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By Kyra Miles

When Cyndi Cunningham heard the Minnesota Department of Human Services was not going to present its revised child care standards in the 2025 legislative session, she said she was excited and relieved.

“What was most concerning was not as much the detail as the disrespectful process,” Cunningham said.

In 2021, DHS announced the Family Child Care Regulation Modernization project, born out of a state Family Child Care Taskforce Cunningham was a part of. The goal of the project was to adjust inspection time so providers could spend more time with their students, create a tiered violation system and revise licensing standards. These are all things Cunningham wants, but not without her input.

“I believe that without the stakeholder engagement and a working relationship with DHS, they presented a document that is overbearing, overhanded, unrealistic, disrespectful,” Cunningham said. “So I believe they got a poor product because they didn’t do the engagement ahead of time.”

Over the course of months of listening sessions, Cunningham and other providers said they didn’t feel like their concerns were being taken seriously. When they got the draft in April 2024, Cunningham’s organization Lead&Care for family child care providers had a meeting where they organized a petition of over 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 drafts.

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

It’s been 40 years since child care licensing standards were last revised, and the state is in need of more child care providers. In a report summarizing the child care listening sessions, Minnesota non-profit Southwest Initiative Foundation outlined issues with the revised standards draft including concerns about financial and time constraints, impracticality of requirements like soil testing and excessive documentation. While the draft did address outdated statutes like the requirement of a landline phone, it did not address the big issues providers had with current standards, like ratios of providers to children.

“Instead of fixing these things that we already knew were problematic, the draft included chapters and chapters of changes, of things that are really considered best practices,” DHS Family Child Care Ombudsperson Lisa Thompson said. “But a statute is not a guide for best practices. A statute is held as law, and when you do not comply with the letter of the law, you are in violation of the law.

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

Cunningham knows it’s important for kids to be safe and understands the need for regulations, and she said she looks forward to being a part of conversations on licensing revisions. Part of her petition included a delay of submission of revisions until 2026 with the hope the state will put more money into the project by then.

“We are going to go into legislation with something in 2026, however that looks,” she said. “I believe that we can get to the 2026 regulatory changes with less chaos and angst. We have to build the relationship and the trust and there has to be engagement.”