The complaint argues that these warrantless actions, which often include strip-searches of children and multiple, traumatizing return visits by case workers, violate the Fourth Amendment. The city’s Administration for Children’s Services is charged with investigating all reports of child abuse and neglect.

“ACS caseworkers lie to parents and withhold information from them about their rights, threaten to involve the police when police are clearly not needed and even directly threaten to take parents’ children away from their care — all to pressure parents to give ACS access to families’ homes and strip-search their children,” states a press release announcing the Feb. 20 filing of the litigation in U.S. District Court. 

The attorneys bringing the case point out that these practices inflict disproportionate harm and trauma on Black and Hispanic families, who are the subject of 80% of ACS investigations, and that in 70% of those inquiries, allegations of parental abuse and neglect are determined to be unfounded.

Calls to reform the nation’s child welfare system have been growing, often spurred by the work of reporters uncovering abuses. The NYC lawsuit cites the investigative reporting of former 74 staffer Asher Lehrer-Small, which revealed the extent to which unfounded reports of suspected parental abuse and neglect were made by NYC teachers and a pattern of retaliation against special education parents , who were reported to ACS after speaking up on their children’s behalf.

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A spokeswoman for ACS that the agency would review the lawsuit and is “committed to keeping children safe and respecting parents’ rights.” 

“We will continue to advance our efforts to achieve safety, equity and justice by enhancing parents’ awareness of their rights, connecting families to critical services, providing families with alternatives to child protection investigations and working with key systems to reduce the number of families experiencing an unnecessary child protective investigation,” spokeswoman Marisa Kaufman said. 

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of nine plaintiffs, but could grow much larger. It asks that ACS’s practices be deemed unconstitutional, that the agency remedy how it investigates families and conducts searches, and that the plaintiffs be awarded compensatory damages.

“This may be one of the most important lawsuits in the field in the last [50]  years,” Martin Guggenheim, an NYU law professor and children’s rights and family law expert, said in the release.

Read the 49-page complaint here

Having worked for five years as an attorney at , he would repeatedly see the Administration for Children’s Services, NYC’s child welfare agency, “blatantly violating family’s rights,” he said. 

They would intimidate families to gain entry into their homes, he said, conduct intrusive searches, including asking children to take off their clothes to look for bruises and, in the most dire cases, separate youth from their parents without judicial approval by acting under what’s known as emergency removal powers. Yet in hundreds of instances each year, according to city data, judges would then deem the agency’s use of those emergency powers unlawful.

The attorney last week launched what he says is the nation’s first civil rights organization dedicated to fighting back against such violations: the . 

There’s a long tradition of groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union or the NAACP Legal Defense Fund bringing lawsuits against alleged government wrongdoing, but “there’s no comparison to the child welfare system for when families’ rights are violated,” said Shalleck-Klein.

“This is the first organization in the country that is going to be dedicated to going on the offense and suing government agencies when they violate families’ rights,” he told ����Ӱ��. “We’re filling a gaping hole in advocacy for parents.”

The Center will bring cases against ACS including alleged Fourth Amendment violations for illegal searches and seizures, he said. It will seek financial penalties to compensate families for their damages and will request injunctions against ACS practices it says are illegal.

“They’re not going to just get a slap on the wrist. They’re very literally going to have to pay for their mistakes,” said Shalleck-Klein.

“These types of lawsuits are hard,” he admits, but said he’s confident that “we’re going to be able to have not just success for individual clients, but also transformative systems change success.”

As many as are the subject of ACS investigations each year, 87% of whom are Black or Hispanic. Although 23% of youth in the city are Black, they make up removed from their families and placed in foster care. 

In 2019, out of more than 1,750 emergency family separations, were immediately rejected by a Family Court judge and still more were thrown out in the days and weeks to come — meaning hundreds of children were unnecessarily put through the trauma of family separation, which studies show is associated with .

“When ACS removes a child from a parent without a court order, if they did not have legal justification for that [removal], that is a constitutional violation,” said Shalleck-Klein. “We know that it is happening routinely.”

“ACS follows federal, state and city laws, and respects the constitutional rights of parents and children,” an ACS spokesperson said in an email to ����Ӱ��, adding that the agency “is committed to being responsive to the needs of children and families.” ACS is required by law to investigate all reports it receives, the spokesperson said, noting that the total number of children entering foster care since 2017 has dropped by more than a third. 

Fewer than 2% of ACS investigations in 2021 resulted in child separation, the agency said.

“It is deeply concerning to us,” the spokesperson added, “that, year after year, there are dramatic racial and ethnic disparities in the reports ACS receives from the state.”

The agency is working to provide child care professionals with implicit bias trainings and education on ways to support families without calling the state’s child abuse hotline, it said.

Across the country, Black youth are to experience a child welfare investigation, with 53% of all Black Americans undergoing the experience before they turn 18. Even if the investigations find no evidence of abuse or neglect, charges can remain on parents’ records for years, jeopardizing job prospects in fields like education and child care. 

Meanwhile, many white families hardly feel the presence of child protective services at all. A former ACS caseworker spoke with in 2020, relaying that, once, when she was looking for an elusive parent, she saw a white woman nearby and asked if she knew the parent’s whereabouts. The neighbor had never even heard of the caseworker’s agency.

“I never met one single Black family that asked me, ‘What’s ACS?’” the caseworker reflected. “There’s one group of people walking around not knowing that ACS exists, and there’s another group of people walking around living in fear of ACS.”

In fall 2020, Harlem community advocate Joyce McMillan interviewed New York City residents in majority-Black, Hispanic and Asian-American neighborhoods about their experiences with the agency and turned their responses into posters that now hang throughout the city.

“They tore my family apart,” one parent said.

“I felt like the police had come to my house once ACS came because they investigated my household like the police,” said another.

Out of the 500 residents to whom McMillan spoke, all but two or three, she said, knew about the agency. Youth and parents alike were haunted by their experiences, she said.

“For children, ACS is like the boogeyman. They run and hide when ACS knocks on the door. They think they’re going to be taken away from their parents,” explained McMillan, who is executive director of . Her organization seeks to abolish what it calls the “family regulation system” and calls for the government to support rather than punish families living in poverty. She now sits on the Family Justice Law Center’s community advisory board.

The new legal organization, she told ����Ӱ��, will be a game-changer for families, finally giving them the opportunity to fight back when they believe their rights are violated.

“Families will have resources to deal with the harm,” she said. “ACS, we call them the family police for a reason. … Until the cameras started rolling, people didn’t believe that Black people got shot in the back and weren’t actually carrying a gun. And it’s the same thing with ACS. So I hope that this work that’s being done will bring out the truth.”

Attorney David Bloomfield, who represented NYC as an assistant corporation counsel, said “on a case-by-case basis, I think there are winnable situations of improper separation,” but system injunctions against ACS might be a “heavier lift.”

Still, the Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate Center law professor said “it can have a chilling effect on improper conduct if there’s able counsel for the families.”

The Family Justice Law Center has been selected for in-kind funding and guidance from the Urban Justice Center’s program. Legal scholars from Stanford, Harvard, New York University and other institutions sit on its academic advisory board.

ACS obtains court permission to enter homes in of all investigations. In most other searches, parents give the caseworker verbal permission to enter their space. But if a caseworker bangs on the door saying that they will return with the police if the family doesn’t let them in, and if the parents don’t know their legal rights, “Was that really a voluntary entry into the home?” asks Shalleck-Klein.

“[Child protective services] may seek the assistance of the police if CPS determine that immediate protective measures are necessary,” the agency said.

Similarly, of emergency child removals get immediately struck down by a Family Court judge. While the emergency removal power is vital when youth are in imminent danger, said the attorney, its abuse can represent an unconstitutional seizure.

“ACS knows there’s no consequence for them doing something illegal,” he said. “If they violate families’ rights, what happens is that the child is returned home. But there’s nothing in the moment stopping them or giving them any pause from conducting an emergency removal when there’s not just cause.”

“We hope that the [Family Justice Law Center] will inject more accountability into the process,” he continued, “because they are now put on notice that they can’t act with impunity and their illegal actions will be challenged in court.”

Shalleck-Klein hopes the Center’s work will lead to fewer children in the foster care system and shorter durations for those who are, while not worsening, or even decreasing, the rates of child maltreatment. “In other words, keeping as many children home safely with their parents as we can,” he said.

The goal parallels the impacts of other changes in the Family Court system. When the legal team representing defendant parents includes social work staff and parent advocates, foster stays were significantly reduced with no change in child safety outcomes, a 2019 NYU found. And similarly, pilot programs that boosted legal defense for families led to major savings for municipalities by avoiding costly foster care when poverty-induced issues might otherwise have been mistaken for parental neglect, a 2020 from Casey Family Programs revealed.

McMillan hopes the plan succeeds, not just for the children who might avoid unneeded family separation, but also for those who indeed are suffering from abuse at home.

If ACS spends less time mistaking poverty-related issues for abusive parenting, “then maybe they will focus on children who actually need help,” said the advocate.

The updated total represents a 16 percent jump over the original figure, which a state agency provided to ����Ӱ�� via a public records request in late December. 

Based on those records, ����Ӱ�� reported in January that school staff had made over 2,400 calls to the state’s child abuse hotline in the first three months of the 2021-22 school year and over 9,600 since the start of the pandemic — many of which, advocates say, were harmful to families and possibly the result of racial bias.

But according to the corrected counts, city school personnel made even more reports than previously known: 2,822 between September and November 2021, and 11,560 between August 2020 and November 2021. 

In late February, the New York State Office of Children and Family Services sent ����Ӱ�� its amended tabulation, noting that reports made by teachers were “inadvertently excluded” from the initial record it had provided in response to a November 2020 freedom of information request.

“When the report was initially run for ‘school personnel,’ teachers were accidentally not included as a source,” OCFS Records Access Officer Tracy Swanson wrote in an email. “Once our data people realized the error, they reran the report and included the accurate data.”

Having left out teachers was a “huge oversight,” said parent advocate Paullette Healy, who herself was subject to an investigation that ultimately found no evidence of neglect.

Gabriel Freiman, head of education practices at the legal nonprofit said the sheer number of reports of abuse and neglect made by school staff — over 11,500 from August 2020 to November 2021 — “demonstrates to me that our school system is really intertwined with the family regulation system.”

Roughly 16 percent of all reports made by school personnel during that time period were from teachers, a comparison of the original and updated records reveals. The vast majority of calls came from other staff in the nation’s largest school district. School personnel are mandated by New York state law to report suspected cases of child abuse and neglect to a central hotline.

“The way that this gets recorded, it’s the person who actually is … making the call to the [],” said Freiman, who works with families navigating child welfare investigations. “If a child discloses something to a teacher about what’s happening in the home and the teacher immediately goes and talks to the principal, it could be the principal that calls in the report or the counselor that calls in the report.”

Healy doesn’t believe it was her child’s teacher who reported her and thinks it may have been a school psychologist with whom she had previous conflicts. Her child’s Brooklyn school did not respond to ����Ӱ��’s request for comment. 

Reporting done by The Hechinger Report and HuffPost in 2018 showed that school officials in select cases as a retaliation tactic against parents they find to be bothersome.

The new numbers matter because child welfare investigations disproportionately impact poor families of color and can cause devastating impacts for children and parents. Charges can stay on parents’ records for years, erasing job prospects in fields like child care. Most dire, children can be separated from their parents — a trauma that studies show is later associated with elevated risks of .

In New York City, some of children named in investigations are Black or Hispanic, while, together, those racial groups make up 60 percent of the city’s youth. Even among neighborhoods with similar poverty rates, those with greater shares of Black and Hispanic residents face , research shows.

Such disparities are “deeply concerning,” a spokesperson for the Administration for Children’s Services, the New York City agency tasked with looking into suspected cases of child abuse and neglect, said in mid-January. 

����Ӱ�� previously reported that many families investigated this school year by ACS say they were not neglecting their children, but rather keeping them home from school as a COVID precaution. Under the city’s own guidance instructing schools to have leniency in such cases, they say, they should never have been reported to the agency.

Mayor Eric Adams’s Sunday announcement that he plans to lift the city’s school mask mandate March 7 may add yet another reason for COVID-wary parents to fear returning their children to in-person learning — signaling the issue may be far from over.

“Ending the mask mandate in @NYCSchools is a [middle finger] to Black, Latino, underrepresented Asian, disabled & immunocompromised kids & staff,” parent organizer Tajh Sutton on Twitter.

But while the total reports from school staff was higher in the fall of 2021 [when NYC schools were in-person] than the fall of 2020 [when classes were online], the share of calls that included an allegation of educational neglect dropped significantly over that span, the state’s data show. Some 63 percent of the 1,996 reports made by school staff between September and November 2020 included an educational neglect charge, while just 31 percent of the 2,800 reports filed over the same span a year later raised the same claim.

ACS data provided to ����Ӱ�� also showed a decline in reports of educational neglect from NYC school staff. From Sept. 1, 2020 to Jan. 31, 2021, school personnel made 2,708 reports alleging educational neglect compared to 1,926 over that same time window in 2021-22, according to the agency’s numbers. 

“A large reason for the difference would be the guidance ACS and DOE worked on together with regard to when to call in a report, and the significant training and messaging that was done with teachers,” an ACS spokesperson told ����Ӱ��.

The City reported in 2020 that during remote learning, some children who missed Zoom classes because their family lacked devices or home internet were , which could have also driven those numbers in the first year of the pandemic.

Healy’s ACS report came in early November 2021, after schools reopened without a remote option. The Brooklyn mother remained unconvinced it was safe to send her two children back into classrooms, having lost several relatives to COVID. So she filed home instruction applications for both kids and stayed in communication with school staff, she said. The whole time, her children accessed and submitted classwork via Google Classroom.

“I was in constant contact [with the schools],” Healy told ����Ӱ��. “​​All of the things that needed to happen were still happening.”

Yet in early November, an ACS caseworker knocked on the door of her apartment. The agency had received a report of suspected educational neglect from a staff member at her younger child’s school.

Healy is an organizer with the advocacy group PRESS, , and was familiar with her rights as a parent. But still, the visit was jarring to the whole family. After the caseworker left, her 14 year-old son, who has autism, paced back and forth for an hour, worried that the unfamiliar woman would return with law enforcement, Healy said. Her 13 year-old child, who identifies as non-binary, had continued nightmares, fearing they would be taken away from the only home they knew. Even Healy couldn’t avoid creeping thoughts of the worst-case scenario.

“You automatically think someone’s here to take my kids away,” she said. 

Since November, the most recent month for which data are available, Freiman said that several clients have continued to navigate new child welfare reports — especially during the Omicron surge when the sheer volume of COVID cases often complicated school attendance.

“We were working with people where the parents had COVID so [were] required to quarantine, but their children didn’t and so the school was expecting them to come to school. But the parents didn’t have a way to get them there,” explained the attorney. “We have had situations where those kinds of problems have resulted in a call to the state central register.” 

ACS has said it is trying to avoid such scenarios. “We are … working together (with the Department of Education) to make sure that families are not reported to the state’s child abuse hotline solely because of [a] child’s absences from school,” a spokesperson wrote in a Jan. 13 message to ����Ӱ��. The agency is providing training to professionals working with children on ways to support families without calling the hotline, they said.

But Healy says there’s still a long way to go. Her own case was closed in December after uncovering no evidence of neglect, but she’s still going through a time-intensive and costly legal process to clear her record of the investigation. She hopes that the Adams administration, including schools Chancellor David Banks, works to ensure that other families don’t have to endure the same hardship.

“The whole punitive measures that ACS has been delivering up until now still needs to be addressed,” she said. “We definitely want to make sure that this gets nipped in the bud under this particular chancellor before more parents are unfortunately held to this repercussion.”

From early November through Jan. 1, the Bay Ridge, Brooklyn family was under investigation by the Administration for Children’s Services, or ACS, the New York City agency tasked with looking into suspected cases of child abuse and neglect. Healy had been reported for educational neglect for not sending her children to school amid COVID fears, even though she says her kids kept up with their work remotely. 

The report that spurred their investigation was one of more than 2,400 that New York City school personnel made to the during the first three months of the 2021-22 school year, according to data obtained by ����Ӱ�� through a public record request — about 45 percent more than were reported over the same time span a year prior when most of the city’s . From August 2020 to November 2021, records show NYC school staff made a total of 9,674 reports. 

The highest monthly tally, 1,046, came in November 2021, the same month that ACS and the Department of Education issued ​​instructing schools to have patience with families keeping their children home due to COVID-19 concerns, and to avoid jumping to allegations of educational neglect when students don’t show up.

About a third of the reports from NYC school personnel from September through November — 839 out of 2,412 — included an allegation of educational neglect. Of that total, just over half named educational neglect as the sole allegation, according to an ACS spokesperson, who pointed out that the rate was actually higher pre-COVID in the fall of 2019, when about 40 percent of reports from city school personnel alleged educational neglect.

Many of the families caught up in COVID-related investigations this school year, including the Healys, say that given the DOE’s statements and guidance, their ACS reports should never have been made.

Child welfare investigations, which disproportionately involve low-income families of color, can have devastating impacts. Charges can stay on parents’ records for years — even in cases like Healy’s where the agency ultimately found no evidence of neglect. Job prospects in fields like child care and education can be erased. And most dire, children can be separated from their parents — a trauma that studies show is later associated with elevated risks of .

ACS has clarified that, on its own, missing class should not be a reason for educators to suspect neglect. “We are … working together (with the DOE) to make sure that families are not reported to the state’s child abuse hotline solely because of [a] child’s absences from school,” a spokesperson wrote in a Jan. 13 email to ����Ӱ��, adding that the agency is providing training to professionals working with children on ways to support families without calling the hotline.

But now, after New York City student attendance rates plunged in early January amid surging Omicron cases, and with over how the Adams administration will approach remote learning, questions swirl over whether even more families may get entangled in the child welfare web.

“I’m … worried about who’s going to be asked to answer for the decisions that they made in the wake of Omicron,” said Gabriel Freiman, head of education practices at the legal nonprofit .

Healy echoed the concern, adding that families who kept children home amid the surge may be “vulnerable to possible investigation.”

How did we get here?

Rewind to the fall: New York City announced that schools would open in-person with no option for remote learning, and Healy was terrified. She had suffered massive personal losses through the pandemic — more than a dozen of her relatives had died of the virus, she said, ranging in age from 36 to 87 — and the Brooklyn mother remained unconvinced that sending her children into crowded buildings was a good idea. She quickly submitted applications for home instruction for both of her kids. 

Meanwhile, just before classrooms reopened, the nation’s largest school district made a vow to parents: “The only time ACS will intervene is if there is a clear intent to keep a child from being educated, period,” then-schools Chancellor Meisha Porter said during a September . “We want to work with our families because we recognize what families have been through.”

Even while remote, Healy’s kids were still learning, she said. Both were accessing and submitting coursework via Google Classroom. She had even met with school staff to update both children’s Individualized Education Programs, the plans that spell out their special needs and mandated school services.

“I was in constant contact (with the schools),” Healy said. “​​All of the things that needed to happen were still happening.”

So it caught Healy off guard when, in early November, an ACS caseworker knocked on her door. The agency had received a report of suspected educational neglect from a staff member at her younger child’s school.

Healy had understood that a visit from ACS was a possibility. As a member of the advocacy group PRESS, , she knew of numerous other parents keeping their children home from school due to coronavirus concerns who had been investigated. She had even put together informing parents of their rights when ACS shows up. But her own investigation still took her by surprise. If anything, she was over-involved in her children’s education, she thought, not neglectful. 

“I’ve always inserted myself into the schools whether they wanted me there or not,” Healy joked.

Familiar with her rights as a parent, Healy did not let the caseworker inside their house. But despite being armed with strategies to navigate the situation, the visit was jarring to the whole family. After the caseworker left, her 14 year-old son, who has autism, paced back and forth for an hour, worried that the unfamiliar woman would return with law enforcement, Healy said. Her 13 year-old child, who identifies as non-binary, had continued nightmares, fearing they would be taken away from the only home they knew. Even Healy herself couldn’t avoid creeping thoughts of the worst-case scenario.

“You automatically think someone’s here to take my kids away,” she told ����Ӱ��.

‘ACS is like the police’

Just like doctors and nurses, school personnel are mandated by New York state law to report suspected cases of child abuse and neglect to a central hotline. But even before COVID-19, alike have critiqued the practice as potentially harmful to families and prone to racial bias.

In New York City, some of children named in ACS investigations are Black or Hispanic, while, together, those racial groups make up 60 percent of the city’s youth. In 2019, according to , the lower-income, mostly Black and Latino neighborhood of East Harlem saw over six times as many investigations as the nearby Upper East Side, which is mostly white and affluent.

Even among neighborhoods with similar poverty rates, those with greater shares of Black and Hispanic residents face , research shows.

“ACS has long been used to criminalize our families,” said Tanesha Grant, a New York City parent leader who formed the group for mutual aid throughout the pandemic. Many Black parents, she told ����Ӱ��, see child protective services as a form of racialized surveillance and punishment. 

“ACS is a curse word in our community. ACS is like the police,” she said.

“It is deeply concerning to us,” said a spokesperson for the agency, “that, year after year, there are dramatic racial and ethnic disparities in the reports ACS receives from the state and is required [by law] to investigate.” 

As per a 2021 state , mandated reporters are now required to undergo implicit bias training intended to keep reporters’ assumptions from coloring their assessments of parental fitness.

But just how much of an impact it will make in the K-12 setting remains to be seen. Nationwide, school staff report more allegations to child protective services than any other category of reporters, yet school reports are or lead to family interventions, research shows. In New York City, approximately 1 in 3 calls from school personnel ultimately lead to evidence of abuse or neglect, said ACS. In cases where no evidence is found, families often report that the investigation process can be .

There’s often a mismatch, said Freiman, of Brooklyn Defenders, between the typical impacts of child protective services investigations and the purpose they are meant to fulfill.

“Neglect is supposed to cover a category below which we don’t expect any parent to go,” the legal expert explained. 

But the parents keeping their children out of classrooms this school year, from what he has seen, tend to be highly involved and caring, like Healy. Some are even former PTA heads at their children’s schools. 

“These aren’t people who are trying to hurt their children. They’re trying to protect their children,” he told ����Ӱ��. “ACS is just the wrong tool to employ.”

Even the softer guidance that ACS and DOE offered in November was not enough to sufficiently blunt that tool, advocates said. Healy said she worked with 50 families accused of educational neglect through PRESS and was only able to use the updated guidance to dismiss cases against two of them. 

Miranda rights for child welfare

As a way to mitigate some of the worst effects of ACS investigations, state Sen. Jabari Brisport, a former educator from Brooklyn, is that would require a Miranda-style reading of parents’ rights at the outset of every child welfare investigation. 

“Parents of color are more likely to be unaware of the rights they have when dealing with [child protective services],” Brisport told ����Ӱ��. “The bill seeks to address the disparities in the CPS system.”

When, without warning, ACS showed up at the door of Melissa Keaton’s Flatbush, Brooklyn apartment in late October, the mother was taken by surprise. Having lost her father, who was a caregiving adult to her 9-year-old daughter, in April 2020 during the city’s deadly first coronavirus wave, Keaton chose not to return her traumatized child to her sought-after dual language school in Manhattan’s Lower East Side when classrooms reopened. The family was not ready for a two-train commute to and from school each day, Keaton decided. Unlike Healy, she was in the dark about how to navigate the interaction with her caseworker.

“There’s no paperwork. There’s no way of, you know, finding out what is this process? How does it work? What is expected of me?” Keaton told ����Ӱ��.

Parents are not legally obligated to allow caseworkers to enter their homes unless ACS has a warrant. But many parents assent without realizing they have a choice. If caseworkers find evidence of drug use or other outlawed practices, it can lead to compounding charges and increase the likelihood of child separation. 

“Sometimes our families actually find themselves in a deeper hole — not because they’ve done anything wrong — but because ACS comes into the home looking for a problem,” said Tajh Sutton, a PRESS organizer. “They’re going through your refrigerator, your cabinets … asking these really invasive and inappropriate questions of your children.”

“This bill doesn’t create new rights,” explained Brisport. “It literally tells parents what their rights are.”

‘ACS should not have been called’

Despite the lasting psychological impacts of the neglect investigation upon her children, Healy also acknowledged that her caseworker was kind and actually quite helpful. The staffer fast-tracked her children’s applications for home instruction, helping her younger child recently gain approval for the program. Healy hopes her son will also soon be approved.

But her example, she believes, is an outlier. Not everyone is so fortunate. 

On Dec. 23, Keaton was preparing to lay flowers on the gravestone of her late father. The day marked what would have been his 63rd birthday — and because her dad’s December birthday used to be a part of the family’s holiday rituals, Keaton was feeling his absence even more acutely.

But before she left, she was contacted by her caseworker, who relayed what the mother thought was good news: She was ready to close the case. Keaton told her to come by.

When the caseworker arrived, she told Keaton that the investigation had been completed, but the agency had indeed found evidence of neglect. The news hit her like a thunderclap, Keaton said, stirring fears for how she might appeal, what the findings might mean for her future employment having previously worked at a children’s summer camps, and, most of all, whether it opened the possibility of her daughter being taken away.

The message, Keaton said, was “imprinted in my mind throughout the holidays, along with the thought of, ‘What happens next?’” 

The caseworker instructed her to appeal, Keaton said. When pressed on the evidence behind the finding of neglect, Keaton said, the caseworker explained that her daughter’s school had taken weeks to respond to requests, and when they did, they cited her elementary schooler’s inconsistent 2019 summer school attendance as a strike against the family — data that Keaton said is “completely false.”

Staff at the elementary school did not respond to requests for comment and ACS said that it cannot disclose the details of individual cases. Keaton is awaiting paperwork in the mail that will provide insight into the exact reasons the educational neglect allegation was substantiated by ACS. 

Keaton believes her case was unproductive at best, and inappropriate at worst. She was trying to keep her daughter safe and had been putting together educational assignments for her despite, she said, not being provided materials by her school. She was also applying for medically necessary home instruction — a process through which the November ACS and DOE joint guidance instructs schools to support parents wary of COVID rather than reporting them to child services. 

“Based on the guidelines,” said Keaton, “ACS should not have been called.”

Lead Image: Paullette Healy at the front door with her younger child, Kira. (Asher Lehrer-Small)