The Children's Mission of St. Paul and St. James

Mustardseed Afternoon Club, which opened in early 2000, is a recreational program for up to 25 children in grades K through 5, plus a few older children who have come up through the program. It includes free play (indoor and outdoor), snacks, reading aloud, homework time, singing, crafts, games, and occasional trips to parks, museums, and other places of interest.

Mustardseed Afternoon Club began as a two-day-per-week program and rapidly expanded to three days per week and then, in the fall of 2001, to five days. This expansion outran our resources, and in spite of generous support from many friends, we reached a budget crisis in 2007 and have had to cut the afterschool program back to three days per week in 2007-08.

Our enrollment is extremely diverse economically, ranging from a few children whose families can afford the full fees, to families who pay only a nominal monthly amount. The diversity benefits all the children.

Our afterschool program is not just a safe and supervised place. Nor is it simply an extension of school, with its rules and assignments. We encourage the children to play and unwind from school, and to enjoy learning and being together in a variety of ways.

Our space is the large, open parish hall, built in 1890. Comfortable and homey, it serves as our “one-room schoolhouse.” In a deliberate effort to be more like a family, each of our small groups of seven to ten children includes a range of ages from Kindergarten through middle school.

We are fortunate to have a small city park easily accessible at the rear of our parking lot. It includes swings, a climber, a bocce court, and a flower bed surrounding a memorial to neighborhood men who served in World War 2. In spring, our kids plant flowers in this bed.

For active play on rainy days, we have an indoor basketball hoop and an inflatable jumping house.

After free play and a healthy snack, we have homework time and projects. In the course of the year, we explore many subjects and themes. We use books and stories to illustrate the possibilities of hope, courage, love, loyalty, and the goodness and value of the world around us and the people in it. Our craft and learning projects are built around the story themes. Children make individual projects but we also do projects together, emphasizing cooperation and respect. We also incorporate songs and games that develop these themes. Our “official” program song is “Inch by Inch, Row by Row,” reminding us of how small seeds need to be nurtured in order to grow strong and healthy.

The program is staffed by a director and 2 part-time assistants. Volunteers are crucial to the program, to provide individualized attention and homework help. Even with the recent cutback, Mustardseed Afternoon Club is our largest program by far, comprising over 70% of our program hours in the course of a year.

Our Story with the Department of Public Health

Between April, 2004 and October, 2006, we were embroiled in a lengthy conflict with the Connecticut Department of Public Health concerning the status of Mustardseed Afternoon Club. The State insisted that our afterschool program was a child care center (subject to licensure under the same regulations as all-day day care centers for babies and toddlers); we believed that it was a recreational program, exempt from licensure.

The dispute began in April of 2004, after our program had already been in operation for over three years. We came to the Department’s attention when we filed for listing as a provider under Care4Kids, the state program that provides vouchers to working parents to help defray the cost of child care. The Department served us with a notice claiming that we were operating an illegal child day care center. We were told to close our doors immediately, apply for a license, and pay a $10,000 fine.

We disputed this claim. DPH offered to reduce the fine from $10,000 to $1,500, and to help us with the licensing process. We began the process, but continued to dispute the fine, and filed a Motion to Dismiss with the Attorney General’s office, arguing that we did in fact qualify as an exempt program under the law. Frank Cochran (Cooper, Whitney, Cochran & Francois), a parishioner at St. Paul & St. James, took charge of our case on a pro bono basis, out of the conviction that it embodied important principles for churches attempting to exercise their call to ministries of hospitality, nurture and outreach.

Our Motion to Dismiss was rejected, and we then embarked on a series of hearings that passed through various levels in the Department of Public Health, up to the level of the Commissioner’s office. Meanwhile, in order to keep our program open, we retooled it to fit clearly within DPH’s concept of a “recreational” program. This meant shortening its length to two hours, and de-emphasizing structured homework help and academic enrichment. In August of 2005, the Commissioner of Public Health turned down our appeal, and the Department once again repeated its claim that we were operating an “illegal child day care center” and demanded that we pay a fine, now set at $3,500.

DPH’s argument was that because our program design includes helping the children with homework, we fall outside the regulation exempting “recreation operations such as but not limited to creative art studios for children … and classes in music, dance, drama and art that are no longer than two hours in length, library programs, boys’ and girls’ clubs, church-related activities, scouting, camping or community-youth programs.” The one change from previous rulings was that the hearing officer acknowledged that the two-hour limit in the above sentence refers only to the first part of the list. We therefore returned to our previous schedule, with a 5:30 pm closing time.

With a generous grant of $10,000 from the Louis Calder Foundation, we upgraded the lighting in our program space to meet DPH’s standards for a licensed program. However, when faced with the choice of paying the fine or appealing to Superior Court, we chose to take our appeal to court. This was our first opportunity to appeal to a neutral third party rather than asking DPH to reverse its own previous actions.

On April 18, 2006, more than two years after the dispute began, our case was heard by Judge Jonathan Silbert. On August 10, he issued his ruling:

This court concludes that the terms “education” and “recreation” are not mutually exclusive, and DPH’s failure to recognize that the two terms overlap is a fatal flaw in the reasoning underlying the Hearing Officer’s Decision. One could understand the concern if Mustardseed subjected its charges to extensive periods of formalized teaching. Mustardseed, however, while it clearly includes opportunities for learning, does not involve any formal instruction at all. …

A review of the activities of the Mustardseed program, as presented to the Hearing Officer, reveals nothing that exceeds the bounds of the recreational. Although time is set aside for homework, this was presented merely as an opportunity to do such work on one’s own at the Church, rather than waiting until arriving home in the evening, and the alternative projects were presented only as activities to stimulate the minds of those who had no homework assignments. In short, Mustardseed is a program that provides “refreshment of one’s mind or body after [school] through some activity that amuses or stimulates” [dictionary definition of recreation cited by DPH in its previous ruling]. It is therefore a recreational operation that is exempt from licensure by statute. … Because the program was exempt from licensure, DPH was without authority to impose a civil penalty. …

Based on the foregoing, the Church’s appeal is sustained.

The Department of Public Health, however, moved to appeal this ruling.

On October 30, 2006, an article appeared in the New Haven Register describing our situation. That same day, state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal instructed the Department of Public Health to withdraw its appeal, noting that his office found the law regarding licensure of child care centers “unclear and inadequate” and suggested that the state legislature might need to review the statute governing oversight of day care centers.

Broader Implications

We are delighted that as a direct result of our persistence in this case, the State has chosen to open the door to a more flexible interpretation of the law. We hope that our long struggle will have brought down barriers, not only for Mustardseed Afternoon Club but for other churches trying to carry out what they believe ought to be a relatively simple, manageable, two-to-three-hour-a-day ministry of hospitality and nurture for neighborhood children.

This case has broad implications, since society is increasingly looking to churches to help provide social services including offering safe places after school for children of working parents. We know of a number of other churches that either gave up on their attempts to open an afterschool program (as one frustrated program leader remarked, “It’s easier to open a school in Connecticut than an afterschool program”) or else paid a fine to DPH for operating an “illegal” program and agreed to provide no homework time, in order to remain open as an exempt “recreation operation.”

We will be watching the legislature with interest as it undertakes to address this issue.

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