A Las Cruces church’s refusal of state funding appears to be a driving factor in its decision to close a daycare center. Now that decision has some parents scrambling to find other child-care options.
Heath Haussamen / NMPolitics.net
First Baptist Church in Las Cruces, which informed parents last week that its day care center is closing.
The decision to close the center, announced last week, leaves parents a month to find a new place for their children.
First Baptist Church’s Senior Pastor David Burrows was quoted by KFOX-TV as saying the cost of running the facility and the decision to not take government funds to help were deciding factors.
“When the government gives you money, they have the right to tell you how to run certain aspects of your organization,” the TV station quoted Burrows as saying. “We understand that. It’s not one particular group. It’s the fact they get to dictate to us, across the board, how to run our organization or different organizations or ministries.”
One parent claimed that the decision to close came in response to the U.S. Supreme Court decision last month that legalized gay marriage. The parent claimed that the pastor said the church doesn’t want the government forcing it to hire “homosexuals or atheists,” the Las Cruces Sun News is reporting.
Same-sex marriage has been legal in New Mexico since 2013. And last month’s ruling didn’t affect employment protections that were already in place.
Burrows insists that the decision to shut down the day care has been in discussion for months and wasn’t related to the Supreme Court ruling. The Sun-News quoted him as saying, “The fundamental reason we are having to close it is that it would cost us $300,000 to run the day care properly. We’d need to add nine full-time people. To do that would cost about $200,000, and then we’d also need to replace the $100,000 in state funding, which the church has realized is not a good thing for us to do.”
The Sun-News quoted one parent, Stacie Allen, as saying parents offered to pay more to keep the center open during a meeting with church officials last week.
“Every single parent in (Tuesday’s) meeting said they would do that, but it was still not considered to be an option,” Allen said. “They would not accept our solution to keep this place open.”