Quality Care

The National Academy of Sciences’ landmark report, From Neurons to Neighborhoods made a statement regarding the difficulty involved with finding a quality day care to care for a child with a disability. 

Like all families with young children, those whose children have a
disability or special health care need are faced with the challenges of
finding good quality affordable child care. But the inability or
unwillingness of many child care providers to accept children with
disabilities, transportation and other logistical problems, difficulties with
coordinating early intervention and child care services, and the scarcity of
appropriately trained caregivers made the effort to find any child care
a tremendous challenge for these families.

Although Title III stands to help the families of a child with a disability, it is also placing a day care employee who is untrained to take care of a child with many needs. A parent of a child with a disability made this comment:

Day care after day care was filled with people who had no experience
with disabled children, no fault of theirs. The last day care, our third or
fourth program, I remember I would pick up my son and listen about what
art projects and things the other children did all day. The only report I
would hear about my son was whether he did or didn’t cry all day.

This report shows that the caregivers were not particularly qualified to take care of the child with the disability. Although Title III stands to make sure children with disabilities can attend these centers, do the centers participate in trainings to learn how to help the child? Are classroom ratios lowered to accommodate the needs in the center? How often is more staffing hired? It seems as if Title III is trying to help, but what are the centers doing?