Cypress Day Care Faulted Over Girl Who Strayed Off

The state agency that monitors day-care centers has faulted a local facility for sloppy supervision and other “serious deficiencies” that officials said allowed a 2 1/2-year-old girlto wander away unnoticed for an entire day earlier this month.

In a critical report released Tuesday, the state’s Community Care Licensing department also revealed that a passer-by who found Katy Dunn, just minutes after the child left the Cypress College Campus Children’s Center, went to the school and asked a teacher there if any children were missing. “The school responded ‘no,’ ” stated the report.

As a result, the little girl was taken to the Orangewood home for abused and abandoned children and was not reunited with her frantic parents until the next morning. Katy’s mother had come to the center shortly before 5 p.m. to pick her up but was told by staff members that no one had seen the child all day.

The licensing agency, a division of the state Department of Social Services, ordered the Cypress facility, which cares for 55 children, to take various corrective measures that focused on “inadequate” procedures for signing in and

supervising children. The state wants the center to devise a new system for accounting for children and to do a better job training its staff and determining the workers’ specific responsibilities.

After the March 12 incident, Cypress College officials said that the center’s staff was blameless and that the girl’s mother bore responsibility for allegedly failing to turn the girl over to her teachers on arrival.

But state officials painted a different picture after an investigation that they said was spurred in part by an article in The Times.

The state report, noting that no one at the center took charge of Katy in the moments after her mother dropped her off that morning, said: “Line of teacher responsibility broke down.”

If the corrective orders are not met, the licensing agency has the power to suspend or revoke the center’s license, place it on probation or take other disciplinary action.

But center officials asserted that the process of revamping procedures in reaction to the incident has already begun, and state officials said they are satisfied that some progress has been made. Investigators will check back at the center in coming months.

While citations against day-care centers are fairly routine, licensing program supervisor Mary Kaarmaa said: “These are definitely very serious problems. It’s not the norm--we don’t always have kids walking away from schools unattended, and we’re lucky this wasn’t worse.

“But at the same time the people at the center have been working to change their procedures, and they seem committed to making sure something like this doesn’t happen again.”

Debbie Dunn, the girl’s mother, said Tuesday that she feels somewhat vindicated by the report but that it cannot make up for the trauma that she said Katy and the family have gone through.

“This report verifies that I didn’t do anything wrong,” she said, “and that (college officials) were liars when they said I was negligent. That’s the worst thing in the world you can say to a parent, and I’m glad the truth is out.”

But she added: “This is still a real tough emotional time for the whole family. . . . Katy’s been having nightmares about the police and cages and everything since this happened, and she never lets me away from her any more. . . . She’s even gone back to the bottle; she’s just kind of going backwards.”

Dunn said she has enrolled Katy in another day-care center, plans to take her to a therapist and is thinking about dropping her nursing studies at Cypress College because she is not sure she wants to have Katy in any day care.

Cypress College President Kirk Avery declined comment on the state’s report Tuesday because he said his copy of the handwritten document is illegible.

Center director Diane Montano said of the report: “We are taking this all very seriously and have been changing some of our procedures.

“In the 14 years we have been in operation here, we have had an unblemished record, and if there are changes that have to be made, we will do it,” Montano said.

Specifically, the director said the center is revising its sign-in procedures for incoming youngsters to provide better supervision and accountability.

State officials said the incident could have been cut short if center staff members had conducted a proper review when a person who found Katy approached them just 20 minutes after she had wandered off.