Audit Report On Administration For Children’s Services Oversight And Monitoring Of The Screening Of Personnel By Contracted Child Care Centers

Audit Report In Brief

This audit assessed the adequacy of Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) oversight and monitoring of the compliance of contracted child care centers with contract provisions and City and State regulations pertaining to the screening of their personnel for past or pending criminal actions and reports of child abuse and maltreatment.

ACS has an overarching mission to protect the City’s children from abuse and neglect.  ACS’s Division of Child Care and Head Start (DCCHS) administers and oversees child care services and Head Start programs provided by private, non-profit, and community-based organizations under contract with ACS.  As of January 2009, there were 282 group child care centers, under contract with ACS, responsible for serving 19,772 children under the age of six.

Audit Findings and Conclusions

ACS contract monitoring activities include evaluating contracted child care program compliance with requirements for background screening of personnel.  These activities include annual program assessments by the ACS Program Assessment Unit and follow-up visits by Borough Office personnel.  However, these activities do not provide for sufficient ongoing monitoring to ensure that all personnel at contracted child care centers are appropriately screened for past or pending criminal actions and reports of child abuse and maltreatment, as required by contract and statute.  Our examination of 236 personnel files at 15 sampled child care centers and review of operational practices disclosed certain weaknesses that provide opportunities for the lack of screening to go undetected or for unscreened personnel to have unsupervised contact with children.

The results of our observations at 15 ACS-contracted child care centers disclosed that seven (47%) of the centers lacked either DOI or SCR screening clearances for one or more of their personnel.  Overall, we cited 21 employees (15%) of the 138 employee folders reviewed at these seven centers as lacking either child abuse and/or criminal history clearances.  However, at no time during our visits to the child care centers did we observe any unscreened personnel working with children without being supervised.  Further, we observed that there were at least two staff members working with the children in all areas.  After additional follow-up by ACS, there remained nine employees at four centers that lacked child abuse and/or criminal history clearances.

In addition to monitoring weaknesses, we noted that ACS does not have a formal agreement with either DOI or DOHMH specifying the responsibilities of each agency regarding ongoing communication and sharing of information between the agencies, particularly with respect to criminal and child abuse and maltreatment screenings of child care center personnel.

Audit Recommendations

To address these issues, we make 8 recommendations, among them that ACS should:

• Increase the testing of child care center personnel files to the maximum of 100 percent to ensure that clearances for all required personnel, paid and unpaid, are appropriately screened. If 100 percent testing is not possible, require that an acceptable level of existing personnel be checked and that all clearances be checked for all new personnel (paid and unpaid) who joined the child care center since the date of the last assessment visit.

• Require Technical Consultants to follow-up cited screening deficiencies to ensure that all required clearances are obtained by the child care program.

• Require supervisor review of the site visit reports.

• Enter into a formal agreement (i.e., memorandum of understanding) with DOI, DOHMH, and OCFS to establish the roles, responsibilities, and procedures for the timely sharing of information between the agencies about the names of child care personnel for whom criminal and child abuse and maltreatment have been performed.

• Require that child care centers immediately follow up on all individuals cited in this report for lacking either child abuse or criminal history clearances to ensure that clearances are obtained in a timely manner.

Agency Response

ACS officials generally agreed with the audit’s eight recommendations.