A commitment to children
By Jonathan Gramling
Part 1 of 2
It is a bittersweet moment for Boggess. Earlier this year, she thought it would be her last graduation before she stepped down from this part of her life's mission to improve the prospects for children in the Madison area. But Boggess is such a stickler for the welfare of the children that she won't sell the Hughes Place center on Madison's south side to just anyone with cash in hand. The new owner is going to have to be about something and share the same spiritual educational mission that Boggess has. If need be, Boggess is prepared to continue her mission for another year until that special someone comes along.
Boggess came to Madison in the early 1980s from Freeport, Ill. to attend the University of Wisconsin. She became involved in early childhood education here while she attended school -- she worked part-time at Child Development on Fisher Street and at a day care in her church on Fish Hatchery Road. When the Early Childhood Training Center was put up for sale in 1982, she jumped at the chance and put her roots down in South Madison and on the east side where an ECLC satellite was located on North Lawn Street.
It was fortuitous that Boggess took over when she did. While ECTC's student population was primarily Euro-American at the time, reflecting the demographics of that side of Park Street at the time, South Madison was soon to experience an explosion in the growth of its African American population as families -- many of them single-parent households -- moved to Madison from urban areas like Chicago to escape the drugs and the gang violence.
Many of the young children had a different set of circumstances that many day care providers were not prepared to deal with. While other centers would routinely dismiss students who acted up, Boggess had a "Do not dismiss" policy. "We had a huge influx of children that Madison wasn't used to," Boggess recalled during an interview with The Capital City Hues. "The trend was actually happening in my own schools. Kids were being dismissed. I understood why other facilities were dismissing children because I was having the same problem with my staff. My staff at North Lawn would threaten to quit if we didn't get rid of a particular child. And I was losing great teachers because of that because I refused to dismiss the child. So something had to be done. I couldn't be at all of the schools. So I had two vans and would take children to different school locations. I would pick the child up and bring him to the center where I was going to be that day. If I had complaints from my staff, I would ask the parents to bring the child to me. It worked. And then these parents would go out and say 'If you're having any problems with your kids, I know a woman that will take them and she won't kick them out.' When I enrolled the child, I told the parent that I would not dismiss them. I reassured them that I would not dismiss them for any reason."
Another group who benefited greatly from Boggess' presence in South Madison was the parents. As the influx of families came into Madison, Governor Tommy Thompson and the legislature instituted the Wisconsin Works program to move families off of welfare and into employment.
"We had this huge influx of children coming into the center because parents now needed to go to work or get trained," Boggess recalled. "One of the ideas that Tommy Thompson had was they would take these women and train them to be day care providers and help them start their own day care centers. The women would be working and we would have enough facilities in the state for the children of the women that they were going to put to work. That was his theory. There was a pot of money for these women to go back to school to get their teaching certificate. So they did do that, which was a great idea for me because I was losing teachers right and left because most of the teachers had good intentions -- they would come in and be excited about doing this job but had no clue on how hard it would be. I knew who had a clue on how hard this would be and that was the parents of these children. So now that they had their certificates in hand, I would bring them into the center and train them. They needed to be trained in this special way that I needed them to be trained. We couldn't pay very much. So we bartered. They were required to pay the parent fee and I would pay as much as I could pay because parents had a clue and it helped. Some of the parents paid some percent for their schooling. There was a fee for going to school as well. There was a grant that was 50 percent of the cost and I would pay 50 percent of the cost. And we would take care of their children at the same time. That worked. We still have some of those parents working here 15 years later. It worked."
While Boggess had at one time expanded to four centers, she currently operates the one center on Hughes Street. She sold two of her centers, the one on North Lawn, which was a converted church on and the one on the Beltline that was brought and torn down to make way for a car dealership. While the provision of day care in South Madison has been a continual battle for Boggess for 25 years, it has also left her with some fond memories and a great sense of satisfaction.
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September 5, 2007 Archives