The city is contending with a backlog of 140 incomplete background checks of day care providers and employees, weeks after the death of a 1-year-old boy at a Bronx day care center that also operated as an illegal drug distributor.
“I’m not here to say that we are where we want to be,” said Corinne Schiff, a deputy commissioner within the city’s health department, which regulates child care programs, during a Council hearing on Thursday. “We are still perfecting these systems, we are still troubleshooting, we are still learning new systems, providers are still learning them, but we are really on a much better trajectory.”
The city requires anyone working in its nearly 10,000 child care centers – as well as any adult living at a home-based day care program – to pass a background check, which providers could conduct themselves up until 2019, when new federal requirements were implemented statewide.
The unit within the city’s health department charged with handling the new workload only consisted of 15 staff, Schiff said, which it balanced with temp workers and others who could do overtime “when they could.” And the unit was so clogged with emails that it would take hours to open certain attachments.
Schiff said that by last summer, that led to an “extraordinary” backlog of tens of thousands of background checks that took two months to clear.
Schiff said her clearance unit recently hired 40 new staff members to aid with its backlog in September. It also launched an electronic form for day care providers in May – which it used to clear more than 5,000 background checks thus far, along with state inspections that didn’t include background checks on every resident living in the home. It also did not include a check for fentanyl, health officials said last month.
Local elected officials are now pushing for a package of bills aimed at rectifying the city’s slow moving oversight into its day care centers. In addition to a bill requiring background checks be completed within two weeks of its request, the city is also considering legislation that would explicitly require the Board of Health to coordinate with other agencies on approvals for these day care centers. The Council is also considering a bill mandating that the health department works with the education department on background checks for child care providers, employees and volunteers.
“This painful and heartbreaking incident has reinforced how essential it is for our city to have safe, high-quality child care providers,” Councilmember Lynn Schulman said at the hearing, which was jointly held by the health and youth services committees, in reference to the Bronx day care. “But to do so, we must ensure there are no loopholes in the background check process.”
During her testimony, Schiff described a tedious process for background checks that takes an average of 36 days compared to the 14 being proposed by the Council. The process includes records from out of state or flags that require extra steps and could take longer than the two-week deadline proposed. She also said the department already provides outreach to the different agencies it works with on approvals.
“We needed staff and we needed an IT system,” she said. “We got that – so we’re doing much better.”
There are 9,692 child care centers in New York City – which eclipses the 7,572 in the rest of New York state, according to the Office of Children and Family Services. However, the state’s licensed child care centers only meet roughly half of the estimated demand created by the 1.4 million children under the age of six in New York, according to a labor report released earlier this year.
Pandemic-era health mandates initially shuttered some child care centers: 65% of child care centers remained open and were operating at only 30% capacity in 2020, according to the state department of labor. However, the industry’s speedy growth within the last several years allowed it to almost entirely recover – while other industries continue to languish. The child care services workforce is at 98% of its pre-pandemic levels as of the fourth quarter of 2022.
