A 2-year-old child is left alone at a park after a field trip. The state fines the toddler’s day care provider $299.
A 4-year-old suffers a head injury when a wooden microwave falls on his head. His day care is fined $499.
A 4-year-old is beaten with a shoe by a day care worker. The day care’s fine: $499.
The child care centers in these incidents had two things in common: They were fined by the state for serious safety lapses, and they never paid. In fact, as of last month, nearly one in five child care providers fined during the past five years failed to pay, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has found.
Until the AJC inquired in November about fine collections, the state Department of Early Care and Learning had done little to make delinquent day cares pay up. The agency that depends almost exclusively on fines undercuts its ability to improve the quality of child care by failing to collect all of the money.
“That’s unbelievable,” said Sherry Poole, whose 3-year-old son wandered away from a Douglasville day care center. The center, now closed, never resolved its $299 fine, according to state records.
“They should put some force behind it,” she said. “They have the authority. They shouldn’t just brush it underneath the carpet. It’s people’s children that are at stake.”
This is the latest article in the newspaper’s nearly six-month investigation of day care regulation in Georgia. The AJC has previously reported that DECAL is not as aggressive as other states when it comes to other forms of punishment, such as revoking licenses.
But the tool Georgia uses more often than some other Southern states — fines — is weakened by the state’s lack of follow-through.
Bobby Cagle, commissioner of DECAL since January, said he was aware that some fines had gone unpaid, but he did not know the percentage until the AJC inquired about it.
“I can’t say I was surprised. Was I satisfied with it? Absolutely not,” he said, adding that DECAL’s collection rates were: “Not great. Not awful. But not satisfactory.”
Cagle’s predecessor, Holly Robinson, who was DECAL’s commissioner for most of the five years reviewed by the AJC, declined to comment. “I prefer to let the current commissioner do the speaking for the agency,” she said last week.
$36,000 uncollected
As of last month, at least 88 fines from the past five years were delinquent, accounting for 18 percent of the 491 fines levied during that time.
The late fines totaled nearly $36,000 — revenue that would have gone into the state’s general fund.
After the AJC filed a request for the late fines data, one-quarter of those child care programs — 22 in all — came forward to pay or resolve their fines after being contacted by DECAL staffers.
Cagle told the AJC that his staff did not make a special push to collect fines after the newspaper filed its records request. He did acknowledge that the number of child care providers who paid fines last month was “pretty high” compared to previous months.
When asked how many delinquent fines were paid in each of the previous months of this year, Cagle referred the AJC to a spreadsheet of data already in the newspaper’s possession.
The answer, according to that data: None.
Minus the recent payments, the state is currently owed $27,000 in outstanding fines.
Nearly all of those fines are for $299 or $499, though DECAL is empowered to fine day care providers up to $500 per day up to $25,000. State records show only three fines have been for more than $499 in the past five years, all of them since June.
Day care owner Craig Starling made the delinquent list.
Two of Starling’s day care centers near Savannah, named Little Country Day Care, were fined $299 three times — for a total of $897 — between 2006 and 2008, according to the state’s data. All three of the fines were for “continuing noncompliance,” but the data had no more details.
When reached by phone, Starling disputed the state’s data. “I think that’s wrong. I don’t know where you’re getting your information or who told you that,” said Starling, who has since sold one of those day care centers.
He said he had a vague recollection of being fined.
“I guess I kind of remember that, but there’s no way that we would not have paid it,” he said.
When asked for evidence that he had paid them, Starling said, “I don’t even save IRS [documents] after three years. So I’m not going to save that.”
Nationwide problem
The collection rates for DECAL might be a part of a nationwide problem.
“Undercollection is a real phenomenon,” said UCLA School of Law lecturer Ezra Ross, who recently researched government agencies’ failure to collect fines and penalties. “This is an outrageous thing.”
Ross and a research partner spent close to a year examining the collection rates of nearly 20 state and federal agencies. They found that most of the agencies had collection rates under 50 percent.
When informed of DECAL’s collection rates, Ross said the Georgia department fared well compared to the ones he reviewed, but he still wasn’t impressed.
“It should be disturbing that they’re not at 100 percent,” he said. “Collect what you impose. What’s the problem here?”
Ross’s research discovered that government agencies didn’t use the tools at their disposal to collect the money.
“There’s a lot of money that’s left on the table that would help if they would collect it,” Ross said. “And it’s not happening.”
Ross said he believes agencies don’t collect fines well because they don’t have enough motivation to do so. It’s not a high-profile task; agencies and workers get more attention for making major rule changes and ferreting out wrongdoing, he said.
“But what happens after they’ve imposed the fine?” Ross said. “People aren’t really paying attention to that.”
He also said most fine revenue, like DECAL’s, goes into the general fund, so the department that collected the money doesn’t get to keep it.
Collection tools
If a child care program in Georgia fails to pay a fine, DECAL has several options.
The department may levy another fine, revoke the program’s license or even file a lawsuit to collect the money.
When asked by the AJC, DECAL couldn’t produce any evidence that the agency has pursued any of them over the past five years.
Cagle defended the agency, in part, by saying that its regulations did not specifically say it could revoke licenses and levy additional fines until December 2009.
However, the AJC obtained letters sent to child care providers prior to those changes — as far back as March 2008 — in which DECAL threatened additional fines, license revocation and legal action.
It does appear that DECAL is clamping down on day care programs, though public records turned over to the AJC suggest the tougher stance came after the newspaper filed records requests for the information.
Cagle said his agency had been trying to collect late fines before the AJC’s inquiry but, when asked, did not furnish evidence to support his claim.
Information about unpaid fines provided to the newspaper shows that DECAL staffers have been calling day care providers directly to collect the money.
However, according to that data, the earliest record of staffers making phone calls to day cares was Nov. 4 — three days after the AJC’s request for the information.
Cagle said it has always been his department’s practice to make such calls.
On Nov. 18, apparently for the first time ever, DECAL initiated the process of revoking a day care’s license for failure to pay a fine, records show.
The day care, Auntie Sheree Daycare in Atlanta, cut a check for $299 that day, reversing the process.
The agency’s letters seeking money also appear to have become more threatening of late.
Though some previous letters cited license revocation as an option, a new round of letters sent out last month promised it if the owners didn’t pay up fast.
“Failure to pay the enforcement fine within five (5) business days will result in revocation of the license,” the letters said.
Cagle also said his agency is now researching how it could collect money from child care programs that closed down without paying their fines, such as employing a collection agency.
“Not paying fines is unacceptable. I won’t accept it,” he said. “And we’re going to make every effort to collect fines that are due.”
Learning that her former day care center never resolved its $299 fine didn’t sit well with Sherry Poole and her family.
The family still remembers the cold winter day in 2007 when her young son, Dante Fitzgerald Jr., somehow slipped out of the Douglasville facility wearing a T-shirt.
Dante had a tendency to wander off, once leaving his mother’s apartment while she slept.
On this day, Dante walked a block away and into the foyer of a Publix grocery store. A manager found Dante, brought him inside and called the police.
The day care center, B.E.S.T. Learning Source, closed a year and a half later.
Before the center closed, DECAL allowed its owners to spend the fine money on already required child care training, as long as the center provided documentation.
The program never did, according to the state’s data.
Randall McDaniel, co-owner of the day care, disputes the state’s data, saying that he conducted the training and that the state signed off on it. When asked to furnish evidence, McDaniel did not produce any.
“They got slapped on the wrist very lightly and then they thumbed their noses at that and went on,” said Dante’s grandfather, Roy Poole. “And nothing’s been done.”
--------------------
About this story
While reporting on this story, the AJC learned that the state allows child care programs to resolve their fines by spending that money on training for child care workers that is already required.
Each year, all child care workers across the state are required to obtain 10 hours of relevant training.
The newspaper filed a request with the state Department of Early Care and Learning to find out how often the state allowed providers to pay for training to settle their fines. DECAL Commissioner Bobby Cagle said his agency did not have that information compiled.
In an interview, Cagle disputed that the training option allowed providers to get out of their fines, saying that there is plenty of free training available for child care workers. In other words, being required to devote fine money toward training still affected the day care owners’ pocketbooks.
In fact, Cagle said his own agency offered free training.
The AJC asked how much and how many child care providers took advantage of it.
DECAL’s response: “We do not track this information.”
About the Author
