Families of children with disabilities can face challenges finding child care that meets their needs, limiting their ability to work or attend school and access care that supports their children’s development. Understanding the supply of child care and how well it serves these families is critical to ensuring all families can access the care they need.

The Georgia Department of Early Care and Learning (DECAL) contracted with a team at the Urban Institute to conduct a study in 2024–25 that would help them better understand and estimate licensed child care supply across Georgia. As part of this partnership, we conducted a web-based survey of licensed child care learning centers and family child care learning homes in February and March 2025. This work is part of a multiyear partnership between DECAL and Urban’s early childhood team.

This brief is a deeper examination of the supply of child care for children with disabilities. The agency wanted to better understand the current supply of care for children with disabilities, the challenges providers face in meeting these needs, and what they need to better support families.

Key Findings

The brief examines the types of disability-related requests providers received, the share of providers serving children with disabilities, the supports providers needed to serve these children, and the reported results when providers could not meet these needs.

Some of the key findings include the following:

• Providers regularly received requests from families to support children with disabilities, with accommodating on-site speech, occupational, physical or behavioral therapies among the most common requests.
• Centers reported the number of children enrolled with diagnosed disabilities, individualized education plans (IEP) or individualized family service plans (IFSP), and who were at risk for disabilities. The percentage of children across these different categories varied by age. Specifically, a higher percentage of school-age children had diagnosed disabilities compared to being at risk for disabilities; for younger children, a higher percentage of children were considered at risk for disabilities or delayed compared to the percentage of children in that age group who were diagnosed with a disability. This finding is intuitive, as the likelihood of being diagnosed is likely to grow over time.
• Providers said that more funding and training would help them better serve children with disabilities.
• When providers could not meet the needs of children with disabilities, it sometimes led to unplanned exits from child care for families.

The findings of this brief underscore the importance of exploring whether the current supply of child care is able to meet the needs of families whose children have disabilities, as well as what providers need to meet their needs. This information can inform efforts to help providers have the resources needed to support children with disabilities and thus help these families thrive.