Maria de la Luz Polanco Fallad’s clients are families — and they feel like family.
At her home in Albuquerque, Polanco Fallad spends more than 16 hours a day caring for children, including her own 2-year-old. She plans pickups and drop-offs to ensure she’s never watching more than four children at a time — the limit for her business. And throughout those busy days, she forms tight bonds with the parents and children she serves.
“I always tell my parents, ‘You don’t become a day care parent; you become family — because you leave the most precious thing in the world to you, to me,’ ” she said. “And they’re not just kids coming into the house; they become my kids.”
Polanco Fallad doesn’t run a licensed day care center, in which educators look after children in classroom-like settings, or a licensed home-based child care.
Rather, she runs what’s known as a registered home, which faces fewer state regulations than licensed facilities. Registered home providers must still comply with background checks, training and home visiting requirements to ensure children are safe in their care, but they don’t need a fire inspection by the state fire marshal or local fire officials; zoning approval by state, city or county authorities; or confirmation from the New Mexico Environment Department or another agency that they are in compliance with rules surrounding swimming pools, private water supplies and private waste or sewage disposal.
Oz Lochner, 2, works on fine motor skills by threading beads onto a pipe cleaner at Desert Montessori School earlier this month.
Nathan Burton/The New Mexican
As New Mexico endeavors to fulfill the bold promise of what Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has called free universal child care, the state will have to rapidly increase the number of child care slots while also ensuring children are in safe, high-quality settings.
The state Early Childhood Education and Care Department will rely heavily on registered homes like Polanco Fallad’s to quickly increase the supply of slots — a move some people worry will result in a dip in the quality of care available.
Others, however, assert the expansion of registered homes — in addition to center-based care and licensed homes — is essential to ensure families can choose the kind of child care that works best for their kids.
The state early childhood department, too, has pushed back on the notion universal child care would bring a drop in quality, saying the state’s regulatory team will be able to keep up with all the facility check-ins. Regulatory staff check in on facilities on annual and biannual bases.
“In terms of quality, I don’t expect there to be any decline,” said Sandy Trujillo-Medina, director of the agency’s Early Care Education and Nutrition Division.
Home-based child care programs can be licensed, registered or neither.
A carve-out in New Mexico law allows anyone to care for up to four children — including their own — at home without registration or licensure, said Rebecca Baran-Rees, vice president of policy and community development at Growing Up New Mexico.
But being neither comes with a catch, Baran-Rees said: “If you are neither registered nor licensed, you are not eligible for child care assistance subsidy payments.”
Managed by the Early Childhood Education and Care Department, child care assistance covered the cost of child care for families earning at or below 400% of the federal poverty level — the equivalent of nearly $130,000 in 2025 — prior to the implementation of free universal child care.
Child care providers can qualify to receive higher child care assistance reimbursement rates — in other words, more state money per student — in several ways under early childhood department regulations.
One way is pursuing higher quality of care, as determined by several metrics — teacher-to-student ratios, staff training and experience, and screening of children’s development — through a voluntary state-run rating system.
Pursuing licensure can also increase reimbursement rates for a home-based child care facility.
While both registered and licensed home-based child care facilities can access state child care subsidies, the reimbursement rates for the two differ considerably. A toddler in a licensed family home would fetch a monthly reimbursement rate of $1,275, for example, compared to a $750 in a registered home.
But the differences between licensed and registered homes aren’t just tied to reimbursement rates.
Licensed child care homes can serve more children at one time. While registered homes are limited to four kids who don’t reside in the home, licensed child care providers can care for six children at a time — or double their capacity to 12 with an additional educator.
Both licensed and registered child care homes have to meet strict requirements to ensure the children in their care are safe — but the specifications for each differ slightly.
Child care facilities take a lot of moving parts to operate, so they need to complete numerous safety checks before they even begin the application process with the early childhood department to attain licensure or registration, Trujillo-Medina said.
The latest version of the Early Childhood Education and Care Department’s application to become a licensed child care home is nearly 60 pages long. It requires background checks for all adults in the home plus a fire inspection and compliance with other health and safety rules. During in-person visits, department staff confirm the licensed home has everything from smoke detectors and a first-aid kit to learning materials in good condition and displays of student artwork.
The application process is slightly less burdensome to become a registered home — although that, too, requires background checks and a home visit from state regulators. Registered homes do not have to secure zoning, fire and environmental approval.
The laundry list of standards a prospective provider must meet needs to be checked off before they submit their application, though the department does complete “courtesy walk-throughs” of centers beforehand to point out any potential issues that may come up during an inspection, Trujillo-Medina said.
All of a provider’s preparation work can take anywhere from three to six months, she said. The department’s processing of the application and inspection of the facility then takes about one more month — assuming the facility is already relatively ready to open.
“It just depends on where the provider’s at,” she said.
Rep. Rebecca Dow
Gabriela Campos/New Mexican file photo
Quality care
For state Rep. Rebecca Dow, a Republican from Truth or Consequences, the state’s plan to rely heavily on registered child care homes raises some concerns.
Though she said she’s committed to high-quality, affordable care, Dow argued free universal child care will be financially unsustainable, and she worries the state’s plan to rely so heavily on registered child care homes will reduce the quality of care available to families.
Dow knows what she’s talking about when it comes to early childhood education. She became pregnant at 19, three semesters into pursuing a college degree in business. To be able to care for her infant daughter and pay for necessities, she went to work in an early childhood program — and fell in love with it.
After college, she returned to Truth or Consequences to help found the community’s first private child care center, where she worked until 2019.
“I have spent two decades advocating for access to high-quality, affordable care for all. … I was doing early childhood before early childhood was cool,” Dow said.
As part of the state’s efforts to expand child care capacity as it moves toward the goal of free universal care, the Early Childhood Education and Care Department is planning to register 1,000 new homes — enough to care for 4,000 children — in addition to 55 new licensed centers and 120 new licensed homes, to meet families demands during the child care expansion.
So far, the state early childhood agency has made very marginal progress toward that goal, increasing capacity statewide by just 10 slots total from late July to mid-December.
During that time period, the state lost 66 child care slots in licensed facilities, while registered care made up the difference by adding 76 more slots.
“Going free tomorrow required the state to go backwards,” Dow said. “Registered care is the only way to meet this demand, and there is little to no expectation of understanding of childhood growth and development for registered care.”
But that’s not entirely true: Early Childhood Education and Care Department regulations require new child care employees — including those who run their own home-based child care facilities — to complete professional development, including training in emergency response, behavior management and child development.
Homes must keep a training log on file indicating the hours earned and subject matter accomplished during training, according to Early Childhood Education and Care Department regulations.
Baran-Rees framed decisions about licensure and registration as choices unique to each provider — rather than an automatic difference in quality.
Day care teacher Gabby Perez helps soothe Delilah Stevenson to sleep at Turquoise Child Development Center in Tucumcari on Dec. 11.
Nathan Burton
“There may be numerous reasons why someone does not choose to get registered, but are just as devoted to the quality of their program,” Baran-Rees said. “And so they work with organizations like Growing Up New Mexico to support those quality learning environments, and they’re building developmentally appropriate activities, and they’re engaging in sensory play, and they’re thinking about their program in very high-quality ways.”
In addition to operating its own child care center for children up to age 5, Growing Up New Mexico runs business support programs for home-based providers. The state early childhood department also provides free professional development courses for child care providers.
To meet the swell of new facilities, Trujillo-Medina said the early childhood department has scaled up the capacity of its team tasked with making sure providers have met safety requirements and staff have proper training in early childhood. The agency hired six new full-time staff and 30 temporary employees to support the initiative, she said, all of whom also help process incoming applications for child care assistance.
Trujillo-Medina added that third-party accrediting bodies that assess centers’ qualifications and the state’s rating system — which designates a facility’s quality based on its staff’s training and experience, teacher-student ratios, and other metrics — would also ensure new facilities are adequate in quality.
And at the end of the day, families get to decide which kind of child care works best for them, said Monica Archuleta, director of community programs at Growing Up New Mexico
The state’s mixed-delivery child care system is designed to allow parents to pick from a variety of center- and home-based options.
In some cases, the minutiae of registration versus licensure versus neither isn’t the most important factor in that decision.
“There’s also family choice,” Archuleta said. “We’re very familiar with families who have chosen a nonregistered, nonlicensed, home-based educator over a five-star licensed program.”
That was the case for Jessica Shelton, a Santa Fe mom of two young children.
Immediately after finding out she was pregnant, Shelton said, “I felt like suddenly I was in The Hunger Games trying to compete and navigate to find child care for my baby who wasn’t even born yet.”
Through friends, she got connected to a home-based provider, who became an “honorary abuela” to Shelton’s children. That provider, however, isn’t registered or licensed as a result of administrative challenges in upgrading her home — meaning Shelton’s family can’t benefit yet from the state’s free and universal child care program.
Nonetheless, Shelton has opted to keep her family’s provider.
“She’s really good at taking care of my babies, and that’s what matters the most to me,” Shelton said.
Provider perspectives
Alisha Walls is a second-generation home-based child care provider.
Originally from Sacramento, Calif., Walls grew up in her mother’s in-home day care. “That’s how my mom raised us,” she said.
After working in child care centers, she started her own child care business in Alamogordo — which in turn enabled her to pursue bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Her home is now a licensed child care home with the state Early Childhood Education and Care Department.
Getting licensed took work, Walls said. After submitting an application and background check forms, she worked with staff at the Early Childhood Education and Care Department to set a date for an in-person inspection. They visited to confirm Walls’ space met state standards with appropriate educational materials, a safe environment, adequate enrollment and vaccination records, and much, much more.
“They go through everything in your house,” Walls recalled.
Brittany Sandrik, a day care teacher at Turquoise Child Development Center in Tucumcari, helps a table full of students stack blocks Dec. 11, 2025.
Nathan Burton
She went through that process to be able to care for more kids. As a registered provider, Walls could only accommodate four children at a time — but there was constant demand for child care in Alamogordo, with nearby Holloman Air Force Base bringing a steady supply of families to the area.
By getting licensed, Walls was able to accept two more children. She now has a roster of 10 students up to age 6 and cares for six kids at any time, with a curriculum based in Reggio Emilia pedagogical principles, like child-centered learning, project-based activities and collaboration in the classroom.
“A lot of the centers here are full, so yes, there are people that are banging on the door for child care,” Walls said. “With the … curriculum that I provide, a lot of people want that type of program.”
Polanco Fallad said she’d love to get her home-based child care in Albuquerque licensed, too. She called it the “next step” for her business.
However, the licensure process still feels intimidating, Polanco Fallad said.
“I would look at it and then just not know what to do with it,” she said of the lengthy licensure application. “I don’t know where to go.”
