How did The Hechinger Report Gain Information Contained in a Child Care Worker’s Personnel File for Publication?

How did The Hechinger Report  Gain Information Contained in a Child Care Worker's Personnel File for Publication?

Is this a preview of the touted (SB2274) Early Childhood Services Interagency Council “character” and does such conduct really validate increased funding for the Early Learning Collaborative?

Freedom of Information Act 

The Freedom Of Information Act intends to hold government accountable through transparency and gives the public an opportunity to monitor the functioning of their government.

The Hechinger Report and The Clarion-Ledger requested complaint and inspection reports for every licensed child care facility in District V, which spans a large part of Mississippi, including Jackson, Vicksburg and Yazoo City.

The Mississippi State Department of Health said it would cost $40 an hour to pay someone to pull the records, a fee that was reduced to roughly $20 per hour after The Hechinger Report filed a complaint with the Mississippi Ethics Commission.

Relevant public interest under the FOIA is “the citizens’ right to be informed about what their government is up to.”

Steering “High Quality” (QRIS) is Against the Interest Congress Intended in FOIA

On December 1-4, 2016, on the Facebook page of The Hechinger Report, reporters wrote:

“We want to hear from parents about their experiences finding safe, high quality places to leave their children…” (Click here.)

“Wanted to be sure that everyone knows we’ve got an inspection report from every child care center in the Mississippi Department of Health’s District Five (Claiborne, Cophia, Hinds, Madison, Rankin, Simpson, Sharkey-Issaquena, Warren and Yazoo counties.) Curious about how your center fared? We’re happy to share! Let us know what centers you’re interested in.”

FOIA Exemption 6: It is not enough that the information might aid the requester in lobbying efforts. Hypothetical public benefits cannot outweigh significant invasion of privacy.                                                     U.S. Department of Justice

A request for more information as to what was being released to the public yielded the following response from The Hechinger Report:

“Nothing we have is confidential…We have copies of complaint reports that are marked substantiated or unsubstantiated but any reference of those complaints would say clearly if they were substantiated or unsubstantiated.”

Alleged Defamation

On January 31, 2016, The Hechinger Report and the Clarion-Ledger published “Mississippi child care in crisis: State’s weak oversight puts children in harm’s way”. It reveals investigations The Hechinger Report conducted at centers that may have been targeted based on the unsubstantiated complaints and identification of individuals disclosed and received in its FOIA request from the Mississippi State Department of Health.

In one case, although The Hechinger Report did not provide hospital records or lab results from the parent or anything that would hold up in a Court of Law verifying an infant had in fact been given juice or medicine that made him sick, it chastised the Mississippi State Department Health for insufficient investigation and/or for not substantiating that such an incident had indeed taken place.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that such a statement on the part of The Hechinger Report may be defamatory.

The Scoop – “We Want Absolute Power!”

On February 1, 2016, The Hechinger Report teased the question, “Who should fix problems with Mississippi’s early childhood system?”

It went on to report, “The Department of Health has the most control — it’s the only agency that can open or close a center and impose fines — yet there are holes in its monitoring process, according to advocates and legislators.

That narrow approach limits how effectively the state can monitor centers, said Cathy Grace, co-director of the Graduate Center for the Study of Early Learning at the University of Mississippi.

Some lawmakers have suggested the Department of Education should take a larger role in regulating centers.”

On February 2, 2016, Hechinger tweeted: “A few legislators have prioritized child care in Mississippi including @Brice Wiggins.”

§ 25-61-11  Personnel Files Not Public Record

On February 7, 2016, The Hechinger Report and The Clarion-Ledger published “Turnover, low pay may undermine child care in state”. On the same day Hallmark premiered “Kitten Bowl III” in support of shelter and rescue adoption, The Hechinger Report revealed the work history portion of a personnel file as follows:

“On a Wednesday morning in June 2014, xxxxxxxx, director of xxxxxxx Center sat in her office as a parent accused a worker of grabbing her son’s neck. The worker had been hired five months earlier, with no experience in child care. Her background included 10 months as a vet assistant, two months as a sales associate at an art gallery and one month at an animal shelter where she “took care of the cats,” according to records from the Department of Health’s Division of Child Care Licensure.

The point was to demonstrate that the accused had no former experience as a caregiver, a violation of the Regulations, and The Hechinger Report could have just said that but then, that might not have been adequate to be highly offensive to a reasonable person.

Instead, it set work at the Humane Society/shelter apart in dramatic quotations as though this employment is unworthy and allegedly violated both the Privacy Act and Mississippi Code which prohibits disclosure and release of personnel records or any part of such record in the agency’s possession. (Click here.)

Child Care Small Business Discrimination

February 8, 2016, child care providers held a news conference at the Capitol to announce a Mississippi Committee finding to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights of potential gender and race discrimination towards child care small businesses in Mississippi’s early learning system. The report listed recommendations to be considered that would improve quality for children in these environments without additional costs to this state!

 

Child Care Priority

Brice Wiggins did not attend.

 

Limiting the Pool of Talent!  Snubbing Most Stakeholders!

On February 9, 2016, Bill 2274, Education, was posted. The Bill seeks to establish full control of all financial resources and authority over all Programs for preschool aged children. It would eliminate the Governor’s State Early Childhood Advisory Council and with that, remove the following stakeholders from the early learning policy making table: child care providers from each Congressional District; Building Blocks, Excel by Five, The Center for Education Innovation, nSpark, Mississippi State Extension Service, and more.

 

LOL!

The Hechinger Report dutifully laid the groundwork for SB2274 and the one model takeover of all early learning (by the Pre-K Collaborative) last week espousing the following:

 “But many child care workers and advocates don’t trust the Department of Human Services. In 2012, the agency rolled out a controversial policy requiring all parents who receive child care assistance from the state to scan their fingerprints when picking up and dropping off children.”

 Is it possible that these investigative reporters do not know that the individual responsible for the large scale alienation of providers – through the purchase of the finger scanning payment system (designed to reduce the amount of child care assistance low-income parents received as a large savings to the agency) – Jill Dent, is now the Director of Early Childhood Education at MDE!  (Have I mentioned Rachel Canter?  Click here.) We would not trust our right to hold an operating license with MDE for sure!  LOL!

 

Stolen Joy!  Industry-Wide Demoralization! 

We might need “a home”, but feel the influence and interviews in the Hechinger series of articles and its very narrow collection of expertise, its report of a defunct opportunity (T.E.A.C.H.) and the touting of a twice failed plan (Race to the Top) have more than demonstrated the leadership child care providers would be subjected to under the proposed Early Childhood Services Interagency Council. We fear it might be as disproportionate and hateful as we believe the Hechinger Series to be thus far.

Adversity is the rule for child care and working families when law gives some state actors the upper hand, so we wisely prefer and support a balance of power. Technology and the State Early Childhood Advisory Council make that possible.

 

Sticking with SECAC!

Child care providers wish to have equal input at the policy making table at SECAC, the ONLY place where we have been welcomed.

We feel the research and work done through SECAC’s Blueprint for Early Education encompasses the genius, expertise, combined resources and sustainability necessary to affordably improve child outcomes in all Mississippi communities (benefitting all constituents) – not just a selected few. It is the least likely to cause controversy, the least likely to have a Disparate Impact and the least likely to supplant the embedded private child care industry. (Click here.)

So, we think we will keep our seats, and ask the Hechinger reporters to kindly have one.

Not Expendable!  Keep Mississippi Working

The private child care industry is Mississippi’s workforce support system and we congratulate Governor Bryant on the creation of 2,500 new jobs in Clinton!

 

The Legislature’s Oversight Agency –

PEER’s Objective Evaluation

The Joint Legislative Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review of the Early Learning Collaborative (PEER: The Mississippi Legislature’s Oversight Agency) does not recommend increased funding or additional staff for the Pre-K Collaborative.

In an Executive Summary, PEER reports:

“MDE awarded funding to four collaboratives that utilized a prekindergarten curriculum found through rigorous research to have “no discernable effects” on student learning.

…after the first full year of implementation, prekindergarteners in the program’s participating collaboratives achieved the end-of-the-year target score on the Kindergarten Readiness Assessment less often than children enrolled in other public pre-kindergartens.”

I have just checked and you may check as well if you like – no desperate child care smear campaign has changed those findings.  (Click here.)

 

 

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