EDITORIAL: OUR VIEW: Child Care Safety Act just makes sense

March 30--Alabama is one of only ...

Here we go again, writing a sentence that begins with that ever-familiar phrase.

It happens too often: Alabama being one of the lone states to stand nearly alone. So let's do it again, shall we?

Alabama is one of only seven states that allows wide ranging exemptions for child care centers so they operate without regulation or inspection.

There's legislation to broaden the oversight of child care facilities, limiting the exemptions.

The bill applies minimal standards like employee background checks, which make sense. You do not want people with known criminal histories, including pedophiles to be watching your children. A reasonable caregiver to child ratio must be met. If you have ever watched children for a day you quickly realize a good ratio of staff to child just makes sense.

It requires employees have CPR training and the day care show proof they are trained. Wouldn't you want your child care provider to know CPR? Health inspections will occur so that we don't have another incident where 30 children from a local day care end up at a hospital with Staph like what happened after the Sunny Side Day Care incident in 2015.

While there is broad support for the legislation called the Child Care Safety Act, there is also resistance.

Resistance? To providing basic safeguards in facilities protecting and caring for children while their parents are working.

Words too many of us throw around to stop rational legislation keep popping up when talking about the act: regulation, government oversight and religious freedom.

Even when it comes to levelheaded commonsense such as protecting children with basic health and safety regulations or annual unannounced inspections of a day care, we still find resistance.

More information:Bill requiring all day cares to be licensed moves forward

Exempt day care providers -- most of which are religious affiliated facilities -- are encouraged but not required to follow the Department of Human Resources' standards. Nearly half of center-based child care and nearly a third of all child care in Alabama are unregulated and uninspected, according to Voices for Alabama's Children, which supports the legislation. In Montgomery County, 80 of 215 child care facilities (37 percent) were exempt from licensure and inspection in July 2016.

In mid-March, Rep. Pebblin Warren, a sponsor of the bill, spoke on the House floor about the bill, pulling it after a 20-minute speech on its importance and the loopholes the current law has for day cares screened from oversight.

Read more:Bill to license faith-based day cares delayed

Churches that don't want to be regulated and licensed pushed back, so Warren pulled the bill from a vote that day, legislators -- including Warren -- told Advertiser reporter Brian Lyman.

The bill, according to its advocates, protects religious freedoms and the bill's sixth paragraph states, "the licensing of a faith-based child care facility may not be construed to infringe upon the rights of the facility to teach or practice a religion."

We have recommended this before:All sites must be inspected

What the bill will do is require all facilities to have specific staff-to-child ratios, cleanliness standards, training and criminal background checks.

What it will do is protect for our children.

What legislators should do is pass the bill.

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