Last year’s report, “A Quiet Crisis: Minnesota’s Child Care Shortage,” raised a major conversation on the child care shortage facing all of Minnesota and the impact it is having on just not families but also on employers and the economy. A year later, we’re revisiting the issue with a two-page update, “Child Care’s Quiet Crisis: An Update.”
We found that the number of family in-home child care providers is continuing to plummet across the state, and while new and expanding child care centers seem to be taking up the slack, the new capacity is not evenly distributed at all. We’re also including some examples of communities working out their own solutions and what people in the field are saying: that until something can be done to increase wages and/or profits for both center and family providers, the child care shortage will continue.
