Idaho is poised to become the first state in the country to eliminate state-mandated child-to-staff ratios for early care and education settings — a longstanding and universal licensing requirement used to ensure minimum quality standards and health and safety in environments where babies, toddlers and young children are being served.

It’s one of a handful of changes included in a bill that seeks to deregulate key components of the early care and education industry.

State legislators believe the bill, if passed, would increase child care slots throughout the geographically vast but rural state — through both the establishment of new early care and education programs and additional slots created at existing programs — and alleviate the severe child care shortage that Idaho, along with nearly every other U.S. state, is currently facing.

Opponents, however, argue that, in a state with already some of the most relaxed child care regulations in the country, such a move is likely to attract bad actors to the industry and endanger the children in their care.

“No other state or developed nation that licenses child care has attempted anything like this before,” noted Christine Tiddens, executive director of Idaho Voices for Children, a nonprofit, nonpartisan advocacy organization, during an Idaho House committee hearing about the bill on Feb. 21.

National early childhood expert Elliot Haspel called it “one of the most dangerous child care bills I have ever seen moved through a legislature, both in terms of the impacts on children and in terms of setting a precedent other states might look to,” in a post on his Substack.

The legislation has moved quickly through the statehouse since it was first introduced on Feb. 14. Following testimony from Tiddens, as well as numerous parents and early care and education providers who oppose the legislation, the House Health and Welfare committee voted 11-4 in favor of House Bill 243 last week, referring it to the House floor for a vote.

The bill passed the full Idaho House on Thursday, Feb. 27, with a vote of 54-15. It now heads to the Senate. If approved, and barring a governor’s veto, it would become law July 1.

‘Things Can Go Terribly Wrong’

Idaho’s conservative legislature generally favors deregulation and a free-market approach, believing that most industries can govern themselves better than any public entity can. That’s their logic behind House Bill 243 as well.

Currently Idaho — like every other state in the nation — has maximum child-to-staff ratio requirements in place for early care and education programs that vary based on age group.

One adult in Idaho, for example, can care for up to six infants at a time or up to eight toddlers.

Idaho’s child-to-staff ratio for infants is already the highest in the country, with only two other states (Georgia and New Mexico) setting the same maximum. The National Association for the Education of Young Children, which is widely seen as the standard bearer on this issue, recommends no more than four infants per adult in early childhood settings. A few states even limit to three infants per adult.

Research shows that higher child-to-staff ratios can threaten children’s health and safety.

Imagine an early childhood educator in a room of four wholly dependent infants under her supervision versus one in a room with eight. What if there is a fire and the building needs to be evacuated? What if a toddler wanders off and injures himself? Would she even notice the child had left the room?

“Because infants, in particular, and also toddlers, require more intensive care, those ratios are in place to ensure they’re getting developmentally appropriate [care],” says Melissa Boteach, vice president of child care and income security at the National Women’s Law Center.

Without ratios in place to put checks on quality and safety, Boteach adds, “Things can go terribly wrong.”

In the past year, the only infant death reported in a child care facility in Idaho was found to have occurred in a program that was out of compliance with child-to-staff ratios.

Beyond the risk of worst-case scenarios — injury and death — higher ratios also lead to lower quality: children sitting for hours in soiled diapers, skipped feedings, and missing out on the high-quality caregiver interactions that brain science tells us is the most critical component of their early development.

“At the end of the day, all these regulations are put in place to ensure children are getting the highest quality of care possible,” says Brenda Miranda, senior research scientist at Child Trends, a national research organization focused on improving the lives of children. “If we continue to roll these back, it’s children’s safety and development” at stake.

Letting Parents and Programs Decide

It’s possible that the state legislators backing this bill don’t know enough about child development to realize the potential harm that could be caused by House Bill 243.

Many of them believe that providers should be allowed to use their discretion in setting child-to-staff ratios. (Under the new law, providers would be required to develop their own child-to-staff ratio policy, make that policy available to families, and stick to it.) If one teacher feels she can take on eight or nine infants, they seem to suggest, who are they to stop her, especially when there are plenty of parents in Idaho looking for infant slots right now?

During the Health and Welfare committee hearing on Feb. 21, Rep. Rod Furniss testified that the state should also trust parents to use their own judgment in deciding how many children are too many for one adult to supervise.

“It should be the parents’ responsibility to say, ‘How many kids are you babysitting?’” Furniss said, using a term that the field has fought hard to eradicate. “They can determine, if they already have 12 kids in the home, that might not work. Let the parents make the decision there.”

Though legislators may not be well-versed in developmentally appropriate practices for young children, the bill’s backer, Wonderschool, certainly is.

Wonderschool is a for-profit company that works with child care providers in almost every state, offering services such as licensing support and business training. It also operates a child care program search for parents and families.

EdSurge has written about Wonderschool a number of times in the recent past, including to spotlight its work in matching substitute teachers to early childhood programs and helping prospective early childhood providers get trained and licensed. The company’s support for this piece of legislation does not align with its track record of promoting high-quality early care and education programming.

Wonderschool CEO Chris Bennett declined to be interviewed for this story but did provide the following written statement:

“Wonderschool will always be committed to supporting child care providers in operating high-quality programs. We know that running safe, high-quality programs means ensuring both appropriate ratios and developmentally appropriate practices.

“Wonderschool operates nationwide and appreciate[s] that, as states work to alleviate child care deserts by boosting supply and accessibility, their approaches will differ. We very much value the policy innovation that is happening around the country and appreciate that different states have different realities on the ground and policy tools at their disposal. There is no single way to achieve shared objectives of child care access, quality and safety.”

The company’s involvement in the bill has raised confusion and concern among early childhood advocates — in Idaho and nationally. From what anyone can tell, Wonderschool doesn’t stand to gain much from the state eliminating child-to-staff ratios and otherwise deregulating the industry. In the absence of a clear explanation, though, speculation abounds.

“Silence speaks volumes,” notes Boteach of the National Women’s Law Center. “If they have a compelling reason for why they would be trying to undermine the quality of care that babies and toddlers are getting in a state, they should speak to it.”

‘A Free-for-All in Child Care’

Early childhood educators, program operators and parents have reacted sharply to the proposed legislation since it was first introduced.

Justin Snyder, owner of a small chain of early learning centers in Boise, said that he initially thought the proposal was too “outlandish” to go up for a vote in the legislature.

“I’m born and raised in Idaho. I know we’re all about deregulation here,” he says. “But there are limits, I think, to what can safely be done. Getting rid of the minimum safety guarantees for working families that need to send their kids to child care, to me, sounds like a non-starter.”

Snyder is one of the people who testified before the House Health and Welfare committee last week.

“I don’t want to break from licensing standards,” he told committee members during the hearing. “How often do you get small business owners up here asking you to regulate them more? Today might be the first.”

The legislation will not impact high-quality early care and education programs like his, Snyder predicts; their ratios will remain the same. But lower quality programs, and new programs run by people who suddenly see a chance to profit off of early care and education, could take advantage of the — theoretically — unlimited number of children they can enroll.

Those programs — and the more competitive tuition rates they would presumably offer — are most likely to attract low-income families who have few alternatives.

“When you have two parents working full time or even multiple jobs, they don’t have the time to be fully vetting or running their own background checks on every provider,” Snyder added. “They rely on state licensing for that and know there’s a minimum standard of care everywhere they go in the state.”

Cassandra Wagner, philanthropy director at Giraffe Laugh Early Learning Centers in Garden City, Idaho, described the new landscape, if the bill becomes law, as a “free-for-all in child care” in which program ratios rise to “dangerous levels where children are being put at risk.”

“It puts parents in a tough spot,” Wagner says. “We’re not going to change our ratios, but other centers will — and reduce the quality of care families receive. Bad actors will start popping up just to make a buck.”

If this legislation becomes law in Idaho, as appears likely, that is bad news for children and families in Idaho, experts say, but it’s also a worrying sign for what could follow.

“There’s always a risk of this spreading,” says Boteach. “I’d hope other states see this as an anomaly, not something to emulate, but if they did, [we could expect to see] rising infant death and injury, providers leaving the field because they’re overworked, and very negative ripple effects across our economy and communities.”