The 1999 Texas Child Care Portfolio polled the state's regulated child-care facilities from August 1998 to May 1999. About 90 percent of the facilities responded. In the state's major metropolitan areas, Dallas had the highest rate of off-hours child care available. Only 16 percent of Dallas' regulated facilities offered care in those hours, Rath said. Although officials said they are still analyzing the data, preliminary findings also show that rural areas typically offer quality child care but not enough, Rath said.
Quality is good there because they are typically smaller settings.
According to the report, Texas has about 4.1 million children under 13 and slightly more than half of them are in some kind of child care. Texas has 20,208 regulated child-care centers and family day homes that can accommodate 772,829 children. That leaves about 1.9 million children in other child-care settings, including family care, said Nancy Hard, president of the Texas Association of Child Care Resources and Referral Agencies. Private unregulated care services could be unsafe, she said. The report compared those rates with California, Florida and New York.