Memphis, Tenn.: It Took Three Dead Babies

Tennessee was supposed to be a national model for welfare reform. And so it was until the state ran into a basic truth about putting poor people to work: You can't reform welfare if you don't have good day care. So the story of Tennessee's success in one area--62% of its welfare recipients have moved into jobs--is also the story of its struggle in another. It is a story of day-care warehouses' stockpiling kids and sucking in rich government subsidies while paying barely trained caregivers less than $12,000 a year. It's a story of thousands of meals for poor kids paid for by the government but never provided; a story of prominent politicians and church leaders with ties to the day-care industry repeatedly ignoring the headlines; a story of children dying in overheated vans.

Last month Tennessee at last reformed its reform, adopting the most sweeping changes in child care in state history. But that move came with a hard lesson: money without oversight and accountability may do more harm than good.

The state understood from the start that providing day care took cash, so welfare parents received vouchers, paid for by state and federal money, covering tuition at about 70% of Tennessee's day-care centers (as much as $85 a week for a child under two). To meet the demand of a welfare population going to work, Tennessee made it relatively easy to open centers, didn't require background checks or training for caregivers before they started work and mandated a higher ratio of children to staff than state experts recommended.

The day-care explosion hit Memphis hard. About 9,000 children in Shelby County (which includes Memphis) received subsidized care before welfare reform; by 1999, the number was 21,000. Centers relying on those $85-a-week kids could soon be found on almost every corner of the inner city. For a few local entrepreneurs, it was a windfall. For example, Koinonia Child Care Center, run by the Rev. Roosevelt Joyner, has doubled in size since reform and today receives more than $1.7 million a year in child-care subsidies. Says Joyner: "The reforms put a lot of minority people who would not ordinarily go into business into business."

In June 1997, the Work 'N' Play Day Care Center moved into what had been a car dealership in East Memphis to accommodate its growing size. The new location was close to the home of Adrian and Tomeka Williams, who were looking for day care for two-year-old Adrian Jr. and four-month-old Destiny. On June 25, less than a week after the center opened, the van driver unloaded the other kids for the day but left Destiny in the van. She was discovered 5 1/2 hours later, still strapped into her child seat. The temperature inside the van had reached 112[degrees]; Destiny died of massive swelling of the brain caused by heat stroke.

State officials cannot recall anything like this ever happening before in Tennessee. Parents who had been quietly questioning the quality of care now wanted answers and changes. But day-care operators with powerful allies in the state legislature argued that this was an isolated incident, that tougher requirements, such as lower child-to-staff ratios, would put centers out of business. Nothing happened. "Everybody had something to say," notes Tomeka Williams, who still watches the van in which her daughter died drive by each morning, "but nothing was done."