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KinderCare Learning Companies is the largest private provider of early childhood education in the country, operating over 2,300 facilities and programs nationwide.
While KinderCare reportedly had the capacity to serve over 200,000 children when the Oregon-headquartered corporation went public in October, its CEO, Paul Thompson, told Yahoo Finance that there was a "lot of opportunity" to serve even more families beyond the 40 states and the District of Columbia where it presently operates.
When speaking with BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey on the Monday episode of "Relatable," investigative journalist Edwin Dorsey cast doubt on whether families are best served by the growing day care giant, highlighting various complaints about KinderCare across the country, as well as a handful of troubling reports of alleged abuse and/or neglect — including a report of a Wisconsin baby's alleged exposure to cocaine at a care facility last year and another report concerning a KinderCare worker's alleged slashing of a toddler with a pizza cutter.
'Kids were overdosing on drugs brought by the staff.'
Dorsey told Stuckey that he makes liberal use of Freedom of Information Act requests to get copies of the consumer complaints people send to regulators and to state attorneys general offices, and that when it came to KinderCare, he found a "high level of complaints."
The complaints were primarily about "child safety issues — and not the type of stuff you normally expect where, you know, maybe a kid, like, fights with another kid or somebody has allergies," said Dorsey. "There is, like, issues where kids were escaping from the KinderCare locations. Kids were getting locked in rooms, you know, with no supervision. Kids were overdosing on drugs brought by the staff."
Blaze News reached out to KinderCare for comment but did not receive a response by deadline.
The investigative journalist concluded in a report last month that KinderCare, which apparently receives millions of dollars in government subsidies, "is a broken business that harms the children and families it claims to help."
'This seems like a pretty simple and basic issue for day care.'
One of the incidents that drove the reporter to that determination took place on May 15, 2024, in Oak Creek, Wisconsin.
After finding scratches and marks on her 11-month-old son when she picked him up from KinderCare, Kimberly Hopson took him to Children's Wisconsin, where doctors informed her the baby had cocaine in his system, reported WISN-TV.
Investigators subsequently searched Hopson's home but found no trace of the illicit substance. When they searched the day care, police indicated drug-sniffing dogs found a bag of cocaine in a worker's backpack in the infant room.
Passion Watson, the KinderCare worker who owned the backpack, was slapped with a misdemeanor drug possession charge to which she later pleaded guilty.
At the time of Watson's arrest, an attorney representing the drugged child and his family stated, "I would expect that a day care that has that many locations and that type of brand recognition to have appropriate protocols, standards and policies to ensure against what took place."
A WTMJ-TV investigation revealed that the KinderCare Oak Creek location had over two dozen violations cited by the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families, including for staff being aggressive with infants, undocumented injuries, and kids having access to power tools and toxic chemicals. The location has since had its license revoked.
Dorsey referenced a 2021 incident where a motorist found a 3-year-old boy wandering near an off-ramp in Milford, Connecticut. When the passerby notified the staff at the Wellington Road KinderCare where his parents dropped him off, staff reportedly indicated they had no idea the boy was missing.
WTNH-TV noted at the time that two years prior, the same location had been cited for 10 violations during an unannounced visit by state licensing inspectors.
"I know of at least three cases where kids are escaping from KinderCare, and this is, like, way more than any other chain," Dorsey told Stuckey. "This seems like a pretty simple and basic issue for day care — you gotta make sure that the kids can't escape, and that's going on repeatedly in KinderCare."
'It's a complete, you know, abuse of taxpayer funds.'
Another example Dorsey identified was the June 13, 2024, incident that took place at the KinderCare center in Rochester, Minnesota.
The Minnesota Star Tribune reported that Andrianna Newburn was initially charged with third-degree assault and making felony terroristic threats for allegedly going into the day care's infant room and slashing a co-worker's baby with a pizza cutter.
The Minnesota Department of Human Services cleared the KinderCare facility earlier this year, concluding that the employee was solely responsible for the incident of maltreatment.
Other incidents referenced in Dorsey's report include the death of an Ohio infant after a stay at a KinderCare location that had multiple serious violations during inspections; a Florida mother's February 2022 discovery that KinderCare workers had locked her 2-year-old daughter inside and left for the day; a KinderCare teacher's alleged beating of a 4-year-old boy at a Dunedin, Florida, KinderCare location; and the threats caught on a hidden recording device allegedly issued by workers at a San Antonio KinderCare location.
Dorsey suggested to Stuckey that across the various examples of abuse and neglect, KinderCare appears to have also dropped the ball on transparency with parents, who learned of their kids' maltreatment through secondary sources.
Dorsey noted further that KinderCare receives a substantial amount of money in federal funding "through the Child Care and Development Block Grant, which was started in 1990 under George H.W. Bush with the idea being that ... having kids in, like, informative day cares is so beneficial to early childhood education and to kids' development that the government should be subsidizing it."
"The reality is that it's kind of, like, the opposite," continued Dorsey. "It doesn't seem like it's beneficial to your development to have 20 kids in a room supervised by someone earning $12 an hour in a corporate environment that just doesn't care about these kids. So it's a complete, you know, abuse of taxpayer funds. The government has huge ability to flex on these centers."
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