The Rochester Child Care Center sought to hire a college student last Wednesday for summer work

The Rochester Child Care Center sought to hire a college student last Wednesday for summer work, but she can't start work until she gets her fingerprints taken.

"That sounds reasonable," said Christiane Casserly, executive director of the nonprofit. "But when we called to schedule fingerprints at the DMV, they're booked out to the end of July. That's not reasonable."

It's one of the rule changes included in a massive proposed overhaul in the 104-page " Child Care Licensing Program Rules" by the N.H. Department of Health and Human Services. However, the fingerprint rule was already implemented last fall 2016, which a DHHS spokesperson said was a federal requirement. Many child care professionals in the region are lobbying for a change in the proposed new rules they said would help mitigate the backlog to get the fingerprints complete.

Before the fingerprint rule change, child care centers could hire a person, schedule the fingerprints and the person could start working as long as they were never left alone with children and paired with personnel that has already been approved until the fingerprint background was complete. Casserly and others want the rules to revert to that policy.

Dover City Councilor Sarah Greenshields owns Little Tree Education in Madbury.

She said her company extended an offer to a college student last week but ran into a similar scheduling delay with the Division of Motor Vehicles office in Dover, one of the DHHS recommended locations to get fingerprints.

In comments submitted to DHHS on the proposed rule changes, Bevin Smith, director of Little Tree Education, highlighted the issue that regional child care centers expressed with the new fingerprint requirements: "As the hiring manager at our school organization, I am very connected to the current staffing shortage crisis that we are all presently facing in the field of early childhood education.

With the N.H. unemployment rate as low as about 2.8 percent, the various increase state regulations in the (early childhood education) profession, along with the low average hourly wage for an early childhood teacher, have made the available applicant pool very limited."

Smith urged DHHS to revert to the previous standards, allowing a fingerprint to be scheduled and allow the person work supervised until the background check is fully complete.

"The department has received feedback from providers and other stakeholders on proposed changes to the child care licensing rules during public hearings and public comment periods, and is currently reviewing these comments as it works internally on the rules revision. When that internal work is complete, a final rule will be submitted for JLCAR's consideration," DHHS spokesman Jake Leon said in an emailed statement Friday.

JLCAR's is the Joint Legislative Committee on Administrative Rules that is made up of state senators and representative that approves rule changes before the DHHS can adopt them. It has a hearing scheduled July 20 in Concord on the proposed child care licensing rules.

Julie Blaisdell, director of the Discovery Child Enrichment Center at Pease International Tradeport in Portsmouth, also pushed for reconsideration of the strict fingerprint rules.

"In this field, it's hard to find good, quality people," she said. "If they have to go a month without working, they are obviously going to try to find something else instead."

Blaisdell, Greenshields and Casserly all said they have never had to let someone go because of the results of a fingerprint background. Their internal background checks have weeded out undesirable applicants beforehand, they said.

All three agree with the need for fingerprint background checks but feel that since it is required by the state, it should take days not weeks to complete.

All three expressed concern that all the time they took to locate and vet a qualified professional could be wasted because of the delay.

The employee could become a nanny quickly or get a department store job for similar pay.

Greenshields urged college students who plan to pursue early childhood education to take care of their background checks now so they don't run into regulatory delays when they want to get a job in the field.

The background checks, which cost $50, are good for five years.

The proposed rule changes can be found at www.dhhs.nh.gov/oos/aru/documents/hecdraft4002fp.pdf.

The JLCAR meeting will be held July 20 at 9 a.m. in rooms 306 and 308 in the Legislative Office Building, 33 North State St., Concord.