Mercado, Esther · Esther Mercado

Through the Division of Child Care Services (DCCS), the New York State Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS) establishes regulations for licensure, registration, monitoring and oversight of child care programs in New York State, with the exception of day care centers in New York City. OCFS is responsible for the oversight and monitoring of child care programs in New York State including the following child care modalities: day care centers (outside of New York City); family day care; group family day care; and school-age child care. This includes approximately 19,000 regulated child care programs serving over 550,000 children and over 45,000 legally-exempt child care providers who serve almost 90,000 children. In addition, the regional office staff process close to 3,100 new applications, conduct almost 3,300 criminal history evaluations and investigate over 3,600 complaints against regulated and illegal child care facilities every year. DCCS develops policies and implements enforcement actions of child care providers when necessary.

This dataset includes OCFS regulated child care providers, allowing immediate public access to information on the location and status of all regulated providers. The child care provider information include facility name, facility type, county, license/registration number, zip code and school district. For licensed day care centers, this capacity is broken down by maximum capacity per age group (Infants, Toddlers, Pre-School and School-Age); for registered schoolage child care, the maximum capacity is reflected as an overall total; and for Family and Group Family Day Care, capacity is listed in text because the maximum capacity is limited by the number of children under the age of two years in care at the home.

To give New Yorkers the access they deserve to government data and information, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo launched the Open NY initiative in March 2013 and signed Executive Order 95. It directs state agencies to identify, catalog, and publish their data on the state's open data website administered by the Office of Information Technology Services (ITS). Open NY increases transparency, improves government performance, empowers New Yorkers to participate in government, and encourages research and economic opportunities statewide.