A school and an apparent daycare in Spring Valley have been shut down after county inspectors found dozens of violations. Officials say the school operating on the upper floors was unsafe, while the daycare being run in the basement of the same building was illegal, prompting an order to clear everyone out.
Rockland County's director of buildings and codes said the school and daycare operation, along with their landlord at the Main Street building, had been given a year to come into compliance with the law after failing a previous inspection. But when his team arrived last week to respond to a fire alarm, they found that nothing had changed.
The third-floor school still did not have a sprinkler system, and the basement was clearly still housing an unpermitted daycare, officials said. Inspectors described disturbing conditions inside, saying it appeared infants and toddlers were sleeping amid rotten food, trash and even a tub of chickens.
The director ordered that no one could come back inside until the violations were resolved, requiring the building to be vacated. He framed the decision as preventing a potential life-safety issue for the occupants, including the children in the basement and those in the school upstairs.
When he returned a few days later to check whether the vacate order was being obeyed, the official said it was not. The operators did not give his team access to the property and instead demanded that the inspectors come back with a search warrant before they would be allowed inside.
A state Supreme Court judge then allowed the inspection team to enter and ordered the landlord and the school operators to appear in court to explain their actions. According to officials, the operators and the landlord are due in court on Monday morning to answer for the conditions found at the building.
Maria Rodriguez, who has run a cafe in the same building for the last 10 years, said a fire downstairs could endanger her business and other shops along the street, and she welcomed the intervention by the county and the court. Efforts to reach the building's owner for comment were not successful.