On the heels of Tuesday’s article on Missouri’s proposed new child care center rules on field trips and other safety matters comes news of another dangerous child care mistake in St. Louis.

According to a spokesman for the St. Louis Police Department, a 3-year-old was allegedly left on the Florissant-based Heaven 24/7 Learning Center’s van during a June 9 field trip to the St. Louis Zoo.

Police said the child was discovered by a zoo patron who had parked her car next to the van and heard the child yelling, “help me.” The patron unsuccessfully attempted to push in the window of the van which was slightly open. The patron told police she had seen a child care group enter the zoo when she parked her car and was able to find the caregivers a few minutes later inside the zoo.

The patron said the child was sweating and shaking when he was let out of the van by the staff. Police said the high temperature that day was 76 degrees. The child had been in the van for about five minutes, officials estimate.

The incident was later hotlined to the state Children’s Division which then alerted city police. Two 24/7 staff members on the field trip were questioned by police on June 11 and admitted they had failed to do a head-count nor realize that one of the children was missing. They were arrested for endangering the welfare of a child, but the city circuit attorney’s office declined to take up the charges.

The director of the day care declined to comment. State regulators are currently investigating the incident, said Kathy Quick, head of child care regulation for the state.

The Department of Health and Senior Services, which oversees child care regulation, is currently trying to revise child center licensing rules, covering everything from safe sleep practices to staff training and field trip rules. The rules haven’t been overhauled in nearly two decades.

The proposed new rules would require a mandatory head-count and lower staff-child ratios on field trips. Swimming trips would require significantly reduced ratios - as low as a one child per staff member  for very young children.

Quick said she expects some backlash from some child care providers on the field trip ratios because of the increased cost of staffing such trips. But she said child safety should come first.

Others who monitor day care quality say field trips involving very young children need even more scrutiny. Andi Schleicher, executive director of the St. Louis-based Child Day Care Association, said the trips are  riskier activities for young children. She argues that group outings to places such as the zoo and the science center for kids younger than preschoolers aren’t really age-appropriate curricula.

Additionally, Schleicher said parents need to be making sure child care centers with vans are following the law and using appropriate car and booster seats. Under state law, school buses are exempt from such rules, but vans are not.

In 2007 a toddler was left unharmed in a day care van during a summer trip to the Science Center. Staff with the shuttered Happy Go Lucky Day Care in Berkeley also failed to do a proper head-count. Schleicher said in that case state investigators further discovered that the center was not using required booster and car seats.

That incident also got further scrutiny when the city circuit attorney first chose to press child endangerment charges against the staff on the field trip. That happened about a week after the office announced it would not charge a St. Louis doctor and her medical-researcher husband in the death of their infant after they accidentally left the sleeping 7-month year old in a car on a hot summer day.

Some argued at the time that Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce was unfairly favoring a professional couple over the child care care workers. Joyce eventually dropped the charges against the child care workers.