What is Shortlist?
Finding childcare takes dozens of hours of research that most parents end up doing with a spreadsheet and a prayer. Shortlist does the research instead: it pulls licensed providers from state registries, cross-references inspection records and accreditation data, reads provider websites, and organizes everything into a consistent, comparable format.
The result is a searchable database parents can filter by neighborhood, type, age range, and price — just the information needed to narrow a visit list.
Shortlist exists to make childcare transparent — the same data, the same standards, applied equally to every provider.
Who’s behind this
Shortlist is built by Diana Clemons, a senior product leader with 15 years in data and analytics, currently at Morningstar. Diana grew up in Kansas City and lives in Seattle with her family; the original spreadsheet that became Shortlist was the one she built for herself when she couldn’t find a transparent way to compare local providers.
Every provider on Shortlist is independently researched using licensing records, inspection reports, accreditation data, staff qualifications, and parent feedback. Shortlist is independently funded and answers only to the parents who use it.
Shortlist is published by Shortlist LLC, a Washington limited liability company.
The story
Essay
There’s More Than One Good Daycare
Everyone said the best daycare in the neighborhood was a Spanish immersion program. Diana’s family doesn’t speak Spanish. This is the story of how she stopped chasing the consensus pick and built Shortlist instead.
Read the full essayMethodology
Every provider is documented on a consistent framework: licensing status, inspection history, staff qualifications, pricing transparency, and parent feedback. Shortlist surfaces the evidence so parents can narrow their visit list. No pay-to-play.
Prices are normalized to a per-day figure (monthly price ÷ days per week ÷ 4.33 weeks) so a part-time co-op and a full-day center can be compared on equal footing. Co-op tuition excludes required parent volunteer hours, which are disclosed separately.
Data sources
Shortlist pulls licensing records directly from each state’s official child care licensing source: Washington (DCYF), Texas (HHSC), California (CDSS Community Care Licensing), Colorado (CDEC), Missouri (DESE), and North Carolina (DCDEE). Every provider we list exists in that state’s licensing dataset, and the facts we publish come from it, from the provider’s own published material, or from the provider directly. Where a state publishes inspection and complaint records — Washington, Texas, and California today — we surface them verbatim with a link to the state’s own record.