MINNEAPOLIS — A surprise to many looking for child care on Care.com this week, when the site pulled tens of thousands of its listings.
The Wall Street Journal reports Care.com removed nearly 47,000 listings, just as the paper was investigating the website's caregiver vetting process.
In Minnesota, the state's nearly 3,000 listings were slashed to a little more than 300.
It's added frustration for parents already struggling to find qualified child care.
"We have several hundred [people] on our wait list," said Ann Edgerton, Director for the University of Minnesota's Child Development Center.
Edgerton said at one point, she thinks the center had nearly 600 on its waiting list. What's more, only people associated with the University are allowed to enroll their children, so those numbers only reflect the need within the U of M community.
"Even members of our own staff were trying to find care and several of them have come in and cried and said, 'I never knew how bad it was,'" Edgerton said.
That's common across the state. According to numbers from the Center for Rural Policy and Development, in the Twin Cities there is a 38-percent shortage between the children who need care and the number of licensed providers.
In greater Minnesota - it's worse. According to the Center, 49 percent of the people in central Minnesota who need care, probably won't find it.
It can lead parents to jump at the first opening they find. Diane Benjamin with Child Care Aware of Minnesota warns not to do that.
"These are the people taking care of your children and you have to feel confident and comfortable that your child is okay," Benjamin said.
Instead, Benjamin says go to parentaware.org. It's basically the state's version of Care.com. It uses county data to list every licenses child care provider in the state. You can search by your location.
"So, you know that every listing you get back is someone who has met certain standards of safety and health," Benjamin said.
Beyond that, she says meet with the person you're thinking of hiring and ask questions.
"Someone that is running a quality program is not going to not want to answer your questions. They're going to be really happy to have that conversation," she said.
Benjamin says there's such a shortage of providers in Minnesota, because it's hard to find people to do the job as more daycare providers are aging out of the profession.