Scraping US Childcare Registries: Why 'Active Filter' Works in Only 2 of 5 States

A developer analysis reveals a key pitfall when scraping US childcare-license registries from five states — New York, Connecticut, Colorado, Delaware, and Texas — all hosted on the Socrata open-data platform. Although all five states share the same SODA query syntax, the 'active licenses only' filter functions correctly only for New York and Connecticut, which have properly configured server-side status columns. Colorado and Delaware publish no status column at all, while Texas has a status field that is not wired into the active-only filter, meaning toggled filters silently return closed or revoked facilities. Additional inconsistencies include non-numeric capacity values across datasets, requiring fallback parsing logic to prevent full pipeline crashes. Texas also uniquely exposes email and website fields absent from all other states, highlighting how a uniform API surface can mask deep schema-level differences between independently maintained datasets.