The History of Sunrise
Sunrise Children's Services is a ministry that grew out of the extreme needs present at the end of the Civil War. Many women were left with children and without a husband to provide for the family. Because of the spread of disease and poverty, many children were orphaned with no family to care for them.
In the midst of these troubled times, a group of women from Walnut Street Baptist Church in Louisville began to reach out to children in need. At first they sought families to take boys and girls left destitute or orphaned by the war. They even tried putting some up in boarding houses. But because of the great numbers of children needing help, they began the process of creating a place of caring and love.
On June 30, 1869, the first three children were received into what would be called the Louisville Baptist Orphans' Home. For the next 78 years, Baptists ministered to children through this first facility in downtown Louisville before moving the children in 1950 to the new Spring Meadows Children's Home campus near Middletown.
A second Baptist children's home was established in 1915 in Glendale. A rural campus, originally called Kentucky Baptist Children's Home, now known as Glen Dale Children's Home. The two ministries operated separately until 1954 when the Kentucky Baptist Convention created the Kentucky Baptist Board of Child Care to oversee their operation. A third campus, Pine Crest Children's Home, opened in Morehead in 1956. It served children until its closure in 1971.
In 1980 and 1981, new cottages were constructed at Glen Dale and Spring Meadows. An emergency shelter was established in Elizabethtown in 1982. A similar facility, the Sunrise Dixon Center, opened in Dixon the following year. In 1988, the Sunrise Morehead Center was opened in Morehead. The next year, the shelter in Elizabethtown became the agency's first treatment program and was renamed the Baptist Youth Ranch.
The adoption program that operated through Spring Meadows in the '60s was reopened in 1990 and is now known as Sunrise Pregnancy and Adoption Services. Cornerstone Counseling, Sunrise's outpatient Christian counseling service, was begun in 1992 with one office in Bowling Green. There are now 3 Cornerstone offices -- in Berea, Richmond and Owensboro.
In 1993, Genesis Home for girls opened and the agency began expanding the Family Foster Care program. That was followed in 1994 by the agency's acquisition of an emergency shelter, which was called the Sunrise Bronston Center. Originally in Somerset, the Southern Region shelter moved to a new building in Bronston in 1997.
Under grants, two programs were started in southern Kentucky. The first began in 1995 when the Family Preservation Program was added to the list of services. This program saught to help struggling families solve problems so that it would not become necessary for children to be removed from the home. In 1996, the Family Reunification Program began in Somerset to help families prepare for the return of children placed in out-of-home care. Unfortunately, both programs had to be suspended in 1999 for lack of funding.
The Wilderness Camping Treatment Program, in Somerset opened in 1996. This program seeks to help seriously troubled young men by teaching team-building and other skills in a rugged outdoor setting. In November of 2001, the Bronston Center was incorporated as a part of Wilderness.
The Youth Support Center opened in London in 1999. The Youth Support Center works with teenagers recently discharged from residential care or the juvenile justice system. It is also a preventive program for youth whose environment or behavior makes them vulnerable for problems that could bring about removal from their homes.
In 2000, an international adoption program with the Ukraine began.
The boys of Spring Meadows moved into the new, state-of-the-art Anna Ashcraft Ensor building at Spring Meadows in Mount Washington in the spring of 2006. A few months later, all Sunrise support staff moved into the new Eldred M. Taylor Ministry Support Center building on the Mt. Washington Spring Meadows campus.
A lawsuit filed by a former employee of Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children (now Sunrise Children's Services) and four other tax-payers, has shed light on the possibility of religious coercion by the organization. The lawsuit challenges the faith-based agency's eligibility for state funds.

Specifically, interviews of children conducted by the state of Kentucky have revealed complaints from some of the children. Mainly, children who said they were Catholic, Pentecostal, Jehovah's Witnesses or atheist voiced complaints in the interviews.

"They tried to more or less force me to become a Christian," said one child in an exit interview. "I just felt I was being pressured into giving up my religion." 

Another child reported s/he was "not allowed to choose when or when not to attend a religious service," per the interview, and was told "'to do' some type of Bible study during that time or get consequences."

Both the Commonwealth of Kentucky and Sunrise say there is a strict policy against proselytizing in the program and that it does not prevent children from practising their individual faiths.

They also stress that these complaints number merely a "handful" among the approximately 1,500 children that are served by the faith-based agency.

"If a child says, 'I don't want to go to the Baptist church,' then the child does not go," Jonathan Goldberg, the state's attorney, said. Some children might have mistankenly believed they were forced to go, he added.

The plaintiffs are seeking to have the interviews unsealed, at least in the cases where the child is now 18 years of age or older. The state and Sunrise argue they need to be kept confidential.

The lawsuit originated with Alicia Pedreira, who was fired in 2000. She alleges her firing was direct result of Sunrise (then Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children) finding out she is a lesbian.

Sunrise Children's Services provides residential programs and foster care homes for children that have suffered abuse or neglect. Since 2001, Kentucky has paid Sunrise US$61 million to provide the services for children who would otherwise be in direct state custody.

In 2001, the state did find cause for action against one of Sunrise's homes to fix "a coercive religious environment" where staff members confirmed that church attendance was required. 

With accusations of undue pressure by a Christian agency funded by the state, the Sunrise case bears some similitude to the lawsuit against Iowa for paying Chuck Colson's evangelical agency to run part of its prison.

Last June, U.S. District Judge Robert W. Pratt strongly reprimanded and ruled against Iowa's use of a Christian social service agency to administer its prison. Judge Pratt stated: "For all practical purposes, the state has literally established an Evangelical Christian congregation within the walls of one of its penal institutions... There are no adequate safeguards present, nor could there be, to ensure that state funds are not being directly spent to indoctrinate Iowa inmates." 

The Iowa ruling is pending appeal.

Critics point to both of these cases as failures of George W. Bush's faith-based services initiative. The program is often seen as conflicting with the tradition of separation of church and state in the United States.