After Cynthia King’s nearly 4-month-old baby died suddenly in a licensed childcare facility in 2014, the grieving mother pushed to overhaul the system. 

She worked with lawmakers on bills to address childcare oversight and sat on a working group created by the Legislature to discuss solutions for improving daycare safety. She also advocated for the Department of Human Services to track and publish statistics on its website about incidents in childcare facilities so parents can make more informed decisions when placing their children. 

But more than a decade later, some of the most basic improvements she and other advocates pushed for remain unchanged. Hawaiʻi is the only state in the nation not complying with a federal requirement to publicly report serious injuries and child abuse in childcare settings. 

The state Department of Human Services, which is responsible for regulating and licensing childcare facilities in the state, says it can’t track those statistics because it lacks standardized definitions for “child abuse” and “serious injuries” — even though it published data on those categories in years past. This data was self-reported by childcare facilities. The department still investigates allegations of abuse when they receive complaints from parents or staff members.

A page on the department’s website shows the last time data was published for those two categories was 2016. The page also tracks deaths in childcare facilities and, until recently, that reporting was out of date too, ending in 2022. After Civil Beat asked about it, the department updated the site to reflect that no deaths have occurred in recent years.

The void of information means Hawaiʻi is in the dark about how often children are getting injured and abused in the islands’ more than 700 childcare facilities. 

“As a parent, I feel such disappointment and such severe frustration with their lack of movement on this,” said King, whose son was one of six children to die in licensed daycare facilities between 2012 and 2015. “I don’t know what act of God is going to make them realize that this is something that should be prioritized and something that they need to do to protect kids.”  

Lack Of Definitions

As of 2016, serious injuries and instances of child abuse were rare in Hawaiʻi childcare settings with only one serious injury and zero instances of substantiated child abuse. But it’s extremely important for the state to track and report those numbers, King said. 

Her 4-month-old son, Wiley Muir, died suddenly at an in-home daycare facility. His cause of death was originally listed as bronchiolitis, a lung infection common in infants, but was later changed to “undetermined.” The daycare provider was later forced to shut down after a state inspection revealed she was caring for more children than legally allowed. 

The deaths of six children in licensed daycare facilities over the course of four years led parents to testify before the Legislature in 2017, urging lawmakers to pass stricter rules for childcare oversight. Improving data reporting on serious injuries and child abuse also came up, but lawmakers said there was no need for a state law because a federal law had recently passed requiring states to publicly report those statistics. 

The Child Care and Development Block Grant Act of 2014 mandated that states make inspection reports available online as well as publish the number of deaths, serious injuries and instances of substantiated child abuse that occur in childcare settings each year. 

The Department of Human Services declined multiple requests for an interview for this story. In emailed statements, the agency said it has been working to establish the definitions through an “administrative rulemaking process” that includes consulting with the Attorney General’s Office. 

Scott Morishige, administrator for the department’s Benefit, Employment & Support Services Division, said the agency did not have a projected date for when the process would be completed. 

“Once these rules have been promulgated and enhancements to our system are in place,” he said, “DHS will make this data publicly available.”

Laurie Tochiki co-chaired the Mālama ʻOhana Working Group, which was established by the Legislature in 2023 to listen to community concerns about the child welfare system and come up with recommendations for improving it. She said many community members wanted to see more transparency and communication from DHS.

The continued lack of reporting on child abuse and serious injuries in childcare facilities shows the state still has a lot of progress to make, she said.   

“We heard from the community that there’s an urgent need for the Department of Human Services to be transparent, to hold accountable all parts of all parts of the system, to hold people accountable for the safety and protection of our children,” she said. “This is an example of the need for transparency and accountability.” 

Hawaiʻi Is Last State To Define Abuse 

DHS last year requested additional time to comply with the reporting requirements and noted its lack of definitions make it difficult to collect data.

In 2018, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Child Care told states they had the flexibility to define “serious injury” and cautioned against being overly broad. The director at the time, Shannon Christian, wrote in a memorandum that being too broad may lead states to penalize facilities where minor injuries occur and discourage providers from reporting. 

Some states updated their definitions while others did not. A 2024 story published in The 19th found Hawaiʻi was the only state that hadn’t finalized its definitions. 

Joseph Campos II, the acting director of the Department of Human Services, said in an email that licensing staff still investigate allegations of abuse or neglect in childcare settings.  

“When an individual caregiver is substantiated as the perpetrator of abuse or neglect, DHS requests immediate termination of employment,” he said. “Additionally, when conditions exist that pose an imminent danger to the health, welfare or safety of children, a provider’s license is suspended or revoked.”

According to the agency’s website, the department maintains records of the results of its investigations for two years and makes them available for public inspection per Hawaiʻi public records law. Exemptions to this exist, though. 

DHS declined to give Civil Beat records of its investigation into Wiley’s death in 2016 citing a provision in the state Uniform Information Practices Act — Hawaii’s public records law – that allows a daycare investigation to be withheld from the public if it relates to a criminal proceeding that could be jeopardized by the release.

The agency also conducts annual inspections of individual childcare facilities and posts those results online. Parents can search specific providers to see if they are in compliance with health and safety requirements, such as whether all staff members have passed background checks, whether there is a first aid kit on site and whether the facility has a written policy for how to respond in an emergency. Parents can also see a list of deficiencies for individual providers if certain requirements aren’t met. 

But the data for individual childcare providers lacks information about whether injuries or substantiated child abuse have occurred at the facility. A “complaints” tab on each provider’s page also comes up blank.  

A search for complaints about a specific provider on the state’s website elicits the message: “Thank you for your patience while we work on posting complaints. Complaints that occurred in 2024 will be posted. Please contact the assigned child care licensing unit for questions about this provider.” The page links to a document with the phone numbers of state licensing workers. 

Push For Better Reporting

The need for DHS to improve its reporting of incidents in childcare facilities dominated conversation at the Legislature in 2017 after five children died in daycares between 2012 and 2015. 

King learned in October 2015 that her son’s childcare provider, Therese Manu-Lee, had been forced to shut down her daycare after a surprise inspection revealed she was caring for 14 children, eight of them infants — more than four times the number of infants allowed for a home-based provider. 

Manu-Lee did not respond to a call or email seeking comment. She told Civil Beat in 2016 that Wiley had been ill. 

“It was not my fault,” she said at the time. 

Starting in 2016, King worked with legislators on various childcare oversight bills. One passed the following year and named after her son, the Wiley Kaikou Muir Act, required licensed childcare facilities to maintain liability insurance. 

Other bills she advocated for didn’t get traction, including one that would have created a misdemeanor charge for childcare providers if it was determined that a child died or was injured as a result of their failure to properly care for the child. 

Another bill that would have required DHS to post reports of all childcare facility inspections online also failed to pass. But DHS noted at the time it was already working to comply with federal law requiring those inspections to be posted by 2018. 

Knowing that the state is still not posting aggregate data on child abuse and serious injuries is extremely frustrating and disheartening, King said. 

She said she knows other parents who are afraid to put their babies in daycare because of what happened to Wiley and are waiting as long as possible to enroll their kids. These parents, she said, feel a responsibility to evaluate childcare providers’ safety rather than relying on the state agency that is supposed to be responsible for it. 

“A lot of them have trauma and concerns having witnessed what I went through,” she said. “It’s also unfortunate and more disappointing that the onus is on them to be discerning, instead of there now having been change that we can all feel more confident in.” 

Civil Beat’s reporting on women’s and girls’ issues is funded in part by the Frost Family Foundation.