Photo Courtesy of City Comptroller’s Office
An outdoor play area at a shelter in Manhattan.
By Forum Staff
Child care services at City shelters are not subject to the same health and safety regulations that govern child care facilities outside of shelters, said City Comptroller Scott Stringer.
According to the findings of an investigation authored by his Office and released last week, officials found “dangerous shortcomings” in how child care services are provided to children age 0 to 3 in City shelters, including a failure to ensure that child care workers undergo criminal background checks or enforce basic health and safety standards.
“We found a lack of oversight in shelters that we inspected, as well as conditions that would give any parent nightmares – and that is not acceptable,” Stringer said. “There should be one health and safety standard for all child care facilities in New York City, regardless of where their children go to sleep at night. That’s why I’m calling on the City to conduct a full census of our youngest homeless children that focuses not just on where they reside, but on whether they’re actually getting the services they deserve.”
Last December, Stringer’s Office released an audit that showed “serious” safety, security and health issues at shelters for families with children, leading to “an unprecedented response” by the Department of Homeless Services to address the findings. Building on that audit, Stringer noted, the new investigation found that child care services at City shelters were not subject to the same health and safety regulations as all other child care sites, resulting in lower standards for staff screening, training and the physical condition of the facilities.
The investigation released last Wednesday found that the largest population served by the Department of Homeless Services is children age 0 to 5, and that the average length of stay in shelters for those children is now 412 days, an increase over previous years – underscoring the importance of providing quality child care to this population. The investigation also documented a 224-percent increase in the number of children placed in commercial hotels between April and August of 2016 – facilities that have no on-site child care services at all.
Because child care centers in City shelters do not have a formal permitting process and are not subject to Department of Health and Mental Hygiene standards, “severe shortcomings are rampant,” Stringer noted. For instance, the Comptroller’s Office found that:
- Based on surveys of all 43 City shelters with unpermitted child care centers on site, 82 percent of child care workers in these shelters had not been screened for either criminal convictions or records of child abuse, or both.
- In addition, 49 percent of the child care employees at these sites did not have valid training in child abuse and maltreatment identification, reporting, and prevention.
- More than one-fourth of all shelters for families with children operate child care centers onsite without any permits from City government.
- Although ACS funds subsidized child care vouchers and early education programs for children as young as six weeks of age, Stringer’s investigation found that ACS and DHS used different methods for tracking children. As a result, neither agency could identify which children in the shelter system received some form of subsidized child care through ACS, and which did not.
That we have such extraordinary regulatory loopholes should alarm all of us. We need to fix it—and we need to fix it now,” the comptroller said.
