Mapping Access to Child Care for Minnesota Families
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Many Minnesota families with young children struggle to access, afford, and provide early care and education opportunities that can help them both earn a living and help their children thrive.
The quality of children’s experiences in the first few years of life has lifelong consequences for the children, their families, neighbors, and communities.
Community leaders want to promote families’ access to child care with smart investments that focus resources on the places and opportunities that will make the most difference.
The tools on this site reveal how families’ access to care varies around the state and around each neighborhood. It gives you the richest, most-accurate view available of the childcare system by harnessing together data on the locations, prices, and quality ratings of all licensed center-based and home-based care providers including public pre-kindergartens and Head Start; U.S. Census data on where Minnesota families with young children tend to live; and data on travel time by car between residential communities and provider locations. It grows out of research by economists at the University of Minnesota.
The cost of care is another important aspect of families’ access to care. Cost has two main components: the price the provider charges and the value of the travel time ($10/hour) required to access the provider (10 drives weekly). Families living closer to providers charging lower prices have lower total costs of access.
The analysis does not take into account public subsidies to attend private care, such as Minnesota’s Early Learning Scholarship program. We are working to obtain the relevant data to incorporate this.
The third and final aspect of access to care focuses on the quality of care. For each simulated family location, we measure the share of nearby slots that are highly-rated in Minnesota’s Parent Aware system.
You can also get a community-level access report based on 2022 data. Report 1) compares family access across communities around the state. 2) shows a trend over time.