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

Director qualifications are licensing rules, and in Pennsylvania they come from the Department of Human Services (DHS).

DHS's Bureau of Certification Services regulates child care centers, group child care homes and family child care homes.

The center rules a director works under sit in Chapter 3270 of Title 55 of the Pennsylvania Code, which applies to facilities providing out-of-home care for seven or more children aged 15 or younger at any one time, and the director qualification itself is set in §3270.34.

Where this page and the current rule text disagree, the rule governs.

Pennsylvania sets the minimum for a center director at an associate degree.

Two of the routes the rule lists: a bachelor's degree from an accredited college or university in early childhood education, child development, special education, elementary education or the human services field plus 1 year of experience with children, or an associate degree in early childhood education or a related field plus 3 years.

Education and experience trade off across the routes — the bachelor's route asks for one year of experience and the associate route asks for three.

Our research transcribed two routes and not the rule's full list, so confirm the current combinations in §3270.34 with DHS before you rely on any one of them.

Experience is the variable that moves with education on the director routes: the bachelor's route asks for 1 year of experience with children and the associate route asks for 3 years.

Pennsylvania counts those years by hours.

For purposes of calculating, one year of child care experience is a minimum of 1,250 clock hours under the same chapter that sets the director qualifications.

No. The Pennsylvania Director Credential is optional — it is not a licensing requirement for directing a center.

The credential has its own entry bar for directors who want it: the minimum educational qualification for the award of the Pennsylvania Director Credential is an associate degree, and the credential is built on an associate degree with 18 early childhood education credits, including 9 credits of Director Credential coursework from an approved college.

There is tuition help aimed at it: Pennsylvania's Rising STARS Tuition Assistance funds the Director Credential and the School Age Professional Credential at up to $8,000 per year, and it funds credentials — not degree programs.

The training floor sits in the chapter's staff-person rule: a staff person shall obtain an annual minimum of 12 clock hours of child care training.

Directors are facility employees — the same chapter requires the director to be employed by the facility and on site at least 30 hours per week — but the director provisions we transcribed set no training floor of their own, so the staff-person minimum is the number to plan around.

Confirm a director's own annual hours with DHS.

Clearances run on a longer clock: Pennsylvania child care employees need a PA Child Abuse History Clearance, a PA State Police criminal history check (PATCH) and an FBI fingerprint check, renewed every 60 months from the date of the oldest clearance, and certified child care staff also need a National Sex Offender Registry check.

The director rules also fix how the job is held: a director shall be employed by the facility and present at the facility site a minimum of 30 hours per week.

Our research found no separate assistant-director rule in the director provisions we transcribed; the qualification level the chapter pairs directors with is the group supervisor, the rule's title for the lead teacher.

In centers with 45 or fewer children the director may also serve as group supervisor, and centers enrolling more than 45 children need a group supervisor for the first group of 45 enrolled children and for each group or partial group of 45 additional enrolled children.

Group supervisors qualify on routes of their own under the chapter; one is an associate degree in early childhood education or a related field plus 2 years of experience with children.

Pennsylvania's workforce registry for early childhood staff is the PD Registry, run by the Pennsylvania Key for OCDEL.

The registry is used for Career Pathway placement, CDA vouchers and the Director Credential.

For a director, that ties the optional credential to the same registry the center's teachers use for Career Pathway placement.