Childcare Landscape Study - Flipbook - Page 47
Davidson County Child Care Landscape Study Results
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Many programs also use some of their licensed capacity to provide before and after school
care and/or summer and holiday care to school age children. If you consider occupied and
open slots for school age children as well, the greater Davidson County child care system
currently operates at 83 percent of its licensed capacity.
Child care programs operate with a full-day actual capacity of occupied and open slots that
is lower than their licensed capacity for a number of reasons. Each age group has differing
required educator-to-child ratios and maximum group sizes, and thus depending on how
programs use their classroom spaces for different age groups, they may be limited by these
maximum group sizes beyond their licensed capacity. Or, programs could face issues hiring
and retaining staff that prevent them from offering as many slots as they otherwise could, or
may just prefer to keep their programs smaller.
Most Child Care Centers Do Not Want to Change the Number of Slots They
Currently Allocate to Infants, Toddlers, or Preschoolers
Through the Child Care Provider Survey, greater Davidson County child care directors
weighed in on how they would change the number of slots they offered to each age group
they currently serve assuming they had adequate staffing and resources. These results can
build an understanding of the extent to which existing providers in greater Davidson County
could potentially provide additional child care capacity, versus relying on new providers to
increase capacity. Results indicate that most programs would continue offering the same
number of slots for each age group even with adequate staffing and resources. Across all age
groups, more than half of survey respondents report that they would not want to change
anything about the number of children they serve within each age group (see Figure 3).
Figure 3: Programs Reporting No Desire to Change Their Current Full-Day Actual Capacity
Child Age
Programs Reporting No Desire to Change Capacity
Infants
53%
Toddlers
67%
Preschool
69%
Source: Davidson County Child Care Provider Experience Survey. The Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center, 2025. Infants
n=83; Toddlers n=109; Preschoolers n=116. Note: Survey respondents reported on desire to change their current full-day
actual capacity by age, causing the sample size to be different for each age. For example, if a program does not serve
infants, they were not asked about infant capacity.
Of programs that indicated a desire to change full-day actual capacity for at least one age
group, most reported that they would want to increase their capacity to serve more children.
When asked in the Child Care Provider Survey what factors limit their ability to increase their
capacity to their ideal number of children, programs most frequently identified hiring and
retention challenges, competition from public pre-K programs, and the overall costs of routine
expenses as their primary barriers.
Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center 2026
www.pn3policy.org
