Is Your Child Benefiting from the Protections Licensed Child Care Centers Offer?

by | Feb 1, 2019 | Blog

You need to know if the Child Care Center where your child attends for preschool or out-of-school time is licensed by the Utah Department of Health.  If the center is not licensed by the Utah Department of Health or is deemed license-exempt, your child is not protected by key safety standards deemed necessary by the State of Utah to assure you and your child have the best protection from potential harm.  This is why: 1) License-exempt child care, preschool, or out-of-school time centers are not required to abide by any of Utah’s standards put in place to protect children from potential harm.  Additionally, because these centers are license-exempt, they have no supervising authority to which they must report when there is potential or real harm for children.  Conversely, licensed child care, preschool, and out-of-school time centers meet Utah Health Department’s highest standards of safety and assurance of well-being for your children. 2) One example is, only the Department of Health has the legal authority to perform thorough background checks on employees and owners.  A Utah license-exempt center has no requirements to perform background checks on its employees and/or owners.  Even if the Utah license-exempt center performs background checks, they are unable to access necessary records on individuals that only the Utah Department of Health can access to assure your child’s safety.   If a parent who wishes to report harm to a child that happened at a license-exempt center, the Utah Department of Health has no mechanism to take a complaint about a license-exempt center and has no authority to act on the child’s or parent’s behalf regarding any incident at the license-exempt center. 3) Another example is, Utah licensed centers must abide by very specific, strict, and low child to teacher ratios.  On...