After winning a series of national investigative reporting awards, the Journal Sentinel‘s “Cashing in on Kids” series by Raquel Rutledge came away with the big one last week — a Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting, the newspaper’s second in three years.
It was another endorsement for the newspaper’s investment in big projects and investigations.
The paper’s series on waste and fraud in the state’s Wisconsin Shares childcare program for the working poor is a classic piece of journalistic muckraking: Dissecting a taxpayer-funded government program that gets little day-to-day attention and turns out to be ripe for abuse. And it was built the old-fashioned way — from careful review of public records after a series of tips from anonymous, low-level informants. The result drew praise from inside the profession and from readers commenting on the paper’s Web site.
Still, not everyone in Milwaukee has enthusiastically endorsed the Pulitzer-winning stories. The most vocal criticism has come from the Shepherd Express. Last Nov. 19, the alt-weekly asked in a headline, “Wisconsin Day Care Centers: Fraud or Honest Mistakes?” A follow-up editorial Dec. 2 called the paper’s coverage “sensationalized” and “disgraceful” and accused the state of “a Soviet-style witch hunt.” “If there is fraud, it should be prosecuted, but the vast majority of the cases being labeled as fraud simply appear to be reporting errors,” the Shepherd asserted.
In a story last August the JS singled out Latasha Jackson for racking up $3 million in childcare revenues over the last decade from Wisconsin Shares despite having been repeatedly written up for scores of violations. On the eve of publication last summer, state authorities moved to shut down Jackon’s day care facility and demand money she was allegedly overpaid.
In March, the Shepherd went out on a limb to defend Jackson in a story that ignored the substance of the original JS story and tried to suggest she was merely an innocent victim in the face of an overzealous state bureaucracy when her license was revoked. The weekly trumpeted an administrative law judge’s recommendation in January that the state reverse the revocation, reinstating Jackson’s license, and that concluded she was overpaid by only $400 rather than more than 10 times that much as the state had charged. (A state Department of Children and Families spokeswoman told Pressroom this week that the judge’s recommendation is still pending in the department.)
And in another story just six days before the Pulitzers were announced, the Shepherd was even more dismissive, declaring that the JS was “incapable of doing any objective reporting on day care providers” and that the series was based on “flawed reporting.”
Rutledge’s rebuttal came this week in an online chat. When a questioner asked about the Shepherd‘s suggestion that some of the people singled out “were later absolved of wrongdoing to far less fanfare,” Rutledge replied:
“The criminal investigation into Latasha Jackson is very much alive and records have substantiated everything that we have written – if that’s who you are referring to. That said, a small fraction of the providers among the more than 140 whose public funding was cut have had their licenses restored. That’s not surprising. It seems to me that regulators would question why on three, four or even five occasions if they went to a center and didn’t find any workers or children (yet received a bill) they would be suspicious and cut public taxpayer support. If that provider later proved they were on a field trip or had a legitimate reason for billing but not being there then they could be reinstated. That in no way speaks to the integrity of our work. I don’t know what is behind the Shepherd’s columns. Perhaps they were seeking the counter narrative. You’ll have to ask them.”
Rutledge’s response is understated. From where Pressroom sits, the weekly’s criticism of the JS reeks of sour grapes and ignores the well-substantiated body of evidence that the Journal Sentinel produced in support of its claims.
The irony is that with its shoddy critique, the Shepherd actually undermines legitimate concerns it purports to raise. One is that the Wisconsin Shares program remains an important element of the state’s welfare-to-work package. Childcare advocates fear, with some reason, that in the wake of the fraud uncovered by the newspaper, public support for any childcare services for the working poor could rapidly erode.
While the state has thousands of childcare providers participating in Wisconsin Shares, fewer than 200 have been accused of wrongdoing. “The perception that is being created, we worry, is that every child care provider in Milwaukee is criminal, and we know that not to be the case,” says Bob Jacobson, communications manager for the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families.
Jacobson worries that fallout from the revelations could thwart passage of legislation that would actually help the state and consumers better evaluate childcare providers. “Some people say, ‘Hold your horses, why would we want to do anything with this program? We should just throw it out the window entirely.’ That’s kind of what we’re up against.”
The other issue is that there were innocent providers caught up in the state’s subsequent dragnet. So far, state records show, about 20 providers have been reinstated out of more than 160 suspended from Wisconsin Shares. More cases for reinstatement are pending. But that’s still far less than the “vast majority” the Shepherd so blithely claimed were merely guilty of paperwork missteps.
Rich Abelson, director of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees District Council 48, the union that represents home childcare providers in Milwaukee, says the JS series has left him feeling “schizophrenic.”
‘I’m always happy when people who are stealing from government programs get caught,” Abelson tells Pressroom. “When we create these programs to help people in need, and people take advantage of these programs for personal greed, I think that is reprehensible.”
Yet, he says, the series appears to have led the state “to really go over the top” in cracking down on providers — many of whom came out of poverty themselves and lacked the sophistication to deal with the state regulations for the program. “The state ended up lumping a lot of folks whose only crime was their failure to provide proper paperwork in a timely fashion with folks who were genuinely defrauding the system.”
Those suspensions are in the process of being undone, but in the meantime they’ve damaged providers’ reputations and cost them legitimate income, he says.
Abelson contends collateral damage from the state’s newly aggressive enforcement has been underplayed and that the union’s warnings about the impact have largely fallen on deaf ears at the paper. But he also gives props to Rutledge and to the series.
“It won the Pulitzer Prize,” he says. “Who am I to second guess that? She uncovered some real fraud. There’s no question about that.”
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