Committee hears DCYF licensing bill; lawmakers raise jurisdictional concerns over childcare provisions

The Senate Human Services Committee heard Engrossed Substitute House Bill 2253 on Feb. 23, a DCYF agency-request bill containing technical corrections and licensing updates for foster care, kinship caregivers, crisis residential centers (CRCs) and childcare providers.

Committee staff described multiple elements: immediate termination of a child-specific probationary license if high-potency synthetic opioids or illicit substances are found in a home; allowing DCYF to develop WAC rules for defining and assessing inactive foster-home licenses (with appeal rights); requiring blood-borne pathogen training for foster care licensees while exempting kinship caregivers; and clarifying that a license will not specify certain service categories currently enumerated in statute.

The bill also includes a technical fix for CRC staffing ratios: codifying a 1 staff to 4 youth ratio during working hours and 1 staff to 6 youth during sleeping hours, reflecting long-standing program practice, while removing an inconsistency that previously read as 4 staff to 8 youth without hour-specific guidance. Derek Harris, CEO of Community Youth Services, said the change aligns statute with current practice for CRCs and is budget neutral.

Representative Birnbaum (24th Legislative District) said the bill began as agency-request technical corrections and added clarifications to keep RCW aligned with WAC and DCYF practice. He explained that language removing a historic licensing exemption for physicians and attorneys "is just cleaning up the statute" and does not prevent professionals from becoming foster parents; rather it removes an automatic licensing shortcut that the agency indicated was no longer practiced.

Several senators expressed concerns about committee jurisdiction: Chair Wilson and others noted that many childcare-licensing matters traditionally fall under the Early Learning & K-12 committee, and members asked DCYF to provide written follow-up showing how the bill's childcare provisions align with existing statutory and WAC standards to avoid duplication or unintended changes.

DCYF staff (Jarrell Sanders) said the updates will ease burdens for kinship caregivers and DCYF staff and urged committee support. The committee did not vote during the hearing and agreed to continued conversation and follow-up on jurisdictional and statutory alignment questions.

Next steps include written clarification from DCYF on how the proposed statutory language intersects with existing licensing rules and a fiscal note still pending for the current bill version.