Minnesota Child Care Providers Push Back on State, Holds Back Licensing Standards Review – InForum

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

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

In 2021, DHS announced the Family Child Care Regulatory Modernization Project, born out of a state Cunningham served on the Family Child Care Task Force. The aim of the project was to adjust inspection time so providers could spend more time with their students, create a tiered infringement system and review licensing standards. These are all things Cunningham wants, but not without her input.

Kyra Miles / MPR News

“I think without stakeholder engagement and a working relationship with DHS, they’ve come up with a document that’s overbearing, overblown, unrealistic, disrespectful,” Cunningham said. “So I think they got a poor product because they didn’t commit ahead of time.”

During months of listening sessions, Cunningham and other providers said they didn’t feel like their concerns were 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 more than 1,000 names to stop this legislation.

It worked, and now DHS is going back to the drawing board. 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 weigh in on additional projects.

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

It’s been 40 years since child care licensing standards were last revised, and the state needs more child care providers. In a report summarizing child care listening sessions, the Minnesota-based nonprofit Southwest Initiative Foundation highlighted problems with the revised draft standards, including concerns about financial and time constraints, the impracticality of requirements such as soil testing and excessive documentation. While the draft addressed outdated statutes, such as the landline requirement, it did not address the big problems providers had with the current standards, such as the ratio of providers to children.

“Instead of fixing these things that we already knew were problematic, the bill included chapters and chapters of changes, things that are really considered best practices,” said DHS Family Child Care Ombudsman Lisa Thompson. “But a statute is not a guide to best practice. A statute is considered law, and when you disobey the letter of the law, you are breaking the law.

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

Cunningham knows it’s important to keep kids safe and understands the need for regulations, and she said she looks forward to participating in conversations about revising licenses. Part of her petition included a delay in submitting the revisions until 2026, with the hope that the state will put more money into the project by then.

“We’re going to get into legislation with something in 2026, whatever it looks like,” she said. “I think we can get to the 2026 regulatory changes with less chaos and unrest. We have to build the relationship and the trust and there has to be engagement.”