Does every classroom need a CPR-certified staff member in Georgia?

The short answer

Yes, and the detail that trips centres up is which person.

Ga. Comp. R. & Regs. 591-1-1-.14(2)(b) (GA credentials rule set, verified against primary text 2026-10-02):

There must always be one staff person present in each classroom where children are present that has current and valid pediatric CPR and pediatric first aid training.

One staff person holding both. Not one CPR holder plus one first-aid holder working the same room. That reading is a materially easier roster to build, which is exactly why centres build it and then fail an inspection on a classroom they believed was covered.

This is a scheduling problem rather than a records problem. Your filing cabinet can be complete and your 3pm roster can still breach the rule.

Three separate duties, and they stack

Georgia states the CPR/first-aid obligation three times, at three different scopes. All three apply at once (GA credentials rule set, verified against primary text 2026-10-02):

Duty	What it requires	Clause
Per classroom	One staff person present in each occupied classroom holding both pediatric CPR and pediatric first aid	591-1-1-.14(2)(b)
Per shift, proportionally	At least fifty percent of the caregiver staff present must be trained	591-1-1-.14(2)(a)
The Director, personally	The Center Director must hold current CPR and first aid at all times	591-1-1-.14(2)(d)

Read the second row again, because it is the one that is almost never on a compliance checklist. Satisfying the per-classroom duty in every room does not satisfy .14(2)(a). A centre running six rooms with exactly one dual-certified person each, plus seven untrained aides, meets the first duty and breaches the second.

And the Director's duty is personal and continuous. .14(2)(d) binds the Director regardless of who else is on site, so it is not discharged by other staff holding the classroom-coverage certification. We model it as a separate role-scoped requirement for that reason. We also read it as having no grace period: "at all times" names no onboarding window, so where the classroom duty allows a new hire 45 days, the Director's own certification does not get that allowance. Where the text is silent on relief, we take the stricter reading.

The timing: 45 days to get certified, then two different clocks

591-1-1-.14(1)(a) sets both the deadline and the renewal intervals — and this is the certification clause, distinct from the coverage clauses above (GA credentials rule set, verified against primary text 2026-10-02):

Certification	Deadline from hire	Renewal interval
Pediatric CPR	45 days	24 months (a "biennial training program in pediatric cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR)")
Pediatric first aid	45 days	36 months (a "triennial training program in pediatric first aid")

This is the part that quietly breaks rosters

Biennial and triennial do not stay aligned. A staff member certified in both on the same day in January is dual-qualified for 24 months. In month 25 their CPR has lapsed while their first aid is still valid for another year — so they personally still hold "a" certification, their file still looks half-current, and they no longer satisfy .14(2)(b) for their classroom.

Nobody's certificate "expired" in the sense a director usually watches for. The pair came apart. Over a few renewal cycles across a dozen staff, the two clocks scatter, and coverage becomes something you cannot eyeball from a wall chart.

Two consequences worth designing around:

• The thing to track is the pair, per person — not two independent certificate lists.
• The thing to check is the pair, per occupied room, per shift — because .14(2)(b) is a presence duty. It is satisfied or breached by who is standing in the room, not by what is in the cabinet.

That is why we evaluate this as a live coverage duty against who is actually present, the same way a staff-to-child ratio is evaluated, rather than as a checklist of held certificates.

The records check: the gate clause and the renewal clause are different clauses

Georgia requires a valid satisfactory Comprehensive Records Check Determination on file before a person is present at the centre with children (GA credentials rule set, verified against primary text 2026-10-02):

• The gate — 591-1-1-.09(1)(b) for a Director, 591-1-1-.09(1)(c) for an Employee: the determination must be on file "prior to being present at the Center while any child is present for care," with a clearance date no older than the preceding 12 months of hire. Note the scope: present at the centre while a child is present, which is broader than "working as a caregiver."
• The renewal — 591-1-1-.09(1)(l): the check must be repeated "at least once every five years."

On the gate's two clause numbers. Georgia states the same before-care gate twice, in role-specific clauses: .09(1)(b) names the Director, and .09(1)(c) is a separate clause with identical wording but for "every Employee" in place of "Director." Two further clauses sit alongside them — .09(1)(a) is the upstream fingerprint-submission duty naming Director, Employee and Provisional Employee together, and .09(1)(d) is a weaker fingerprint-only gate for Provisional Employees specifically.

Nothing you have to do changes with the role: the gate timing is the same and the five-year renewal at .09(1)(l) applies either way. So this is a citation-precision point, not a compliance one — but it is one we got wrong. We cited .09(1)(b) alone for the role-general requirement, here and in our own rule data, which puts the Director's clause forward as though it were the general rule. Both now cite the pair. We model this requirement role-generically, so the honest citation is both subsections.

Keep the gate and the renewal apart, too. Neither .09(1)(b) nor .09(1)(c) states an interval, and .09(1)(l) is not the gate. A vendor that cites a gate clause for the five-year interval has cited the wrong clause — also a mistake we have made and corrected in our own material, which is why we are pointed about it.

The federal floor does not supply Georgia's interval. 45 CFR 98.43(d)(2)(ii) (FEDERAL credentials rule set, verified against primary text 2026-10-01) requires a background re-check at least once every five years, and we apply the stricter of state and federal at evaluation time. Georgia's five years already meets that floor under Georgia's own authority, so the federal rule changes nothing here and Georgia's citation stands on its own. Georgia's single umbrella check deliberately does not map onto the four separately-named federal components — it covers the same ground under one name, and we do not fabricate a gap by matching on labels.

Three recheck triggers we do not schedule

591-1-1-.09(1)(l) sets four recheck triggers. Only the five-year clock is one we can compute:

1. At least once every five years — modelled.
2. An arrest or charge for a covered Crime — not modelled.
3. A lapse from the child care industry of 180 days or more — not modelled, but tracked as a known gap. Unlike triggers 2 and 4, this one names an interval (180 days); what is missing is the anchor — a candidate's last day in the child care industry is not a field we carry. So it is a registry entry (unevaluatedObligations above), not merely a line in this paragraph. South Carolina's break-in-service fingerprint re-check reads like the same shape in rule text and fails differently in our product: there the anchor is built and nothing records the break, so that clause fires and is lenient, where Georgia's cannot fire at all. Same-looking rules, opposite failure modes, two different disclosures.
4. "When the Department so requests" — not modelled.

Triggers 2 and 4 name no interval or date to compute from at all; one is event-driven with no threshold and the other is an open-ended administrative order the Department may issue at any time. Our model renews on an interval, and the one event anchor it does carry is specific to another state's rule, so these two are real obligations that are your calendar, not ours. We would rather name them than let a clean screen imply they are handled.

What else Georgia requires of your staff

Requirement	Shape	Clause
Center orientation	Before assignment to children or task; one-time, no renewal clock	591-1-1-.33(1)
Health and safety orientation	Within the first 90 days of employment	591-1-1-.33(3)
Transportation training	Two clock hours, every 24 months, for the Director and each staff person who participates in transportation	591-1-1-.36(3)

On transportation: .36(3) is a training requirement, and that is the whole of what we model here. Georgia separately requires, at 591-1-1-.14(2)(c), that a CPR/first-aid-qualified staff member be present during any field trip or transportation of children. That is an activity-scoped coverage duty — a different shape from the classroom and role duties above — and our model does not express it outside an actual vehicle trip. Having the training is not the same as satisfying the field-trip coverage duty. A non-vehicle field trip is uncovered here entirely.

Two things Georgia does not require, stated as absences

These look like holes in our data. They are not; they are findings about Georgia's text, and docs/adr/0014 is the rule that stops us "fixing" them.

Georgia imposes no staff tuberculosis test and no staff physical examination requirement.

The other four states we model all carry a staff TB row. Georgia's absence is therefore conspicuous, and the temptation to add one "because the pattern looks incomplete" is exactly the error that would make this library worthless. It is absent from our Georgia data deliberately, because it is absent from 591-1-1.

So we will not write "requirements vary by state" here, and we will not call it a gap in the law. If you hold staff TB screening in Georgia, you may well have good reasons — your insurer, your county, a policy of your own. Georgia's licensing rules are not one of them.

What this page does not cover

A reference page with no stated gaps is marketing. These are the limits of what is above.

• .14(2)(c)'s field-trip and transportation coverage duty is not modelled, as described above. We model the .36(3) training, not the activity duty.
• Three of the four records-check recheck triggers are not scheduled — arrest, 180-day industry lapse, and Department request. Named above; yours to track.
• Georgia's annual training quota is a different rule family and is not claimed here. The 10 clock-hour annual requirement with its topic mix is an accumulating ledger rather than a credential with an expiry, it is versioned separately from Georgia's credential rules, and this page makes no claim about it. Georgia amended its training rules without touching its credential rules, which is precisely why we version the two apart.
• The .36 transportation passenger-checklist regime is distinct from the .36(3) training credential and is not part of what is described above.
• This is the credentials rule family only. Georgia's ratio rules and training rules are verified separately from its credential rules, and no claim on either family is made here. Not every rule family in every state has been promoted to verified against primary text; per-family status is stated on each state's page in the state reference library. Check Georgia before relying on a Georgia claim from any other family.
• KinderBee is at a pilot, disclosed stage, not a finished compliance guarantee. We model rules from primary text and show you what the rule says and when a record stops satisfying it. We do not certify that your centre is compliant, and no software can — an unannounced licensing visit (45 CFR 98.42(b)(2)(i)(B)) assesses your centre, not your vendor.

Same state, other rule family: the annual training side of the same staffing question is on its own page — Georgia's annual child care training hours. Its claims rest on Georgia's training rule set, versioned and verified separately from the credentials rule set this page states.

How to check us

Every Georgia clause on this page was read from rules.sos.ga.gov/gac/591-1-1 — the Georgia Secretary of State's own rules host. We re-pointed this rule set off a law.cornell.edu mirror deliberately: a secondary mirror can serve superseded text, which is a mistake we made in another state and do not intend to repeat.

On which edition you should be comparing against: the chapter's cover page is dated July 1, 2025. Rules .14 and .33 were last amended by a filing dated May 15, 2025, effective June 4, 2025 — that amendment predates and is folded into the July 1, 2025 edition, so the edition cited here is current.

We also checked 2025 HB 175 (effective 2025-07-01), which broadens the statutory definition of a comprehensive background check in O.C.G.A. Title 20 to add national sex offender registry and multi-state registry language. It matches what .09's rule text already required, so it changes nothing in the Comprehensive Records Check as modelled.

For the federal clause: 45 CFR 98.43 via Cornell LII, with the effective date confirmed against the Federal Register as published (81 FR 67438).

Start with Georgia for the full per-family picture, including which of Georgia's rule families have been verified against primary text and which have not. The companion piece how often background checks must be renewed covers how the federal five-year floor interacts with all five states we model.