Questions grow over East Helena child-care licensing after abuse case

David Carl Simpkins was allowed to open a home child-care business in East Helena after seeking state approval in 2010, and the question now is how Montana’s screening and inspection system failed to stop him sooner. The case has become a test of whether licensing paperwork, background checks and complaint reviews are enough to protect children once a provider is operating.

Montana’s Child Care Licensing Program says licensed and registered providers are supposed to receive a pre-inspection before care begins, then ongoing monitoring, annual inspections and follow-up on complaints. State rules also require fingerprint and background checks before approval, including DOJ and FBI fingerprint checks, a sex-offender registry check, child protective services checks and name-based criminal records checks.

Those safeguards did not keep Simpkins from remaining in business long enough for new warning signs to emerge. A 2022 complaint to the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services alleged corporal punishment, verbal abuse and loaded firearms accessible to children. The investigation opened, then closed three days later when Simpkins chose not to renew his license, and his business license expired in March 2024.

The concerns around PaPa’s Day Care did not begin there. Reporting has said the business accumulated recurring safety violations over several years, raising the larger question of whether the state was responding to problems as they surfaced or merely recording them after the fact. Simpkins now faces eight felony counts of child sexual assault, and reporting has said the first alleged incident tied to those charges dates to 2005, with allegations stretching back more than 40 years.

For parents in East Helena and across Lewis and Clark County, the case cuts to the core of child-care oversight. Families are expected to trust that a licensed provider has already cleared the required checks and passed inspection. When that trust breaks, the failure lands not just on one household but on the state agencies that are supposed to monitor, investigate and intervene.

That failure matters in a state already struggling to find enough care. A 2020 labor report found Montana’s licensed child-care capacity met only about 47% of estimated demand. The same report said 57% of businesses reported a shortage of affordable child care in their community, and 60% said expanding access should be a priority.

The federal government has also warned that licensing systems can miss hazards in practice. The HHS Office of Inspector General reported that 96% of inspected child-care providers in one sample had at least one instance of potentially hazardous conditions or non-compliance. In East Helena, that gap between the rules on paper and the checks on the ground is now the central accountability question.