BATON ROUGE - A Louisiana senate bill to address gaps in child safety and oversight in early learning centers, especially when it comes to child sexual abuse cases, was brought before the Senate Health and Welfare Committee.

The author of the bill, State Sen. Regina Barrow (D-Baton Rouge), says Louisiana has gaps in its systems for handling child sexual abuse investigations.

"It started out as a resolution looking at child sexual abuse, trying to ensure who would be the proper persons to ensure that those reports are being made too, and the investigations are being followed through on," Barrow said.

Barrow and others hope the proposal will better define who is a caretaker and ensure that appropriate authorities act when children are abused. She says more than likely, it would be the Department of Children and Family Services, which has long been alarmingly understaffed.

"Who was being responsible for some of those reports? How many of those were going to law enforcement, how many of those were going to DCFS, and who actually should have been leading the charge," Barrow asked.

Committee members watched a recording of a family's story that was presented in a previous meeting in January. The parents talked about discovering that their daughter, who is four, had been injured by another child while they were at a private school. A boy in her class had touched her inappropriately.

"I took her straight to gymnastics on a normal Monday afternoon routine. When I helped her change into her leotard, I discovered a significant amount of blood in her underwear," The father said in the video.

Barrow says those parents experienced firsthand exactly the problem that needs to be fixed when they tried to report the encounter to authorities.

"They had reported to DCFS and reported it to law enforcement, but because of the [two children being underage], then there was no one who could be properly charged, supposedly for that particular crime," Barrow said.

The members of the committee were taken aback by the lack of a clear path for handling such cases.

Additionally, the bill aims to ensure consistent licensing standards for both public and private facilities and improve coordination among DCFS, law enforcement and schools.

More broadly, the bill would add consistency to restrictions keeping adults with certain criminal records from working with children, whether in public or private settings.

"This bill will require schools to check the DCFS central registry for all school employees and prohibit them from hiring new employees if they are on the registry," Barrow said.

The bill will next go before the Senate Finance Committee. If it passes there, it will then go before the Senate floor.