Toys and watering cans lie ready in a box on the grounds of a daycare center.
Jens Kalaene/picture alliance via Getty Images
More than 14,000 licensed childcare facilities across the US are due for a state-mandate inspection.
Some states, like California, haven’t inspected many of its facilities since before the pandemic.
USAFacts calculated that roughly 43% of inspections tend to find compliance issues.
Years after her son, Deacon, died at a California-based childcare facility that authorities later called “grossly over capacity,” Dani Morin warned in a TikTok video that even though the state only mandates an inspection once every three years, she was easily able to locate several facilities that hadn’t been inspected since before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Inspired by Morin’s video, researchers at USAFacts, a not-for-profit group owned by current Los Angeles Clippers owner and former Microsoft Executive Steve Ballmer, compiled inspection data from 148,166 licensed childcare facilities in 41 states between June and September 2023 to discover that 14,683 licensed childcare facilities across the country are behind on receiving their state-mandated inspections.
“This is a national crisis, this is an issue,” Morin said to Insider after reviewing the new report. “Parents trust the licensing department to do their job, and there’s no jobs being done.”
USAFacts
According to the federally-operated ChildCare.gov website, licensing ensures that childcare facilities follow a minimum set of standards toward sanitation, child-to-caregiver ratio, building safety, and more.
While some states were wildly more out of compliance than others — only 46% of licensed childcare facilities in Idaho have reportedly received inspections compared to 97% of facilities in Ohio — overall, the report found that just under 10% of facilities were in need of one, according to each state’s licensing rules and regulations.
As for Minnesota, its state records reflect that 85% of its childcare facilities have received an inspection recently enough to comply with state law.
When USAFacts initially compiled the state’s records just over a month ago, its report estimated that 81% of Minnesota’s licensed childcare facilities were out of compliance — easily amounting to the largest proportion in the nation. The state, however, updated its public-facing records in recent weeks following several messages from Insider and USAFacts.
In a statement on Tuesday, a representative from the Minnesota Department of Human Services sent Insider data saying the proportion of licensed childcare facilities that had received inspections in 2022 was over 90%, however, they noted they calculated their proportions using a calendar-year system while USAFacts’ methodology instead pertained to the previous 365 days, which could account for the calculation differences.
When it comes to the frequency of required inspections, that varies from state to state.
Tennessee, for example, requires childcare facilities to be inspected four times a year, while California only requires it once every three years.
USAFacts
The data visualization engineer at USAFacts who spearheaded the project, Amber Thomas, pointed out that her team discovered that about 43% of inspections resulted in the inspector discovering the childcare facility was out of compliance in some fashion. It’s difficult in many cases to determine the specific violations found by the inspectors as they’re not always listed.
“We can’t say anything as to how severe that issue is because they didn’t report how severe the issue is,” Thomas said. “So it might just be your first aid kit is missing gauze. It might be your paperwork is a little bit out of date. It could be that you’ve got something super dangerous like guns in the house. But there’s no way to know the difference between those things based on the data that they’ve provided.”
Dr. Katherine Glenn-Applegate, the director of child care and education initiatives at the Ohio-based childcare referral agency, Action for Children, advised parents looking into childcare for their kids to do as much research as they can.
“I would encourage parents to keep that in mind too, to do their research and be informed about the circumstances that their children are in, but know that there’s a wide range of what the licensing violations might be.
In the case of Morin’s son’s childcare facility, prior state inspections had already flagged it repeatedly for grossly violating the child-to-caregiver ratios. Each time that occurred, however, the facility’s owner would close down the house-based daycare and start a new daycare at a separate location.
Morin alleged this was an intentional move by the facility owner to obfuscate their violations to parents, explaining that in California law, “license follows the address,” meaning that once a childcare facility changes its location, its history of violations doesn’t follow alongside it in future reports, effectively wiping the slate clean.
Now, about seven years after Deacon’s death, Morin frequently produces videos to her following of nearly 700,000 on TikTok of her very own “Mom hacks,” child-safety lessons, and tips on how to look into childcare facilities as she parents her son, Rhett.
“All I can do is share my story and tell people, ‘This is how I got bamboozled. Don’t let it happen to you. Look into your childcare.'”
USAFacts’ report analyzed licensing data from 41 states, ultimately choosing to exclude Hawaii, Illinois, West Virginia, New Hampshire, Florida, Kansas, Massachusetts, Nebraska, and Pennsylvania from the report as its researchers were either unable to obtain any information due to technical and data limitations from the sources themselves, or were severely limited in the information provided by the states.
Representatives from the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services and California’s Department of Social Services did not respond to Insider’s request in time for publication.