A Fort Collins day care center that was allowed to operate on probationary licenses a half-dozen times over the past six years before it was forced in November to change ownership — from violations that ranged from child abuse and neglect to falsifying records to cover up other problems — has child care and safety advocates questioning why it took so long.

Those same advocates, some of them parents impacted by the state’s decisions, are also questioning how the owner — Sara Brownell of The Learning Experience day care chain — has surrendered ownership of one facility while maintaining ownership of another in Loveland, where similar violations have been recorded and probationary licenses issued, records show.

State officials defended their decision to allow Brownell to continue operating TLE on Boardwalk Drive in Fort Collins until early November, when the facility was denied a renewal of its license, saying it wasn’t until mounting evidence made it clear the state needed to intervene.

But that didn’t happen until after the Colorado Department of Early Childhood had repeatedly cited the facility with dozens of safety and care violations dating to 2017, records show.

Ultimately, state officials were flagged in September 2022 to several problems at the facility by a day care worker who said she witnessed children being mistreated and rules being flouted, according to a copy of the correspondence obtained by The Gazette.

They included allegations of unattended infants, sleeping staff, unqualified workers, infliction of corporal punishment, falsified fire drill logs and training certifications and, in the most serious case, a child choking as staffers untrained in CPR failed to call 911.

“I believe that I almost witnessed the death of a child that day,” the worker, Debbi Potts, wrote the officials.

State inspectors confirmed several of Potts’ allegations, records show.

Pleading for a reprieve, Brownell wrote state officials to say she’d taken her eye off her workers, transitioned to part-time work — taking a three-week European vacation in the process — and wrongly relied on her staff.

“I immediately began taking drastic measures to fix and remedy the violations that had taken place during my absence to avoid future violations,” she wrote in October 2022 in an effort to keep her license.

She wrote she was upping her personal work schedule to more than 50 hours weekly and planned “to continue this for the duration of my career as a child care business owner” while opening her second TLE location in Loveland.

“I have learned through this most recent experience that I need to go back to being an active owner to ensure rules, regulations and guidelines are being followed on a daily basis,” she wrote licensing officials. “I am a dedicated, knowledgeable owner committed to the safety of children through following licensing rules and regulations, accountability of procedures, quality customer service and staff support.”

Same violations recur

The state listened and placed Brownell’s facility on probation, at the time its fifth in five years. It had opened in January 2016 and had been on probationary status virtually the entire time since.

Less than a year later, she was in trouble for similar violations at the same day care and placed on probation — again.

In its most recent inspection, the department said day care workers at the TLE had mistreated children, didn’t report injuries required by law, and frequently weren’t able to keep track of the children they were minding — all of that just two weeks after state inspectors had put the facility on a probationary license for a variety of other problems.

Brownell’s license to operate the TLE on St. Cloud Drive in Loveland isn’t impacted despite similar problems, officials said, because facilities are treated individually rather than bundled.

The Fort Collins facility was allowed to reopen under new ownership in early December. State licensing officials says about three-quarters of the workforce that had been with Brownell are still there.

Officials at TLE’s corporate offices in Deerfield Beach, Fla., did not return email and telephone messages from The Gazette.

Similarly, Brownell did not respond to efforts to reach her.

There are 17 TLE facilities in Colorado, including one in Timnath that is also on probation, records show. TLE is a nationwide company with more than 300 locations that franchises its name to individual owners while sometimes retaining ownership itself.

Parents were told about the Fort Collins’ location’s multiple probationary licenses, records show, via mailed letters from the state that offer scant details as to why it was on probation, according to copies reviewed by The Gazette. Instead, parents were directed to a website to find any relevant reports on their own.

Several told The Gazette that placing the burden on parents to learn pertinent details about a facility that cares for their children is onerous.

“That’s a bit difficult for some of us that don’t have reliable internet service or families where English is not their first language or anyone who simply doesn’t understand,” said one parent who asked her name not be used to protect her children’s privacy.

Barring an investigation on their own, parents say they rely strongly on the state’s oversight.

Said another parent: “Child care is so hard to find and it’s so expensive that if the state thought things were bad enough, they’d close the place down, right?”

One probation after another

Colorado licenses more than 4,700 day care providers, a mixture of at-home care and stand-alone brick-and-mortar centers.

Of those, 47 have operated at one time or another under a probationary license since January 2022, meaning regulators have cited each with problems serious enough to require regular monthly monitoring to bring them into compliance, according to CDEC.

Four are on probation, records show.

Reasons for a probationary license could be how children are being cared for, such as founded complaints of child abuse that range from the minor — unattended children in a classroom or playground — to the more serious.

There could also be issues with record keeping, such as outdated emergency contact information or incomplete medical records. At times, facilities are cited for not having properly trained staff or outdated certifications for them.

Regulators say they keep close tabs on how a day care operates and are quick to step in if needed.

“If (a licensee) has been submitted for an adverse action, that means they’ve been given a set of things to fix or they could end up on probation,” CDEC spokesman Ian McKenzie said. “If any inspection is a repeat of the same thing, or it rises to a level of concern, they will get probation and are checked monthly for three to six months.”

Of the facilities on probation since last year, seven were repeat violators, records show, including Brownell’s TLE in Fort Collins.

But records indicate the time it takes investigators to look into complaints of abuse or neglect can sometimes lag several weeks. At Brownell’s TLE in Loveland, for example, it was nearly a month before a complaint in July was investigated, records show. Investigators confirmed the allegation.

In July 2022, a worker at Brownell’s TLE in Fort Collins called the CDEC to report the center not only hadn’t been conducting required fire drills but had falsified records to indicate as many as 17 of them had been done, according to a Larimer County lawsuit the worker, Matthew Norris, filed.

It took CDEC more than a month to look into his complaints. The day after CDEC did, affirming his allegations, Norris says he was fired. The case was settled.

Forced to decide

The cost of day care in Colorado is at an all-time high, with some areas of the state seeing as much as 44% of a household’s income needed to pay for the care of two children, according to a Colorado Health Institute survey in November 2022.

The average annual expense in Colorado for day care of two children is more than $22,200, CHI found — more than the typical yearly cost of housing, food or medical care.

Child care is considered affordable when it costs no more than 7% of a family’s income, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

In Pueblo County, for instance, nearly 1 in 5 families reported not being able to find child care when they needed it. Statewide, it’s nearly 1 in 10 families.

The greatest burden, the survey found, was on families with lower incomes, largely because the costs were unaffordable. In some cases, families are forced to decide between less-expensive and lower-quality day care or simply leaving the workforce.

Industry advocates say regulators shouldn’t be so quick to press for a licensee to close shop, but rather spend greater time helping the business to come into compliance.

“Those licensees that are several times on probation, we appreciate the state’s willing to do those extensions. We’re trying to include many cultures, and sometimes that can be an issue, with family run businesses, some difficulties,” said Dawn Alexander, executive director of the Early Childhood Education Association of Colorado, a day care industry trade group.

“We appreciate the fact that it’s not a one-and-done thing for probation,” she said. “If there are identified issues that need to be resolved, the state says they’ll use probation as technical business support and keep business in business. We don’t want to lose child care for issues of simply not being in compliance.”

Locales cited for safety concerns, however, should get greater scrutiny, Alexander said, and are rightly placed on probation.

But that’s typically only for a short time, said Alexander, a former CDEC license specialist who inspected day care centers.

“A program would go under probation with founded issues,” Alexander said. “But when I was in licensing, I didn’t’ see it extend again when it was just a bump on the head. If we saw a pattern, then no way they would keep them open.”

But that’s not what happened at Brownell’s TLE location in Loveland, records show.

On a probationary license since October 2022, subsequent inspections did not find any fault in child injuries that had occurred there, records show, so it was approved for a permanent license in April 2023.

On Aug. 15, however, inspectors cited the facility for using corporal punishment on children — one child’s head was banged as a staffer swung open a door, another was suffered a head injury when a staffer moved them with their foot — and another staffer working with the children hadn’t undergone a background check.

In addition, staff knowingly served a child food they were allergic to, records show.

The next day, CDEC approved the center’s application to increase its capacity of kids, records show.

Two months later, Brownell’s TLE in Fort Collins was placed on probation for the sixth time, records show.

Brownell last week told state regulators she is also negotiating with TLE to return the Loveland franchise, according to people familiar with that conversation. CDEC said Brownell is still the owner of record.

A troubled industry

Colorado’s day care industry has been peppered with problems for years, some so severe that legislators stepped in.

In 2021, Gov. Jared Polis signed Senate Bill 21-201 into law. The Elle Matthews Act, as it came to be called, requires stricter enforcement and transparency of unlicensed day care businesses or those exempt from licensing. The state posts information online about facilities whose licenses are revoked and unlicensed day care providers ordered to shut down.

The law was the result of the death of Elle Matthews at an unlicensed facility in Parker that state inspectors persistently tried to shutter. Its owner cared for 17 children despite nearly a half dozen cease-and-desist orders by the state — none of them easily accessible to the public.

“Parents shouldn’t have to jump through hoops asking for (Colorado Open Records Act) documents to determine if their provider is fit,” Elle’s mother, Kelsey Matthews, told legislators during tearful testimony in an April 2021 hearing on the legislation. “If we would have known the number of cease-and-desist orders, we wouldn’t have left our child there.”

The woman charged in 3-month-old Matthews’ death, Amanda Anderson, pleaded guilty to child abuse and was sentenced to eight years probation. The Matthews family sued Anderson in Douglas County civil court and was awarded nearly $1.5 million in August 2023, records show.

In October 2021, Carla Faith of Colorado Springs was sentenced to six years in prison following her conviction on charges related to her having hidden 26 children — all under the age of 2 — behind fake walls in the basement of an unlicensed day care facility.

Faith was also in charge of two other day care providers, none of them licensed.

In the one where the children were hidden, investigators had found a pile of backpacks in a closet that Faith told police were from a soccer team and she had volunteered to clean them.

More than a dozen day care licenses — most of them small in-home providers — have been revoked since January 2022, records show. Five are in Colorado Springs.

In that same period, CDEC has denied license renewals to seven day care providers, records show. Four of them were in 2023, the most recent at Brownell’s TLE facility in Fort Collins in November.

Eight other providers were unlicensed and forced to close, records show.

The state’s website that is to provide the reports detailing the revocations and denials had several inoperable links, The Gazette found.

Except for Brownell’s location, CDEC said the other facilities denied license renewals were only on probation a single time.

“The assurance for families in one of those programs, they have a state person coming in frequently to have support and hold accountable and keep in alignment,” Alexander said of daycare providers who are on a probationary license.

How frequently a location is placed on probation before it is denied a license, however, is unclear.

“How many is too many is really up to the department,” Alexander conceded.

CDEC says it all depends.

“Sometimes violations are not found to rise to the level of immediate revocation. Some do. Others continue to extend the probation periods,” spokesman McKenzie said.

He added: “A family at any time can look up a license or site to see what violations a provider has and can make a choice for themselves on whether to enroll their child.”

That site is www.coloradoshines.com.

State regulators repeatedly placed The Learning Experience day care center owned by Sara Brownell in Fort Collins on probation for a variety of violations over six years, yet allowed the facility to continue to operate until recently, leaving some to question why. Another in Loveland with similar problems was also allowed to stay open.

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