Is There Minnesota-Level Fraud in Michigan's Childcare Grants?

In the aftermath of Nick Shirley dismantling the daycare scams in Minnesota, I got a tip on the child care providers here in Michigan. And what I’ve uncovered is extremely troubling.

Back in 2021, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed into budget over $700 million for the “Child Stabilization Act” which were federal funds given to child care facilities in order to keep their doors open and support kids and families.

The now defunct website explains that daycares, schools, and home care facilities applied and were granted funds based on the number of children they were enrolled. This was a non-competitive grant so every child care provider that submitted an application was awarded funding.

You read that correctly. If you applied, you got the money. No background checks, no visits to facilities to see if they were safe for children or if there was enough staff, and no research done to see if kids were even enrolled.

There were 5,890 programs approved, totaling over $365 million, with 2,931 licensed group homes or licensed family homes. Only 20 were ineligible, the state reported in 2022.

The group homes on average were issued over $20,000 per facility while the family homes were granted on average $11,000.

Unlike the “Quality Learing Center” daycare facility that Shirley uncovered in Minnesota, every licensed daycare center I spoke with in Michigan picked up the phone and appeared to be operating a legitimate business.

The group and family home facilities, however, paint a very similar picture to what Shirley brought to light in Minnesota.

There are good apples of course. Almost every home facility I tried to contact, however, had bad emails and/or non-working phone numbers, making it hard to actually get a child enrolled. Many had no websites, either.

How do kids get into a care center if you can’t contact anyone at the facility?

As I dug in further, inspection reports were done on these care centers, and many were found noncompliant with rules and regulations to ensure the safety of children.

Looking on certain locations via Google Maps, I found that many lacked playground equipment, while others had no information indicating the home was a child care facility.

From there, I went and started looking at the inspection reports. Regardless of how many violations the home had, every license I looked into was recommended to still be issued.

For some cases, the applicants didn’t have basic training to watch children. Others had water temperatures that were too hot and accessible to kids. Some didn’t have appropriate exit requirements, meaning they were not compliant with safety codes in order to allow proper evacuation in case of a fire.

It didn’t matter though. As long as a corrective action plan was submitted, no changes were made to their licensing.

For example, one care facility in Lathrup Village had five violations. The owner was not only out of date on the latest training to run her facility but also had a faulty water heater while operating on an expired license. The facility was allowed to stay open due to an acceptable corrective action plan being submitted.

In another example, a caregiver in Southfield was watching 11 children by herself while two of the kids were not signed in by the caregiver or their parents. The other person who was supposed to be on staff had also not completed a training refresher course, six months after being told to do so.

No big deal, right?

In other words, it seems like the State of Michigan could care less about the safety of the children in these home care facilities. I have yet to find a single example of a license that was taken away, let alone the return of any of the grant money due to a facility failing inspections.

Check it out for yourself! If you head to the state’s Child Care Hub website and go through group and family homes that are listed under someone’s real name, there’s a good chance you will see inspection violations while the care facility is allowed to remain open.

Is this why the State of Michigan took down the website bragging about the grants? It worked last month just fine but now can only be accessed via WebArchive.

Is the Whitmer administration trying to hide their tracks while at the same time allowing unfit people and dangerous homes to remain in the approved child care network?

It's a terrifying trend: Democratic-approved establishments use our tax dollars where there seem to be no consequences for failing inspections and putting our children at risk.