When you make a tax-deductible gift by midnight, your donation to KQED will doubled up to $25,000! Help us meet our year-end goal and help KQED start 2025 form a place of strength!
The fire alarm is seen in the infant room at Kidango Eary Care & Education in San José on Wednesday, Dec. 11, 2024. New state fire codes and regulations have delayed openings for infant and toddler care centers such as Kidango. (Juliana Yamada/KQED)
The renovations are done. Diaper changing tables and cribs are in place. Teachers are hired.
Dozens of preschools and child care centers across California are just waiting for the licenses they need to care for infants and toddlers, but a change in state fire regulations has disrupted their operations and forced them to turn away or delay enrolling thousands of children.
“We already have a shortage of infant and toddler care. This just exasperates it,” said Stacey Scarborough, director of an Early Head Start program for Venice Family Clinic, a health care and social service organization in Los Angeles.
Sponsored
She said her agency had almost finished converting the ground floor of a homeless family shelter into an Early Head Start center when she heard about an updated state building code, limiting five babies and toddlers per classroom unless the child care facility has a sprinkler system, fire walls and other fire safety equipment.
Architects and contractors didn’t know they had to install sprinklers, which meant Scarborough would need to spend more time and money to make the upgrade — or lower enrollment and staff and risk losing her federal grant.
“It hits everything,” she said.
The regulation went into effect in 2023, but a lack of communication by state regulators left child care centers in the dark. They found out about it earlier this year when they applied for licenses to care for children under 3 and failed to obtain fire clearance. The rule change comes at a time when many child care centers are seeking to serve more younger kids as they lose 3- and 4-year-olds to California’s expansion of transitional kindergarten and other public preschool programs.
To reconfigure their operations, centers have to meet a different set of health and safety regulations for infant and toddler care, including adhering to a strict ratio of one adult for up to four children. Scarborough planned on grouping eight infants and toddlers in a classroom with two teachers. She said the new building code limiting a classroom to five didn’t align with licensing rules.
“It was kind of a random number that didn’t make sense because we’re already set up for eight,” Scarborough said.
State fire officials said the updated building code conforms to international standards and that it makes sense to place strict limits on the number of infants and toddlers allowed in a room because they can’t evacuate on their own during an emergency.
“They’re non-ambulatory, as we call them, and so we add extra levels of safety precautions to add more time,” Fire Marshal Daniel Berlant told KQED.
Berlant acknowledged a “huge lack of communication of the rollout of the code.” The rule applies to new facilities, he said, but many local fire inspectors assumed that child care centers applying for a new license also had to comply with it.
“While the fire code explicitly states that these requirements are not retroactive — they’re only for new facilities — many [child care centers] were going and getting this new license type and they were selecting the boxes, saying they’re a new license,” he said. “They were a new license, but they weren’t a new facility. And so that created a lot of confusion with local fire marshals.”
Advocates pushed back against the updated code and criticized regulators for failing to consult with them.
“We operate in terms of ratios. So as long as we have enough adults per kiddo, we can get those kiddos out of the building,” said Melanee Cottril, executive director of Head Start California.
Centers are required to have cribs on wheels so they can evacuate babies during emergencies, she added.
Her association, along with several other child care organizations, surveyed 320 providers across the state in August and 34% said they responded to the code change by closing newly renovated classrooms, reducing slots for infants and toddlers or seeking estimates for fire sprinklers so they could salvage their plans. The survey estimated that more than 2,250 infants and toddlers lost or could lose access to center-based care.
Under pressure from child care advocates, lawmakers passed a bill in September that gives providers a break until the Office of the State Fire Marshal and the California Department of Social Services, which oversees child care licensing, come up with new occupancy standards for child care centers.
Last week, a child care provider reached out to a Sacramento Metropolitan Fire District inspector to clarify the rules and was told by email that if she wanted to open an infant care room in her preschool, the whole building would need fire sprinklers.
Another provider in Sacramento said she had enough indoor and outdoor space to enroll more infants and toddlers but canceled her plans when she got a $1 million estimate to add sprinklers and other plumbing to increase water pressure.
“Child care is a low-margin business. None of us are in this to make money, and trying to dig your way out of a million-dollar upfront debt was a deal-breaker for us,” said Francesca Winn, co-owner of Acorn to Oak nursery and preschool.
She said roughly 1,000 families are on her waitlist for child care, and she’s disappointed she couldn’t help more of them.
Margarita Saucedo, the director of program development for Kidango, a subsidized child care provider in the South Bay and East Bay, said a fire inspector refused to come to a center she tried to re-license for infant care in San José until fire sprinklers were installed.
She said the work would have cost about $150,000 and would have forced the closure of other classrooms at the center for several months.
“We would have a period of time where families would not have child care. What do we do for all these families?” Saucedo said.
Saucedo said that after lawmakers granted providers a reprieve, she received fire clearance but is still awaiting approval from state licensing regulators before she can open classrooms to infants and toddlers.
Scarborough was also awaiting final approvals from licensing to open the Early Head Start classroom at the family shelter.
Berlant said starting next year, his office, along with the California Department of Social Services, will consult with child care facility operators, local fire officials and other stakeholders as they develop a new building code. He said it will also be important to set standards for existing facilities that can’t “do all those costly retrofits” and figure out how to “provide additional support or programs to help new facilities meet these codes.”
“We recognize that access to child care is critical, as is the safety of our children and our workers … but in particular in child care facilities where children are not able to evacuate on their own,” Berlant said.
Sponsored
lower waypoint
Stay in touch. Sign up for our daily newsletter.
To learn more about how we use your information, please read our privacy policy.
We've all done it – felt the relief of canceled plans. But Atlantic staff writer Derek Thompson says Americans are spending more time alone than ever before, and that it’s affecting our personalities,...