State child-care fraud lands woman in prison

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A woman who operated two child care centers near Milwaukee will spend about a year and a half in prison for stealing $134,000 from the Wisconsin Shares program.

Ferlisha Ivy of Menomonee Falls must also pay the money back, and spend four and a half years under extended supervision.

The 39-year-old Ivy told Milwaukee County Circuit Judge J-D Watts that she was not acting out of greed. She said children stopped coming to her second facility.

So Ivy kept paying her employees by submitting false attendance records so she could get tax money under the state’s child care program for the working poor. But Judge Watts said Ivy should not have been a child care operator in the first place.

She was rejected for a license after being convicted in 2007 of cutting her husband with a knife during an argument, and she managed the two centers with licenses given to two of her children.

Tags: wisconsin, government, crime, courts