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Enforcement and Compliance Policy

The major responsibilities of the Child Care Services’ division (CCS) of the Georgia Department of Early Care and Learning (DECAL) include regulating the state’s child care programs to ensure they are meeting basic health and safety requirements and supporting/helping programs to meet those requirements.

  1. Regulating child care programs involves
    • Continually reviewing the state’s rules and regulations governing child care and, when necessary, amending or repealing those rules to ensure they are current and in the best interest of children and families.
    • Monitoring child care programs to ensure they are complying with the current rules and regulations.
    • Issuing an enforcement action when a program is not following current rules and regulations. The enforcement actions that may be used range from providing technical assistance to, in rare cases, license revocations. Regulation is part of DECAL’s legal authority.
  2. Supporting/helping child care programs means providing the programs with tools, resources, training, technical assistance, and other types of support to help them meet rules and regulations.

Both regulation and support are components of a strong licensing system and are intended to reduce the risk of injuries and fatalities among children and to improve program quality.

In 2014 CCS convened a group of external stakeholders to begin a project to review and subsequently align the unit’s regulatory and support functions. The group was called the Enforcement Task Force. The goals of the group were to examine the existing enforcement policy and then to create a new enforcement action model that is transparent, easy to understand, and that aligned program compliance with state licensing rules and regulations.

This new enforcement and compliance system went into effect on July 1, 2016.

The items in the Document List below describe the enforcement and compliance system in more detail. (Note: The Child Care Enforcement Policy Project Report includes a step-by-step description of the process in section “IV. Components of the Child Care Services Enforcement Chart” on pages 8 through 15.)

Documents List