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 compiles every licensed provider in a metro from the state’s own licensing records, attaches the state’s inspection and complaint file wherever the state publishes one, reads what each program publishes about itself, and organizes all of it into one comparable format.
The result is a page for every provider and a searchable index for every city — the state’s record of a program sitting next to what the program publishes about itself, which is what a family needs to decide who is worth a visit.
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. 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 here because a state licensing dataset says it exists, and every value on a listing traces to a named source — the state record, the program’s own published material, or the program directly. A field with no source stays blank rather than being estimated. 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 the same framework, and each value carries the source it came from and the date it was last checked. Shortlist surfaces the evidence and leaves the judgment of fit to the family that tours. No pay-to-play: a provider’s standing with Shortlist never affects whether or where it appears.
Published tuition arrives weekly, monthly, annual, per-semester and in installments, so every price is normalized to a monthly figure. Where a program also publishes its hours and days, the listing shows the hourly equivalent (monthly ÷ days per week ÷ hours per day ÷ 4.35 weeks) so a part-time co-op and a full-day center compare on equal footing. Co-op tuition is the dollar fee only — required parent volunteer hours are a real cost and 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), North Carolina (DCDEE), and Illinois (DCFS). 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, California, Colorado, North Carolina, Illinois and Missouri, which is every metro Shortlist covers — we surface them verbatim with a link to the state’s own record.