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 the other hand, license-exempt centers are not subject to ANY State protective regulations regarding child to teacher ratios. This often means, those children in license-exempt centers lack sufficient supervision, as deemed necessary by childcare advocates and Utah’s Department of Health, to assure their safety and well-being.
4) License-exempt centers don’t pay the additional required fees and have no inspections performed by the Utah Department of Health. Licensed centers must pay additional fees and have semiannual inspections that are then reported on the internet for the public to view.
4) Finally, the Utah Department of Health has no authority or ability to track complaints or issues related to license-exempt centers. Even when a center which considers itself license-exempt fails to file the required paperwork to be license-exempt in the State of Utah, Utah Department of Health has no authority or ability to demand that the center file the necessary paperwork to be license-exempt unless the center is operating as a licensed center as defined by the Utah Department of Health. the Department of Health could then require them to be licensed. The end result, however, is that Utah has very little understanding of how many license-exempt centers and how many children attend them in Utah.
We can see that the risks posed by the status of licensed-exempt centers in Utah are great. Because of this, the Utah Professional Child Care Association helped to introduce a bill (HB146) in 2014 Utah legislative session which was passed by the House, but was not heard in the Senate, that would assure children in license-exempt centers would have the same protection as those in licensed centers. Since it did not get passed, it is up to each Utah parent to carefully consider the risks they may be placing their children in if they choose a child care, preschool, or out-of-school time center that is not licensed by the Utah Department of Health.
Ed Dieringer, CEO/Owner, Bennion Learning Center, Taylorsville, Utah 84129
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