The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education is recommending the state remove 177 licensing rules for child care facilities that it said were outdated and repetitive.
The move follows Gov. Mike Kehoe’s executive order directing the Office of Childhood to reduce regulatory requirements by at least 10%. Child care providers reported they are discouraged from joining or staying in the field because the state’s regulatory system is so burdensome, according to the executive order.
Missouri Commissioner of Education Karla Eslinger said at Tuesday’s state board of education meeting that complexity made child care unattractive to prospective providers.
“Cleaning up and having more clarity around what is it that is the expectation, then more people will have an opportunity to meet those expectations,” Eslinger said. “We'll have more slots available for kids to have service, and there'll be more people interested in engaging in all this work.”
The department reviewed more than 1,400 child care licensing regulations before flagging 79 rules in the family child care home rulebook and 98 in the child care center rulebook for removal. More than half of the licensing rules were also repeated across both rulebooks.
Leaders with the Office of Childhood said some of those redundancies came when different departments overseeing child care facilities were brought under one roof. Other rules have become outdated as new best practices have been added, like safe sleeping practices in 2011.
Nancy Scherer, the office’s regulations and compliance administrator, said the state hasn’t been able to remove rules that are no longer necessary.
“It has become a snowball effect, and we have more rules than we need to have, and we're going to simplify those to put them in simple language so providers can understand what that rule means,” Scherer said.
To address duplicative rules, the department plans to consolidate regulations into a single book with general requirements for all providers and specific ones for different types of facilities. A separate set of rules will be created for school-age-only programs, which operate differently.
The department’s review said the formal rule rewriting process has already begun and will take about two years to finish. Scherer said the process is lengthy to ensure there are no coverage gaps for regulations.
To inform the review, the department hosted 14 listening sessions across the state, created a task force representing providers, families, and experts, and received feedback from about 1,000 survey responses.
The effort comes as Missouri faces widespread child care shortages. A 2023 investigation from Missouri Independent and MuckRock found nearly half of the state’s children aged 5 and younger lived in child care deserts where there are more than three kids for every licensed child care slot or no licensed slots at all.
The state also struggled to keep up with a backlog of child care subsidy payments last year after switching to a new software, before finally catching up this spring. In May, a group of Republican senators blocked a bill that would have created a tax-credit program for child care.
Department staff said there are more than 2,500 licensed providers in Missouri, and there are at least 300 applications each month that are pending approval
Eslinger said the department's licensing changes will help improve child care access for families.
“Whether it's the efficiency in which we are able to respond to stipend requests, licensing review, anything that happens with our child care centers, providers, all of that will help us to increase access, help us to have more child care opportunities for families,” Eslinger said.
