How ratio compliance is measured

An OCCL inspector walks into the Claymont gym and counts twelve children and one adult. Tom Bradley, the site director, wants to know what PTRS would have said about that room at that moment. The honest answer is that PTRS works out ratios in three different places, from three different sets of figures, and none of them would have noticed. This page explains each one, and then why every ratio screen in PTRS reads compliant today.

What a ratio is here

Children divided by staff, in one room, at one moment. Twelve children with one adult is 12 to 1.

The limit depends on the children's ages. Delaware sets it by age band (From the regulation DELACARE sections 27 and 88), and PTRS stores seven bands, from 4 to 1 for infants up to 15 to 1 for ages 9 to 18. The full table is in Attendance fields and limits.

Calculation 1: at the moment of check-in

This one runs only when a check-in names a room, and no screen in PTRS lets you name one. It is described here because it is what a technical person would trigger if they recorded a room for you.

PTRS counts the children with an open check-in in that room, adding the one arriving. For staff, it copies the staff figure from the room's previous occupancy note, and uses 1 if the room has never had one. It divides children by staff and compares the result with the room's own limit, or with 15 if the room has no limit set. At or above the limit is a violation. At or above nine tenths of the limit is a warning. Below that is safe. It writes a new occupancy note with those figures, and if the result was a violation it tells anyone with the compliance page open.

Two things about this matter.

The staff figure is not a count of staff. It is copied forward from the previous note, and the only thing that writes notes is this calculation and its twin at check-out. The first note a room ever gets is written with the fallback figure of 1, and every note after that inherits 1. Nothing sets it from shifts, from who is on site, or from anything else. Every occupancy note PTRS will ever hold says one adult.

The comparison is "at or above", so a room limited to 15 to 1 is a violation at exactly 15 to 1. Calculation 2 treats the same room as compliant at exactly 15 to 1. Being right on the limit gets opposite answers.

Check-out runs the same sum with one child fewer and writes another note. It tells no one when a room comes back within ratio.

Calculation 2: the Ratio Monitor under Staff

This is the one behind Staff, then Ratio Monitor, and behind the note PTRS takes every 15 minutes. It is the one that reads the DELACARE rules.

For each room at each active site, right now:

Figure	Where it comes from
Children	The room's most recent occupancy note, or 0 if there has never been one
Staff	The number of staff shifts at this site running at this moment, whose room is this room or was left blank
Required ratio	The DELACARE rule matched to the room, or the room's own limit if none matches
Compliant	Yes when the room has no children, or when children divided by staff is at or below the required figure

A site is compliant when all its rooms are.

Three things follow from how this counts.

A staff member with no room on their shift counts in every room. One floating adult at a site with six rooms is counted six times, once in each.

The DELACARE rule is matched by number, not by the children's ages. PTRS picks the first rule whose limit equals the room's configured limit. A room set to 10 is treated as ages 5 to 8; a room set to 15 as ages 9 to 12. No child's age is looked at. The DELACARE rule for mixed-age rooms, which depends on the youngest child present, is not applied, and the youngest-child field on every note is left blank.

The "qualified staff" figure is not a check of qualifications. It counts the shifts that are linked to a staff record. It does not look for a current CPR or first-aid certificate, although four of the seven DELACARE rules say only qualified staff count.

The note PTRS takes every 15 minutes

PTRS tries every 15 minutes, all day. It first looks at the hour on its own clock, which runs on universal time (UTC), and does nothing outside 6 am to 10 pm UTC. Delaware is four hours behind in summer and five in winter, so the notes cover roughly 1 or 2 am to 5 or 6 pm local time. A club running to 6 pm has its closing hour unrecorded in winter, and the small hours of the morning recorded instead.

Inside that window PTRS writes one permanent note per room per active site, using calculation 2. If a room with children in it is over ratio, it tells anyone with the compliance page open. If a room is within ratio but would tip over if one adult left, it sends a warning the same way.

That is the whole of it. No email, no text, no message to anyone who is not looking at PTRS at that moment.

Calculation 3: the compliance score

The compliance score has its own ratio rule. It reads the same occupancy notes and ignores both the room's limit and the DELACARE table. One set of thresholds applies to every room in every organisation:

The room's ratio	Outcome
Children present and no staff	Violation
No staff and no children	The room is skipped
15 to 1 or worse	Violation
14 to 1 up to 15 to 1	Warning
13 to 1 up to 14 to 1	Warning
Under 13 to 1	Compliant

The staff-ratio score starts at 100, loses 20 for each warning and 40 for each violation, and cannot go below 0. A preschool room limited to 10 to 1 is scored compliant by this rule at 12 to 1.

How much of the compliance score ratios are

The compliance score is made from six categories, each with a weight:

Category	Weight
Staff ratios	0.25
Credentials	0.20
Incidents	0.20
Documentation	0.15
Safety	0.10
CACFP	0.10

The overall score is each category's score times its weight, added up, then divided by the total of the weights that took part. Three of the eight rules PTRS runs carry the Safety weight, so the weights that take part add up to 1.20 rather than 1.00, and ratios' real share would be Worked out 0.25 divided by 1.20, which is 20.8%, not 25%.

That figure is theoretical, because of the next section.

The compliance score is not produced at all today

Straight after working out the weighted score, PTRS tries to build a list of the six categories, and because three rules share the Safety category the attempt fails every time. The scheduled compliance check catches the failure, notes it in its log and moves on, so it appears to run every five minutes for every site while no compliance score and no compliance alert is ever written. There is no score for ratios to be a quarter of.

The Compliance section of this guide covers this fully. It is stated here because "ratios are a quarter of your compliance score" is the sentence this page would otherwise end on, and it is not true today.

Why every ratio screen reads compliant

Follow the figures backwards and the whole picture is one chain with two breaks in it.

Break one: nothing ever writes an occupancy note. A note is written only by a check-in or check-out that names a room. No screen offers a room, not the kiosk and not Quick Check-In, and offline check-ins never carry one. So no room ever gets a note. With no notes, calculation 2 sees 0 children in every room and calls it compliant. Calculation 3 sees no children and no staff and skips every room, scoring 100. Staff, then Ratio Monitor, therefore reports every site compliant and an overall rate of 100%.

Break two: the attendance page asks for something that is never written. The ratio panel and the full-screen Ratio Monitor ask PTRS for the newest note for each site as a whole. The 15-minute notes are written room by room. The two never meet, so the panel gets an empty answer and shows 0 children, 0 staff, 0.0:1 and SAFE for every site, every time. Its amber-at-13 and red-at-15 colours are fixed in the screen and are never reached.

Which of these would PTRS refuse?

Twelve children and one adult are in the Claymont gym. Maya arrives and Denise scans her badge. Does PTRS stop the check-in?

No. The scan does not name a room, so no ratio is worked out. PTRS records the check-in and the gym now has thirteen children and one adult, with nothing in PTRS aware of it.

The same room, and the 15-minute note is taken. Does anyone hear about it?

No. The room has no occupancy note, so the note records 0 children and marks the room compliant. Even if it had recorded a violation, the only people told would be those with the compliance page open at that moment.

What this means for how you work

1. Count the room. No screen in PTRS can tell you whether a room is within ratio today.
2. Do not show the ratio monitor to an inspector as evidence. It is not measuring anything, and it says SAFE.
3. The stored notes are better than the screens. PTRS does write a permanent note for every room every 15 minutes inside its window, with the required ratio, the actual ratio and whether the room was compliant. An inspection request should be answered from those notes. The screen that would show them does not work, so someone with technical access to PTRS's records has to pull them out.
4. Whatever your rooms' limits say, the compliance score would judge them at 13, 14 and 15 to 1. If the score is ever restored, a room set to 10 to 1 will not be scored against 10 to 1.
5. Staffing is not part of any ratio you can see. One path assumes one adult per room. The other counts an unassigned adult in every room at once.

Related

• Read the ratio monitor, which screen to open
• Attendance fields and limits, the DELACARE table and every threshold
• Check a child in, why no check-in names a room
• Attendance, the full list of what is not wired up