Minnesota sees rise in reports of kids left alone at day care

Stories of kids left unsupervised by Minnesota child-care providers appear nearly every week in state investigative reports.

Child-care workers in Rochester and Montrose left 2-year-olds unsupervised on playgrounds, according to documents posted in mid-July. The week before, a memo described a 3-year-old slipping through a St. Paul center’s unlocked gate and walking onto University Avenue. Reports published earlier this month chronicled how a toddler and preschooler were briefly left alone in Brooklyn Park and Chaska classrooms.

Such incidents have increased recently, the Minnesota Department of Human Services warns. The agency issued an alert this month urging child-care centers to take precautions, such as providing more staff training and having workers take attendance more frequently.

“Supervision is an important component of ensuring the health and safety of children so that staff are able to intervene during potentially dangerous situations,” DHS Deputy Inspector General Alyssa Dotson said in a statement.

Reports of unattended children often share the same ending: The child is quickly discovered, alone but unharmed, in a classroom or outside.

However, a lack of supervision can put a child in danger and has been a factor that contributed to some child-care centers and family child care providers losing their licenses.

DHS’s alert this month focused on child-care centers, which the state is responsible for investigating. People have submitted more reports lately of kids leaving such centers without staff knowledge or ending up unsupervised on playgrounds and in classrooms, hallways, bathrooms and community settings, officials warned.

On average almost 16 reports of potential child-care center neglect, such as lack of supervision, have been assigned each month for investigation, according to DHS data from the past six months.

That is a 38% increase from the average during the previous six months.

DHS hasn’t identified why there have been several cases in a short period of time, Dotson said, noting many factors can contribute to the incidents, including the arrival of summer.

Summertime often brings a lot of changes at facilities, said Ann McCully, executive director of Child Care Aware of Minnesota, which trains provider and helps families search for child care.

There can be new hires and reorganization of classrooms to meet increased demand, as well as more time spent outdoors or on field trips, she said. That could mean staff members are less familiar with kids, creating more chances for potential missed headcounts.

Staff shortages in child care are likely compounding the issue, McCully and others stressed.

“It’s one more symptom of the fact that we do not have the workforce that we need,” she said. “They are needing to find people quickly. There’s a lot of turnover, so the opportunity [for] deeper trainings that we would all like to see — including, I’m sure, the center directors — is maybe not always there.”

The state should promote the field and add early childhood education classes for high school students, and speed up its background check process for those applying to work at centers, said Jodie Riek, vice president with the Minnesota Association for the Education of Young Children.

Center directors are reporting DHS can take three months to do background study, Riek said. And in rural communities, she said would-be workers must drive long distances to get fingerprinted and photographed for the studies.

Along with staffing struggles, providers are seeing more kids with behavior challenges than before the pandemic, said Courtney Greiner, who owns Esko Minis Child Care and Preschool and is a leader of the advocacy coalition Kids Count on Us.

“These teachers are just taking on so much responsibility and doing things that I truly don’t think that people that have never done it could even understand,” she said. “We’re asking them to do impossible things, and then errors are made at the cost of safety and supervision.”

Her center had an incident a couple years ago when a child hid behind an outdoor toy after a headcount was taken and was missed as the rest of the class went indoors, she said. The teacher realized the child was on the playground and the center self-reported the situation to licensing officials and retrained staff, Greiner said. Providers are “devastated” when something like that occurs, she said.

Child-care staff should be aware of the elevated risk during transition moments — such as when a classroom is headed outside — and busy times of day when parents and other visitors are opening entrance doors, DHS noted in its warning. The agency said providers should develop procedures to regularly take attendance during the day, particularly during high-risk times like field trips or before and after transitions.

The challenges with transitions are captured in DHS maltreatment investigations, such as reviews of Tutor Time centers. That business was recently investigated for reports of unsupervised children at both its Lakeville and Brooklyn Park locations. Staff at those locations did not respond to requests for comment.

At the Brooklyn Park location, two staff members — one of whom was new — described an “overwhelming” process to get 11 children ready to go outside and how one 18-month-old was accidentally left in the classroom for six minutes. In Lakeville, a 3-year-old was using a classroom bathroom without staff knowledge for a few minutes when the rest of the group was on the playground.

Staff members at child-care centers must be able to see and hear a child at all times so they can intervene to protect the child’s health and safety, state law says. It provides a few exceptions, such as when children of a certain age go to the bathroom or grab items from a locker or cubby with a staff person’s knowledge.

When someone reports a provider failed to follow the rules, it spurs a maltreatment investigation, which could lead to an employee being disqualified from providing such services. Often, documents show, DHS warns an employee they will be disqualified if they are responsible for future substantiated maltreatment and issues a correction order for the facility.

In the recent alert to providers, state officials emphasized that child-care centers also need risk reduction plans. The plans are supposed to assess and address risks around supervision, naptime, food allergies and many other situations. State lawmakers recently tweaked the requirements for those plans: Starting Aug. 1 centers must add specific procedures to ensure adequate supervision when a preschooler is using an individual restroom at a center.

“A strong risk reduction plan is key to preventing injuries and ensuing children are supervised,” Dotson said.