How does oversight of child care spending actually work in Washington state?

The Senate Early Learning and K-12 Education Committee held a work session to answer that question on Jan. 15.

Staff presented overviews of these systems to the committee, which includes Sen. Lisa Wellman (D-District 41), Sen. T’wina Nobles (D-District 28), Sen. Claire Wilson (D-District 30) and Sen. Paul Harris (R-District 17). The work session was called because of “significant interest in child care centers and businesses in Washington state” that has “intensified … because of news coming from the state of Minnesota.”

While there are various types of child care facilities in Washington, in general they are all subject to annual unannounced inspections by the Department of Children, Youth and Family (DCYF) and food inspections from the USDA every few months.

“Monitoring and accountability and support of our providers is not one tool … it’s a system of checks and balances, conversations across licensing, child care subsidies, and our partners,” DCYF Assistant Secretary for Early Learning, Nicole Rose, said in the session.

In order for those annual inspection visits to count, there must be children present.

“If my licensor goes out there and there’s no children present during that annual visit, they will come back and they’ll ask questions. We do three attempts and if there’s still no children present, then we do take licensing action and we would close their license,” said Ruben Reeves, Assistant Secretary for Licensing.

In 2025, there were over 6,600 licencsed child care providers in the state, and there were 14 cases of child care facilities being closed because they did not have any children enrolled after those three attempts.

“On average our licensors will go out to 700 different providers a month as an annual monitoring checklist or are investigating the licensing complaints,” Reeves said.

Sen. Nobles asked for examples of situations where no children would be at a child care center when a licensor or auditor arrives.

Reeves explained that a few examples could be because the provider or children at the home are ill, if the child care center operates only at certain times like weekends or nights, or many other possible scenarios. He added that many in-home child care centers may only be licensed for five to 12 children.

There are both random and focused audits conducted as part of the DCYF program integrity plan as well as independent audit reviews from the state auditor’s office under the statewide single audit. The federal office of child care conducts a formal on-site monitoring of the child care development fund, which are federal funds that help support licensed child care and child care subsidies.

The auditors that specifically assess the child care programs complete about 240 audits per month of providers and about 620 eligibility audits of families every month.

The Early Achievers quality improvement program that began in 2007 provides yet another layer of oversight.

Providers participate in it and they get assessed by evaluators and are required to receive coaching, which is “the nationally evidence-based standard for making sure providers can improve.”

As part of this coaching, child care providers are actually required to provide video of staff interacting with the children as well as video of every room of their facility.

“You have a regulatory entity that’s checking on them periodically, but then you have a different level of interaction coming from our coaches, where they are much more regularly interacting with the facility and the children in that facility,” Jennifer Ziegler, contract lobbyist for Child Care Aware, said at the session.

When child care providers are able to achieve higher ratings, they also gain access to higher levels of subsidy reimbursement from the state as part of the quality incentive program.

Sen. Harris asked if there was any way that a fraud scheme could happen through this rating and subsidy relationship.

“Today’s a weird day, I love college basketball and apparently some basketball players were throwing games to get money, and I would never have thought that, so who checks the evaluator to make sure that if someone’s getting a greater reimbursement for getting the higher rating score, is there anybody that actually checks the score to makes sure that there’s no kickback going on?” Harris asked. “I’m not saying this is happening, but in the world we’re in today, it’s a crazy world.”

Staff shared that the evaluation process is under an entirely separate entity at the University of Washington, so this wouldn’t be possible.

Presenters also shared information about Working Connections Child Care (WCCC), which is a public benefit that helps families afford high-quality child care where the state pays a portion of the cost.

It’s funded by state and federal funds and 63,753 families were eligible in 2025, although a little over half of those families actually took part.

The expenditures for child care through this program in the state in 2025 were $927 million.

While estimates vary, a wide range of economic studies find that the return on investment for child care investments is $4 to $16 per dollar invested.