In 2024, if you want to make a dinner reservation, you’re very likely to open an app on your phone, input a few details and then filter your results to see which restaurants have availability for your party size, date and time.

If you want to find child care, on the other hand, good luck.

In most states, you can visit a website and see a map of providers in your area, along with some basic information about them — ages served, operating hours, quality rating — but details about their enrollment availability is often either not listed or long out-of-date.

A quick search on Colorado’s state-run child care dashboard, for example, populates a number of quality-rated providers who accept infants within five miles of this author’s home address. Yet some of those providers haven’t updated their openings since June 2023, or even August 2022. The infants who were enrolled, when that availability was posted, are not even infants anymore.

That’s about as useful as perusing Google Maps to find a restaurant that, fingers crossed, may take a reservation for a party of four next Friday night at 7 p.m. It’s one thing to know that a restaurant exists; it’s another for that restaurant to be able to accommodate you when and how you need it.

This is a trend that many in early care and education have noted and admonished. Today, people can buy a car online. They can find their next house on Zillow. But they can’t search for available child care near them.

“Why is it a fist fight to find child care?” asks Amy Smigielski, early care and education manager at Resultant, a data analytics firm that recently led a major overhaul of Iowa’s child care search function. “It shouldn’t be that hard. Technology should make this easier.”

In August, after $5 million and a couple of years of behind-the-scenes development, Iowa launched Child Care Connect (C3), a free tool that offers families “near-real-time” insight into child care providers’ availability.

The goal was to create a dashboard that is about as simple and effective as Resy or OpenTable — but for families seeking child care, explains Smigielski.

Iowa’s new system is a recent and sophisticated example of what modern technology can do to improve families’ experience of finding child care. It’s far from the only one, though. Maryland, Arizona and a handful of other states have also invested in refreshes of their child care search systems, making for a smoother user experience for families.

But even better, according to those involved, is that these new systems, on the backend, give local and state officials more insight into the true supply-side challenges and realities of the early care and education sector. They’re able to drill down and determine if a certain community lacks, say, any licensed programs at all, or has a severe shortage of infant care but a surplus of toddler slots. State and business leaders hope that, with this information, they can make more targeted investments in the field.

Making Connections

Iowa’s old search system could tell families where early care and education programs were. That wasn’t the issue, says Ryan Page, director of child care for the Iowa Department of Health and Human Services. The problem was families couldn’t see availability.

“I can give you a list of 20 providers, but if 19 don’t have slots, that’s time off you as a parent,” she says, meaning that parents were having to call and check in with all 20 providers only to find that most didn’t have openings.

The idea to create a better statewide platform to aid families in finding care came out of recommendations released in fall 2021 from a task force created by Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, according to Page.

The platform would also benefit providers, adds Tami Foley, a policy program manager at Iowa’s HHS who has overseen the C3 project. Child care programs suffer when they have prolonged vacancies. And sometimes that’s just an information gap. There may be families seeking care and providers seeking children to fill empty slots, but they just aren’t finding each other.

“If they don’t have every seat or slot available filled,” Foley says of providers, “that really impacts their bottom line.”

Iowa HHS began working with Resultant and Iowa State University to build out a solution.

“The magic of all of this,” Smigielski of Resultant says, “was all of this information exists already. The secret was connecting everybody.”

Many early care and education providers were already using child care management systems (CCMSs) for tasks such as tracking enrollment, keeping up with daily attendance and submitting invoices. Leaders in Iowa decided to build pathways (mostly through application programming interfaces, or APIs) to two major CCMS vendors, which would in turn allow the state to receive aggregate information about how many seats are available in a given program each day. It was the state’s solution to integrating public and private systems and getting them to share information with one another, but without placing an additional burden on providers.

The data refreshes every night and is immediately reflected on the C3 website, giving families insights into which programs can accommodate them right now.

For providers who use a different CCMS or none at all, the state sends out a digital form every month asking them to update their availability. (Iowa is also working on building data bridges to more CCMS vendors, to increase provider participation, Page says.)

Paige Smothers, the owner and director of Sprouts Early Learning Academy in Carlisle, Iowa, has been filling out the vacancy form every month since May, she says. When she opens the form, it shows her her answers from last month’s check-in and asks if the information is still accurate, with responses broken down by children’s ages. If the answer is yes, she says so and submits the form. If the answer is no, it directs her to update the numbers, based on ages and full-time/part-time status.

“It probably takes me three to five minutes to do,” she says. “It’s very, very user-friendly.”

Smothers’ program, in Carlisle, is about 10 minutes outside of Des Moines by car and less than a mile off the main highway. Child Care Connect allows families to search for care along their route to work — which, for many, includes going from a suburb into the city. That function helps families look for care in a larger geographic area, without adding time to their commute.

It’s also quite helpful for programs like Sprouts.

“This opens up a lot of opportunities for us as a business,” says Smothers. “[Families] are able to see smaller communities like Carlisle where there may be more vacancy for their child. … They can literally make a two-minute pit stop, hop back on the highway and get to work.”

‘Momentum Is Growing’

Because Iowa’s Child Care Connect just launched, it’s still early to know how parents are using and benefiting from the platform.

In Maryland, however, a refreshed child care portal has been up and running for about two years.

The Maryland Family Network, a statewide nonprofit that provides resources to families during a child’s first five years, partnered with technology platform Upfront to update the state’s child care search tool, called LOCATE.

Today, LOCATE looks like a child care search function built for the modern age. As of February, Upfront has been requesting vacancy data once a month from the more than 6,000 providers who are listed on the platform. Their responses are integrated into what families see.

Kaitlyn Wilson, a mother of six living in Rosedale, Maryland, just outside of Baltimore, used LOCATE at the end of the summer to find child care for her two youngest, ages 2 and 4.

She had a few criteria in her search, so she set filters accordingly: her children’s ages, within a certain distance from her home, and accepting state child care subsidies.

The results populated, and she could see in the preview, marked by a green icon next to “Open Spots,” which programs had current availability. (Providers who have not responded to the latest monthly vacancy prompt will not show “Open Spots,” to keep data as up-to-date as possible, according to Upfront founder and CEO Dana Levin-Robinson.)

Wilson describes the platform as “super easy to use.”

She contacted a few of the programs that fit her needs, and just a few weeks ago, her children started preschool at one of the options she found through LOCATE.

“I really, really love it,” she says. “Their teachers are wonderful. The facility is great.”

Upfront has also been working with Arizona, whose new child care search will launch in November, and a state on the East Coast that is not yet named publicly, says Levin-Robinson.

Resultant, too, is working with two other states at the moment — a midwestern state and one in New England, Smigielski says.

That’s on top of a number of other companies that offer similar early care and education services and are working with a handful of other states right now, says Mia Pritts, an early childhood consultant working with Opportunities Exchange, an organization that is helping to drive this work forward.

“Momentum is growing,” says Pritts. “If you think about how much easier it is to do things the way it’s always been done, versus changing and trying new things, the fact that this is happening in all these different states is awesome.”

Benefits of Better Data

The public-facing side of these efforts is all about creating a smoother experience for families seeking out child care. But the work behind the scenes, those involved say, is arguably even more important and promising.

All of the information funneling through these new backend data systems, like Upfront and Resultant, is helping state leaders better understand the gaps in their child care systems.

“One of the biggest deficits we have in addressing the child care shortage is an utter lack of information about what we need,” says Smigielski of Resultant.

Maps showing child care shortages — or the popularly termed “child care deserts” — are based on old census data, Smigielski and others explain. They are rough estimates, at best.

Pritts predicts that what states will find, from these data-driven views into their state care capacities, is that some communities dubbed “child care deserts” are far from it, and others that have been overlooked may finally get some attention.

In just the first couple of months after Upfront began collecting vacancy data from providers, Levin-Robinson says, the company identified 2,000 child care slots the state had not previously known existed.

“I jokingly call us a supply optimizer,” she says.

These systems could also, Smigielski points out, help state leaders make an argument to the federal government that they need more funding. And they could help states distribute the funds they get every year from the federal government in a more intentional way, making sure that dollars are flowing in the direction of need.

“This is a tool for lawmakers [and] communities to look and say, ‘My gosh, we need 100 infant slots in our community,’” explains Page of Iowa HHS. It can also drive decision-making in the case of an employer who is, say, looking to open a new branch in a different part of the state, she adds. Because labor participation and child care are so intertwined, it’s helpful for employers to be able to ask and answer, If I plan to hire 200 employees in this mid-sized town, will there be enough child care slots to accommodate all of them?

Sheri Penney, employer engagement director at the Iowa Women’s Foundation, says the new database is able to “get into the weeds” in a way that wasn’t possible previously. “It gives us this more accurate picture.” In the short time that the data has been available, Penney has been introducing it to community leaders, saying it’s her “first stop” now in every meeting.

Some of this supply-side work is still somewhat theoretical — these projects are in their infancy, after all — but there’s plenty of potential. And in the meantime, families and providers are already benefiting from the new front-facing experience.

In fact, says Smigielski, for families in Iowa, now finding available child care is almost as easy as making a dinner reservation.