Child care providers want changes to strict rules that result in costly upgrades, licensing issues
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Minnesota’s home-based child care providers are shutting their doors at an alarming rate. Some say one reason so many providers are quitting is because they feel burdened by complex regulations and strict enforcement actions that drive up their cost of doing business.
Kelsey Hayley, 35, is a family child care provider from Mounds View in Ramsey County and has been running her business for three years.
“I’ve always loved the family child care business, being able to work with kids, having a small group, being able to apply my education from early childhood and apply it in my home,” Hayley said.
But a growing part of her job is all the documentation and paperwork she needs to do to keep her license up to date and meeting all the state’s rules and regulations. Hayley agrees that most of those rules are needed to help keep kids safe. But some of them, she says, go a little too far.
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“Some of these new regulations that they’re trying to put out seem very tedious and not something that will necessarily affect a child’s outcome,” Hayley said.
For many home based child care providers, she says it can be overwhelming.
“We wear lots of hats. We are the teacher, the janitor, the lunch lady, the secretary, we wear all of these hats,” Hayley said. And on top of all that work, “we are getting more correction orders, we are getting more rules.”
Many home-based child care providers say it’s not just the complex regulations, but that they are left up to each county’s inspectors, or licensors, to interpret and enforce. Some providers say they end up living in fear of citations and expensive repairs to meet the regulations.
That was the case for Amanda Rieder, 32, who just last month closed her child care in rural Tyler, Minnesota after eight years.
“I ran into a problem where I had a new water heater installed at my house, and we turned it all the way down for the temp and my licensor came,” Rieder said. “She checked the temp, and it turned out to be too hot, and we can’t turn down the water heater anymore. It’s turned down to the lowest setting possible.”
And Rieder gives another example of when the regulations required her to make costly improvements to her home.
“We had to either buy hinges that made the door self close, or you had to buy one of those attachments to screw onto your door that pulls it shut, and so we had to make those changes,” Rieder said. “That’s all expense out of your own pocket.”
Even though that regulation was later repealed, Rieder and other providers say all the time spent on paperwork and fixing minor infractions takes them away from their main job — caring for and educating the kids. And it’s taking a toll.
As of August, the Minnesota Department of Children, Youth and Families reported that there were 5,663 active licenses for family in-home child care providers in the state. That’s down sharply from the nearly 10,000 in-home child care providers operating in the state a decade ago.
And the state officials who oversee child care providers, and state lawmakers have taken notice that there is an affordable child care crisis in Minnesota.
They launched an effort in 2021 to cut red tape, update and streamline the licensing process, and reform child care regulations. The state had begun to implement some changes and examine others, but the Family Child Care Modernization project paused its work about a year ago when many child care stakeholders said they weren't included in the process.
For example, the challenges facing rural child care providers can be different from those in the Twin Cities. Marnie Werner, vice president of Research and Operations, at the Center for Rural Policy and Development, says regulations affecting family child care providers can vary differently.
“We’ve lost 50 percent of our in-home providers in the last 20 or so years in rural areas,” Werner said. “When they’re working on the regulations, they need to keep in mind that family providers in rural areas don’t have the ability to just raise their rates … you have to keep in mind at a higher level to make sure that when you get down into the weeds of the regulations you’re not doing things that are just going to drive rural providers away.”
Minnesota’s Department of Children, Youth and Families, which oversees child care, says it’s been holding meetings with and getting feedback from stakeholders around the state and the process of overhauling regulations is back on track.
State Rep. Nathan Coulter, DFL-Bloomington, is sponsoring a bill with bipartisan cosponsors aimed at easing some of the more restrictive regulations.
“I think right now, you know, through the best of intentions, we have a licensing structure that, I think in many ways, is really sort of hindering,” Coulter said. “That is forcing folks to spend more time on paperwork and on worrying about things that they could and should be spending caring for their kiddos.“
The bill would streamline licensing, improve and standardize inspections and provide more leniency for minor citations, and it would allocate funds to better support the child care industry.
Coulter is hoping to pass the bill when the state Legislature returns to work early next year.
