Not a “Great Start” for Christian Childcare Centers

By: Chris Johnson

In 2023, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer announced the launch of a new department under the executive branch: the Michigan Department of Lifelong Education, Advancement, and Potential – or MiLEAP.

From the outset, MiLEAP has had one ambitious goal, to expand the ages of students under state education programs in both directions, both for Pre-Kindergarten toddlers and for high-school graduates. Under MiLEAP, the state’s opportunity to educate Michigan’s children now starts at 4-years-old and lasts until that student graduates from a community college.

Among the goals listed on the state’s “Roadmap to Achieve PreK for All,” are “Meet the needs of all children” and “Offer PreK that meets family needs and preferences,” yet the actual practice of the state to bring aboard existing private daycares to participate in the program not only reveals how the state’s biases harm private daycares who are trying to meet the “needs and preferences” of children and families, but how state-funded education, by means of its attempt to keep its hands “clean” of religious instruction, results instead in religious discrimination.

The essence of the “PreK for All” plan is to expand access to the state’s already successful “Great Start Readiness Program” preschool, which provides grants to private daycares who meet certain requirements. But, no matter how well a preschool meets or surpasses those requirements, if the center uses a religious curriculum, or includes Christian education in their lesson plans, they are considered ineligible for the new program.

With the roll-out of “PreK for All,” what that means is that every Michigan 4-year-old has access to free preschool, just as long as they send their child to any preschool center that is not Christian. As a result, Christian daycare/preschool centers are losing students.

Worse than that, without a successful preschool program, many will struggle to keep their doors open. While there is always a need for infant care, the youngest ages obviously require more personal supervision – feeding, changing diapers, reading to them, playing with them, etc. – which requires more staff. It isn’t until children get to the preschool level with more independent and peer play that a daycare begins to be able to recoup some of the costs of the personnel necessary for infant care.

In other words, by incentivizing families to leave Christian preschool centers, which is what the state does by making every other preschool “free,” the state is threatening the very existence of childcare centers which view their mission as a ministry.

This is right in line with the purpose of state-funded education from its very inception.

Horace Mann, an early proponent of public education who is known as the “Father of American Education,” put it this way in the mid-1800s, “What the church has been for medieval man, the public school must become for democratic and rational man. God would be replaced by the concept of the public good.” 

The COVID lockdowns which sent America’s students home to watch their teachers on Zoom while their parents listened in the background is credited with awakening Americans to the horrific truth of what their students were being taught in this godless “concept of the public good:” gender confusion, sexual degeneracy, racial division, hatred for their own country.

Michigan’s public has to ask ourselves if this is really something that we want to start sooner in our state’s students’ lives and last longer. And, in the meantime, Michigan’s – and all the states’ – parents need to consider what the true cost of all this “free” education is.

Pastor Voddie Baucham said it best, “We cannot continue to send our children to Caesar for their education and be surprised when they come home Romans.”

 

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