Since Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham announced plans in September to offer no-cost daycare and prekindergarten for all families statewide, The New Mexican has repeatedly requested data on New Mexico’s childcare capacity.
The goal was to examine a challenge parents say has long plagued the state’s childcare system: There aren’t nearly enough slots to meet the demand for care.
But reliable data on the subject has been surprisingly hard to find — even from the state agency tasked with overseeing early childhood education.
The team at the New Mexico Early Childhood Education and Care Department responsible for responding to public records requests was prompt. After receiving four requests from The New Mexican on March 17 — seeking an accurate list of the state’s childcare providers and a reliable accounting of the number of children they can care for at one time — the staff responded with records by March 27.
However, the initial records released through the request did not include capacity data. The agency followed up with that information by April 15.
When The New Mexican requested additional capacity data for the month of April, the agency provided responsive records about a week later.
The turnaround was speedy compared with response times to records requests at other state and local agencies.
But The New Mexican identified two apparent errors in the data.
First, the documents listed total capacity in registered childcare homes — at-home childcare settings that do not have to meet the fire inspection, zoning and environmental approvals required of licensed facilities — as six children per home.
Prior reporting by The New Mexican shows registered homes may not care for more than four kids at one time, other than children who live in the home.
After confirming with Early Childhood Education and Care Department spokesperson Julia Sclafani that capacity in registered homes maxes out at four children, The New Mexican calculated total registered home capacity by multiplying the number of homes by four — rather than six, as was originally suggested in the department’s data.
The New Mexican also encountered issues with the Early Childhood Education and Care Department’s capacity data for licensed childcare facilities, which are subject to a higher level of state regulation than registered facilities.
The agency’s data provides total capacity for all children in licensed facilities, as well as disaggregated capacity for children under 2 and children over 2.
Logically, capacity for children under 2 plus capacity for children over 2 should equal total capacity — but that wasn’t the case.
For instance, the total licensed childcare capacity listed in the department’s data from April added up to 73,408 slots. But the 61,630 slots for kids over 2 and 12,863 slots for kids under 2 is 74,493.
For the purpose of its latest investigation into the state’s universal childcare expansion, The New Mexican opted to use the raw total capacity figures for licensed childcare capacity, rather than adding under- and over-2 capacity.
When The New Mexican asked the Early Childhood Education and Care Department about the discrepancies, Sclafani attributed them to “errors in data entry.”
The errors, she wrote in an email, are “being investigated and addressed by ECECD.”