Middleville mom ordered to stop watching friends’ children waiting for bus

Bureaucratic rules often lead to absurd results.  In this case, I am compelled to believe that DHS has lost its ever-loving mind!

Francie Brummel and Lisa Snyder thought they had a perfect solution to getting their two kids on the Thornapple Kellogg school district bus.  Brummel drops her 7-year-old son off at Snyder’s nearby house on her way to work, where he waits for about an hour before the bus comes each morning.  Another neighbor, Lori Forbes, brings her son and Mindy Rose’s son to Snyder’s home as well. Snyder waits with all of them for the bus.  The women are all friends who live near each other in a rural part of Barry County.  Snyder’s home on Thornbird Drive is a designated bus stop, and the children would all ride the same bus anyway.

Seems like a reasonable solution so your children do not have to wait out in the cold for the bus, right?  Well, not according to DHS.

After only three days of school, Snyder was notified by the state Department of Human Services that a neighbor had filed a complaint that she was operating an illegal day care out of her home.  Really? Are you kidding me?

That was a rhetorical question, but I’m going to answer it anyway.  According to state law, a person cannot provide care for unrelated children in their home for more than four weeks per calendar year unless they are licensed or registered with the state.  Failure to do so is a misdemeanor punishable with fines or jail time.

This story has now been covered in all of the local papers and nationally on the Today Show.  Frankly, this is an embarrassment for the State and DHS.

You can view the interview on the Today show here:

State Representative Brian Calley has introduced legislation to prevent this in the future. The problem is that this lady should have never been prosecuted in the first place.

© 2009, Melinda Deel. All rights reserved.