Wisconsin regulated child care programs and DCF inspection history
Wisconsin · Child care inspections
- Published by
- Wisconsin Department of Children and Families (DCF)
- Official source
- What's covered
- Every licensed and certified child care program in Wisconsin, with DCF licensing visits, cited rule violations and enforcement actions from the Child Care Finder.
- History
- From 2023
- How often we sync
- Directory daily (07:40 Central); inspection history crawled nightly, each program about weekly.
- Last complete sync
- Records
- 4,790 providers
- 1,208 providers history read
- 5,375 visits
- 14,221 violations
- How we get it
- Bulk Excel directory download; per-program Child Care Finder pages read one at a time.
- Terms
- Public records published by DCF. No robots.txt restriction on the pages read.
- Attribution
- Source: Wisconsin Department of Children and Families.
Known gaps
- DCF publishes about three years of visits; older history needs a public records request.
- Complaint investigations and self-reported incidents are not on the Finder.
- The first statewide history backfill takes several nights; programs not yet read are 'not yet indexed', never 'clean'.
- About 8% of addresses did not geocode and are not on the map.
How violation severity is mapped
Every cited violation is filed as serious, non-serious or unknown. Unknown is never counted as a clean record.
| The source says | We file it as | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Violation marked serious (exclamation icon) on the DCF rule-monitoring visit report | serious | DCF's own serious-violation designation |
| Violation on the visit report without the serious mark | non-serious | |
| Violation listed only on the Child Care Finder provider page | unknown | The provider page does not show DCF's serious designation |
Spotted a mismatch with the official source? Email openrecords@recordwell.us with the page link. All data sources.