A baby got high on cocaine — shocking report on tax-funded KinderCare

One of the nation’s largest day-care providers, KinderCare, is not the rosy, child-friendly company it purports to be — and independent investigative journalist Edwin Dorsey has the receipts.

“One thing that I’m very good at is using FOIA, the Freedom of Information Act, to get copies of complaints people are sending to regulators. So one common thing I’ll do in my research is I’ll go to the FTC, and see what complaints people are submitting to the FTC, and go to local state attorney offices and see what complaints people are submitting to state AGs,” Dorsey tells Allie Beth Stuckey on “Relatable.”

When he did this for KinderCare, he found that the company has “a lot of child safety issues.”

“And not the type of stuff you’d normally expect, where maybe a kid fights with another kid or somebody has allergies. There was issues where kids were escaping from the KinderCare locations, kids were getting locked in rooms with no supervision, kids were overdosing on drugs brought by the staff,” he tells Stuckey.

In one case, a woman dropped her child off at KinderCare, only to be called six hours later and told that her child was throwing up and needed to be picked up.

“She took him home and she knew right away something was wrong, and so she went back to KinderCare and said ‘What happened? My kid was fine this morning and now he’s very, very sick and has all these bruises, and clearly, something’s wrong,’” Dorsey explains.

“KinderCare denied anything was wrong, but the mother knew something was wrong, so she took her kid to the hospital, and the hospital did a drug test and this 2-year-old tested positive for cocaine,” he continues.

The police got involved and searched the mother’s house, but they didn’t find anything. That’s when they looked into KinderCare, where it turned out one of the staff members brought cocaine to work in a bag.

“This is the type of pattern of misconduct you’ll see at KinderCare locations. There’s about 70 in the state of Texas; there’s hundreds nationwide,” Dorsey says. “And the common theme I see in all these KinderCare cases is the company is never transparent with the parents about what happened.”

Not only are there more stories like this child's, but KinderCare is receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in government subsidies.

“KinderCare largely caters to working families. They also have a program to watch kids whose parents are in the military, so service members, and about 35% of their revenue comes from the U.S. taxpayer, which is their largest source of revenue, through the child care development block grant,” Dorsey tells Stuckey.

This grant was started in 1990 under President George H.W. Bush.

“The idea being that early childhood education, having kids in information day-cares, is so beneficial to early childhood education and to kids' development that the government should be subsidizing it. And the reality is, it’s kind of the opposite,” Dorsey says.

“In addition to all these safety issues and ingesting cocaine and roaming the streets, it does not seem like it’s beneficial for 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,” he adds.

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