Family child-care providers raise concerns over proposed regulations in St. Peter listening session

At Amy Lee Sellner’s home daycare in Le Center, things can get a little messy. It’s a common sight to find kids with fingers sticky from making crafts and soles coated in sand after sticking their toes in the sandbox out back. During the summer, there’s not a day that a kid doesn’t go home with black feet. But muddy shoes are a point of pride for Sellner, who advertises her home daycare as a place where kids can learn social skills through the power of play.

But now, Sellner fears that her approach to child-care and her home business as a whole could be made obsolete by a litany of new regulations proposed by the Department of Human Services.

In a DHS-hosted listening session at St. Peter High School on July 10, Sellner joined dozens of other area family child-care providers voicing their frustrations with the agency’s 97-pages of proposed revisions to the state’s child-care licensing standards.

The document comes with a lengthy list of requirements including a detailed catalog of toys each provider must have, a comprehensive cleaning schedule and a rule that providers must either cover soil in outdoor play areas or have it tested for lead. The proposed standards also prohibit pet hair in areas of the home accessible to children and the use of aerosol sprays, scented candles and air fresheners.

Sellner said it would cost her thousands of dollars just to get her backyard into compliance with the proposed regulations. Any exposed dirt would either have to be tested or covered, trees would need to be uprooted so she could build a fence around her backyard playground, and playground equipment like her climber and swings would have to be moved out of the grass to a designated fall area layered with wood chips, sand or mulch.

Between the expenses of bringing her yard in line with the revised rules and the impracticality of having pets while keeping her home free of animal hair, Sellner warned that the regulations, if implemented, would cause her to close her business.

“If they pass the draft as it is right now, I would have to shut my doors as soon as it went into effect,” said Sellner.

She wasn’t the only family child-care provider at the listening session warning that she would have to close. Concerns over the potential costs of meeting the draft’s physical space requirements, conducting annual HVAC inspections and radon testing and the burdens of documenting frequent cleanings and other activities for the state were commonly shared by those in attendance.

These worries come as Minnesota has seen a shortage of affordable child-care facilities and a rapid decline in the prevalence of family child-care providers. Since 2000, in-home child-care capacity has been reduced by nearly 50 percent.

DHS Inspector General Kulani Moti said the agency was taking feedback from family child-care providers in listening sessions across Minnesota, which will inform the development of a revised draft to be sent to the legislature for consideration during the 2025 session.

“We’re going to take all of that information and we’re going to look at all of these comments — what providers think are doable, what providers had issues and concerns with and what is unreasonable,“ said Moti.

The draft was developed by DHS following the passage of a 2021 bill seeking to modernize child-care licensing standards, which have not received a significant update since the 1980’s. In an effort to bring Minnesota in line with “national regulatory best practices,” the regulations introduce new environmental health provisions for radon and water supply testing and updates to guidance and training on addressing problematic behaviors in children.

“Environmental health, behavior guidance, teacher qualifications, things like that were included to be more up to date with what we know and what we’ve learned about child-care as of today,” said Moti.

Brenda Novack, a Waterville-based family child-care provider and President of the Lead & Care Association of Family Child Care Professionals, said that an update to the draft standards was inadequate, and that DHS should restart the whole process from the ground up.

“It is just is unacceptable and it’s disrespectful when it comes to family child-care providers,” said Novack.

Novack raised concerns not only with the added costs the regulations could put on providers, but the burdens of following the cleaning routine demanded by the draft proposal.

“If I had to do the cleaning they want me to do. I will never spend any time with I don’t have any time to do what I actually what I love is to teach little kids to be with them to watch them grow and to see all their little milestones,” said Novack.

She also worried that the detailed provisions were written with such specificity that family child-care providers would have little breathing room to craft their own curriculum with different approaches in mind.

“If they give us the exact same guidelines, family child-care and the uniqueness of us is going to go away,” said Novack. “And that’s the beauty of this, is that we are all unique. We all run our program with different philosophies. Some are nature-based, some are Montessori-based, Reggio Emilia is another one that a lot of providers like to follow. If they do this, all that’s gonna go away.”