The city is contending with a backlog of 140 incomplete background checks of day care providers and employees, weeks after the death of a 1-year-old boy at a Bronx day care center that also operated as an illegal drug distributor.
“I’m not here to say that we are where we want to be,” said Corinne Schiff, a deputy commissioner within the city’s health department, which regulates child care programs, during a Council hearing on Thursday. “We are still perfecting these systems, we are still troubleshooting, we are still learning new systems, providers are still learning them, but we are really on a much better trajectory.”
The city requires anyone working in its nearly 10,000 child care centers – as well as any adult living at a home-based day care program – to pass a background check, which providers could conduct themselves up until 2019, when new federal requirements were implemented statewide.
The unit within the city’s health department charged with handling the new workload only consisted of 15 staff, Schiff said, which it balanced with temp workers and others who could do overtime “when they could.” And the unit was so clogged with emails that it would take hours to open certain attachments.
Schiff said that by last summer, that led to an “extraordinary” backlog of tens of thousands of background checks that took two months to clear.
Schiff said her clearance unit recently hired 40 new staff members to aid with its backlog in September. It also launched an electronic form for day care providers in May – which it used to clear more than 5,000 background checks thus far, along with state inspections that didn’t include background checks on every resident living in the home. It also did not include a check for fentanyl, health officials said last month.
Local elected officials are now pushing for a package of bills aimed at rectifying the city’s slow moving oversight into its day care centers. In addition to a bill requiring…
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