For one hour, then another, Jazmin Green’s temperature climbed like a rocket inside the gold Chevy Astro van. It was 92 degrees outside.
Inside the van, parked at Jazmin’s day care center, the temperature would have risen to 126 degrees within a half-hour. In two hours, to 140 degrees — suffocating heat for anyone but particularly harmful for a 2-year-old child.
As horrific as it is for a small child to be trapped alone in a vehicle, it is not especially uncommon among Georgia child care providers.
An analysis of state records by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution showed that, statewide, day care workers left children in vehicles 57 times over the past five years.
That amounts to 11 percent of all serious incidents documented at child care programs by the state Department of Early Care and Learning, which regulates and inspects them.
“From my perspective, one instance is too many,” DECAL Commissioner Bobby Cagle said. “What that says to me is that there’s too many of them, first and foremost.”
But, Cagle added, the 57 violations represent only a fraction of the 6,686 child care providers throughout the state.
Jazmin’s father, Charles Green, said he was surprised by the numbers.
“That’s way too high,” he said. “If you don’t take care of your children, then you have nothing.”
In nearly all of the cases, the day care provider received a $299 fine — a punishment that a leading national child care organization considered weak.
Among the incidents in the state’s files:
- A Loganville child care provider left three children in a vehicle for 1-1/2 hours while she voted in 2008.
- A driver for an Ellijay facility forgot to drop two 4-year-olds at school and left them alone in a van for 75 minutes in an IHOP parking lot.
- An Atlanta day care center left an 18-month-old in a bus for seven hours.
It’s not clear whether Georgia child care providers are leaving more children in vehicles than their counterparts in other states.
But one child care advocate said the AJC’s findings are a sign that change is in order.
“I think it’s a pretty clear indicator that we need stronger and more effective systems for child care centers in checking kids into transportation and out of transportation,” said Pat Willis, executive director of the advocacy group Voices for Georgia’s Children.
When asked for yearly statistics for children left in vehicles, Kentucky, South Carolina and Tennessee could not or did not provide that information.
North Carolina and Alabama did. Georgia fell in between those states, with 8.5 incidents of children left in vehicles for every 1,000 facilities over the five-year period. North Carolina led with 10.7, and Alabama had 4.9.
Leaving a child in a vehicle on a warm day can quickly turn deadly — particularly in the Southern states, which have far more deaths than any other part of the country.
On an 80-degree day, the temperature inside a car reaches 99 degrees after 10 minutes. After a half-hour, it climbs to 114 degrees, said Jan Null, a meteorologist and lecturer at San Francisco State University who has done extensive research on child deaths in hot vehicles.
Children experience heat stroke when their body temperatures hit 104 degrees, Null said. Their bodies start shutting down at 107 degrees.
When workers at Marlo’s Magnificent Early Learning Center finally realized Jazmin Green was missing that day in June, the tiny child had been trapped in her car seat for at least two hours, possibly three, according to the license revocation notice the state sent to Marlo’s in July.
Jazmin’s mother got an emergency call from Marlo’s asking her to come to the center immediately. Even before she arrived, someone called back and told her to go to the emergency room instead.
She thought one of her two children at the center must have suffered a broken bone or something terrible, she told the AJC in June.
‘The worst nightmare’
A similar incident, with a different outcome, occurred at the Appletree Learning Care facility in Alpharetta last year.
On June 8, 2010, its staffers accidentally left a 5-year-old boy in a van while on a trip to see the movie “Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel.”
For nearly two hours, a booster seat held the boy captive while the other children watched the movie inside, according to state documents detailing the incident.
The boy later reported that he was “very hot” and “kept sweating and sweating,” but did not require medical care, documents stated.
The boy’s mother, Katrina Hunter, told the AJC that once she found out her son was OK, she did not worry about what could have happened.
“I wanted to focus on what did happen,” said Hunter, 45, a nurse who lives in Alpharetta. “And what did happen is my child was fine. Thank God.”
Hunter praised the center’s response to the incident, saying staff there was honest and open about the mistake. She said she continued to keep her two sons in the center for a year afterward, only pulling them out when she moved.
Appletree owner Gail Morrill said she deeply regretted the incident.
“It’s the worst experience and the worst nightmare that you can imagine because the security of a child is the most important thing in a preschool day care,” Morrill said in a phone interview.
She said her center failed to follow the rules because one of her staffers was distracted by personal problems.
$299 fine: Is it enough?
After investigating the movie theater incident, the state dished out its standard punishment to Morrill: a $299 fine. The AJC’s analysis revealed that 90 percent of child care providers received the same $299 fine for leaving kids in cars or vans.
“Which, to me, is not enough,” said Linda Smith, executive director of The National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies, which provides child care information to the public. “Leaving children in cars — hot cars in summers — is life-threatening. And I just don’t think a $299 fine is sufficient to get the message across to people about how serious it is.”
Jazmin’s mother, April McAlister, agreed.
“That’s not enough,” she said. “It should be a $1,000 fine.”
Cagle, the DECAL commissioner, questioned whether higher fines would be a stronger deterrent of such incidents. He also said his agency didn’t want to put children at risk by forcing homes to close.
But he did say that he had enlisted a child care expert to conduct a review of his agency in November, “including whether we’re levying fines that are sufficiently high.”
“If we get recommendations from this expert that says we need to increase those penalties, certainly we’ll do that,” he said.
Alabama, which has fewer incidents than North Carolina and Georgia, takes a tougher approach to punishing child care centers for leaving children in vehicles. Rather than issuing fines, its most common punishment is one that Georgia rarely uses: barring providers from transporting children.
North Carolina generally responds in a manner similar to Georgia, with a written warning and a fine between $250 and $500. In some cases, it might issue only a warning, officials said.
Tennessee hasn’t had a child die in a child care provider’s vehicle since 2003.
But that’s because the state did something about it, officials say.
Between 1997 and 2003, five children died when they were accidentally left in vehicles by Tennessee child care providers. One of them was the son of the day care center’s owner.
The tipping point for change, officials say, came in July 1999, when two of those children died on the same day at different facilities in Memphis. (See accompanying box for details on Tennessee’s practices.)
When asked whether tighter rules have made a difference, a state official pointed out that no one has died in a child care vehicle in the past eight years.
“A lot of times, in regulation, success is measured by what doesn’t happen,” said Lois Barrett Luke of the state Human Services Department. “And I think, if you look at what hasn’t happened, it’s a good track record.”
‘A birthday with no party’
When Jazmin Green’s mother arrived at Southern Regional Medical Center, the staff told her that her daughter was in cardiac arrest.
It is now three months later, and Jazmin’s father has been dreading this day in particular.
Today is Jazmin’s birthday. She would have turned 3.
“We throw a birthday party for our kids every year,” said Green, who also has a 4-year-old son. “And this will be the first time that we have a birthday with no party.”
Green doesn’t know what his family will do instead. He thought about having a candlelight memorial. More than anything, he just wants the day to come and go.
“Everything about my daughter right now is hard to deal with,” he said. “You’d look forward to it if she was here. It would be a happy day. Now, it’s just going to be a candlelight and mourning and prayer.”
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Watchdog journalism
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution spent weeks analyzing state data to make this in-depth report possible. We’re continuing to investigate, so expect more stories in the weeks to come.
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How we got the story
The newspaper decided to take a closer look at child care providers – and the agency that regulates them – after the death in June of Jazmin Green, 2. After obtaining information from the state about all significant incidents at child care programs statewide during the past five years, the AJC zeroed in on the cases involving children left alone in vehicles. With its data in hand, the newspaper contacted several other states to compare Georgia’s regulation efforts with theirs. We also interviewed numerous local and national child care advocates and experts and spoke with parents whose children had been left in vehicles by their day care provider.
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Meet our reporter
Tim Eberly has been on the newspaper’s investigative team since April 2009. He has previously reported on questionable land deals in Gwinnett County and the school construction scandal involving the DeKalb school district. He is currently focusing his attention on the state department responsible for child care oversight. Eberly previously worked at newspapers in California, South Carolina, Montana and Washington, D.C.
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