What these records are — and are not

This site republishes inspection records that state regulators keep on licensed and registered child care operations — in Texas, the Health and Human Services Commission; in Delaware, the Department of Education’s Office of Child Care Licensing. That sentence defines the whole site, including its limits.

What they are

A dated presentation of a public record about an operation — a business or program that holds a state permit. Each page shows what state inspectors recorded when they visited: the standards they evaluated, the citations they issued in their own words, and the corrections the state has verified. The intended reader is a parent comparing care options, reading the same findings the state wrote down.

What they are not

They are not a report about a person. The records name operations. The people who work at an operation — teachers, aides, directors — are not the subject of these records, are not named in them, and are not profiled anywhere on this site.

They are not a background check or a screening product. Nothing here is collected, assembled, or presented for judging an individual’s character, reputation, or eligibility, and these pages are not consumer reports. They must not be used — by an employer, a landlord, a parent cooperative, an insurer, or anyone else — to make employment, housing, credit, insurance, or eligibility decisions about any individual.

They are not a judgment of quality. A citation is a dated finding about one standard on one day, shown here alongside the total number of standards the state evaluated at that operation. A page with many citations and a page with none are two records, not two grades. This site assigns no scores and no labels, because the record itself doesn’t.

They are not current. Each page carries the date its records are presented as of. Operations improve, decline, change hands, and close. For an operation’s standing today, the state’s own records govern.

If you need an actual background check

The states run their own channels for that, including fingerprint-based checks for people who work in child care, administered through the same agencies whose records appear here. Those checks are the state’s to run; this site is not a substitute for them, and nothing here should be presented to anyone as one.

Errors

If a page misstates the state’s record, the corrections page explains how to report it and what happens next. How records are sourced and presented is covered in the methodology.