A new TV ad from Attorney General Josh Stein’s campaign highlights scathing inspection records from a childcare center that Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson operated with his wife nearly two decades ago.
The ad features a video that recreates violations found by state inspectors at the Robinsons’ Precious Beginnings facility in Greensboro between 2005 and 2007.
“State documents show it was unsanitary and endangered children,” the narrator says in the ad. “The Robinsons were officially cited for lack of supervision and uncovered electrical outlets around the one-year-olds. Inspectors found falsified staff credentials and no criminal background checks. Documents showed the childcare center even operated at times without lights, heat or running water.”
Some of the records from the childcare center inspections were reported recently in The News & Observer. Robinson’s campaign spokesman said in response to the N&O that the report was “just another attempt by liberals to dig up old news – some of it even by decades – to smear Mark Robinson.” He accused the lieutenant governor’s opponents of “cherry-picking a few minor violations and clerical errors to grind a political ax while ignoring visits that include ‘superior’ ratings.”
The inspection records show that the Robinsons failed to cover electrical outlets in a classroom used by one-year-olds in 2005. The inspector wrote that the center operators claimed the outlets had a safety feature that didn’t require a cover to keep kids safe, but the inspector found that the outlets had no such feature.
An inspection from the same month found that 1- and 2-year-olds were not being properly supervised while they slept because their caregiver was “sitting outside on the porch talking to visitors.” The inspector also found the center in violation of required staffing levels because only two caregivers were responsible for 18 children. And the report said bottles of baby formula weren’t properly labeled or refrigerated.
A 2006 inspection found that the center wasn’t following requirements that children have their hands washed after their diapers were changed. And it found that “beds, cots and mats were not in good repair, properly handled, stored, or clean and sanitized between users.”
And in 2007, state regulators received a complaint claiming that Precious Beginnings “has been using the oven for heating as the gas had been cut off for a period of time. The lights in the daycare have been cut off several times. It is unknown if the daycare has running water at this time.” It’s unclear from available records if any state inspections found problems with water, heat and lighting at the center; there’s no mention of it in the inspection findings.
Robinson wrote in his 2022 book that he enjoyed running the childcare center but it “was hard at times to operate effectively because there were so many regulations and red tape,” and that’s one of the reasons he and his wife, Yolanda Hill, sold the business later in 2007.
Hill went on to start a nonprofit, Balanced Nutrition, that worked with childcare center operators to secure federal funding for meals. She shut down that nonprofit in April amid an N.C. Department of Health and Human Services investigation that last week declared the organization “seriously deficient” and ordered it to repay the state more than $130,000.
