LEXINGTON, Ky. — On a spring afternoon two years ago, Barbara Martin pulled on the front door of the Louisville day care where her 8-month-old granddaughter had been dropped off earlier that day.

The door didn’t move. It was locked.

Then Martin heard a baby’s familiar wail.

She recognized it as her granddaughter, forgotten by the staff and left all alone in the dark building.

It was only 5:30 p.m. — a half-hour before the Lil Angels Enrichment Center in the city’s West End was scheduled to close that Friday — but all the lights were off. The staff had gone home early for the weekend.

“I didn’t have any idea what was going on, so it was very terrifying. Very!” Martin recalled in a recent phone interview about the April 2023 incident. “I basically lost my mind.”

Before police and firefighters arrived, summoned by Martin’s 911 call, several of her frantic relatives pried open a side door of the building, hastily searched and found her granddaughter howling in a playpen.

Paramedics examined the red-faced baby, who finally settled down.

They also checked Martin.

“They thought I was having a heart attack,” she explained.

There have been plenty of bad days like this one over the last few years among Kentucky’s roughly 1,800 licensed child care centers.

Annual state data obtained by the Lexington Herald-Leader show numbers soaring in the wrong direction, such as:

—Hotline complaints about child care facilities, up 46%, from 1,244 to 1,822 between 2022 and 2024.

—Substantiated incidents of child care abuse and neglect, up 73%, from 37 to 64.

—Serious injuries to children while in licensed child care, up 64%, from 466 to 764.

All these numbers stand at higher levels today than they did before the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020.

Making headlines recently, Madison County prosecutors have charged nine people with child abuse — allegedly hitting children and making them go without food — or attempted obstruction of an investigation at two affiliated Richmond facilities, A Step Ahead Daycare and The Kids Club Child Care Center.

One of those defendants was seen strangling a 4-year-old child at one of the day cares, according to court documents.

Among scores of other cases cited in 2024 by the Kentucky Division of Regulated Child Care, which annually inspects day cares and more frequently investigates complaints, there were:

—A 5-year-old Louisville boy left behind by day care staff on a field trip to a neighborhood park on a sizzling 92-degree day, who ended up at the hospital for heat exhaustion.

—A 2-year-old girl in Bowling Green whose elbow was dislocated when a child care teacher grabbed her arm, picked her up off the floor so her feet no longer touched the ground and dragged her across the room.

—A 10-month-old boy in Georgetown who had the end of one toe amputated in a closing door while he was in a child care teacher’s arms.

—A child care teacher in Winchester who roughly mishandled a 7-year-old boy, leaving him with bloody scratches from her fingernails, and who ordered the other 10 kids in the class to encircle the boy, mock him and call him “crybaby” as he wept.

The bloodied boy was admitted later that day to a mental health clinic in Lexington for “self-harm” because the day care inaccurately told his mother he cut his own arms, according to a state investigative report.

After the boy insisted he didn’t hurt himself, surveillance video footage revealed the truth to state social workers.

“OK, everybody call him a crybaby!” teacher Tamera Greenridge at the Clark County Child Development Center told the other kids in the class as shown on the video, according to a state investigative report.

The boy yelled “Stop!” at the rest of the class, but they didn’t stop, according to the report.

A fourth-degree assault charge is pending against Greenridge in Clark District Court. Her next hearing is scheduled for July 21. As part of her pretrial release, she’s not allowed to serve in a care-taking role with children.

What’s gone wrong in Kentucky child care?

Industry insiders say several factors combined to create a “perfect storm” in the commonwealth’s child care sector.

One-third of the industry’s workforce in Kentucky disappeared between 2019 and 2024, discouraged by an average hourly wage of only $13.98, scant benefits and stressful job duties.

The average dishwasher in Kentucky makes about as much money as child care workers. So does the average retail cashier.

Poorly compensated, the number of Kentucky child care workers plunged from 11,160 to 7,510 over those five years, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Child care workers who remain on the job tend to be young and inexperienced, sometimes even teenagers, more likely to make mistakes — or get too rough with kids when they’re frustrated, a word that frequently pops up in state investigative reports of child care incidents.

“It all starts with the hiring,” said Louisville attorney Chad Graham, who represents Martin’s family in its negligence lawsuit against Lil Angels Enrichment Center.

“Who do they hire? Have they been properly trained? Can they be trusted to follow through on that training?” Graham asked. “I can tell you, the responsibilities with these jobs are much greater than the rate of pay, and that absolutely affects who you get.”

Raising child care wages by increasing the fees paid by families wouldn’t be easy.

Kentucky families with kids in child care already spend an average of 10% of their household income on day care for each child, according to federal data. The median cost in 2023-24 was $6,300 per year, with the price of infant care nearing $10,000.

Yet lower wages mean fewer employees, and fewer employees mean more day cares are packing classrooms to the maximum student-to-teacher ratios allowed by law.

“All these three things kind of — they’re not an excuse for the abuse, but they set up a perfect storm that could help increase those numbers, right?” said Sarah Vanover, a former director of the Kentucky Division of Child Care in Frankfort and now the policy and research director at Kentucky Youth Advocates.

“The more children you have in a class, the higher the stress level is for the teacher,” Vanover said. “And this is a very physically demanding job. It’s a very emotional job, and when your stress level continues to increase, just like parents, when their stress level increases, it can contribute to an increase in abuse.”

With “predominantly entry-level staff” and not enough veteran teachers to supervise as mentors, difficult situations escalate out of control very quickly, Vanover said.

Teaching, not babysitting

Elizabeth Harris knows about situations escalating out of control.

Harris, co-owner of the Clark County Child Development Center in Winchester, said in an interview that she didn’t want to discuss specific incidents at her facility.

That includes Greenridge, the teacher charged with assault in June 2024 for bloodying the 7-year-old boy.

Another teacher at the facility was charged with assault in May 2024 for dragging a 5-year-old boy across a classroom floor and giving him carpet burns along his back. A Clark District Court judge agreed to dismiss that charge in May, ruling that the former teacher had not gotten into any further legal trouble for 12 months.

In 2021, state investigators said, the Winchester Fire Department responded to a fire alarm at the Clark County Child Development Center shortly after lunch.

While sweeping the facility to make sure it had been evacuated, they found a 1-year-old child sleeping alone in a classroom. Day care staff told firefighters the room was darkened for nap-time and so they overlooked the infant on their way out the door.

Harris agreed that hiring and retaining quality child care staff is a challenge.

“I think staffing is an issue in all industries right now, not just child care,” Harris said, sitting in her office while the crying, shouts and jabbers of small children could be heard from over the partition wall.

“But with child care, I do feel that some people come into it thinking it’s — that you’re not a teacher, you’re babysitting. And that’s not at all what child care is,” Harris said. “So sometimes I think that they have the idea that it’s an easy job. They don’t understand exactly what all goes into being an educator.”

Day care employees might have the responsibilities of teachers, but they don’t get the pay.

The median average salary for an elementary school teacher in Kentucky is $57,370, according to federal data, or twice what the average child care worker in Kentucky makes. And that’s to say nothing of the health care and retirement benefits typically awarded to school teachers, not to child care workers.

Situations turn ugly

After a child care situation turns ugly, employees sometimes tell state investigators they weren’t prepared for the responsibilities they faced.

In July 2024, a teacher at the YMCA of Mason County’s day care yelled at and roughly mishandled two small children, one of whom was autistic, according to a state investigative report.

The teacher told investigators she was on the job only 10 months and felt overwhelmed by misbehaving children who wouldn’t follow her directions.

The teacher “added that there were times in the classroom where she felt like she had no idea what she was doing,” investigators wrote in their report on the incident. “There was no evidence to indicate that (the teacher) had completed cabinet-approved orientation training.”

In another incident, in April 2024 at Campus Kids Early Learning Center in Lexington, a teacher who was on the job for five months yelled at the 2- and 3-year-old kids in her classroom as she struggled to get them to lie down and take naps.

“You are being disrespectful!” she yelled, a witness later told state investigators. “You are a child and are supposed to do what an adult tells you to do!”

Then the teacher picked up her purse and walked out of the day care, leaving the children in the charge of a startled visitor — not a day care employee — who happened to be walking down the hallway at the time.

The teacher later explained that “she had to leave as she was having a panic attack,” according to the investigators’ report.

Problems pile up

Some day cares keep getting in trouble, despite state supervision.

In Louisville, for example, the staff members at Lil Angels Enrichment Center made a lot of mistakes even before they started their early weekend in April 2023 and left behind Martin’s granddaughter, according to public records.

State inspectors documented at least nine serious problems at Lil Angels in the preceding five years, including:

—A traffic crash where the facility’s van ran a red light and got T-boned with three children on board.

—Serious injuries, including a 10-month-old infant’s skull fracture from a falling chair that staff inadequately tried to treat with an ice pack and a child whose finger was smashed under a teacher’s rocking chair, requiring stitches.

—Understaffing that left kids alone in rooms without adult supervision, sometimes monitored by surveillance video from an employee at the front desk or a staffer looking through a doorway from another room.

—An ugly episode where a Louisville Metro health department inspector was chased out of the day care by the owner’s screaming, cursing mother for asking food safety questions in the kitchen.

In “corrective action plans” handed down after some of these incidents, the Kentucky Division of Regulated Child Care ordered Lil Angels to monitor the whereabouts of children in its care, especially as closing time neared, according to court records.

The day care failed on the day it lost track of Martin’s granddaughter.

“I forgot she was in the bed, so when the lasted kid in the front left, I still didn’t remeber (sic) (the girl) was in the bed,” the teacher responsible for the baby explained in an apologetic, handwritten note provided to state investigators days after the incident.

“They kept getting put on these performance-improvement plans by the state. But there wasn’t much follow-through, so things never really improved,” Graham, the Martin family’s attorney, told the Herald-Leader.

And then state officials cited Lil Angels for still another serious mistake five months later.

In September 2023, parents of a 1-year-old girl at the day care said she suffered five bite wounds totaling 16 puncture marks on her face that required hospital treatment.

Day care staff told them another child repeatedly bit their daughter’s face as she sat in a raised swing chair and they were distracted, the parents told state investigators.

Hospital staff described the incident as “supervisional neglect,” adding in their notes: “We were all pretty taken aback by the number of bites.”

‘The best I could’

The owner of Lil Angels, Shea’lia Lee, told the Herald-Leader in a recent interview that she voluntarily shut her day care shortly after the face-biting incident.

The decision wasn’t entirely voluntary.

Records released by the Division of Regulated Child Care under the Kentucky Open Records Act show the state dropped its fight to revoke Lil Angels’ license in November 2023, but only because Lee agreed to close the place.

“So, mistakes happen,” Lee said. “It is what it is. I’m sorry it didn’t work out there. I did the best I could do, and that’s what I told the state. But as far as being there any longer, I couldn’t handle the pressure. It’s too much.”

Lee said Lil Angels’ location in a low-income part of downtown Louisville made it hard for her to attract good staff.

“Maybe we could have got more qualified people,” she said. “But the problem is, they didn’t want to come to that area. No matter what you were willing to pay them, anyone that had any kind of value did not want to come down there.”

“I tried the best I could for the area, and again, I think I did a pretty good job, considering,” she said.

Martin, the panicked grandmother, asked why state inspectors carefully documented serious problems at Lil Angels over the years and issued corrective action plans but allowed the place to stay open for so long.

It was inevitable that a child was going to get hurt there, she said.

“I blame the state for part of it,” Martin said. “The state needs to make sure these child care providers are checked out and doing their jobs properly. Look at the records of the employees. They shouldn’t let stuff just keep happening.”

Revoked doesn’t mean closed

The Division of Regulated Child Care, which is part of Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear’s Health and Family Services Cabinet, refused to grant interviews or respond to specific written questions for this story.

“We do not have anyone available,” cabinet spokeswoman Elizabeth Fisher said in response to the newspaper’s multiple interview requests over the last two months.

In a written statement, the cabinet said that since Jan. 1, 2022, it has revoked the licenses of 33 child care centers for serious health and safety problems.

“Team Kentucky is dedicated to the safety and well-being of our children, and we have worked to make it easier to report child care violations, become a licensed provider and for parents to find the resources they need to choose the best care for their child,” Fisher wrote.

On further questioning, however, the cabinet acknowledged that 22 of those 33 facilities remained open for business as of May.

Either their appeal of the license revocation was pending (in 17 cases) — a process that can continue for many months — or their appeal ultimately succeeded (in 4 cases) or they prevailed in an informal dispute resolution with the cabinet (in one case).

Too few options

Sometimes a day care avoids getting shut down by acknowledging its mistakes while pointing out how few child care options would exist in the community without it.

For instance, on April 11 of this year, the health cabinet’s Office of Inspector General sent a letter to Pikeville Scholar House Early Childhood Education Center in Pike County to say that its license revocation was being rescinded and replaced with a corrective action plan, allowing them to continue.

In a meeting with state officials, the Eastern Kentucky day care acknowledged that a staff member was fired for roughly grabbing a 3-year-old child off a cot by the upper arm and dangling the child in the air.

Separately, several toddlers were left unattended on two occasions, which is not acceptable, according to the cabinet’s letter.

However, the daycare argued against its closure by saying it serves 43 families who don’t have a backup plan for child care; it’s one of just three child care facilities in the area; and the other two facilities already are “near capacity.”

“We do not want children to be displaced,” Wayne Hancock, a daycare board representative, told state officials, according to the letter.

But only so much can be forgiven for that reason, said Vanover, the former state child care regulator.

“In a case of abuse, if things were significant enough, then yeah, it will lead to closure,” Vanover said.

“I know it is hard to find child care,” she said. “If you’re calling for an infant spot, they might give you a two-year wait list, and by then, you won’t have an infant, you’ll have a 2 year old. And that’s across the U.S., not just Kentucky.

“But ultimately, what the Division of Regulated Child Care has to consider is, are the children safe there? And if not, then the program has to be closed.”

Reginald Thomas, a Democratic state senator from Lexington, is an attorney who has represented day cares fighting license revocation by the health cabinet. Thomas said state regulators usually won’t hold a rogue employee against a child care facility if it clearly did not approve or tolerate the employee’s misbehavior.

In one Northern Kentucky appeal, Thomas said, a daycare owner had written policies that prohibited hitting children or leaving them alone.

Unfortunately, two teachers at the facility violated those policies, he said.

“In those cases, I argued that the actions of the teachers were outside the scope of the authority of the day care, and therefore, the owner should not be held responsible,” Thomas said. “I was successful, and the revocation was dismissed.”

Misbehaving kids a factor?

It’s not just facilities that get breaks. Their former employees sometimes do, too.

The Herald-Leader found that at least 11 Kentucky day care employees who were identified in 2024 abuse and neglect cases ended up charged by police, usually with misdemeanor assault. Such charges could bring up to a year in jail.

But court records show these cases either tended to be dismissed — and in one case, quickly expunged from public view in court records — or disposed of with two years probation, not jail time, provided the defendants commit no further offenses during that period.

One insider warns that poor behavior by children contributes to the problems at day cares.

State Sen. Danny Carroll, a Paducah Republican, is an advocate for the child care industry in the Kentucky Legislature. Back home, Carroll runs Easter Seals West Kentucky, a social services nonprofit whose programs include a day care, so he’s familiar with the industry’s challenges.

In the 2024 legislative session, Carroll proposed an ambitious bill — the Horizons Act — that would have pumped $150 million a year in state funds into child care assistance, including day care teacher training and financial assistance for Kentuckians opening day cares and developing innovative new child care models. Carroll’s bill did not get out of the Senate.

In Carroll’s opinion, while inadequate staffing is a major obstacle, so is the misbehavior that some children bring into day care, possibly worsened by the stress and isolation of the pandemic.

Day care staff struggle to deal with kids who won’t follow instructions, who can be rude, abusive and sometimes even violent toward other children and adults, Carroll said.

“You know, I really thought that once COVID passed, the behavioral issues would start to level out, once we got through that group of kids,” Carroll said. “But the reality of it is that’s just not happening.”

“I was meeting with a room full of child care providers during (the legislative) session, and I wanted to get their perspective. I said, ‘In our center, we have had to discontinue services for more kids in the last year than probably I have seen in the 15 years I’ve been in this business, all because of behavioral issues.’

“And just about without exception, every one of them raised their hand to say that they’re seeing that also,” he said. “There are just so many more behavioral issues today than there were in the past.”

‘Struggle for the classroom’

Some recent incidents cited by state regulators seemed to begin when staff struggled to deal with an unruly child and events spiraled out of control, according to state reports. They failed to take appropriate steps, regulators said, such as taking children outside the classroom with another teacher to talk, avoiding losing their own tempers and not using physical force as a form of punishment.

In several cases, kids were either autistic, nonverbal or had other mental or behavioral conditions that challenged their teachers.

At an Ashland day care that closed in 2024, the director washed a boy’s mouth out with soap from the bathroom dispenser in December 2023 after the boy told a teacher to “Shut the f--k up!” Another employee saw the boy come out of the bathroom, crying and saying, “It tasted nasty!”

The director was not charged.

At an Owensboro day care in June 2024, a small boy flipped a table over in class. A teacher grabbed his upper arms hard enough to leave bruises and carried him out of the room. The teacher was not charged.

And in February 2024, at Early Learning Academy College View Campus in Elizabethtown, a teacher grabbed a 3-year-old boy by the shirt collar, roughly yanked him toward her, pushed a table against him to pin him in place, lifted and dropped him to the floor by his arm and urged other kids in the class to taunt him.

The teacher didn’t deny her actions later.

But she complained that the boy had thrown toys from the shelves, and “she made the comment that the particular child gets rewarded for bad behavior and it’s unfair to the other children in the classroom,” another employee told the Department for Community Based Services, according to a state report on the incident.

“This particular child has been a struggle for the classroom in terms of behavior,” according to the report.

The teacher, Hazel Darlene Carlson, was charged with third-degree assault (child abuse) and convicted on July 22, 2024. She was sentenced to two years of unsupervised probation.

Most day care teachers aren’t equipped to properly deal with disruptive children, Carroll said.

“It would be great to be able to have a behavioral support person on staff, to be there each day even when we’re not facing these issues,” the senator said. “But most centers cannot afford that. That that would be a significant expense. It’s just not feasible.”

Even Graham, the Louisville attorney suing Lil Angels Enrichment Center for negligence, said he sympathizes with the responsibilities placed on child care operators.

Graham said he held a job working with young children to help support himself while he was in university. It was a physical and emotional drain, he said.

“I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know that I could run one of these places,” he said.

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