Issue of the Week: Demonizing Day Care Providers

Issue of the Week: Demonizing Day Care Providers

Plus Hero and Jerk of the Week

By Shepherd Express Staff

The Journal Sentinel did an investigative series on day care providers, which is good, but the paper’s sensationalized coverage was disgraceful. If there is fraud, it should be prosecuted, but the vast majority of the cases being labeled as fraud simply appear to be reporting errors. It is similar to the person who puts a number on the wrong line of a 1040 income tax form. It is not fraud; it is a reporting error.

Reasonable legislation was drafted and passed that would have dealt with any kind of intentional fraud, but Gov. Jim Doyle vetoed the word “intentional” out of the legislation. Thanks to Doyle’s selective veto, the state can now suspend payments to any day care provider if it “reasonably suspects” that a person has violated the program’s rules. The state doesn’t need to prove its accusations or even find that the provider had “intentionally” committed fraud. The state just needs to suspect it. And the day care providers aren’t given a chance to defend themselves until months after their payments have been suspended.

If there were any accusations of children being abused, which there were not, then perhaps that would have provided a rationale for immediately suspending centers and asking questions later.

Rational and fair-minded people must get past the hype and the headlines, take a closer look at what’s happening to these small businesses—many of them run by African-American women in the central city—and ask themselves how they would feel if their revenue was cut off by the state because unelected state bureaucrats decided that they “suspect” some kind of fraud was being committed. Do we really want to live in a society like that? For example, the Department of Justice raided at least one day care provider who had spoken to the press while she was in the process of appealing her case. This is not the way the American system works. It appears to be harassment and intimidation, pure and simple, a warning to other providers that they shouldn’t defend themselves.

Mr. Doyle, this is still America and people are innocent until proven guilty. Why is “due process,” one of the foundations of the American criminal justice system, ignored when it comes to small-scale day care centers?

Again, the Shepherd certainly condemns those who intentionally defraud the state. But we also condemn this Soviet-like witch hunt that doesn’t belong in the America that we learned about in our high-school civic classes.