A Wisconsin Union-sponsored daycare may have known child sex offenders living less than two blocks away from the center and failed to tell parents.
Six convicted child sex offenders, some guilty of more than one count of first or second-degree sexual assault of a child, live at 306 N. Brooks St. in a low-income housing project, Porchlight.
Union officials and parents who send their children to Bernie's Place, which serves UW-Madison faculty and students, said the center had not informed them of the sex offenders' proximity, though at least one Bernie's official may have known.
'We have contact with the police department and I've been on the website to know where people are,' said Amy Welk, director of Bernie's Place in a phone interview Friday. 'I'm an informed person.'
When the Daily Cardinal asked Welk whether the daycare had notified parents, she hung up.
Parents reacted with mixed feelings regarding whether Bernie's should have told them of the offenders' placement Friday.
'I'm horrified, actually,' said one mother who wished to remain anonymous. 'I think we do have a right to know.'
Additionally, she noted that on the rare occasion her husband picked up her son, no one at Bernie's checked his identity.
'Every time he picked him up [at another daycare], he was carded because the girls [that work at the other daycare] wouldn't recognize him. He really noticed that nobody bothered [at Bernie's],' she said.
She said she intended to speak to Welk and might consider pulling her son out of the program.
Another mother who spoke on the condition of anonymity said she felt the children were adequately supervised at Bernie's and would not consider pulling her son out.
'I don't think they have an obligation to tell us, maybe they could have just provided a heads-up about it,' she said.
She said she had done research in the prison system and was not shocked by the presence of sex offenders in the community.
'I think that they're sort of everywhere and I don't really buy into this whole hysteria around the fact that there could be a registered sex offender next door,' she said. 'It's public access. Anyone can go online to the website and put in their zip code and find out who the sex offenders are.'
Mark Guthier, director of the Union, said Bernie's has a sponsorship agreement through the Union's Community Services Committee. He said Union officials had no prior knowledge of the situation, but that it could pose a danger to the children.
Mary Lee, a field supervisor for the Wisconsin Department of Corrections said the department monitors the sex offenders at Porchlight on a weekly basis, with home visits performed monthly.
She said the DOC pays for some offenders to live at Porchlight for 30 days after being released from prison if they have no stable residence.
'We pay regularly for four beds per month, but above and beyond that there is various offenders, including sex offenders, that actually rent from that apartment,' Lee said.
Steve Schooler, executive director of Porchlight Inc. which has 21 locations including the Brooks Street complex, said his organization does check conviction records of prospective tenants, but does not deny them housing or treat them prejudicially based on priors.
'We're a lot more lenient about convictions than any other landlord,' Schooler said. 'We don't monitor anybody. Let's get that straight.'
Schooler said he has never had any complaints from neighbors about the residents at that location and has never tried to contact Bernie's.
Lee said the DOC scans for daycares when they place sex offenders in a neighborhood, but was unsure whether her agency had spoken to Bernie's.
DOC Spokesperson John Dipko said the agency notifies local police when it places offenders, but said the public and daycare proprietors can go online to learn the whereabouts of sex offenders.
'That information would be available to the daycare center and other daycare centers and really anybody else, so they wouldn't have to necessarily call us,' Dipko said.
The mother who said she thought Bernie's had an obligation to notify parents said she would seek more information now that she knows, but said an online search would not have occurred to her.
'It's not something that I think most parents think about checking,' she said.
