Licensed Preschool in Lancaster, OH

Preschool in Lancaster

As of July 2026

Lancaster's 30 licensed providers split 21 centers to 6 licensed homes, with a handful of other provider types rounding out the roster. Ten providers carry a Google rating, averaging 4.4★, with 5 rated 4.5★ or higher. Seventeen Lancaster providers — well over half — hold a medal under Ohio's Step Up To Quality, led by 9 Bronze, 5 Gold, and 3 Silver. CloverMap lists all 30 Lancaster providers with rating and medal status attached for side-by-side comparison.

What to know about childcare in Lancaster

Lancaster's roster of 30 providers runs 21 centers to 6 licensed homes, putting centers at roughly 70% of the total. That leaves a real but smaller pool of home-based options for families who prefer a residence setting, alongside a handful of other provider types that fill out the rest of the count. For most Lancaster searches, the starting point will be centers simply because there are more of them, but the home options that exist remain worth a direct look.

Seventeen of Lancaster's 30 providers hold a Step Up To Quality medal — more than half the roster — with the distribution weighted toward Bronze: 9 Bronze, 5 Gold, and 3 Silver. That's a broad base of medaled providers even if the top Gold tier is smaller than the Bronze tier. On Google, 10 providers carry a rating averaging 4.4★, and 5 of those 10 sit at 4.5★ or higher, leaving 20 providers without a public rating yet — a reminder that the medal data and the review data each cover a different slice of the roster and are worth checking separately.

Every Lancaster provider is licensed by Ohio's Department of Children and Youth (DCY), which sets baseline staffing, safety, and facility requirements for both centers and licensed homes before either can legally operate. Step Up To Quality is a separate, voluntary review sitting above that baseline — participating providers are assessed further and awarded Bronze, Silver, or Gold, while non-participants remain fully licensed and legal, just without that additional public designation.

For a Lancaster parent, the 17-provider medal pool is the broadest data point available here and a reasonable first filter — SUNNY SIDE CHILDCARE is one example among Lancaster's licensed providers. Layering the 10 Google-rated providers on top narrows things further for anyone who wants both signals in agreement before calling. With centers outnumbering homes better than three to one, most Lancaster families will end up comparing centers directly, using medal tier and location as the deciding factors.

It's also worth noting that Lancaster's medal and rating pools only partly overlap: with 17 medaled providers and 10 Google-rated providers out of 30 total, a fair number of Lancaster's providers show up in one data set but not the other. Neither absence is disqualifying — it simply means the fullest picture of a given provider comes from checking both the Step Up To Quality medal, if any, and the Google rating, if any, rather than relying on a single number when weighing one provider against another.