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On September 21, conservative local vlogger Katie Daviscourt put out a video on X suggesting that there was rampant fraud in Somali daycares mostly in Tukwila and High Point. Similarly to Nick Shirley last year, she knocked on doors of a few day cares (which she identified in her video by name) while accompanied by a camera man (the controversial de-transitioner “Apostate Ari”) and when they didn’t answer the door, she suggested the daycare didn’t have any kids and was a scam. She later tweeted out a list of employees at the WA Department of Children, Youth and Families with Middle Eastern names, implying that these were the employees supervising the daycares she said were fraudulent. I did some digging to debunk some of this, but I’d like to request some help fact-checking some of the other claims that I don’t know anything about. For example, she says that one of the daycares was getting $40K/month in DCYF grants even though it’s only licensed for 10 kids – and market-rate daycare for is about $2K/kid max, so tuition-only grants should have totaled only up to $20K. But could there be a simple explanation — like, some of the grants go to improving the building? If you know how to look into this I would love some help. (And, fair’s fair: the goal is not to “debunk” what she said but to check if it’s true. Even if she made some other false claims, these claims could be true.) What I’ve found so far: 1. The daycares named in the video are not “empty”, based on records from inspections done by DCYF. I looked up the four identified daycares in the video that I was able to find (Manha Family Child Care, Daisy Family Child Care, Aboo Family Child Care and Hiba Family Child Care) on the DCYF’s Child Care Check Page and looked up the inspection records for each one. All of them have inspections that were signed off by a DCYF licensor in the past year, with the name of the licensor and the date of the inspection on the record, and the inspection only “counts” if the kids are present. I also managed to reach one of the licensors on the phone, and she confirmed that she had been to the child care on the date listed, and there were kids present (otherwise she wouldn’t have signed off on it). Between them, the four daycares had a total of 10 inspections (from 2023 to present) by six different licensors. Assuming the licensors were honest, this still doesn’t prove the daycare wasn’t fraudulently inflating attendance (I don’t think the licensors count the kids and compare to billing records?), but it does prove it wasn’t a “ghost daycare”. And maybe the daycare was functioning on the day of the inspection, but since turned into a fully fraudulent ghost daycare by the time Daviscourt visited — but that’s unlikely. In sum: (1) the “ghost daycare” allegations in the video could be true, but probably aren’t; and (2) the fact that she didn’t check this herself is such journalistic corner-cutting that everything else should be taken with a grain of salt. She actually did allege, sort of, that the inspectors themselves were in on it, which brings us to: 2. The image Katie Daviscourt tweeted of “DCYF employees” was misleading as pertains to these daycares, not representative of DCYF employees anyway, and pretty racist. Katie tweeted this on Thursday: These are real DCYF employees listed at https://apps-ca-ext.dcyf.wa.gov/EmployeeDirectoryInternet/ . However the wording “Look who is approving the licenses/inspections” implies these inspectors had something to do with the daycares she visited, or at least that this is a representative sample of the employees that do the inspections. But if you look at the names of the licensors on the reports for the four daycares above, they are: Quiana Montgomery Meanwhile, the list in the image includes an “Administrative Assistant” who (I am assuming) wouldn’t actually go out and do “inspections”. Literally, it looks like someone just seached the DCYF employee directory (which has 3,500 people) and found some Muslim-sounding names and listed them all together to make it sound scary. Daviscourt later deleted the tweet and posted a new one saying:
So, add to the list: forwarding a “tip” as if it was original work, and not vetting anything in it. The fact that the images were A.I. was the least bad part. So that’s what I’ve got so far. If anyone has ideas for how to dig into the other claims in the video, let me know. Thanks! submitted by /u/bennetthaselton |
