22VAC40-185-530. First aid training, cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and rescue breathing.

I object to 100% of staff obtaining CPR and First Aid Certification within 30 days of employment.  A more reasonable and equally safe alternative would be 50% certified and 100% trained within 90 days of employment.  These modifications would still be an improvement to the current mandate.

As a non-profit who employs several college students to help cover lunch breaks, assist at naptime, as well as at the end of the day, the expense of implementing this requirement would be tremendous and hurt our resources available to invest in classroom materials.  This would also be a requirement difficult to meet for those students who do not have cars when needing to drive to a location offering such certification classes (several of them walk to our location as we are near campus).  

Unfortunately, because our Center offers low teacher-child ratios by maintaining a large number of staff, the cost of certifiying all staff in First Aid/CPR was too great for our budget (we are non-profit) and we ceased being subsidized when that constraint on subsidy centers went into effect.  There is no great safety loss in not having everyone trained due to the large number of full-time staff on site who are certified.