Mary Zaleski, a Rosedale mother who has provided family day care in her home for the last four years, says she wouldn't take care of eight children every day if she didn't care so much about them.
Most providers, she says, do their jobs in both a professional and loving manner. That's why, Ms. Zaleski adds, she and others who offer day care in their homes are angry at what they consider over-officiousness and uneven enforcement of regulations by the state Child Care Administration.
The agency was created two years ago to make licensing and regulation simpler and more fair. But Ms. Zaleski -- who is president of the Baltimore County chapter of the Family Child Care Association, an advocacy group for the 12,000 Marylanders who are licensed to care for children in their homes -- says the agency's reputation is so bad that people would rather risk a $1,000 fine for running unlicensed operations than deal with the hassles of working with the state.
Ms. Zaleski is registered. But it's hardly a coincidence, she says, that the number of day-care providers who choose not to register is two to four times the number who do. Or that when the state offered an "amnesty" to the estimated 24,000 to 48,000 unregistered day-care providers earlier this year, only about 550 people signed up.
Novella Sargusingh, a Prince George's County day-care mother who is also registered, complains that she and other providers are "madder than hell."
The agency has done little more than "harass a lot of providers," she says. Ms. Sargusingh, state president of the Family Child Care Association, points to the case of a Howard County day-care mother whose license was revoked by the state because she put a misbehaving 22-month-old child in a bathroom for "quiet time."
The child's parents had instructed the woman to do precisely what she did, Ms. Sargusingh says. But another parent, whose )) child was also cared for by the Howard County woman, witnessed the incident and reported it.
"The parents of the child support the provider in this case, but the [state] won't listen," Ms. Sargusingh says. "What they're saying is that their opinion of proper discipline is more important than what the child's parents feel."
Karen Hudson of Rossville, in eastern Baltimore County, takes her 4-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter to Mary Zaleski's home for day care. Ms. Hudson, a client representative for a local medical insurer, says the state should play a part in monitoring child care, but not to the extent that it overrules the wishes of parents.
"Regulations are fine, but let the parent decide whether a certain provider is going to be a good person to watch your children," she says.
Jerry Carton and his wife Carole, a Pikesville provider, were so angry at what they considered the arbitrary wrath of the agency that they complained to a state senator. Mr. Carton says his wife, who has been registered with the state since 1986, was "treated like a criminal" after an 18-month-old girl accidentally fell and broke her hip last December while in Carole Carton's care.
The Department of Human Resources' Child Protective Services investigated the incident and cleared Mrs.Carton. But shortly afterward, Mr. Carton says, a local official of the state agency began making frequent, unannounced visits to the Carton home and cited Mrs. Carton for not throwing away soiled paper towels and for not clamping lids on outdoor trash cans.
Jerry Carton says the state used those petty infractions to reduce the maximum number of children his wife could care for. A family day-care provider is licensed to watch up to eight children, including up to two children under 2 years old. Mrs. Carton was permitted to take care of only five.
The Cartons complained to state Sen. Barbara A. Hoffman because they knew her to be a reputed advocate of child care. She, in turn, wrote to the executive director of the Child Care Administration, Barbara Smith-Hamer, calling the agency's treatment of the Cartons "harsh."
The couple also threatened to sue the state agency for hurting Carole Carton's reputation as a child-care provider, and for depriving her of income by limiting the number of children she could care for. But last month, agency officials reviewed Mrs. Carton's case and ruled that she could watch up to eight children again.
While the Cartons say they're happy that their particular problem was resolved, other providers in the state continue to complain about inconsistent enforcement of rules by the agency's officers.
During hearings on the ChildCare Administration's budget, Senator Hoffman heard testimony from other home day-care providers who leveled similar complaints about the agency. They urged the state to hire more licensing specialists -- the employees who work directly with day-care providers -- and to increase the ratio of child-care regulators to child-care providers.
Before the Child Care Administration was created in 1990, social service departments in each of the 23 counties and in Baltimore oversaw day care in their own jurisdiction. But Gov. William Donald Schaefer ordered a consolidation to bring licensing and regulation under one roof. Now, instead of 24 jurisdictions with 24 different methods of licensing and regulating child care, there are 12 statewide regions that are supposed to follow one set of rules.
But Fred D. Chew, executive director of the Family Child Care Association, surveyed the association's chapter presidents and found that while relations between the state agency and home day-care providers were good in some areas of the state, there are some problems elsewhere.
Licensing specialists in Carroll and Frederick counties, for example, were giving day-care providers different rules about sleeping arrangements for children in their care. In Prince George's County, enforcement of all rules varied among agency employees. And on the lower Eastern Shore, day-care providers complained that the state didn't explain the regulations clearly or completely.
Ms. Smith-Hamer admits that the agency has sometimes been inconsistent in enforcing regulations. But, she says, the state took disciplinary action against only 1.4 percent of the 12,000 providers during the past year. Such a small percentage, she argues, does not jibe with the notion that the agency is oppressive.
Nonetheless, Mrs. Hoffman says she's concerned that the agency has become "a bureaucracy run amok.
"We need these providers," she says. "You don't come down on these women with both feet when they try their best and might make a mistake now and then. We're not talking about child abuse, or someone who has 55 kids locked up in the basement all day. We're talking about people who do a good job looking after five to eight kids."
Ms. Smith-Hamer says she knows "there are angry [home-care] providers out there." But "a major job of the [state agency] is regulation," she says. And "we're doing our best to be fair to the providers and to do what's best for the children."
To try to patch up relations between the state and day-care providers, she plans to regularly attend the meetings of the Family Child Care Association. And she has hired a liaison, Patricia Field, who will survey providers for any concerns they have and be available to field their complaints or questions. Ms. Field will "have my ear, absolutely," Ms. Smith-Hamer says.
Ms. Sargusingh says she thinks these measures will help. "Maybe now [day-care] providers will be able to call one number and get results directly from someone at the state level," she says.