Colorado has a shortage of day care and preschool facilities. This is particularly the case for infant and toddler care, along with (due to Biden-era rule changes) childcare assistance programs for low-income parents. This is a problem that needs fixing. Without childcare options, many parents simply cannot work. We want people working.
In researching this issue, I’ve spoken with people on both the regulatory and business side of the industry. Interestingly, there was a recurring theme I heard from both. First, that there are problems with how we check providers for regulatory compliance, and, second, that these problems predate the current state agency regulating providers, the Colorado Department of Early Childhood (CDEC).
Something to be aware of in reading the below, but which I won’t go into depth on here, is that multiple state entities have a say in Colorado’s child care regulatory regime. The same school might be subject to regulations and inspections by CDEC, but also fall under the Colorado Department of Pubic Health and Environment’s (CDPHE) purview (as well as possibly others).
Take what you read below and compound accordingly. What you see will be an example of a larger problem, not its entirety. Top that off, too by remembering that sometimes regulations from one agency conflict with regulations from another.
The regulatory regime
While the problem childcare operators face might not be new, I can tell you something that is: regulatory bloat. Since CDEC officially began in 2022, the agency added 27 new rules and regulations to the state’s already voluminous rulebook. By this point, the page count is up in the 500’s. From a purely pragmatic point of view, who can manage this complexity? How on earth are they supposed to do so fairly?
As things stand now, CDEC contracts with several agencies and nonprofits around the state to do their regulatory compliance and licensing checks. Per a CDEC spokesperson, this list has included Goodwill of Colorado, The Institute for Racial Equity and Excellence, Mesa County Public Health, and Red Rocks Community College.
Dawn Alexander of the Early Childhood Education Association of Colorado, a trade group, used to work for Red Rocks Community College as one of their inspectors. She told me that her training was partially done by the state, but Red Rocks did the bulk of it, with a few months of job shadowing (with her first following, then leading). Another contractor, who didn’t want to go on record, told me of a similar process; the state providing some training, with additional in-house training/mentoring prior to hitting the field alone.
Ms. Alexander, as well as the other contractor, also told me about meetings designed to make sure rules were consistently applied across the state and within an organization. This varied from a monthly in-house meeting in one case to a giant, virtual free for all in another.
In the grand tradition of rulemaking bodies, CDEC also puts out what they term administrative guides which don’t hold the legal force of rules, but they are intended to help inspectors and providers to understand and apply the rules in a consistent manner. I pawed through them too quickly to count pages, but I doubt they’d be much less than the rules themselves.
Set up for failure
After multiple discussions, it is clear that there is a concerted effort by contractors and inspectors to fairly and consistently apply the rules. I get the sense from everyone I spoke to on that side of the fence that they genuinely want to be fair and have the children’s safety in mind.
Still, none of that seems to fix the problem providers are having with the rules. Despite providers saying they liked the individuals that came to do compliance, their frustration at the process was easy to pick up on.
I spoke with a provider who didn’t want to go on record (but who did share documentation of her claims with me) who runs a series of childcare facilities in Colorado. From her I got story after story of inspection problems.
One instance that stood out was a report noting that a particular piece of playground equipment had bolts where more than 3 threads were showing on the hardware. Besides the impractability of counting threads on every fence bolt, a natural question about how rules mentioning sturdiness and safety can be narrowed down by an inspector to “showing 3 threads” arises. Whose rule is this? Is it this particular inspector or the state?
From the inspection contractor who didn’t want to be quoted, I heard a story of a banister out of compliance for years, but which had gone unnoticed by any previous inspector. Unnoticed, that is, until a new inspector caught it. The provider, understandably frustrated at the problem, suddenly had a big (and expensive) safety violation in need of repair in order to stay open.
Any game where the players all operate in good faith, yet everyone loses is a poorly designed one. That is what is going on with Colorado’s regulatory apparatus for child care: despite good intentions and actions by all, problems are coming up. These problems are making things so difficult for providers that they don’t expand despite a built in demand for their services.
I heard many solutions and attempted patches in my conversations, but I didn’t hear the one that may ultimately work best: scaling back the number of rules and regulations to human size. It’s a stretch to say that 500 pages of rules, with an inspection “guide” that’s probably about as long, is actually helping us be any safer. I believe we could lighten that load and encourage more entrants into the market to solve our childcare supply problem.
Cory Gaines teaches college physics and is a regular contributor to Complete Colorado. He lives in Sterling on Colorado’s Eastern Plains. He also writes at the Colorado Accountability Project substack
