Virginia’s Child Care Rules Need Reform — Not Reckless Deregulation

Every parent deserves to know that when they leave their child with a childcare provider, that child will be safe, closely supervised, nurtured, and supported by qualified educators. Strong licensing standards, including appropriate teacher-to-child ratios, background checks, safe-sleep practices, staff training, emergency preparedness, and protections against abuse, are essential to maintaining that trust.

But protecting children does not require preserving every regulation, form, deadline, documentation rule, and inspection practice simply because it already exists.

Virginia policymakers should undertake a comprehensive review of the Commonwealth’s childcare licensing system — not to weaken protections for children, but to distinguish requirements that actually promote health and safety from those that consume time and resources without producing a meaningful benefit.

A review of Virginia’s childcare statutes and regulations by the Hopkins House Public Policy & Advocacy Committee identifies approximately 115 separate regulatory requirements, including 41 that are principally or purely administrative in nature. Some administrative requirements are unquestionably necessary. Accurate attendance records, emergency contacts, staff qualifications, and background-check documentation all support safe operations. Others, however, involve repetitive filings, unnecessarily prescriptive procedures, duplicative records, inflexible approvals, or technical requirements bearing little relationship to whether a child is safe, healthy, and receiving high-quality care.

The result is that Virginia childcare providers spend considerable time focused on regulations and paperwork (often more time than they should) rather than on activities that directly promote the safety, development, and well-being of children.

This is not merely an inconvenience. Every hour a childcare administrator spends reconciling duplicative forms, interpreting unclear instructions, conflicting guidance, or responding to a technical citation is an hour that cannot be devoted to mentoring educators, observing classrooms, helping families, strengthening lesson plans, or improving safety practices.

The Center for American Progress report, “A Path Forward on Child Care Regulation”, offers an important distinction between harmful deregulation and helpful reform. It warns policymakers against increasing teacher-to-child ratios, enlarging group sizes, lowering educator qualifications, or reducing essential health and safety protections. Such actions would increase educators’ workloads, worsen working conditions, contribute to burnout, and place children at greater risk.

At the same time, the report calls on states to “right-size” regulation by reducing requirements that are not directly connected to children’s health, safety, or quality learning. It recommends simplifying licensing materials, eliminating duplicative reporting, aligning licensing and quality-monitoring systems, offering flexibility once baseline standards have been met, and replacing unnecessarily particular or micromanaging rules with an approach that recognizes the competence of early childhood professionals.

That is precisely the conversation Virginia should have.

Virginia’s principal operating standards for licensed child day centers are contained in 8VAC20-780, while 8VAC20-821 governs general licensure procedures, enforcement, and background checks. These chapters contain many indispensable protections. They also create a regulatory system so detailed and documentation-heavy that compliance can sometimes become an end in itself rather than a means of protecting children.

Virginia’s licensing inspection system should be a partner with childcare providers in achieving safe, high-quality care. Too often, however, it can feel more like an overzealous prosecutor determined to find an infraction, no matter how technical or inconsequential it may be to keeping children safe.

That approach can undermine the very goals licensing is supposed to advance. When inspectors and providers are positioned as adversaries, providers become more focused on avoiding citations than on openly discussing challenges, seeking assistance, and continuously improving their programs. A punitive culture also discourages qualified educators and responsible organizations from entering or remaining in an already fragile childcare system.

The CAP report points to a better model: licensing personnel should be trained and directed to work with providers as partners, helping programs understand requirements, correct deficiencies, and operate successfully. Colorado and Indiana, according to the report, have undertaken efforts to create more supportive relationships between licensing agencies and providers.

Virginia should follow that path.

The Commonwealth should convene a regulatory reform commission composed of parents, early childhood educators, childcare operators, child-development and public-health experts, licensing representatives, and child-safety advocates. Its charge should be to examine every childcare regulation and ask several straightforward questions:

• Does this requirement directly protect children’s health, safety, development, or well-being?
• Is it supported by evidence?
• Does it duplicate another state, local, subsidy, accreditation, or quality-assurance requirement?
• Is the paperwork proportional to the risk being addressed?
• Could compliance be demonstrated more efficiently?
• And should a first-time, non-safety violation result in technical assistance and an opportunity to correct the issue rather than an immediate citation?

Virginia should also establish a risk-based inspection system that distinguishes among serious safety violations, administrative deficiencies, and minor technical errors. Conditions presenting an immediate danger to children must receive swift and decisive action. But a missing signature, an outdated form, or another correctable paperwork error should not be treated as though it carries the same significance as inadequate supervision, an unsafe sleep practice, a failed background check, or a serious ratio violation.

Clear correction periods should ordinarily be available for non-safety deficiencies. Inspection findings should explain the actual risk involved, the legal basis for the citation, and the steps necessary to achieve compliance. Providers should also have access to consistent interpretations, plain-language guidance, a single electronic document portal, and meaningful technical assistance.

This balanced approach is supported by emerging research on administrative burden in early care and education, which recognizes that providers often must navigate fragmented programs, overlapping requirements, learning costs, compliance costs, and inconsistent administrative systems. These burdens fall especially heavily on smaller, community-based, and home-based providers. They can discourage participation in licensing, subsidy, and quality-improvement programs — the opposite of what public policy should accomplish.

Reform should not become an excuse to cut costs by placing more children with fewer adults. The CAP report found no demonstrated correlation between the strictness of core state regulations, such as ratios, group sizes, licensing thresholds, and educator qualifications, and the supply of childcare. It further warns that weakening these protections may increase educator stress, burnout, turnover, liability exposure, and insurance costs.

The Center for the Study of Child Care Employment’s 2024 Workforce Index documents the persistent economic insecurity of early educators, while national workforce research cited by CAP shows high levels of burnout and reliance on public benefits. A system that places growing administrative demands on educators while paying many of them poverty-level wages is neither sustainable nor respectful of the importance of their work.

Regulatory reform can help redirect resources toward what matters most. The potential savings from reducing burdensome regulations, duplicative paperwork, and unnecessarily punitive oversight should be reinvested in Virginia’s childcare system. Those resources could be used to prepare, support, and more adequately compensate early educators; expand access to professional development; improve facilities; strengthen technical assistance; promote evidence-based practices; and improve the delivery of high-quality, safe care.

Virginia should also preserve and strengthen standards grounded in nationally recognized health and safety principles. The American Academy of Pediatrics’ Caring for Our Children standards identify essential protections involving supervision, group size, sanitation, safe environments, staff training, disease prevention, and emergency preparedness. These are the standards around which a modern licensing system should be organized.

The choice before Virginia is not between regulation and deregulation. It is between a system that measures compliance by the volume of paperwork it generates and one that measures success by whether children are safe, educators are supported, families are treated as partners, and programs are continuously improving.

We can protect children without micromanaging educators. We can enforce meaningful standards without criminalizing every technical error. We can hold providers accountable while also treating them as partners. And we can redirect time and resources away from unnecessary administrative burdens and toward the workforce, facilities, training, and classroom practices that genuinely improve children’s lives.

Virginia’s children deserve strong protections. Virginia’s early educators deserve professional trust and support. Thoughtful regulatory reform can and must deliver both.