of betrayal, but Gov. Kelly was our champion when we were doing this,” Patrick said. “She was the one that said, ‘Yes, I will sponsor this bill and I will ride with you guys to make sure that this bill gets passed.’ And she did that.”

Lexie’s mother, Kim Engelman, said the proposed law changes are a dealbreaker for her. In the three years before Lexie’s Law was enacted, 27 children died in Kansas daycares.

“Despite the benefits of the Office of Early Childhood, we cannot roll back child care protections like this. We just can’t. It’s reckless,” Engelman said. “Every time we have to defend Lexie’s Law, it rips open the wound again.”

Weighing efficiency and safety

Rep. Laura Williams, a Lenexa Republican who led negotiations with the governor’s office, said the bill’s passage would streamline inefficient systems. “The Office of Early Childhood doesn’t grow government because the Children’s Cabinet is already a state agency, and in some ways we’re bringing that under one umbrella,” said Williams, who told The Star she’s confident the compromise would expand access to care. “I live in Johnson County, and really, a child care provider can have a slot and any parent is willing to pay what they can to get that slot,” Williams said. “We have parents fighting amongst each other waiting on these waitlists.”

She said Kansas has learned from the “horrible, tragic instances” that spurred Lexie’s Law but that advancing the interests of families and providers requires deregulation. “I don’t think it’s deregulation because there is no regulation (of unlicensed providers) now,” Kelly said. “Is it giving those folks the freedom to expand their child care provision? More kids, more hours? Yes, it is. But again, I’m going to tell you that it’s probably happening anyway and I don’t think it’s going to make a lot of difference.  “Did I want it to happen? No. As with everything, you have to give a little to get what’s most important.”

Patrick said rolling back regulations will endanger children. “The entire reason behind Ava’s death was unsupervised care and overcrowding,” Patrick said. “There were way too many kids for one person to simply watch.” Patrick and her husband spent hours interviewing Jeanette Lawrence before selecting her to be their day care provider. They liked that Lawrence promised a Montessori-style environment where she would incorporate numbers, letters and Spanish language lessons into children’s daily routines. After their daughter died, investigators discovered Lawrence had 14 children in her home at the time of the tragedy — six more than she told the first-time parents she was responsible for. “Why would they stop at four (children)? Why wouldn’t they just tack on five, maybe six? Nobody is keeping a watchful eye over them until something goes wrong,” Patrick said.

Lawrence was sentenced to more than three years in jail after being convicted on charges of involuntary manslaughter, aggravated child endangerment and operating a registered day care center with too many children.

‘Bad actors’

Tiffany Mannes, who has provided in-home day care for 23 years in Overland Park and represents Kansas on the National Association for Family Child Care, said the background checks, training and safety standards that go into licensure are what ensure safe environments for children. If a health inspector shows up at her home, Mannes is legally required to grant access to the entire property. The same is not true for unlicensed providers, who don’t receive regular inspections and can refuse access to their homes. Mannes said the compromise child care bill could have disastrous implications. “It can feel a little bit personal to have someone looking at your space, and so I can only imagine that moving forward, you could have someone walk in your home, look around and say, ‘Ope, you forgot to cover that outlet.’ And the provider could just say, ‘You know what, I’m going to go unlicensed. I’m tired of having people in my space,” Mannes said. “That’s what terries me, is I don’t really see an upside to being licensed.”

Kelly said it would be up to local law enforcement to respond to complaints at in-home day cares. “Bad actors are going to be bad actors. I don’t care what your rules and regulations are,” she said. Nothing in the language of the child care bill would prevent providers who lose their license for abuse or neglect from reopening as an unlicensed facility.

Kansas Action for Children, a nonpartisan child advocacy group, has also voiced objection to the amendment Williams added to the bill enshrining religious freedom exemptions to immunization requirements for daycares. Under that standard, parents could simply sign a waiver exempting their children from vaccine requirements without official review of whether they were being truthful about the basis of their objection. “With measles cases on the rise in Kansas, we should not be making it any easier for communities to have this kind of spread,” said KAC spokesperson Jessica Herrera Russell.

Kelly said passage of the bill, which remains in conference committee, would be a monumental achievement. “Were there compromises along the way? Of course, there always are,” Kelly said. “But . . . this final product, while I don’t think it’s perfect, is a giant step towards streamlining our whole child care system. “Let’s take advantage of the good things that this will bring and then if there’s some fallout or if there are some things that just aren’t working quite right, we can come back and address it.”

The Legislature reached its first adjournment last Thursday without the Senate taking action on the child care proposal. But Senate President Ty Masterson, an Andover Republican, told The Star he expects to bring the bill to a vote during next month’s wrap-up session.