Homeless man lives next to fraudulent Daycare

A daycare that doesn’t look like one

This field report visits a Minnesota daycare located in the middle of a shopping plaza where many storefronts are boarded up, graffitied, and fronted by a dumpster — with a homeless man sleeping directly beside the entrance.

State visits, the reporter notes, recorded the site as having 39 children enrolled, though only about five were visible during the visit. When the reporter asked to enroll a child, staff could produce little paperwork beyond the licensee’s card.

The most striking detail: the facility’s listed backup provider, the UMI Learning Center, was convicted in federal court in 2024 of claiming 150 “ghost kids” — children who did not exist — to collect federal funds. The report raises the question of why a facility tied to a convicted fraud site was serving as the backup.

The piece captures, at street level, the pattern that drove the Feeding Our Future scandal: thinly staffed sites in distressed locations claiming dozens of enrolled children and millions in government money.

For the documented case behind this pattern, see the Feeding Our Future investigation hub.