Case Study: State of New Jersey improves child care access and safety transparency with Tyler Technologies

New Jersey Explorer Tool Tracks Child Care Access & Safety

New Jersey’s Office of Information Technology partnered with the Department of Children and Families and Socrata to create the Licensed Child Care Explorer, addressing the problem that parents lacked an easy, transparent way to find, compare and check safety records for licensed child care. Previously, data lived in static spreadsheets while hundreds of thousands of families—including many single-parent households and working mothers with infants—needed timely, searchable information on thousands of providers across the state.

The solution was an open-data, cloud-hosted application on New Jersey’s Open Data Center that lets users search providers by location and capacity, view inspection and violation reports, and is updated monthly and managed by DCF. The tool increased transparency and usability—covering 3,611 licensed centers and 351,461 total slots (including 65,178 pre-school and 14,732 infant slots)—has earned positive feedback and media attention, supports the Grow NJ Kids rating system, and serves as a replicable model for other agencies.

State of New Jersey

Poonam Soans

Open Data Program Manager