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You are receiving this email because you are a child care provider, licensor, county supervisor, licensing employee; you subscribed to the Child Care Regulation Modernization listserv; or you attended a listening session for the draft revised licensing standards.
The Minnesota Department of Human Services (DHS) will not propose language to adopt revised child care standards in the 2025 legislative session. DHS received extensive feedback from the child care community requesting more time for additional feedback and engagement on the next draft version of standards. We are honoring those requests and allowing more time for the development of draft licensing standards.
Next steps. The Child Care Regulation Modernization project team continues to learn from its interactions with child care providers, parents, licensors, and early childhood organization professionals. As the team compiles this extensive feedback, it will:
- Summarize and share a recap of key themes and things we learned from the engagement process;
- Release revised drafts for both family child care and child care centers later this year for public comment; and
- Submit a report to the legislature prior to the 2025 legislative session describing progress of the broader regulatory modernization project, including the weighted risk system, abbreviated inspections, and the revised licensing standards.
DHS’s goal is to ensure that all perspectives are included and that the child care community has time to weigh in on additional drafts of the licensing standards before they are proposed to the legislature in the 2026 legislative session.
Thank you to all who have participated in this process. Thank you to everyone who provided feedback through virtual and in-person listening sessions, who submitted survey responses, and who contacted DHS through e-mail and other means to provide input on the draft revised listening standards.
The project team hosted or participated in 23 listening sessions that engaged over 950 participants and collected 2,498 individual ideas or pieces of feedback that were shared on post-it® notes. In addition, over 1,000 individuals completed the survey on draft licensing standards.
Thank you also to our partners for hosting and organizing sessions which helped us to reach more communities: the Office of the Family Child Care Ombudsperson, the Minnesota Initiative Foundations in Northland, Southwest MN, West Central MN, Northwest MN, and Central MN.
More details will be available in the coming months but rest assured that we have heard your concerns and understand the need for continuing to build relationships and trust in this process. Thank you to all who have given your time, effort, and ideas over the duration of this project. We look forward to continuing to work with you to improve child care regulation for Minnesota.
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