Common-sense approach needed for child care rules
Last April the Minnesota Department of Human Services released updated licensing standards for both child care providers and child care centers.
The 97-page document includes updates to nearly every current statute. It includes specifics such as the number of certain types of toys each home must have, a requirement that refrigerators need to be cleaned and sanitized monthly and calls for bare soil to either be covered or tested for lead by a national EPA-recognized lab.
State Sen. Gary Dahms addressed the draft standards in his July e-newsletter. Dahms said the changes will be the first significant revisions to the child care licensing standards since the 1980s. Updating the child care licensing standards is part of Minnesota’s Child Care Regulation Modernization Project.
While the current documents are drafts, Dahms said feedback is crucial step in the process. That’s because the DHS will issue a revised draft this fall after gathering comments. Dahms and his colleagues in the Minnesota Legislature will receive a copy of that draft during the next session. The Legislature would need to consider and pass the new standards, including a start date. The legislative process is expected to include additional opportunities for public engagement.
Meanwhile, multiple in-person and virtual listening sessions have been held by the Southwest Initiative Foundation in southwest Minnesota.
The listening sessions are a good step toward forming new standards in a vital industry. So many working parents in southern Minnesota struggle to find dependable and affordable day care. In many communities in rural southern Minnesota, it’s a crisis.
Reasons for the crisis are numerous. In an attempt to keep prices affordable to parents, wages for child care workers are often very low. Because taking care of children comes with a lot of liability, child care centers bear insurance costs, also boosting the price of care.
While regulations are supposed to protect the children, they also add costs to running child care businesses.
With those concerns in mind, the online listening session did draw a lot of good feedback.
“It’s a lot for one person to do,” said one participant about the proposes schedules for sanitizing toys and equipment.
“To add all this in is just adding more work,” another participant said.
And another participant brought up environmental guidelines that required costly improvements such as mulch or gravel under outdoor play equipment.
These concerns are valid. But so are the regulations stressing safety. So conducting the listening sessions is the easy part.
The challenging aspect of dealing the draft regulations starts with submitting them to the Legislature. The 2024 Legislative session failed to pass a bonding bill. Is the Legislature capable of approving child care standards that will be fair and not force closures?
The district Dahms represents in the Legislature mostly covers rural communities. If new standards force more child care providers to shut down services, that would be devastating to parents. But allowing unsafe day care providers to put young children in harms way can’t be allowed either.
We urge Dahms and his colleagues to analyze proposals carefully and take the time to listen to their constituents. Take a common-sense approach that weeds out the unnecessary proposals but stresses safety as well.