Wisconsin Department of Children and Families - Division of Early Care and Education
Bureau of Early Care Regulation
Child Care Licensing Procedure Manual
All comments entered into WISCCRS are subject to open records requests and must also be made available in discovery requests resulting from appeals of contested enforcement actions. Therefore, licensing staff should enter comments into WISCCRS with the understanding that anyone may be able to view them. Documentation in any of the comments fields in WISCCRS should avoid confidential information to the extent possible or highly sensitive information that would not be appropriate to release to the public.
Comments entered under General Comments in WISCCRS cannot be deleted or modified after they have been added. The general comments section includes documentation that may be entered by child care licensing, certification, and subsidy staff, and can be viewed by staff from all of these agencies, as well as other users who have inquiry access to either WISCCRS or CSAW (Child Care Statewide Administration on the Web). For example, among the numerous agencies that have such access to the General Comments are the Child & Adult Care Food Program sponsors, Child Care Resource and Referral staff, Legislative Audit Bureau auditors, local and state fraud investigators, etc. Therefore, comments entered in this section must be brief and factual, and like all comments, without opinion or speculation.
Comments are also entered into WISCCRS in several modules (e.g., Complaints Module, Enforcement Module, Transaction Module, etc.). Only BECR licensing staff enters comments into these comments fields and they may be modified. These comments fields allow BECR staff to record information or events pertaining to the provider that are not otherwise required to be entered in the data fields on the WISCCRS screens. Comments included in the comments field should only be used to document additional information that is not already contained in the data entry fields in each module but are considered part of the official regulatory record by the licensing specialist.
Regardless of whether comments are entered into WISCCRS directly or uploaded from the licensing checklist mobile application, the licensing specialist follows the same guidelines for recording comments. The External Comments field in the mobile application is the location for the licensing specialist to document the specific rule violation information that will appear on the Noncompliance Statement and Correction Plan (CFS-294) and on the public search website.
The Internal Comments field in the mobile application is the location in which the licensing specialist documents specific comments pertaining to each rule, whether met or not met, that the licensing specialist wishes to detail and include in the WISCCRS regulatory record. The licensing specialist is not required to enter comments in the Internal Comments fields unless s/he determines a need for the notations. These comments are not displayed on the public search website.
This page last updated 03/2018.