MY INITIAL SEARCH for child care in Columbia was a discouraging experience. I spent a week filing through places where the children looked gray, puffy-eyed and tired. I was told at one center, "Oh, no, we would never take them outside on a cold day like this." It was about 40 degrees and we had just moved from Minnesota. There, our day care center required that parents send snow boots and suits because its operators understood the importance of letting children play outside every day.

There were many other differences between child care in South Carolina and Minnesota, such as the required ratio of one teacher for every four infants, a level still not achieved here. Ten years later, South Carolina has only made it to 1-to-6 on that important standard for infant care. But getting that far was an improvement, and the state has made significant strides in child care over those years.

That progress is one of the many reasons it has been so discouraging -- yet again -- to see the news unfold around Bright Ideas Child Development Center in Lexington County. Its operator is charged with unlawful conduct toward children. Her case must be heard in court before her guilt or innocence can be determined.

But it is troubling enough to hear the allegations by law enforcement and a state regulatory agency. Lexington County deputies say 16 1- and 2-year-olds were left unattended at the center for 45 minutes. While they were alone, one of the children was bitten more than a dozen times.

"We felt there have been strides, but the system is failing if there can be programs as unsafe as this and they are still open," says Penny Danielson of Success By 6.

She and other child care advocates cite as one significant failing the lack of enforcement powers available to child care center inspectors. Since the biting incident, the state Department of Social Services released records showing the center has been cited a number of times for deficiencies such as insufficient numbers of caregivers for the number of children present and failing to designate an employee to take charge when the director is absent.

Sandra Hackley of Interfaith Community Services of South Carolina describes the enforcement powers of child care inspectors this way: "They say, 'Get it fixed.' Then the next time they come out they say, 'No, you didn't get it fixed.' And then it's, 'We told you to get that fixed.' This can go on and on."

Parents don't know if their center has been cited repeatedly for failing to correct deficiencies. The state can't fine operators or otherwise penalize them for many violations.

Child care regulators in some other states have more options. In Georgia, for example, a center which requires daily state monitoring, as Bright Ideas did after the biting incident, must pay the cost of that monitoring.

As for parent notification, one system proposed here would provide grades for centers. Repeated violations would lower the ranking, which would be posted at centers, similar to restaurant sanitation grades.

Parents could see a center's score before enrolling a child and also would know if their center slipped a grade. Child care advocates say parents right now tend to be too trusting that the system works better than it does.

"They so desperately want this to be a good place because everything else checks out," Ms. Hackley says. "It's affordable, it's in their neighborhood -- surely someone checks it out."

Right now, four state agencies play a role in inspecting child care centers. But their work has not been efficient and effective enough in ensuring parents that centers meet basic health and safety requirements. The system would work better if oversight of child care could be more united.

A panel of child care advocates, including regulatory agencies and child care providers, has met for several years now to push for the best environment for children. They have high aspirations for things such as increasing the education level of child care workers and decreasing turnover among staff.

However, recent events are a reminder of the top priority -- ensuring the children in child care in our state are safe. Census figures show that nearly 70 percent of mothers in the United States with children under 6 are in the workforce.

Parents, sadly, aren't always the best judge of child care quality. They grow close to their child care providers, and some discount officials' reports of deficiencies.

"It's stressful for parents to have to deal with the fact that their provider may not be doing what they need to be doing," Ms. Danielson says. "They see this provider as a family member. They've entrusted their children to this person."

Ms. Danielson, Ms. Hackley and Rita Paul, deputy director of the Office of First Steps, all said the state must acknowledge its first, basic role in child care -- ensuring that centers meet basic health and safety requirements.

Some of the other states with tighter controls on child care than ours arrived at that end tragically. Ms. Danielson remembers a headline out of Tennessee following a sweeping child care reform movement there -- "It took three dead babies."

The fact that a child care center can keep operating -- essentially unaffected -- through repeated violations of the comparatively lax safety standards applied here shouldn't be allowed to continue. If they do, our state, too, will likely be home to another, more tragic, story.