Nearly 500 child-care providers collecting Wisconsin Shares money have criminal records.
A couple of days before Thanksgiving in 1996, Lisa Johnson took her 12-year-old foster daughter to the basement, pulled out an extension cord and whipped her with it, repeatedly.Johnson turned on some music and cranked up the volume to drown out the girl's cries. Still, other foster children in the house later told Milwaukee police that they could hear the girl beg for mercy. "I swear to God, Mama, I will be good," the children reported hearing. Good - meaning she would never chew gum in school again. Johnson, now 42, was charged with felony child abuse and in 1997 pleaded guilty to battery and domestic abuse. Her foster license was revoked. Yet three years later, she opened a certified day care center in Milwaukee County called Planting Seeds.
Johnson's story isn't that unusual. The Journal Sentinel found that child abusers and people who have committed other serious crimes are becoming licensed child-care providers and are earning hundreds of thousands of dollars through the Wisconsin Shares system. Nearly 500 child-care providers in Wisconsin with criminal records have received funding from the state in the first half of 2009 alone, according to a computer analysis by the Journal Sentinel.
