Choose Safe Places

Choose Safe Places for Early Care and Education is a program created by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) and facilitated by the New Hampshire APPLETREE team. The program's focus is to encourage careful consideration about where to locate early care and education (ECE) facilities so that children are not exposed to environmental contaminants during their care. Children’s exposure to naturally occurring contaminants like arsenic, uranium and radon, as well as manufactured contaminants such as lead, pesticides and other chemicals can be disruptive to a child’s development, learning and behavior.

Children are at a higher risk than adults for negative health impacts from environmental contaminants because:

• Their brains and bodies are still developing.
• They drink larger amounts of water and breathe more air for their size.
• They play on the ground and engage in hand-to-mouth behavior.

Choose Safe Places offers several resources to support environmental health best practices for ECE providers. Please see each section below for more information.

Safe siting

In the process of opening a new child care facility? Moving your child care to a new location? Before you commit, we would love to help! Choose Safe Places has a Voluntary Property Checklist to help ECE providers determine if a potential property for a child care location is safe from environmental contamination. The checklist includes questions that cover the four key considerations for choosing a safe place for child care:

• Former use(s) of the site.
• Nearby sites and activities.
• Naturally occurring contamination.
• Access to safe drinking water.

Voluntary Property Checklists that are submitted to the Choose Safe Places team will be analyzed using publicly available information. A follow up report with recommendations will be provided based on the team’s findings.

Completed checklists can be emailed to NH-APPLETREE@des.nh.gov or printed and mailed to NHDES.

Guides to water testing

Choose Safe Places provides two guides to help licensed ECE providers determine the water testing requirements for their program as specified in the New Hampshire Child Care Licensing Rule.

• The Quick Guide to Water Testing for Child Care Programs breaks down the water testing requirements based on drinking water source, license capacity and license status (new or renewal).
• The Private Well Water Testing Guide is for ECE programs that use a private well and are licensed for fewer than 20 children. This guide walks providers through the process of completing required well water testing step by step.

Free e-course trainings

Choose Safe Places helps offer two free online environmental heath e-course trainings for ECE providers on the ProSolutions website:

• Protecting Children’s Environmental Health (use code: NHECO at checkout).
• Childhood Lead Poisoning in NH: How to Keep Children Lead-Safe.

Get in touch

Questions or concerns? Please reach out to NH-APPLETREE@des.nh.gov.