Wisconsin Department of Children and Families - Division of Early Care and Education
Bureau of Early Care Regulation
Child Care Licensing Procedure Manual
At the initial visit to a public school program, the licensing specialist completes the Health and Safety Checklist – License Exempt Programs – DCF 251 form (DCF-F-5154) available on the DCF Internet. (This form will hereafter be referred to as the DCF-5154.) The DCF-5154 is a paper checklist form (and similar to the Initial Licensing Checklist – Group Child Care Centers) that identifies those group child care health and safety rules that will be reviewed at each annual monitoring visit to a public school program. The licensing specialist documents his or her observations from the initial visit to the license exempt program on the DCF-5154 paper copy.
All monitoring of the public school program following the initial visit is documented using the iPad-based licensor checklist mobile application (hereafter referred to as the mobile app). At each monitoring visit, the licensing specialist observes and documents compliance with the specific rules contained in the Annual Health and Safety Rule Tag, a tag pre-loaded into the mobile app. From the iPad, information collected at the visit synchronizes directly into WISCCRS, the database that stores child care compliance information and serves as the electronic facility file.
Using the mobile app, the licensing specialist makes an electronic entry to record whether each administrative rule is met, unmet, or not applicable to the particular program under review. (In some cases, a rule may be left blank, as described in section 5.) A licensing specialist may also determine whether a rule is met or unmet without making a visit to the program, based on a review of a self-report.
The licensing specialist also includes descriptive compliance information in the mobile app to document the licensing specialist’s observations. When a rule is not met, the specific rule violation information described by the licensing specialist in the External Comments field in the mobile app. is the documentation that will appear on the DCF-294A, in the column labeled Rule/Statute Number-Noncompliance Statement. The licensing specialist may also record notes in the Internal Comments field in the mobile app, but comments entered here are for the licensing specialist’s use only and will not appear on the DCF-294A.
At the conclusion of each monitoring visit, the licensing specialist should offer to review and clarify the results of the visit with the public school program staff at an exit interview, confirming the violations that will be cited. The mobile app compiles data on the number and type of rules reviewed and the number of rules met at the time of the visit, which also may be shared with the program.
This page last updated 06/2018.