UNIVERSITY CITY • The head of a Missouri House committee on child and family issues said Friday that he would address weak day care safety standards in a report to lawmakers before the upcoming legislative session.

Scott Largent, R-Clinton, made the pledge during a meeting of the new House Interim Committee on Strengthening Missouri Families after hearing testimony about state laws and rules that failed to protect young children in day care. Largent, who is chairman of the regular House Standing Committee on Children and Families, said the report would be completed by year's end.

The Interim Committee is holding meetings around the state this fall to learn about pressing issues involving the state's children and families.

The testimony, by parents and child care advocates, was sparked by a Post-Dispatch series this month that found 45 children had died in child care settings in Missouri from 2007 through 2010. All but four deaths occurred in unlicensed facilities that have no state oversight. The majority died in home day cares and involved unsafe sleep practices, such as placing an infant on an adult bed where the child later suffocated. In at least eight deaths, caregivers were watching more children than allowed without a license.

Pam Mitchell, of the Child Day Care Association of St. Louis, urged the committee to address the deaths immediately.

"This is not only a call to action, but this is a call to our collective conscience," she said. "We have to ask, what we can do right now?"

The meeting Friday was at the Epworth Children and Family Services center on Delmar Boulevard. Testimony focused mostly on a law that allows child care providers to exempt children related to them from a daily enrollment count, which can cause the number of children in one person's care to escalate beyond safe adult-child ratios.

Carol Scott of Child Care Aware of Missouri said in written testimony that the state needs to better limit the total enrollment count for all providers. She cited one death in Florissant where the home day care provider was watching 12 children.

"If you were in charge of a group of 12 children, all under the age of 2, how well do you think you would do in protecting their safety and supporting their development?" Scott asked.

Others said the state needs to increase fines to deter unlicensed providers from repeatedly breaking enrollment limits. All urged that better safe sleep standards be incorporated into licensed and unlicensed care so the deaths can be prevented.

Committee members agreed changes needed to be made.

Rep. Rory Ellinger, D-University City, said child care providers who willfully break state enrollment rules and disregard other safety standards need better deterrence.

"I would like to see the laws expanded so that there could be a criminal element to it," he said.

Currently child care providers who care for too many children without a license are subject to a civil court fine of $200. The Post-Dispatch found those providers are rarely prosecuted and several had been caught previously breaking the enrollment rules but had not been punished.

Ellinger said the state needs to stop exempting faith-based child care from licensing so that standards are applied to all child care settings.

"Religious affiliations should really have nothing to do with this," he said.

Others, including Rep. Melissa Leach, R-Springfield, said many deaths could be prevented with simple fixes such as training and getting information to the right people. She said she was leery of forcing regulation into private home day cares.

"I'd hate to see unlicensed facilities be targeted," she said. "It's a free enterprise kind of system."

Leach noted that doctors and hospitals were obvious places to target safe sleep messages for parents.

But Jennifer Wright, a board member with Child Care Aware, told a cautionary tale about her daughter, now 3. She said she was vigilant at home about putting her child on her back to sleep in a crib without blankets, but her church-based child care provider in Arnold was not.

"So imagine my surprise when I came to the day care and found that she is on her belly with a blanket in the crib," Wright said. "I didn't even think to instruct the caregiver or the owner about safe sleep. It didn't occur to me."

Wright said the state also needs to have the authority to stop unsafe unlicensed child care providers from caring for kids. She referred to the accidental death of Nathan Blecha, 3 months, in a home day care in 2007. The provider was watching 10 children the day Nathan died, yet the state could not order the provider to stop caring for kids. That provider opted to close down on her own after Nathan's death.

Wright, who lives nearby, said she might have used the day care for her own child had the provider stayed in business — not knowing that a death had occurred there.

"That really scared me," Wright said.