A bipartisan group of Texas lawmakers on Tuesday announced a coordinated effort to pass a package of bills aimed at improving child care safety and oversight.

"The number of incidents of abuse and neglect and exploitation to children at child care facilities and homes is alarming," state Sen. Joan Huffman, R-Houston, said at a Capitol news conference with other lawmakers and child advocates. "There should be no greater priority of ours than doing what we can to make these environments safer for the children of Texas."

Many of the bills were inspired by "Unwatched," a yearlong, 12-part investigative series the American-Statesman published in December that revealed that 88 children had died as a result of abuse or neglect at day care facilities over the previous decade, that an additional 450 were sexually abused and that the state's efforts to crack down on unsafe day care sites are often inadequate, allowing some facilities with more than 100 violations to remain open.

On any given day, there are about 1.1 million Texas children in child care centers and at-home day care operations. The Statesman investigation found large gaps in state oversight for some of the most dangerous types of child care settings and scant resources for efforts that could help make safe day care more affordable, placing a spotlight on a child safety issue long overshadowed by high-profile failures in Texas' foster care system and Child Protective Services.

Robert Sanborn, president and CEO of the Houston-based nonprofit Children at Risk, said that ensuring Texas has safe, affordable and high-quality child care is important because research has shown that the first few years of a child's life are the most important for brain development and future success.

"This is a time when children are giant sponges, and they're soaking up everything that they can," said Sanborn, whose group led the news conference Tuesday. "Many times this early education will determine the success of these children overall."

Joining Sanborn were Huffman and three other state lawmakers with proposals addressing child care issues this legislative session: Sen. Kirk Watson, D-Austin; Rep. John Raney, R-College Station; and Rep. James White, R-Hillister. A dozen bills on child care issues have been filed this year.

Also Tuesday, the Senate Health and Human Services Committee heard testimony on three day care bills, one by Huffman and two by Watson.

Huffman's Senate Bill 569 would increase oversight for a group of small in-home day care operations the state classifies as "listed family homes."

While the state inspects large "licensed" child care centers every year and medium-size "registered" operations every two years, inspectors never visit listed day care sites, which can look after no more than three children unrelated to the operator.

Huffman's bill would, among other provisions, establish minimum safety standards for listed family homes and require the state to inspect them once every three years. It also would require their operators to be trained in how to avoid unsafe sleep practices, which the Statesman investigation found are the leading cause of day care deaths.

One of Watson's proposals, SB 706, would address another category of overlooked and often dangerous child care operations: so-called illegal day care operations, which are typically small, cheap, in-home businesses run by people who either don't know they have to tell the state about their business or don't bother.

Forty-two of the 88 day care deaths caused by abuse and neglect in the past decade occurred at these off-the-books operations, the Statesman found.

In 2013, the Legislature approved funding for a new investigative unit that sought out illegal day care sites, in part by scouring listings on sites such as Facebook and Craigslist for day care operations that do not show up in state registries. But in 2017, the Health and Human Services Commission, without telling lawmakers, disbanded the unit and used those positions for other tasks in Child Care Licensing.

Watson's bill would reinstate that unit and, unlike the 2013 funding, it would require the agency to dedicate 35 employees to that task, preventing it from reassigning them to other functions.

While reporting "Unwatched," the Statesman ran into problems obtaining public records on the most serious incidents that occur at day care facilities, those in which children die, and had to sue the Department of Family and Protective Services to gain access to its reports on those cases.

Watson's SB 705, which was also heard in committee Tuesday, clarifies the wording of a state law at the center of that dispute and tackles a host of other public information issues related to child care oversight.

The bill, for instance, would improve a public Department of Family and Protective Services database that allows parents to view day care violations over the past two years by requiring more details about the incidents to be posted and by extending the time frame to five years. It would also require all parents who send their children to a given day care facility to be notified if there is an instance of sexual abuse at that operation.

The state needs to improve the way it handles child care, Watson said, because many working families rely on it.

"If people want to participate in the Texas economic experience, many of them need to have affordable child care or they're not going to be able to participate," Watson said.