Earlier this month, members of the Resultant Early Childhood team, our partners at Opportunities Exchange, and Ryan Page, Director of Child Care for Iowa Department of Health and Human Services, presented the webinar, “Empowering Change for Our Youngest Learners: A Supply and Demand Data Story.” The webinar chronicled Iowa’s supply-and-demand journey in child care, highlighted the Child Care Connect (C3) solution, and featured an insightful Q&A from webinar participants and panel members.
Addressing the Problem of Insufficient Child Care in Iowa
In 2021, the governor of Iowa created a task force that brought together state and local leaders in Health and Human Services (HHS), workforce development, and economic development to address child care challenges across the state. The task force report identified child care as a crisis preventing Iowans from getting back to work during the pandemic and offered three core recommendations
- Develop a central online hub for finding not only child care services, but current information about openings and enrollments
- Provide timely updates for families, providers, and the state
- Support child care businesses in communities that need it
Developing a sustainable, actionable system to improve the child care system was a two-year process that saw interest holders align on a cohesive vision, and child care providers buy into this vision based on selected dev ops internal use cases. This led to the successful launch of the Iowa C3 solution, which directly addresses the recommendations of the task force.
An Overview of Iowa C3
Iowa C3 is an integrated data system that provides near real-time views of child care supply and demand. Families can use a single, comprehensive search tool to find openings at child care programs that fit their needs. Data directly from child care providers is refreshed in near real time to ensure data is up to date for families, providers, and the state
Results can be filtered based on a variety of criteria. For example, what is a facility’s quality rating? Do they offer care on weekends? Are they a licensed center or home-based provider? What age groups do they serve? What facilities are on or near my route to work?
Interactive dashboards of supply and demand inform community planning with regards to operational capacity and availability of care. Families can see side-by-side comparisons of child care programs and providers with contact information to follow up and ask questions. HR departments and businesses that are recruiting a workforce can determine the availability of child care in their communities, while emergency personnel can pinpoint providers in times of need.
Advanced analytics tracks the number of searches, time spent searching, search locations, gaps between supply and demand, trends in vacancies and reporting, and other valuable metrics. These insights help interest holders take steps to meet child care needs in specific counties and communities across Iowa.
Technology that Solves Real-World Problems
Opportunities Exchange, a trailblazer in early childhood innovation, showed how data integration through child care management software (CCMS) can revolutionize state systems and support more effective solutions nationwide. CCMS serves as an information-sharing pipeline between state agencies, providers, supporting organizations, and families. Data from multiple sources is automatically connected and organized in an integrated system.
CCMS answers the hard questions to solve real-world problems, providing insights and answers for data-driven decision-making. For example:
- Are workforce shortages impacting capacity?
- Are higher quality programs maintaining enrollments?
- Does enrollment align with inspection results?
- Is messaging on quality impacting family child care choices?
- What is the difference between licensed supply and actual supply?
- What are the gaps between child care supply and demand?
- Is there oversupply in some areas?
- How equitable is available care? How does cost impact this?
Key Benefits of an Integrated CCMS
An integrated system helps all child care interest holders – families, providers, communities, and states agencies.
- Families can find openings for child care that suits their needs quickly and easily.
- Providers can seamlessly share information and gain actionable insights that can be applied to improve their programs. Additionally, the system allows them to spend less time providing the state with data on attendance and enrollment and more time focusing on children and families.
- Communities can better understand the gap between supply and demand across age groups and localities, anticipate where demand will shift, and effectively plan for future child care needs.
- Economies are enhanced by targeted investments in quality child care, which can help build a larger workforce, support more businesses, and create greater economic opportunities.
- Providers, communities, and state agencies benefit from insights into how the cost of care and quality are impacting enrollment, resulting in more intentional decisions and more children placed in higher quality programs. CCMS reduces reporting burdens, eliminates redundancy, and ensures access to reliable data.
Holistically, all child care interest holders can work together to build a foundation for moving the system forward and closing the gap between supply and demand.
Q&A Highlights from Our Webinar
Q: What level of participation are you seeing from child care providers, especially those not using CCMS?
A: The percentage changes every day. Yesterday, participation was 60.6%. Last week, it was more than 70%. Providers not using CCMS can provide vacancies and desired capacity through a monthly data collection form that takes less than five minutes to complete.
Participation will likely never be at 100% because there are private providers that will not share their data with the general public. However, most providers are motivated to participate because they’ll see more traction with families that need child care.
Q: To what extent were state labor and economic development entities involved with collaboration and strategy development?
A: Economic and workforce leaders were part of the governor’s child care task force that developed the core recommendations. More have participated since the launch of Iowa C3. For years, anecdotal evidence was insufficient for assessing child care availability, but dashboards now provide hard data that paints a full, accurate picture of supply and demand and answers common questions about affordability.
Q: How is the difference between licensed supply and operational supply determined?
A: Homes are also registered in Iowa. The regulated supply is based on what HHS determines to be a particular provider’s maximum limits. However, supply data is continuously refined as more data is entered into the system. For example, as the provider enters information into their profile, and CCMS vendors continue to standardize data elements around key metrics like desired capacity, that information is factored into operational supply. In the dashboard, you can see regulated supply and operational supply, and pair that with demand.
Conclusion
The Iowa C3 solution developed and implemented by Iowa State University & Resultant. Opportunities Exchange provides a roadmap for understanding and addressing child care supply-and-demand issues in communities and states across the country.
This groundbreaking system provides current, accurate data on provider vacancies, capacity, and attendance, creating a groundbreaking family search tool that makes it easy to find the right child care program. At the same time, public dashboards illustrate child care supply and demand across the state. State agencies can then make informed decisions to increase child care resources that support a larger workforce, enabling local economies to thrive.
Let’s discuss how we can work together to overcome child care issues and empower change for our youngest learners. Contact us to schedule a complimentary gap analysis and start paving the way for a brighter educational future.
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