What Qualifications Do You Need to Be a Daycare Director in Delaware?

The Office of Child Care Licensing (OCCL) licenses Delaware child care centers and sets the director rules.

OCCL now sits under Title 14 (Education), and the current center rule is 14 DE Admin Code 933, DELACARE: Regulations for Early Care and Education and School-Age Centers, which carried over the rulebook formerly cited as 9 DE Admin Code 101.

The same center rule sets the staff background check: Delaware staff must be fingerprinted by the Delaware State Police for state (SBI) and FBI checks before starting work, and staff who lived outside Delaware in the last five years need criminal history and child abuse checks from each state where they lived.

Delaware calls the director the early childhood administrator.

The rule requires the administrator to be at least 21 years old and to hold at least an associate or a bachelor's degree that includes 15 credit hours across the areas the rule names: child development, curriculum, social-emotional development, and observation and assessment.

The credit hours sit inside the degree on either route, so an associate degree and a bachelor's carry the same 15-hour spread.

How a particular transcript maps onto the 15 credit hours is a detail to confirm with OCCL before you apply for an administrator role.

Alongside the degree, Delaware requires 12 months of experience for the early childhood administrator.

The rule's qualification table states the 12-month figure; the material our research read does not spell out the setting the experience must come from, so OCCL is the place to confirm what counts toward it.

Experience stacks with the age and education requirements above rather than replacing them.

Delaware's rule qualifies the administrator through the degree and the 15 credit hours above rather than through a named credential, and our research did not confirm a separate Delaware director credential for center administrators.

Nationally, the Bureau of Labor Statistics describes a bachelor's degree and experience in early childhood education as the typical preparation for preschool and childcare center directors, and notes that some employers require a nationally recognized credential.

Those are national patterns for the occupation, not the Delaware rule, so read each job posting for what a center asks above the licensing minimum.

The federal CCDF rule, 45 CFR 98.44 under the Administration for Children and Families, requires states to set a minimum annual number of training and professional-development hours for caregivers, teachers and directors; the federal rule does not set the number itself.

Delaware's center rule does: staff working 25 or more hours a week complete 18 clock hours of training annually, including at least 2 hours of health or safety training, and staff working under 25 hours a week complete 9 hours.

Which band applies to a director turns on the hours they actually work at the center, not on the title.

Delaware builds its center leadership from two named roles: each center must employ both an early childhood administrator and an early childhood curriculum coordinator, who must be at least 20 years old.

One person may hold both roles only if they hold an associate degree and the center has a capacity of 60 or fewer children, or if the center operates under an approved plan.

The rule also sets on-site presence: the administrator or the curriculum coordinator must be on site at least 60% of operating hours, and the administrator must be present at least 20 hours a week during the hours of operation.

For a candidate, the coordinator role is Delaware's second leadership track, with its own age floor and its own place in the on-site presence minimums above.