Most day care facilities are regulated by state agencies. They have to be inspected, train their staff and follow specific staff-to-child ratios. But religious day cares in six states face little to no regulation. Where does your state fall?

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Amy Julia Harris

aharris@revealnews.org

Amy Julia Harris is a reporter for Reveal, covering vulnerable communities. She and Reveal reporter Shoshana Walter exposed how courts across the country are sending defendants to rehabs that are little more than lucrative work camps for private industry. Their work was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in national reporting and won a Sigma Delta Chi Award for investigative reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists. It also led to four government investigations, including two criminal probes and four federal class-action lawsuits alleging slavery and fraud.

Harris was a Livingston Award for Young Journalists finalist for her investigation into the lack of government oversight of religious-based day cares, which led to tragedies for children in Alabama and elsewhere. In a previous project for Reveal, she uncovered widespread squalor in a public housing complex in the San Francisco Bay Area and traced it back to mismanagement and fraud in the troubled public housing agency.

Before joining Reveal, Harris was an education reporter at The Charleston Gazette in West Virginia. She has also written for The Seattle Times, Half Moon Bay Review, and Campaigns and Elections Politics Magazine.

Scott Pham is the news applications developer for Reveal. Previously, he was the digital editor for the NBC Bay Area Investigative Team. Before that, he worked at numerous places in the public radio system, reporting for broadcast and innovating online. At KBIA public radio in Columbia, Missouri, he led the station to a national Murrow Award for best website and founded the Missouri Drone Journalism Program, which produced some of the very first drone-enabled journalism in the U.S. Pham is based in Reveal’s Emeryville, California, office.