Minnesota child care providers pause review of licensing standards – Austin Daily Herald

By Kyra Miles

When Cyndi Cunningham learned that the Minnesota Department of Human Services would not introduce its revised child care standards in the 2025 legislative session, she said she was excited and relieved.

“What was most concerning was not so much the details but the disrespectful nature of the process,” Cunningham said.

In 2021, DHS announced the Family Child Care Regulation Modernization Project, which grew out of a state family child care working group that Cunningham was a member of. The project’s goals were to adjust inspection time so providers could spend more time with their students, create a tiered system for violations, and revise licensing standards. These are all things Cunningham wants, but not without her input.

“I believe that without engaging stakeholders and working with DHS, they have produced a document that is presumptuous, arrogant, unrealistic and disrespectful,” Cunningham said. “So I believe they got a bad product because they didn’t do the engagement up front.”

Over the course of months of hearings, Cunningham and other providers said they felt their concerns were not being taken seriously. When they received the bill in April 2024, Cunningham’s organization, Lead&Care, for family child care providers, held a meeting where they organized a petition with over 1,000 names to stop this legislation.

It worked, and now DHS must start all over again. In a statement to providers, the department said its goal is to ensure all perspectives are included and that the child care community has time to comment on further drafts.

“We look forward to considering your ideas and suggestions to further improve child care licensing standards and protect and care for Minnesota’s children,” DHS Commissioner Jodi Harpstead said in a statement. “I am proud of our Office of Inspector General for taking a step back to regroup and take more time to work with the community to get this right.”

It has been 40 years since the last revision of child care licensing standards, and the state needs more child care centers. In a report summarizing the child care hearings, the Minnesota-based nonprofit Southwest Initiative Foundation outlined problems with the revised draft standards, including concerns about financial and time constraints, lack of practicality of requirements such as soil testing, and excessive documentation. While the draft addressed outdated laws such as the requirement for a landline phone, it did not address major issues providers had with the current standards, such as caregiver-to-child ratios.

“Instead of fixing these things that we already knew were problematic, the bill had chapter after chapter of changes, of things that are really considered best practices,” said Lisa Thompson, DHS family and child services ombudsman. “But a law is not a guide to best practices. A law is considered the law, and if you don’t follow the letter of the law, you’re breaking the law.”

Still, Thompson believes DHS’s response is a step in the right direction toward building trust between the state, providers and regulators.

Cunningham knows the importance of child safety and understands the need for regulations. She said she looks forward to being part of the conversations about licensing changes. Part of her petition was a delay in filing changes until 2026 in the hopes the state will put more money into the project by then.

“We’re going to get something into the legislation in 2026, whatever that looks like,” she said. “I believe we can get the regulatory changes in 2026 with less chaos and fear. We need to build the relationship and the trust and there needs to be engagement.”