Yesterday, I told you that in four states–including my state of North Carolina–church-affiliated day care centers are allowed to get away with things that would never be tolerated at their secular counterparts–such as heavy-handed corporal punishment. Well, it turns out that this is the tip of the iceberg. While digging into these centers, the folks at the Center for Investigative Reporting discovered that on a number of occasions, “religious freedom” loopholes allow people to operate day care centers even though there is proof beyond any doubt that they don’t belong within an area code of children.
One of the worst offenders is Maymie Page, director of Early Image Child Care Center in Winston-Salem. On several occasions in the 1990s, she got into hot water for spanking kids even though corporal punishment has been banned in all secular North Carolina day care centers since 1984. The most outrageous incident came in 2000, when she slapped the arms of a child for turning somersaults. She then pulled down his pants and spanked him in full view of other children. She was arrested, and just over a week later, state regulators yanked her license.
However, Page found a way to get back in business. In February 2001, her husband, Howard, asked permission to reopen Early Image under the covering of his church, Faith Tabernacle Holiness Church of God. The request was granted. As a result, Early Image was now permitted to spank kids under a religious exemption to the state ban on corporal punishment in day care centers. However, spanking has fallen out of favor even among religious day cares; Early Image is one of only 14 in the entire state that still engages in the practice.
Looking at Early Image’s history as a secular day care, the Pages’ lawyer must have been one hell of a talker. Maymie had been fined $200 in 1997 for heavy-handed discipline of kids, and was slapped with another $900 fine for hitting a child in the head. She refused to pay either fine, and also refused to implement corrective measures required by state regulators.
Given this history, it seems hard to understand why regulators took the Pages at their word when they said the church would run the center, not the Pages. After all, in churches like this one, the pastor’s word is the law. Any pastor disreputable enough to allow a manifestly unfit day care operator what amounts to a Get Out Of Jail Free card in the name of religious freedom isn’t running a church. He’s running a crime family.
As outrageous as Page’s behavior is, it doesn’t hold a candle to the offenses of Deborah Stokes. Since 2002, Stokes has opened at least 12 day care centers in and around Mobile. Eleven of them billed themselves as church-affiliated. They all share a similar pattern–unsafe and unsanitary conditions, unpaid rent, heavy-handed discipline, workers getting stiffed on pay, etc.
Despite this sordid history, there’s presently no way to shut Stokes down for good. Due to intense lobbying by preachers in the 1980s in the name of religious freedom and church-state separation, Alabama child welfare regulators have no authority whatsoever to regulate day care centers that are “an integral part” of a church. However, in 2008, partly due to Stokes’ antics, the Mobile County Health Department began requiring all day care centers within the county to be inspected in order to stay open–including church day cares. That forced Stokes to take her act across Mobile Bay to Baldwin County, where she’s now based. Jefferson County, home to Birmingham, now also requires all of its day cares to be inspected.
This still leaves local officials in the rest of Alabama playing whack-a-mole to stop similar sleazeballs. Due in part to the disclosures about Stokes, state representative Patricia Todd has introduced a bill that would require church day cares to be licensed.
Let’s not beat around the bush. These “religious freedom” exemptions allow day care centers to operate even when they are a clear and present danger to children. They also give honest church day cares a bad name. Some of my closest friends work in church day cares that would never tolerate this kind of behavior. It’s past time for Alabama and North Carolina to jackhammer shut these “religious freedom” loopholes. Hopefully it won’t take a child dying or being seriously injured to do it.
