Article Link: http://exchangepress.com/article/churches-that-care-status-report-2-on-church-housed-child-care/5008141/
Which national organizations over-see the most child care centers? Kinder Care and La Petite? Wrong. It's the Southern Baptist Convention and The Roman Catholic Church.In fact, nine of the ten organizations with the most child care centers in this country are religious organizations (see Table 1).
Church-housed child care is more than a collection of part day programs operating in "dinghy, dark church basements." It is a dominant, diverse, vibrant, growing segment of the child care world.
This article will provide a current snapshot of church-housed child care in the USA. This snapshot will be somewhat out of focus because it is being developed from data some of which is old, some incomplete, and some uneven in its reliability.
How many are there?
We were able to account for over 20,000 early childhood programs housed in church facilities in this country. To arrive at this number, we analyzed data from three sources: demographic data from Mike Wilson List Counsel (the foremost compiler of early childhood mailing lists); findings of a 1982 National Council of Churches (NCC) survey of 88,000 churches (Lindner, 1983); and our survey of the 30 largest religious denominations (serving 90% of all members of religious ...