A Greenwood child care provider is fighting to prevent the Mississippi Department of Human Services from implementing finger scanners in child care centers across the state.
Debbie Ellis, owner of The Learning Tree and Susie M. Brooks child care centers and a spokesperson for the Mississippi Child Care Coalition, said in a statement that the proposed system “burdens parents with a costly and time-consuming process that overly identifies and stigmatizes low-income children receiving child care assistance.”
The use of biometric finger scanning, which DHS planned to start beginning Thursday, has been delayed. It would require parents who receive federally subsidized child care vouchers to use scanners when they sign their children in and out of day care. According to DHS, the system would save the state money because the state would no longer have to pay for children who were absent from day care. The federal funding child care centers receive would vary, depending on attendance.
Sixteen child care facilities in Leflore County will be forced to implement the system.
The system was halted after a Hinds County chancery judge ruled that DHS did not comply with the state law that governs how agencies make rules, called the Administrative Procedures Act. The DHS did not release an economic impact statement and is now forced to restart rulemaking for the system.
Ellis supported that ruling. “As business people, we need to know about these things. They’ve left too many questions unanswered,” she said today.
The earliest the system could take effect now is mid-December. Redrawing the rules, however, would make no difference to Ellis.
“I support no part of it. I have learned to not trust anything DHS tells me,” she said.
According to Ellis, DHS began purchasing the biometric machines on Sept. 30, 2011. She did not hear about the new system until she received a contract from Xerox, the company that manufactures the scanners, this October.
“We had no input; we had no oversight,” she said.
Ellis stressed the same concerns that child care providers across the state have raised. Privacy is among the most fundamental of these issues.
“From a constitutional standpoint, this is wrong,” said Ellis.
Parents are concerned that the government can track not only the comings and goings of their children but also valuable information about the parents, according to Ellis. Some are worried about the courts having access to criminal records and the like, she said.
DHS claims that the scans are not fingerprints and that no information is stored.
Most important to Ellis, though, is the way the scanners would stigmatize certain children and not others.
“When I’ve had low-income children in my day care, I’ve always held that information in strict confidence. I went to great lengths to keep that information private, sometimes even from the teachers,” she said. “It isn’t only embarrassing for the parents who have to scan every time they sign their children in and out; it also affects the children, and their relationships with one another.”
Ellis said that one of the key reasons low-income children succeed in day cares of mixed income is that in day care they do not feel the stigma of being low-income. “They fit in with the other kids. It’s not this group of children versus that one,” she said.
According to DHS, the scanners could save federal dollars and thus increase the number of low-income children able to receive quality day care. In a press release DHS stated that the finger scanners will work to “maximize federal dollars so that more low-income families in Mississippi have access to quality child care.”
DHS claimed that 8,000 children are unable to receive child care.
The projected cost for the finger scanning program, which is funded through the federal Child Care Development Fund, is $1.6 million per fiscal year.
• Contact Jeanie Riess at 581-7235 or jriess@gwcommonwealth.com.
