A Burlington parent is advocating for heightened enforcement of North Dakota’s child care licensing rules after her toddler son was injured at a local daycare.

Jane McMahon said her goal is to bring attention and accountability to the issue of daycare safety.

Safety concern procedures are on the Thursday, April 30, agenda of the Minot Committee on Childcare, which will receive information from the Ward County Human Service Zone, a division of the North Dakota Health and Human Services Department (HHS).

McMahon said she had been notified by her former daycare of five instances in which her son had been bitten by another child or children, although she found other bites on him, indicating he had been bitten 11 times in total. She contacted the state licensing office and reported the bites, she said.

An inspection by the state didn’t result in an immediate course of action and two days later her son required an emergency room visit and stitches for a finger bite, she said.

“My focus was mainly correction orders, because I feel with utmost certainty that had correction orders been issued initially, my son’s finger would have never been bitten off,” McMahon said.

Carmen Traeholt, Early Childhood Licensing administrator with HHS, said the initial complaint did not include identifying information, so the department was not able to substantiate a specific supervisory concern at that time. With additional details supplied later, the department was able to conduct a more complete investigation, including staff interviews, and issued a 24-hour correction order based on the information gathered.

The department evaluates each complaint based on the information available at the time and takes action when a violation is found, Traeholt said. The administrative code lists a number of instances in which safety concerns can prompt 24-hour correction notices.

“The reason they are 24 hours is because they are serious,” Traeholt said.

If not corrected immediately, a child care facility could be fiscally sanctioned until the issue is corrected, she said. If a corrected violation reoccurs, the same procedure is implemented. However, repeat violations can result in a facility coming under a compliance plan, with assistance from Child Care Aware to provide observations for recommended corrections. Child Care Aware contracts with the state to assist providers with policy writing, environmental improvements, health and safety coaching and other technical assistance.

Other options also exist.

“We can put them under a provisional license, which gives us the ability to come in a little bit more unannounced and check on things,” Traeholt said. “The most severe corrective action we have would be revocation.”

Revocation can result if a facility fails to comply despite efforts to bring it into compliance.

A legislative Child Care Services Advisory Committee created in House Bill 1119 to streamline state licensing of child care providers also has been meeting during the interim.

Rep. Macy Bolinske, R-Minot, who serves on the committee, said the current law creates confusion for providers and families because there are overlapping categories of licensing.

The committee hasn’t looked at the administrative rules for child care licensing, which are reviewed through a separate process with the Rules Committee, she said.

“What our task force is doing is providing a recommendation to the interim Health and Human Services Committee, which I also serve on. From that, legislation could be created,” Bolinske said.

Traeholt said HHS is open to suggestions from parents about improvements to the administrative code or about health and safety issues that could be better addressed in the code.

McMahon said she would like to see shorter compliance periods for many of the violations, along with escalating penalties for repeat offenders and increased licensing specialist accountability.

She also cited her concern over what she views as a tendency to simply work with providers to make corrections rather than write correction orders. So, while the code provides the ability to force compliance with correction orders, it is not used as it should be, she said.

She added the child care shortage shouldn’t be the guiding factor in enforcing provider compliance with laws and codes.

“I would like my children to go to daycare and be able to have a job. You rely on that as a parent. However, I don’t think that we should be sacrificing children’s safety just to keep a place open,” she said. “Safety should come first.”