Is Your Child at a Safe Daycare Center?
No parents should have to get the news that the place where they took their child was responsible for the death of their child.
In Richmond, about six weeks ago, a 13-month-old baby was left in a van for over four hours. He died from heat exposure. He was left in the van by an employee at his daycare. The employee, Keishawn Whitfield, picked the baby up at 7:15 am, drove to the daycare center, and forgot about him. Whitfield, son of the owner of the daycare center (The Yellow Brick Road), was charged with felony child neglect.
Surprisingly, cases of children being left in cars aren’t all that rare. The Virginia Department of Social Services, the state agency that licenses daycare facilities, knows that children have been left in vehicles by their daycare providers, because it requires daycare staff to verify that all children have been removed at the end of each trip. Neverthless, it recorded eleven instances since January 2007 that violated that code requirement — and that was only the cases they discovered during their inspections. Also, these are violations that were recorded at licensed daycare centers and don’t include home day care, certified preschools, children’s residential facilities or religious-exempt daycare facilities which are covered by other regulations. Virginia daycare centers are subject to surprise inspections at least twice each year.
Evidently, that’s not enough.
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