Daycare background check requirements

The one federal floor

Child care licensing is a state matter almost everywhere it touches, with one substantial exception: providers who receive Child Care and Development Fund money face background-check requirements set in federal law, and states administering CCDF have to meet them.

That makes background checks the nearest thing to a national standard in US child care. States can and do go further, but they cannot go below the federal floor for programmes in the CCDF system.

The practical consequence for a provider is that the checks are multi-source and interstate, which is exactly why they are slow.

Who gets checked

Staff, obviously — every employee with unsupervised access to children, and in practice every employee. Volunteers who are regularly present. Contractors who work during care hours.

In a home programme, the household. Every adult who lives there over a stated age, and in many states anyone regularly present in the home during care hours. This is the part that surprises family child care applicants most.

Check whether your state requires the check before employment starts or permits supervised work while it is pending. The answer changes how you hire, and getting it wrong is a licensing violation rather than an administrative slip.

What is checked

Typically a fingerprint-based criminal history search at state level and through the FBI, a search of the state child abuse and neglect registry, a sex offender registry search, and — because people move — equivalent searches in other states the person has recently lived in.

That last element is what makes the timeline unpredictable. An applicant who has lived in three states in five years triggers three sets of interstate requests, and each one runs at its own state's pace.

Ask on the application form where someone has lived. Not to screen them out, but so you can start the slow requests on day one instead of week three.

• State criminal history, fingerprint-based.
• FBI criminal history, fingerprint-based.
• State child abuse and neglect registry.
• Sex offender registry.
• Equivalent searches in recent states of residence.

Planning around the wait

Submit for everyone the week you begin the licensing process, not when the building is ready. The checks are the item most likely to be outstanding when everything else is done.

Budget for them: fingerprinting carries a fee per person, and paying it for applicants rather than asking them to is both a recruitment advantage and a small cost. Say so in the job posting.

Then diarise the re-check cycle. Most states require periodic re-checks, and a lapsed check on a current employee is a live compliance problem rather than a paperwork one.