• THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT ON THIS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT TOPIC! WE HAVE REACHED 200 SIGNATURES, NEXT GOAL IS 500! KEEP SHARING!
• Senator Robert Ortt’s office is requesting to schedule a meeting with us to discuss the items in our petition and concerns!
• We have a meeting with Legislative Director Lila Balali and Monica Wallace’s Chief of Staff this Thursday!
• The OCFS executives are requesting a meeting with us. Since we have already had numerous pocket meetings statewide for years regarding these issues with no change, we agreed to schedule an in-person meeting with their written commitment to make changes and after executing a good faith action to publish a NYS childcare providers a Bill of Rights on the OCFS page immediately.
• By popular request, we have now added the Spanish translation of the petition!

Email sent to OCFS executives:

Hello,

As promised in our reform request e-mail sent on Thursday 11/30, we have gathered real-life experiences from providers of every modality across the entire state demonstrating the oppression and injustices of the current regulatory and enforcement process and intend to share them with you daily until our requests are satisfied.

In a center-based program with 10 classrooms, an 8-year staff member, who receives 35-40 training hours per year on the topics of regulatory policies, created a minor supervision issue resulting in the center owner immediately contacting the SCR to self-report the incident.  The SCR was satisfied that no children were in danger and directed the provider to contact licensing to self-report since it could be a regulation issue.  The provider contacted licensing to self-report which triggered an investigation the following day with CPS and OCFS.  The 8-year staff member was found not indicted by CPS but the program received violations, fines, and mandatory training at additional costs.  Despite the program providing the staff with more than double the required amount of training hours annually at their expense and following proper protocol before and after the incident including putting the staff member on a performance improvement plan, the owner and program suffer fines, violations on their license, reputation damage, and potential lost current and prospective business because of the actions of a tenured staff member who made a bad choice.  The staff member has no repercussions other than following goals on the performance improvement plan.  This program has been open for more than 15 years with only 4 previous paperwork-related violations prior to this incident.

-Center-based Childcare Provider in New York State

Your urgent consideration and action is requested as a systemic reform is long overdue and there are elements of the current regulatory/enforcement process that infringe on our constitutional protections. We eagerly await your response.

NYS Childcare Providers