At the beginning of the pandemic, the Michigan League for Public Policy, a Lansing-based nonprofit, created a list of 11 so-called "child care deserts." These are regions where three children compete for every available slot at an in-home or group day care center.
But those deserts were calculated using the capacity of licensed child care facilities located in a particular county, overstating the number of spots available and thus hiding the true picture of child care availability in Michigan. Many of these licensed child care slots remain empty due to staffing challenges and other reasons.
Through state FOIA requests and a first-of-its-kind analysis of child care records, a consortium of newsrooms including MuckRock, the Detroit Free Press, and Chalkbeat Detroit found that the number of day care deserts in Michigan is nearly double the nonprofit's estimate: 20 instead of 11. Another 23 counties are rounding errors away from the threshold of three children for every available care slot.
In some counties, nearly half of care providers are under-enrolling children, the analysis found. Statewide, there are about 264,000 day care "slots" for 0 to 5-year-olds in Michigan, compared to an official state estimate of 373,000. Data behind the investigation are available on GitHub, and documents are on DocumentCloud.
The reporting consortium also explored the impacts of limited child care availability, such as one story of a child who nearly drowned when her at-home day care visited a nearby pool.
Text excerpted from reporting by Luca Powell and Derek Kravitz. Image via Detroit Free-Press.
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