KY health officials tell lawmakers abuse and neglect getting worse in child care
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Child care abuse reports and penalties have steadily increased since pandemic.
- State agency launched pilot program to train and monitor facilities with risks.
- Daycare staffing shortages and behavioral issues strain worker performance.
Violations of health and safety standards in Kentucky child care centers are growing worse, state health officials acknowledged Wednesday in testimony to a legislative committee.
The hearing followed a Herald-Leader report in June that found that Kentucky has, without public discussion, seen a steady climb in substantiated reports of abuse and neglect in its child care centers since the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Problems identified by the newspaper included inadequate daycare staffing and injuries to children such as broken bones, burns, bruises and cuts.
State health officials who declined to be interviewed by the newspaper in June were instructed to appear before the Interim Joint Committee on Families and Children on Wednesday.
The Kentucky Division of Regulated Child Care has launched a pilot project to provide child care centers with training and close monitoring when they face a violation that could lead to serious consequences if not quickly fixed, Melissa Moore, the agency’s director, told lawmakers.
So far this year, five child care centers have volunteered to participate in the project, Moore said.
According to data Moore presented to the committee, her office is on track to issue about 380 civil penalties for violations to Kentucky child care centers by the end of 2025, resulting in $263,628 in fines collected so far this year. That’s up from from 360 civil penalties issued in 2024 and 290 in 2023.
The majority of those penalties are for Type A violations, which include violations that cause harm or imminent threat of harm or danger to a child, or failure to perform the necessary background checks on employees, Moore said.
The numbers of daycare license revocations, denials of new licenses, emergency license suspensions — all are higher so far in 2025 compared to the last couple of years, Moore added.
No member of the committee asked Moore or her colleagues why the health and safety problems are getting markedly worse at Kentucky child care centers, but one lawmaker said he has a theory.
The committee’s co-chairman, Sen. Danny Carroll, R-Paducah, said in his past experience helping to run a daycare through the Easter Seals West Kentucky, the behavior of young children in child care has become much worse since the pandemic. His daycare had to institute a “two strikes” policy to remove children whose repeated bad behavior disrupted the center for everyone else, Carroll said.
“When you get put in a situation, when you’ve got kids with major behavioral issues, from time to time, staff are gonna react improperly,” Carroll said.
“I felt sorry for those folks, the things that they had to put up with, getting punched, getting hit, getting spit on, getting cussed at, and that was a daily thing for some of our classes — and staff after staff leaving,” Carroll said. “And I know this is common throughout the entire state. Providers have told me that. So I think we need to look at this a little bit closer.”
Carroll said he might file a bill in the 2026 General Assembly that could shield a child care center from regulatory liability if the offender is an employee who violated facility policy and the facility responded in good faith.
It’s not fair for the state to close child care centers for incidents the daycares could not have prevented, he said.
“When I see the staff there from day to day, (asking) ‘Are we going to have a job tomorrow?’ When I see parents that walk by, (asking) ‘Are you all going to be open tomorrow?’ When I see a five-star center get hammered by the media for something that we as a center couldn’t control,” Carroll told Moore. “And I know that our center was not the only one that went through that. That troubles me.”
Moore told Carroll she agreed that Kentucky child care providers are facing additional stress because of poor behavior by some children.
“It is a grave concern for us,” Moore said. “It is the reason why we created the targeted technical support option, because we are seeing an increase in the behavior for children and realize that providers can use additional assistance.”
After the hearing, Moore and Inspector General Tricia Steward declined to discuss the problem of abuse and neglect in child care centers with the Herald-Leader.
In its June reporting, the Herald-Leader found that at least 11 Kentucky daycare employees who were identified in abuse and neglect cases during the first eight months of 2024 ended up charged by police, usually with misdemeanor assault. Such charges could bring up to a year in jail.
But court records show these cases either tended to be dismissed — and in one case, quickly expunged from public view in court records — or disposed of with two years probation, not jail time, provided the defendants commit no further offenses during that period.
Industry experts told the Herald-Leader that one big problem is inadequate staffing, not just in numbers but in quality.
One-third of the daycare industry’s workforce in Kentucky disappeared between 2019 and 2024, discouraged by an average hourly wage of only $13.98, scant benefits and stressful job duties. In some of the 2024 incident reports reviewed by the newspaper, staff accused of abusing or neglecting children were barely out of high school and had only a few months of relevant job experience.
