Instructions/READ ME. The following interactive map and data visualization shows how child care capacity — defined as the number of slots for which regulated child care providers are licensed/approved to offer — and the landscape of licensed providers shifted between September 2021 and January 2024. The tools rely primarily on the “Child Care Regulated Programs” dataset published by the New York State (NYS) Office of Child & Family Services (OCFS), available on the NYS Open Data Portal. Researchers at the Cornell ILR Buffalo Co-Lab obtained a version of this dataset in September 2021 to facilitate its ongoing child care research program. The same research team then downloaded an updated version of the OCFS provider list in January 2024 to examine changes in child care capacity across NYS over the past two-plus years.

The Overall/Home screen of the dashboard summarizes raw data from the OCFS licensed child care provider dataset. Users can filter these data points for one or more counties through the yellow dropdown menu in the top-left of the screen. Users who wish to document exact figures on how much child care capacity and the number of providers have changed since 2021 should use the tools available on the Overall/Home screen only.

For users wishing to understand how finer-resolution geographic patterns of child care capacity have changed since 2021, from the Home screen, click on the red button that reads “Click Here To View Data By Geographic Location”. The suite of tools and visualizations that are available upon clicking this button combines census tract-level data from the current (2018-22) U.S. Census Five-Year American Community Survey (ACS) with the OCFS dataset to juxtapose changes in child care capacity with relevant indicators on the status of children living in the user-selected area. Importantly, in many areas, total capacity and provider numbers in the geography-specific tools will differ slightly from corresponding totals in the Home/Overall screen. WHY? The reason is that, in NYS, several licensed child care providers ask OCFS to withhold their physical addresses/locations from public datasets. As of January 2024, there are 558 providers (roughly 3.6% of all licensed providers) whose addresses and physical locations are omitted from the OCFS dataset. As such, these establishments, as well as the number of child care slots available at them, cannot be represented in the geography-based tools. In most cases, for establishments whose addresses are omitted from public records, the OCFS dataset does list the establishment’s County of operation. It is therefore possible for these locations to be counted in the Overall/Home screen tools. However, because more specific address information is not provided, these ~550 establishments (~3.6% of providers) cannot be georeferenced and linked to their home census tracts. As such, they are omitted from the geography-based tools. Despite this necessary trade-off, the overwhelming majority (>96%) of licensed child care providers are covered in the geography-based tools. Therefore, whereas the Overall/Home screen should be used to derive exact numbers for capacity changes, the geography-based tools capture key capacity trends with the added bonus of revealing where changes have taken place.

The geography-based tools allow users to explore the data using as many as three filters: (1) by county, (2) by capacity change (i.e., lost capacity, gained capacity, or no change), and (3) by provider count change (i.e., lost providers, gained providers, or no change). Because the Overall/Home screen tools pull directly from the OCFS dataset and the geography-based tools aggregate data by census tract, setting a County filter on the Home screen will NOT apply that filter to the geography-based tools, and vice versa. However, setting a County filter on the geography-based tools will apply that filter to all data visualizations that appear in that set of tools. Get started below:

Changes to Child Care Capacity in NYS, 2021-24