Edmonds daycare director petitions for emergency alert system

It's being called a major lapse in security for children. After nearly half-a-dozen daycares were threatened earlier this year, an Edmonds woman says daycares are not getting the same necessary information as public schools would.

At The Trike Stop in Edmonds, center director Ariel James says her 30-person staff works very hard to build relationships with each one of their 100 kids, and as a result they’ve built trust with each family.

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In late January when someone called daycare centers in her city and nearby Shoreline threatening to bomb the facilities and shoot the children, James says her families trusted The Trike Stop would be in lockdown too or at least in the know.

But James says it was phone calls from parents to the daycare center that alerted her and her staff there had been an incident when it should have been the other way around.

“It made us feel stupid because we didn’t have that information that we probably should have had,” James told us.

She came up with a plan for daycares similar to the ones already in place for school districts.

“We don’t have any kind of alert system in place at all for childcare centers—elementary schools, middle schools and high schools all have something in place where the authorities will dispatch or call the school district and then the school district will contact the specific schools in the area of the threat,” James explained.

James says the infrastructure to do the same thing for daycares already exists through the state department that licenses their facilities.

“Each school is given a specific licenser and they’re in charge of an area so there’s a top and it trickles down—so they have all of our contact information,” she continued.

James met with a representative from the Department of Children, Youth and Families in Olympia in February and has just launched a petition—online and on paper— to create a Revised Code of Washington that will mandate an alert system like this.

“Yes I’ve been talking to everybody about it,” she said, because building a safe environment should be every daycare provider’s top priority.

Read her petition here.

Cox Media Group