Should video surveillance cameras be mandatory in Minnesota child care centers?

The bruises on state Rep. Nolan West’s 3-month-old daughter raised enough red flags that his wife photographed the marks on her tiny body. But, the couple figured, bruises happen.

“Her motherly instincts were kicking into overdrive but everybody around her was like, ‘Don’t worry about it,’ because we didn’t know any better,” West said.

Then two workers at their daughter’s child care center were captured by video cameras slamming and flipping other babies.

Now the Republican from Blaine is on a quest to keep other children from being abused at day cares. He wants to mandate that centers add video cameras and keep the footage for months, and require that health care providers educate parents on how to recognize signs of abuse and report it.

Those plans face an uncertain fate in the final weeks of the legislative session at the State Capitol. Many child care providers oppose the video surveillance requirement and say it won’t prevent abuse. The idea has been significantly scaled back from what West and some families who support the measure originally envisioned.

After two employees of the Small World Learning Center in Blaine were caught on video violently handling babies last summer, West initially wanted to require video surveillance at all licensed day cares. But the bill he proposed this year focuses only on centers, many of which already have such cameras, not in-home providers. He has cut back his plan for how long they would have to keep the footage, from 90 to 60 days.

During recent negotiations he agreed to have the regulation only apply to centers that have had a maltreatment violation.

“It’s a terrible change,” West said. “A maltreatment violation is after something horrible has happened, and you might not even get the maltreatment violation if you don’t have the cameras.”

He described the measure as a first step and said as long as he’s in the Legislature he will continue working on strengthening protections for kids in child care.

Meanwhile, many providers have been decrying the potential video mandate as the wrong approach. They flooded lawmakers with letters citing concerns with the cost to add the equipment and retain the footage, as well as privacy issues for kids and staff members.

“People are already really struggling with the bottom line. There’s not huge margins of profit in child care, and so that would require passing on those costs to parents,” said Shannon O’Connor, owner and director of South Metro Montessori School in Lakeville, noting that the configuration of their building would make it costly and complicated to add cameras at their outdoor play space.

She said the mandate would hit smaller child care providers harder.

Even the latest version of the requirement that only focuses on places with maltreatment violations is problematic, O’Connor said. She noted centers often get maltreatment violations when a child is accidentally left unattended for a few minutes.

Video cameras did not prevent abuse from happening at Small World Learning Center and it would be more effective to boost child care workers’ pay to increase professionalism in the field, add a new training requirement around abuse or tighten background study requirements, said Clare Sanford, a vice president at New Horizon Academy and government relations chair for the Minnesota Child Care Association. She estimated about half of the members in their association already use video cameras.

Sanford questioned why legislators would focus on only child care centers and not in-home family day cares or other places that serve vulnerable populations, like older adults and people with disabilities.

“Child care programs have a staffing crisis,” Sanford noted. No one is watching video feeds all day and it can eat up a lot of time to track down a family’s requested video clip, she said. One compromise they have suggested, she said, is requiring a physician’s note of injury before a family can request to review a clip.

West, who has a videography company, called cost concerns overblown. He estimated adding cameras to a facility’s infant and toddler rooms would cost at most $1,000 to $2,500, and maintaining them would cost $600 or less a year. He noted that his bill includes $500,000 in grant dollars to help providers add the equipment.

His pared-back video requirement is included in the House’s children and family-focused budget bill, but hasn’t seen the same movement in the DFL-controlled Senate.

It is one of a handful of bills West proposed this year focused on child abuse. Another measure he hopes will pass in the final weeks of session would mandate that health care providers need to provide written materials to parents educating them on recognizing the signs of physical abuse in infants and how to report suspected abuse. It remains to be seen whether the education requirement will make it into a key House health budget bill.

The Senate Health and Human Services Committee this year didn’t discuss the idea of having hospitals and health care providers do general education for families, said Chairwoman Melissa Wiklund, DFL-Bloomington. She said she will be looking to learn more about the proposed video camera requirement and better understand West’s vision for the change as lawmakers head into negotiations to merge the House and Senate bills.

West proposed a couple other measures inspired by what happened to his daughter and other kids at the Blaine center, which are not poised to become law. Another bill would have set the mandatory minimum sentence for malicious punishment of a child at a year.

Attorneys recently reached a plea deal for one of the two women captured on camera at Small World Learning Center. Elizabeth Augusta Wiemerslage, 23, faces 90 days in jail. The case against the other woman, 24-year-old Chloe Kaye Johnson, is ongoing and her next court date is in May.

Janice DeGonda’s daughter was among the children who suffered at the hands of those staffers, according to video footage. Her daughter began to come home with scratches and marks about a month after starting at the day care, she said, but they weren’t significant enough for the first-time parents to think it was abuse and the center offered explanations “that seemed plausible.”

Then, one day, her husband was changing their daughter’s diaper and saw bruising across her stomach, groin and behind. They ended up taking their child to the hospital and spoke with the Blaine Police Department, she said. Not long after that, a detective told them camera footage showed one of the workers “violently flipping her over from her back to her stomach.”

Five babies in the women’s day care room were injured, court documents state.

“If it wasn’t for this footage that we had, it’s likely that these women wouldn’t have been, A, caught, or B, charged with anything,” said DeGonda of Coon Rapids. She wants video cameras in all child care centers, not just those with a maltreatment violation.

“I don’t want another family to go through what we went through,” she said.