New York City day care providers are speaking out against city and state plans to implement a series of safety enforcement procedures that could put them out of business.

Area day care providers who are members of the social justice group Families United for Racial and Economic Equality (FUREE) and staff from the Pratt Center for Community Development held a press conference at the Bedford-Stuyvesant-based Kwame’s Day Care Center to talk about the negative effects of the city’s new policy on emergency egress, or access to emergency exits.

Under what was for months a yet-to-be finalized new emergency egress policy, the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) and the state’s Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS) conducted varied inspections of local day care centers.

New rules required all of the state’s day care providers to have rooftop access or a backyard exit for their facilities, as a means of emergency exit in case of fire. But in New York City, buildings are often too close to provide for backyard exit space and with some day care centers in large buildings, rooftop access is not always allowed.

Many of these inspections have led to day care shutdowns, FUREE members said; and most of the closings were actually unnecessary. “You just got to the point where you thought, is it worth it anymore?” said Sandra Robinson, a FUREE member and day care provider who complained that an inspector not only visited her day care center this past September, but that she had also had three prior inspections in 2005. Each time, she claimed, the inspectors came and measured the exact same emergency exit areas in her center.

More than 550 providers have received violations since the inspections began and operators themselves have closed some seventy-three day care centers, because they couldn’t meet the new requirements. “These day care providers are people from the neighborhood,” adds Beverly Corbin, board chair at FUREE, “people that our children know.”

“With the Health Department constantly at your door, it’s stressful,” Robinson said. “A lot of people, you know, depending on how long you’ve been doing this work – and some people have been doing it for over 20 or 30 years – some people have just said, enough is enough!”

City Councilman Al Vann says that there “needs to be more clarity, more consistency. In most of these cases some minor repairs are needed to meet the egress issues.”

“We respect the fact that the government is [trying] to err on the side of safety,” he added. “But they should definitely not be putting people out of business.”

The staff at the Pratt Center for Community Development point out in their research report, Stop the Shutdowns: A Look at Group and Family Day Care &Egress Policy in Brooklyn, that the day care closings will affect the quality and quantity of childcare in communities of color.

The report found that in Brooklyn’s East New York, Red Hook, and Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhoods, there is already a lack of affordable childcare services. But if the new laws continue to be enforced in the manner inspectors have been enforcing them for the past few months, some 84 percent of day care providers in these three neighborhoods will be forced to close.

“In low-income neighborhoods, where day care slots are at a premium, losing current or future [day care providers] will have effects far beyond the child who no longer has early childhood education,” the report concludes. “The parents of this child can no longer go to work and the livelihood of the provider has been taken away, eroding the economic stability of the neighborhood.”