Mr. CORMAN. Mr. Hawley?

Mr. HAWLEY. No questions.

Mr. CORMAN. Thank you, sir. We appreciate your contribution. We hope particularly in this very difficult field of confidentiality and accounting that we can work with you, and with people in the legal aid services. I believe the difficulties are tougher for you in some respects, but I think we can learn a lot from you on how to approach the problem.

Mr. LOTRIDGE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would be happy to work with the committee to any extent that the committee would like for us to, and it is a tough problem, not only for legal services, but for

everyone.

Thank you very much.

Mr. CORMAN. Our next witness is Mr. Thomas Seale. Mr. Seale, we are pleased to welcome you to the committee.

STATEMENT OF THOMAS JAY SEALE III, PRESIDENT-ELECT, ALLIANCE OF CHILD DEVELOPMENT ASSOCIATION

Mr. SEALE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I intend to be brief. I would like my statement entered into the record.

Mr. CORMAN. Without objection, it will appear in the record.

Mr. SEALE. I am T. Jay Seale III, president-elect of the Alliance of Child Development Association, a nonprofit corporation representing day care providers from both public and private sectors. The organization has been in existence 3 years and its members are from Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arizona, California, and elsewhere in the southeast. By profession, I am an attorney and have represented day care centers as a part of my general law practice in Hammond, La. Among the concerns advanced by the impressive list of witnesses before this committee, I wish to hold up for your consideration a matter which may seem small in terms of the total scope of title XX and the President's social service bloc grant proposal. But to the providers of day care services in the country and to the mothers of children in those day care centers, and to the public administrators of AFDC programs, the subject of my testimony is critical. Repeal the Federal Interagency Day Care Requirements provided in section 2002 (a) (2) of the Social Security Act. This is provided for in section 109 of the current bill.

Let me explain why it is necessary to repeal these ratios before commenting on and discussing alternatives to it.

The Federal interagency day care requirements (FIDCR) were developed in 1968 and made statutory under section 522(d) of the Economic Opportunity Act. What brought the subiect of ratios in day care centers to the attention of the Congress and HEW was the need to structure programs passed and funded under the "Great Society" initiative of President Johnson. Included in these programs was the Head Start concept, through which Congress recognized that the preschool experience is critical to the developmental process, and that stimulation of the child at this point in his life can provide the impetus. for real achievement. This notion needs no scientific validation for day care providers, whose day-to-day experience is a living testimonial to the correctness of that proposition.

Mr. CORMAN. Are you talking about the staffing ratio or other things in addition?

Mr. SEALE. I am talking about the staffing ratio in particular.

The need for Federal guidelines in head start programs resulted from the fact that many such programs were contracted to individuals and organizations with no day care experience. I know the committee is interested in the report that will come out in October of 1977, and I know the committee is anxious to see what the staffing ratios are, but there is a recent study which has been completed, and done by Dr. John Holloman of the University of Texas at San Antonio, and others. Dr. Holloman used job analysis techniques in the study, and it was completed in February of this year, and I brought a copy for the committee. Basically, the conclusion of these reports is that the quality of care in the child care center may be a function of the training of day care workers rather than the number of day care workers.

Dr. Holloman also suggested that there is a need for high staff ratios in the FIDCR's is based on "discontinuance mothering" studies on monkeys and on children in orphanages, hardly a basis for day care research.

I wish to point out the plight of the day-care centers. These ratios are frozen in the law. They are shackled to the title XX appropriation in such a way that States must comply with them even if to do so denies social services which are needed and which are already funded. Various attempts have been made to suspend or repeal that section, and I am sure the committee is well aware of all of them. These have met with failure not because Congress thought the ratios were good, but rather because the proposals that repealed the ratios were attached to other provisions which have not been successful in the legislative process, or which have been vetoed.

In the meantime many States have begun to reel under the oppressive weight of these standards. In Louisiana, the best day care people in the State in positions of responsibility have found that a ratio of 1 adult to each 12 children is adequate, although not ideal for preschoolers.

The FIDCR ratio is 1:4 for the same age group. Thus the cost of compliance in Louisiana is to triple the labor cost in the day care equation.

Mr. CORMAN. Do you break down the ages at all between 6 weeks and 6 years in that 1:12, or do you anticipate a mix?

Mr. SEALE. That is an average based on 4-year-olds, Mr. Chairman. I would be glad to break down the ratio for you as best I can from recollection. In Louisiana the minimum ratio for infants under care would be 1:4, whereas the ratio mandated by the FIDCR's for the same age group might be 1:1, for instance, for infants 6 weeks of age, and on the whole it is proper to say that the staff ratios for the FIDCR's would double and in some cases triple the requirements of staff for the same age groups in Louisiana.

Now, I certainly am not armed or prepared to debate whether or not Louisiana or any other State's ratios are better or more accurate or more plausible than the FIDCRs, but these are the ratios which were in force in Louisiana until it became necessary to enforce title XX's ratios.

When the Long-Mondale bill came through the conference- committee, it was vetoed by President Ford, resulting in the legislation

before this committee. He indicated that he vetoed it, as I recall from the message, because he felt the bill was inflationary and contrary to administration policy toward the States.

My point, Mr. Chairman, is that on behalf of the day care providers, we are not ones to be caught up in this debate in the highest echelons of government. Our immediate concern is not with finding employment with welfare recipients, although such a program is needed, and Heaven help the work of this committee and others to find such a program. Nor is our concern finding a way to pay for additional staff under FIDCR's, especially when they come without training.

Our chief concern is that the ratios be repealed, at least until the study is done. In short, we can no longer afford to be caught up in other people's philosophical battles, Mr. Chairman.

We cannot afford to have to have another bill defeated on grounds other than the ratios themselves.

Louisiana had 225 day care centers participating in the AFDC program the month prior to implementation of the FIDCR's. As soon as implementation was ordered and Secretary Matthews began making efforts to enforce the standards, 65 day-care centers-almost 30 percent-dropped out of the program, leaving almost 400 children uncared for, not to mention the plight of non-AFDC children in those centers which closed.

Many of the remaining centers are on the verge of dropping out and are waiting to see what Congress does to relieve the problem before deciding. All of the remaining centers are operating in violation of the law. and out of compliance. They risk audit by HEW with the penalties provided.

I would submit to you that this is true in Texas and in Arkansas and in Oklahoma, and I am certain in many, many other States.

Recommendations: Of all the legislation before the Congress on the subject, we feel most comfortable with H.R. 14044 by Mr. Treen of Louisiana. This measure simply repeals the FIDCR's. In doing so it tracks section 109 of H.R. 12175 almost verbatim.

The reason we prefer the Treen bill to the bloc-grant proposal is that we feel passage of the bloc-grant proposal will be delayed in Congress by the Democratic and Republican conventions and the Presidential campaigns, or at the very least be caught in a partisan election year debate for the months to come. Of course, there are the elections in November.

We have other concerns with the bloc-grant proposal, such as the fact that the ceiling on training funds is only one-fourth the amount needed for training. And one State administrator told me that he was afraid the money for AFDC care would be "razooed" to pay educational and medicaid costs rather than to provide day care services, if categorical grants are dropped.

We have no quarrel with the Senate amendments to 12455, which I believe are known as the Mondale-Packwood proposal, except here again we feel that repeal of the FIDCR's, provision for which is included in H.R. 12455, might be jeopardized by a Presidential veto in the same way the Long-Mondale bill was.

We cannot afford to have repeal of section 2002 of title XX blocked because someone objected to some other provision.

Thank you for letting me respond to such a small provision in the legislation.

[The prepared statement follows:]

STATEMENT OF T. JAY SEALE III, PRESIDENT-ELECT, ALLIANCE OF CHILD DEVELOPMENT ASSOCIATION

Distinguished members of the committee, I am T. Jay Seale, III, President elect of the Alliance of Child Development Association, a non-profit corporation representing day care providers from both public and private sectors. The organization has been in existence 3 years and its members are from Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arizona, California and elsewhere in the south-east. By profession, I am an attorney and have represented day care centers as a part of my general law practice in Hammond, Louisiana.

PURPOSE OF THE TESTIMONY

Among the concerns advanced by the impressive list of witnesses before this committee, I wish to hold up for your consideration a matter which may seem small in terms of the total scope of Title XX and the President's Social Service Block Grant Proposal. But to the providers of day care services in the country and to the mothers of children in those day care centers, and to the public administrators of AFDC programs, the subject of my testimony is critical: postponement of the Federal Interagency Day Care Requirements provided in Section 2002 (A) (2) of the Social Security Act. This is provided for in Section 109 of the current bill.

Let me explain why it is necessary to postpone these ratios before commenting on the bill and discussing alternatives to it.

LEGISLATIVE HISTORY

The Federal Interagency Day Care Requirements (FIDCR) were developed in 1968 and made statutory under Section 522 (D) of the Economic Opportunity Act. What brought the subject of ratios in day care centers to the attention of the Congress and HEW was the need to structure programs passed and funded under the "Great Society" initiative of President Johnson. Included in these programs was the Head Start concept, through which Congress recognized that the preschool experience is critical to the developmental process, and that stimulation of the child at this point in his life can provide the impetus for real achievement. This notion needs no scientific validation for day care providers, whose day-today experience is a living testimonial to the correctness of that proposition.

The need for Federal guidelines in Head Start programs resulted from the fact that many such programs were contracted to individuals and organizations with no day care experience. It thus became important to establish some sort of minimum requirements in order to determine two things: first, whether programs were of sufficient quality so that the developmental experience of the children in the centers would be positive and helpful; and second, so that HEW could monitor and supervise the expenditure of public money. Hence the FIDCRS were developed for the Head Start situation, one which was no doubt a laboratory concept at its time.

SCIENTIFIC RATIONALE UNDERLYING FIDCRS

The scientific rationale for the staff ratios embodied in the minimum requirements of 1968 cannot now be determined. It is clear that no research existed on which to base regulatory decisions. But out of an abundance of caution, and a gut-level belief that low ratios must be better than high ones, HEW set the standards at their present level. This was an attempt to concentrate staff attention and care on Head Start children whose culturally deprived background needed the special, remedial nourishing of individualized attention.

Today there is much controversy over various requirements in the FIDCRS and the impact they have. What seems to be clear is that high staff ratios do not insure quality at all: in fact, many of the Head Start centers were initially characterized by very poor care in spite of their high ratios, illustrating the point that it is the quality of the care given, not the number of care givers, that determines the success of a child care program. This conclusion is borne out in nonpublic programs, as well.

It is the consensus of opinion from the academic community, I am told, that no research exists in all the literature from the broad fields of education, psychology, or child development, which indicates conclusively that low ratios are better than high ones, or worse. It is for that very reason that Congress commissioned the much-discussed day care study by HEW, on which a report is due to Congress by October, 1977. This report is a $5,000,000 study to determine what ratios are required for what levels of developmental achievement. No one can be found at HEW, nor in the academic community at large, who will come before this committee with research establishing the need for the stringent child-staff ratios of the FIDCRs. I am told Senator Buckley may have some research data which supports FIDCR ratios, but he has not brought it forward as he was requested to do by Senator Long's Committee on Finance when it considered S 2425, the Long-Mondale Bill.

The only recent study done on the subject of child care ratios has been done at the University of Texas at San Antonio by Doctor John Holloman and others. Job Analysis techniques were used in this study, which was completed in February of this year; that report strongly suggests that the quality factor in child care centers may be a function of the training of day care workers, rather than the number of them. I wish to file a copy of this report in the record of these proceedings.

Doctor Holloman, the author of the report, comments that indications in the literature which suggested a need for high staff-child ratios were based on "discontinuance mothering" studies of monkeys in laboratories and children in orphanages conducted by Dr. H. F. Harlow, and that this research should have no application to the day care setting we see in the mid-seventies.

EFFECT OF IMPLEMENTATION OF FIDCRS

The current day care licensing pattern is of state certification and supervision of centers. All states now have standards, but these standards vary immensely from region to region, as you would expect. The FIDCRS on the other hand, do not vary at all, nor permit much flexibility. But these uniform ratios do have a differential effect from one state to another, and may even cause different problems within a state. Considerable differences exist in the purchase of care (with federal funds) given for preschool age children in the states of Federal Region VI, for example. In Oklahoma the state purchases child care from private facilities such as voluntary or independent centers. In Louisiana only a small portion of child care services are paid for by state and federal funds in Title XX type centers with the great majority of children integrated into independent or voluntary centers. Over 80% of the children cared for with federal funds in the State of Texas are in Title XX type centers, which admit few or no children other than those coming from economically disadvantaged families. Only a small proportion of these children are cared for in fully ethnically and racially integrated centers. Federal regulations require that school age children not be segregated; yet in some of these child care programs, implementation of the FIDCR perpetuate segregation because of the staffing patterns, locations in the various communities, and also because of the requirement that social services be an integral part of the child caring services.

Relatively few individuals outside of pertinent personnel of the Department of HEW and the State Welfare Department are aware of the problems being caused because of specific FIDCRS. Various advocacy groups and other organizations are concerned with only a few specific areas and are not completely aware of all of the ramifications of the various requirements. Nearly all child-care organizations make claims for their interest in the health, welfare and development of all children. Yet they are debating with each other on specific issues and few of these organizations are considering the impact that policies and procedures have on children generally-those in federally supported facilities, those in private facilities and those under informal arrangements.

Relatively few of the issues have been openly discussed with the ramifications and consequences applied to children of all backgrounds. Many advocacy and other special interest groups have conferences in which their leaders reiterate the same issues over and over again and pat each other on the back. This type of conference or forum continues to make for controversy and confuse the legislators in terms of the issues, the requirements, and the need for legislation.