MOBILE
State regulators close down MLK center day care in Spokane
Freda Gandy is executive director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Family Outreach Center in Spokane.
December 31, 2011
The Martin Luther King Jr. Family Outreach Center day care was closed Friday by state regulators due to fire code violations, leaving 25 children without a place to stay and forcing their families to pick them up at noon.
The East Central neighborhood center, 845 S. Sherman St., is not equipped with fire sprinklers, which Washington law requires for child care facilities. The center and the city of Spokane had come to an agreement Dec. 20 allowing the center to remain open as long as it obtained a temporary certificate of occupancy by Dec. 27.
The city offered to provide the certificate as long as certain standards were met, including an inspection by a state fire marshal and the hiring of a “fire watch” to be present at the center at all times. A representative of the state Department of Early Learning, which oversees child care centers, said the department went beyond the deadline to give the MLK center, which serves about 250 to 300 families, more opportunities to meet the requirements.
But Freda Gandy, director of the center, pointed to miscommunications between center staff and city and state officials that she said complicated the process. She said the state fire marshal was unavailable to conduct the final inspection until Jan. 4, but that an initial inspection was conducted about a month ago and the center complied with all requirements.
Clifton Rogers, the state fire marshal for Spokane County, could not be reached for comment Friday.
City building official Joe Wizner requested an inspection of the building Friday afternoon to try to issue a temporary certificate of occupancy. Inspector Supervisor Dan Skindzier said inspectors discovered the center has not hired a fire watch as required, and that Gandy did not provide documentation of the inspection performed a month ago.
Gandy said she has the documents and would have provided them if the inspectors had asked. She also said the center is in the process of hiring a fire watch but has not finalized that process.
Gandy said that when she was notified that the certificate would not be issued Friday, she started calling parents and telling them they would have to pick up their children. She said families are frustrated that the center is being shut down over paperwork.
“They’re parents,” she said. “They don’t understand.”
The problem could become acute next week, when classes at Spokane Public Schools resume and parents are counting on the child care center for after-school programs.
The Department of Early Learning contacted Ben Luety, president of the MLK center board of directors, Friday at about 9 a.m., informing him that the center would be closed at noon unless the temporary certificate of occupancy was secured.
“This was all worked out last week, and now it’s not,” Luety said. “What’s really ironic is the state fire marshal came in and inspected us a while ago and didn’t have a lot to change,” he added, referring to the initial inspection conducted a month ago.
Bob McLellan, assistant director of licensing at the Department of Early Learning, said he believed state staff tried hard to work with the center on a certificate of occupancy.
Wizner said Friday he was unaware the center would be closed, but Luety disputed that statement.
Luety said he called and emailed Wizner several times this week but received no reply by the time the center was shut down.
“I’m really disappointed,” Luety said. “We all wasted a lot of time (at the Dec. 20 meeting) and I don’t have a lot of time to waste. I know other board members that were in attendance don’t have a lot of time to waste.”
This is nuts, and a prime example of “perfect” being the enemy of “good”. Sprinkler systems are extremely expensive, especially when retrofitted into existing buildings. Landlords demand a premium price for the few sprinklered spaces available. The end result is more expense for the parents who can least afford it.
How many children in day care used to die every year in this country due to fires in non-sprinklered day care facilities? Correct me if I’m wrong, but I suspect the number is somewhere between “zero” and “none”. What about the myriad day care operations that are in ordinary homes? Are they now required to be sprinklered as well? I doubt it.
Some basic fire safety requirements such as requiring that the day care be on the ground floor and that there be multiple exists (typically a door and a code-defined “egress window), would surely be adequate and would make it easier and cheaper to operate convenient day care facilities.
Any bets this will become a racial issue?
This affects poor people, so of course the government doesn’t care. If this issue affected the people who wield the money and power in this town, the daycare would still be open.
State aid for the poor has been cut to the bone. People are barely keeping themselves afloat despite this, then the government comes in and does their best to push their heads underwater by shutting down one of the few remaining places that families with low incomes can afford. Why? Because of what amounts to bureaucratic red tape and inflexibility. God forbid the Fire Marshall be bothered to come in on his paid days off either!
Perhaps the bureaucrats involved need to get their pay cut to minimum wage and have to try to find affordable daycare for their children while they work. I suspect the MLK center would get a (temporary) permit pretty damn quickly then!
Protect our children, same as elements in paint, small parts etc. As precident has been set before : NO EXCEPTIONS.
To me, this looks like a classic example of damned if you do, damned if you don’t. What if the state had turned a blind eye to this center’s non-compliance, and there had been a fire, and children had been injured or killed? I’ll tell you exactly what would have happened - you can bet your bottom dollar that the same people who are currently grousing that this center is being persecuted because it serves poor people would be absolutely HOWLING that the state doesn’t care enough about poor children to bother ensuring their safety.
I feel terrible for the affected families and worse for the teachers who are out of jobs, but my sympathy for the center’s administrators is limited. Why? Because I myself run a daycare in Spokane. We’re licensed for 40 kids because the fire marshal told us that if we were to have more than 50 people (including children AND staff) in the building regularly we’d have to get sprinklers installed. Sprinkler systems ARE very expensive, and would have been cost-prohibitive for us. Therefore, our enrollment is capped at 40 even though there’s space for more in the building. We’ll never be able to grow beyond a maximum enrollment of 40 kids specifically because of the sprinkler law, and I won’t lie - that’s frustrating to me. But I’ll still comply because it’s the LAW. I’m not going to pack 60, 80, 100 kids into the building, pray I don’t get called on it, and then if I DO get called on it, be like, “Duhhhhhh, I didn’t know!” Those administrators knew exactly what they were doing; there’s no possible way they didn’t.
Scary thing is something like 75% of kids are cared for by their own unlicensed family members in unlicensed homes without sprinkler systems. OMG. We’d better start licensing parents and inspecting all homes too!
Ick. This is the 3rd day care center shut down in Spokane in the past 2 weeks. Little Lambs Learning Center and Kids Are Us Child Care were both shut down too.