Black youth show up in emergency rooms with gunshot wounds or other violent injuries in the United States. Some hospitals have that can be effective in keeping these kids safer after they are treated, but in most cases victims are sent back into the world to continue their struggles.

They asked the school to look into the 2021 incident and requested a new paraeducator for their child. The classroom aide hadn’t mentioned the injury, despite messaging them throughout the day, the parents said, erasing their trust in her.

But the family’s search for answers and solutions brought them head-on into a problem they hadn’t anticipated: The school pointed the finger back at the Diaz parents, alleging neglect and inadequate supervision of their child. Soon, a caseworker with the Administration for Children’s Sevices, known as ACS, the New York City agency responsible for investigating suspected child abuse, showed up at their door.

“We were just trying to advocate for our son and find out what happened like any parent would,” Michelle Diaz said. “This is where the retaliation started.”

The school’s response reveals a startling pattern: Across the nation’s largest district, parents of students with disabilities who speak up on behalf of their children say they are being charged with allegations of child abuse or neglect — a tactic advocates say schools use to intimidate parents and coerce them into dropping their concerns.

Though it’s not clear how many reports may be retaliatory, New York City educators have made more than 3,500 calls alleging suspected abuse or neglect of children with disabilities over the past two school years, according to data obtained by ����Ӱ�� through public records requests. Each one triggers an intrusive process that, at its most dire, can lead to the removal of a child from parents’ custody. Yet caseworkers found evidence of parental wrongdoing in only 16% of cases, and fewer still go on to withstand judges’ scrutiny.

In more than a dozen interviews, parents, advocates and researchers recounted what they described as a common practice of threats leveraged against families of some of the most vulnerable students in the city’s school system.

“Those are intimidation tactics that they do to parents,” said Rima Izquierdo, a Bronx parent leader who supports families of special needs children across the borough.

“This is a trend. … All the stories sound the same.”

Neither the Department of Education nor ACS responded to parents’ claims of retaliation when asked in an email. DOE spokesperson Nicole Brownstein expressed her agency’s commitment to “the safety and wellbeing of our students.” 

“We are actively working closely with our partners at ACS to retrain staff and ensure that every possible step is taken to provide support for our families in instances that do not meet the level of making a report to the [state hotline],” she said in an email.

A pattern of coercion

Tension between special education parents and their children’s schools is common in New York City, a school system for failing to meet the needs of students with disabilities. In 2021, the city had a backlog of roughly as parents escalated worries that their children with disabilities weren’t receiving mandated services such as physical therapy or counseling. In 2020-21, of New York City’s roughly 1 million schoolchildren received special education services, compared to a national average of 15%. 

Advocating for individuals with disabilities is a federally protected right. Still, special education parents nationwide recount instances of being punished for speaking up on behalf of their children.

In 2022, the federal Office of Civil Rights received from families of students with disabilities. describe anecdotal cases where schools have used child protective services reports or truancy charges to punish families advocating for their special education children. And the American Bar Association published a on the legal rights of parents of special education students who find themselves facing these allegations.

Previous reporting has revealed cases where schools against parents who aggravate educators or administrators. But families of special education students say they are at particular risk for the unlawful treatment.

It’s “a very common occurrence,” said Anna Arons, a New York University law professor, that when families have “substantial back-and-forth with the school about the appropriate services for their child” it can result in educators calling the state child abuse hotline.

School staff are one of several professions legally obligated to report suspected child abuse and neglect. But in New York City and nationwide, educators make a higher share of unsubstantiated calls than any other mandatory reporter category — meaning families often become needlessly ensnared in a process they describe as invasive and traumatic. 

From September 2022 through February 2023, NYC school staff made over 6,500 calls to ACS encompassing all students, including youth in special education, according to data the agency provided. Some 15% of those investigations revealed evidence of abuse or neglect.

New York City’s child protective services system disproportionately involves parents of color. Citywide, some of children named in ACS investigations are Black or Hispanic, while, together, those racial groups make up just 60% of NYC young people. Even among neighborhoods with similar poverty rates, those with greater shares of Black and Hispanic residents face higher rates of investigations, shows.

State data, on paper, show that students with disabilities get reported to child protective services by educators at roughly the same rate as their peers. They make up 21% of the total enrollment and 22% of educators’ calls to the child abuse hotline. But the latter figure is likely missing some students with disabilities. Allegations against special education parents are only flagged as such if the educator making the call mentions at intake that the student has a disability, an ACS spokesperson explained. 

In other words, some reports regarding special education students might never get recorded that way due to human error.

“It’s probably a pretty serious undercount,” Arons said. Educators calling in reports could easily neglect to mention a student’s disability, she said.

Paullette Healy has two children with disabilities and often assists other parents in meetings with their school to design Individualized Education Plans, known as IEPs, for their special needs children. The IEPs are legally mandated and Healy has joined well over 100 such conferences across all five boroughs over the past decade, she estimates. They can get contentious when schools hesitate to provide services students are entitled to, she said.

“There’ll be pushback. It’s like, ‘We’re understaffed. The particular therapist we have now, their caseload is way more than they can handle,’ ” she said.

When parents don’t back down, that’s when schools may begin to send threatening signals, Healy said.

“Not too long after those meetings, behavior letters will come home,” she explained. “[The school will allege] there’s not proper documentation for absences. And then eventually, a knock on the door from ACS. That pattern has already been established. We’ve seen it way too often.”

Healy herself was the subject of an unsubstantiated investigation in the fall of 2020. A school staff member reported the mother for educational neglect for keeping her children home out of fear of COVID. 

An ACS spokesperson said in an email that the agency is working with educators and school leadership to reduce the number of families coming into unnecessary contact with the child welfare system, training educators to instead connect struggling families with resources like food or rent support. The agency runs several community centers across the city that offer free resources to families, such as clothing, food and diapers.

“We will continue to work with stakeholders, like NYC Public Schools, to help reduce unnecessary reports so that we can better focus our child protection resources on those who really need it,” the spokesperson said.

A series of unexplained injuries at school

The Diaz parents recounted a process of escalation similar to what Healy said she’s witnessed.

The family shared numerous documents with ����Ӱ�� including medical records, photos of their son’s injuries, the results of the school’s investigation into possible corporal punishment and official letters from ACS.

In November 2021, Luis and Michelle Diaz had been seeking answers about Tristan’s injuries for months, worried educators might have harmed their son. But the school’s internal investigation found no evidence of mistreatment. Through a Freedom of Information Law request, the parents learned one special education teacher on the second day of school had conducted “joint compressions and massaging strategies” after Tristan had become agitated in class. The school did not conclude the action amounted to corporal punishment. But, to the Diazes, it was evidence an educator had laid hands on their son.

Over the next several months, Tristan kept coming home with new injuries, his parents said: scratches, bruises, a bite mark. School staff maintained the nonverbal child’s markings were self-inflicted, but the Diaz family took Tristan to doctors who disagreed. Eventually in mid-March, the parents reported the injuries to the police, explaining they were concerned their son could be experiencing physical abuse at school.

Tristan missed the next two days of school after getting bitten by mosquitos, which aggravated a tic he had of scratching himself with his fingernails. The Diaz parents said they called to excuse the absences. But still, the school sent home a March 19 attendance letter warning of possible child protective services involvement if the absences continued. Their son returned to the classroom.

Less than a week later came the ACS caseworker’s knock at the door, the parents said.

The ensuing investigation shook the family to its core.

The Diazes said their son Tristan suffered his first seizure in two years, which they believe was brought on by his stress and anxiety from the case.

Meanwhile, Luis Diaz said he faced stark consequences at work. After spending 18 years in the military, he is now employed by the Administration for Children’s Services as a child welfare specialist. When he and his wife were reported for alleged neglect, he got locked out of certain workspaces and sensed that his colleagues, who were all notified of the investigation, began to look at him differently. 

When the case closed two months later with no evidence of maltreatment, the family’s fear and frustration lingered. How could their school wield so much power to upend their lives, they wondered?

“An allegation can be just like that: 1, 2, 3. And then you ruin 60 days of a family. I could lose my job,” Luis Diaz said. 

‘They bully me’

Like the Diaz family, Elouise Cromwell-Evans was also reported to ACS by her school after a dispute surrounding her autistic son’s schooling.

In 2022, Cromwell-Evans said educators sent her and her 13-year-old child in an ambulance to the hospital for a psychological evaluation after the boy said at school that he wanted to kill himself. The doctor concluded the statement wasn’t worrisome, but rather an attention-seeking response after weeks of being called names by a class bully, the mother said.

But she said the school continued to struggle with her son’s behavior, which included spitting on the classmate who was taunting him. In early 2023, educators called another ambulance for a second psych evaluation, she said, telling Cromwell-Evans that if she didn’t show up at school and accompany her son, they would have to report it to ACS as medical neglect.

She complied, but once in the ambulance, said she took the recommendation of a paramedic who thought the hospital visit was unnecessary because he saw her son’s behavior as normal for a boy going through puberty. So she signed release forms and the family left.

Shortly after, the school reported the Bronx mother to ACS, she said.

“They intimidate me. They bully me,” Cromwell-Evans said. “If I don’t do what they say, then I’m neglectful.”

She suspects her race and class have played into educators’ perceptions of her parenting.

“We’re a Black family in a poor neighborhood and we were homeless for five years,” she said. “They’re definitely placing us in a box.”

Child welfare experts say living in poverty does not necessarily mean parents are neglecting their children. Provided there is no intentional mistreatment, struggling families need support — like food or rental assistance — rather than child protective services involvement, University of Chicago professor Darcey Merritt told ����Ӱ�� in October, then at NYU. Recent advocacy and media attention have prompted possible changes to mandatory reporting laws in New York City and . And ACS itself has worked in recent years to provide support to families, where possible, and reduce unnecessary abuse and neglect reports.

Ericka Brewington narrowly avoided a child protective services investigation at the beginning of the 2022-23 school year, she said. She kept her special needs son Amir home from class for several weeks because the school didn’t arrange for a paraprofessional to ride on the bus with him, as his education plan stipulated.

She remembers the school calling and telling her, “we’re supposed to call this in” to child protective services. 

But, in response, the mother, who also serves as a board member on the family advocacy nonprofit , provided email documentation, which she also shared with ����Ӱ��, showing the school had promised a staff member on the bus weeks ago and never followed through.

Brewington believes her savvy staved off a possible ACS report. But for parents less educated about their rights, “this would have scared the living daylights out of them,” she said. The threat of being separated from their children, in those cases, can be enough to make parents drop any demands they’re making for educational services, she said.

“You throw that in any parent’s face,” Brewington said, “they’re going to give in.”

It’s a threat so potent that many families completely avoid asking for the services their IEPs entitle them to, said Shalonda Curtis-Hackett, a parent advocate in Brooklyn.

A former PTA president, Curtis-Hackett said families often confessed to her during the early stages of the pandemic that their special education students weren’t getting the help they needed. But parents asked her not to relay the complaints to the school because they were worried about potential repercussions.

“I don’t want to be retaliated against,” the Brooklyn mother said they told her. 

It’s a calculus likely familiar to parents across the city. A class action lawsuit filed in November 2020 claims early in the pandemic. As of June 2022, city data show were fully receiving the help stipulated by their education plans, up slightly from a year prior.

Curtis-Hackett endured her own unsubstantiated ACS investigation in 2021 and now works as an outreach coordinator with the , which provides community-based legal defense services. 

“When parents are trying to get services for their kids and they’re not just letting the school give them the bare basics of an IEP, … ACS is definitely used as a retaliatory weapon,” she said.

To Michelle Diaz, the irony is rich. She was alleged to be neglectful while taking every step she knew of to advocate for her child, she pointed out.

“In a million years, did we think we were gonna have an ACS case?” she said. “We go above and beyond for our son.”

Between August 2019 and January 2022, only 24% of investigations prompted by calls from school staff found evidence of abuse or neglect compared to a citywide rate of in 2020 — meaning K-12 workers make allegations that do not get substantiated far more often than most other professions.

Teachers, with whom children spend most of their day, misreport more than any other school staff: Two thirds of their calls to the state hotline are unfounded, according to data obtained by ����Ӱ�� through a public records request.

Meanwhile, families say the investigations plunge their lives into deep uncertainty and inflict lasting traumas on their kids. Parents describe children with recurring nightmares, fearing every knock on the door may be a caseworker looking to snatch them from their home.

Darcey Merritt, associate professor of social work at New York University, regularly engages with families impacted by the child welfare system in her work and research. She also serves on the Child Maltreatment Prevention Committee of the .

Over the years, Merritt has come to see the system as overly punitive toward poor families who love their children but may struggle to meet their basic needs due to lack of resources. 

The expert believes it’s time to reimagine child welfare to better support those families: “We need to start the whole thing over,” she said.

����Ӱ�� spoke to Merritt to learn what issues she sees in child protective services — and what can be done.

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

����Ӱ��: What should people who work in schools understand about the child welfare system?

Darcey Merritt: We can’t disentangle neglect from poverty, it’s inappropriate to do so. 

On any given day, 76% of the children and families that are exposed to child welfare are there because of some form of neglect. And neglect is tethered to poverty: supervisory neglect, physical neglect, which refers to people not having appropriate food, clothing and housing. 

A lot of these issues related to neglect are structural issues that are outside the control of parents. Yet [child protective services] is blaming parents for their unfortunate, involuntary socio-economic statuses. So that’s a problem. 

Teachers are mandated to report out of an abundance of caution if they feel like a child is unsafe for whatever reason. But there’s got to be a way where mandated reporters first figure out how to be more useful in addressing the actual problem. If a child has dirty clothes consistently every day, let’s figure out what to do about that without getting CPS involved. 

I think there needs to be changes in state mandating laws, so [reporters] are encouraged, maybe even required, to first figure out how to address the problem. If they don’t have enough child care, well, then let’s find child care. If they don’t have enough food, let’s find food. Laundry machine is broken and they can’t go to the landlord because they’re behind on their rent? Let’s figure that out. These are all things that are happening. 

What might those changes look like?

We need to start the whole thing over and reserve child protective services for those kids who have been physically and sexually abused. We need to have a separate institution, a separate agency or organization, working with communities and neighborhoods to provide support for all the other kids so that the go-to response isn’t to report a child who’s poor. It all comes down to money and what our society is willing to do to make sure that people have a standard level of resources and support to be able to raise their families.

We need to really have more respect for these parents because they love their children and they are victims of an inequitable society.

To make sure I’m understanding correctly, are you saying child protective services should not be the ones responding to neglect charges?

I do not think they should be handling neglect charges. I think that some other agency that’s not connected to the stigma of having a CPS case should respond. Whatever support we put in place, it needs to be untethered from the institution of child protective services.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t help these families. I’m saying the child protective services is not the agency to handle neglect cases that have to do with poverty.

New York State law, as of 2021, requires implicit bias training for mandatory reporters. Does that rule go far enough to mitigate some of these problems?

I don’t think it goes far enough. You can’t just do a training and call it a day. You have to have something in place so that when people are making decisions, you can check whether or not this decision was made because of some unseen bias. For example, ‘Oh, this child’s parent has been involved with the carceral system. Go ahead and report this one.’ That’s how people continue to cycle in between these harmful punitive systems. 

We have our own Western idea of what safety and family well-being means and it’s all from a deficit lens. Rarely do we look at family dynamics and functioning from a strength-based perspective. I interview a lot of moms for my research and all of them say, ‘We love our children, but we needed help.’ 

It’s a really serious problem and the racial disproportionality is going to continue (because impoverished parents have no choice but to rely on the government for welfare). Black children are highly disproportionately involved with the child welfare system and before Black children, Native kids have the highest disproportionality of involvement. People don’t even pay attention to that.

Interesting. I didn’t know that.

The highest is Native American children, then Black children, then Latino children. White children are not overly represented in the system.

Some parents have told me they can’t help but know about child protective services, or, in New York City, the Administration for Children’s Services, because either they’re personally impacted or they know someone who is. Meanwhile, other families are completely oblivious. Have you seen that difference between communities?

It’s true. Once you’re involved, you know what that looks like. Parents’ language is even institutionalized. Have you heard people who are involved with the carceral system say, ‘Oh, somebody caught a case.’ These ACS-impacted moms literally say, ‘Well, I caught an ACS case.’ That language is a thing. 

And another group doesn’t have any idea what ACS is.

What are the harms of overreporting and what are the harms of underreporting [to child protective services]? 

The obvious harm of underreporting is that we may miss children who are in actual danger from parents that abuse their children. 

This whole issue of, ‘out of an abundance of caution, we need to report anything that we suspect might be problematic,’ that’s where the rub lies. We have to figure out how to pull out those issues that are related to poverty. 

The harm of overreporting is that when CPS comes knocking at your door, you are immediately traumatized. The very minute a child is taken from your home for any amount of time, you are immediately traumatized. They then have workers coming in on a regular basis, they’re being mandated to do certain groups and therapy, all kinds of things that don’t relate to the fact that maybe they need some money.

I personally renamed CPS the ‘child poverty surveillance.’ That’s my own little term I’ve made up for them.

You have to be subjective when you’re making a decision about whether or not a child is in danger. And one needs to be really, really reflective about their implicit biases, because [the worry is] a poor Black child will be treated differently than a poor white child. 

You live and work in New York City. Do mandated reporters, like school staff, lean more toward over or underreporting? 

They lean more towards overreporting. 

What messages are those people receiving when they get trained? Is it ‘When in doubt, report?’ Is it, ‘Take every precaution before you do?’ What are folks hearing?

I think they’re hearing, ‘When in doubt, report.’ I think that’s what they’re hearing. 

For the most part, folks are afraid because if you don’t report something and the child ends up really harmed, then the liability is on the mandated reporter. I think they’re being given a double message: ‘When in doubt, report,’ but on the back end, ‘Be careful, because there might not be a need for CPS to be involved.’ 

In schools, especially those that are under-resourced, they don’t have the means to help a family with their basic needs and their financial needs. [Instead], teachers are by law required to report to child protective services. It just makes no sense. The solution does not match the problem. And it causes harm in the meanwhile.

Given the system as it stands, if you are a mandated reporter in a school setting, how do you respond in a way that both protects a child in real danger, but also won’t jeopardize a family for no reason? How do you weigh that judgment call?

It’s hard. 

I had this conversation with my partner who teaches in Philadelphia. He’s not a social worker. I’m a social worker. But he [has to play the role of] a social worker, because he has to do social work as a teacher. 

When something’s going on with a child, my recommendation is to find out what’s happening from the family first. I recommend taking more caution before making a phone call [to the state hotline]. See if you can come up with a solution first. 

That puts a greater burden on teachers because then they end up being social workers as well. So it’s a very fine line, finding out what resources one has at the school, if the nurses or the climate officers or whoever the people are at the school [can help]. 

I’m only speaking about cases where neglect is related to poverty. Now, there are other cases of neglect where a parent intentionally left the child with a child abuser. All the neglect I’m talking about is unintentional. 

Child protective services should not be the go-to for cases of unintentional neglect related to poverty. That phone call should not be made to CPS but to another agency that we just don’t have yet. 

When child protective services investigated Shalonda Curtis-Hackett’s family for neglect in 2021, the Brooklyn mom could measure the personal toll in pounds lost: 20. 

She tried to fight the clawing thoughts that her caseworker “could try and snatch my kids,” a vision she says she still can’t escape in her nightmares.

Though the agency eventually found no evidence her children were malnourished — her husband is a professional chef — the process of having a welfare worker inspect their Bushwick apartment, check the fridge for food and ask prying questions deeply disturbed her children, who are now 8, 10 and 15.

“My children are happy-go-lucky kids and I’ve had to adultify them and tell them about the world much faster than I wanted to,” Curtis-Hackett said. 

The mother, who was also PTA president at her younger children’s school at the time, believes the report came from a K-12 staffer who said her kids’ bones were sticking out, an observation made while the children were attending class via Zoom at the time.

If so, the family is among the thousands of New York City households — disproportionately Black, Hispanic and low income — subjected to unfounded investigations into abuse or neglect initiated by calls from their children’s school. 

In fact, between August 2019 and January 2022, city school employees made over 13,750 false alarm reports to the state child abuse hotline, according to data obtained by ����Ӱ�� through a public records request to the Office of Children and Family Services. 

Over that time span, the vast majority of school-based reports were ultimately unfounded, including at least 58% of calls from guidance counselors, 59% of calls from principals and 67% of calls from teachers. Less than 1 in 3 teacher reports led to any evidence of wrongdoing.

“Teachers, out of fear that they’re going to get in trouble, will report even if they’re just like, ‘Well, it could be abuse.’ It could be. It also could be 10 million other things,” said Jessica Beck, a middle school English teacher in the Bronx.

Those reports spur investigations that, at their most dire, can lead children to be separated from their parents — a trauma associated with elevated risks of . Even when closed and dropped, investigations can stay on parents’ records for years afterward and erase job prospects in youth-serving fields.

Kamaria Excell is a social worker who has helped dozens of parents recover from the damaging process. She led a 12-week healing program with the community-based organization . The vast majority of participating parents — 95%, she estimates — had investigations that were ultimately dismissed. But the shame, anger and eroded trust did not fade.

“Families deal with the repercussions of careless [child welfare] investigations for years after,” she said.

When a case gets closed, Curtis-Hackett, the Brooklyn mom, added, “it doesn’t stop the PTSD.”

‘When in doubt, report’

In total, only 24% of investigations prompted by calls from school staff found evidence of abuse or neglect compared to a citywide rate of in 2020 — meaning K-12 workers, teachers especially, make allegations that do not get substantiated far more often than most other professions. (Another 16% of K-12 calls led to an alternate response for children determined not to be in imminent harm and 59% were dropped outright.) Even that rate likely overstates the true level of maltreatment, family law attorney David Shalleck-Klein said, because it’s a metric the agency determines “unilaterally” and includes cases that may ultimately be dismissed in court.

The issue extends beyond Gotham, with similar rates of unsubstantiated reports from school staff nationwide. Among mandated reporters, K-12 workers are the most likely to report abuse or neglect and the least likely to have their allegations find evidence of wrongdoing, show.

Like most states, New York requires educators, child care providers, law enforcement officers, health care professionals and social workers to call a hotline if they believe a young person may be experiencing abuse or neglect. But, in practice, that decision is always a judgment call, said Beck, the Bronx middle school teacher. And in NYC schools, it’s a call made by teachers who are mostly white about students who are mostly Black and Hispanic.

“What looks like neglect to a teacher who has privilege might actually be poverty,” said Beck, who is white.

For example, educators are trained that poor hygiene can be a sign of neglect. But if a kid in her class smells, the teacher will speak with the parents rather than immediately calling in a report, she said. Some colleagues in the same situation, though, may call the state hotline, plunging that family’s life into the havoc of a neglect investigation.

The ethos is “when in doubt, report,” said Darcey Merritt, an associate professor of social work at New York University.

“Instead of immediately reporting a suspected neglect situation, find out how to address that need that’s being unmet first,” she suggests.

That is not what a social worker at a Bronx transfer high school — small schools designed to re-engage students who have dropped out or fallen behind — sees on the ground, unfortunately. She asked not to be identified for fear of getting into trouble at work.

“It’s totally C-Y-A, cover your ass. If you’re unsure, just call,” she said.

“They never provide information on what happens after the call,” she continued. “Mandated reporters don’t know that, many times after making a call, 24 hours [later] someone’s going to show up to this person’s house … and start conducting an investigation: a search of their home, checking counters, checking their cabinets, strip searching their young children to check for any bruises or marks, depending on the allegation.”

Instead, the training sessions she has attended have begun by projecting the names and pictures of young people who have died by parental abuse, the social worker said, a tactic she considers “fear mongering.”

The Department of Education said it cares deeply about the well-being of students and is committed to providing support and care at the earliest opportunity.

“While every NYC Public School member is a mandated reporter, we are focused on connecting with children and families who may be in need, providing them access to the vital interventions, supports and services they need to stay safe,” DOE spokesperson Suzan Sumer said in an emailed statement.

The Administration for Children’s Services, the city agency that investigates suspected abuse and neglect, said it is working to cut down on unneeded reports. Overall, school and child care-based reports fell 17% from spring 2019 to spring 2022, it said.

As per a , mandated reporters are required to undergo implicit bias training. And this fall, ACS will hold a series of five-hour trainings in collaboration with the NYC Department of Education to help school staff better understand the citywide resources they can refer families to rather than calling the child abuse hotline, the agency said. Only one representative from each school, however, is required to attend.

“We take our mandate of protecting children and supporting families seriously, while simultaneously being committed to reducing unnecessary child protection involvement with families, particularly families of color,” a spokesperson wrote in an email.

Of in 2020, 36% found evidence of abuse or neglect and 86 children died, according to the . The large majority of those deaths “​​were unrelated to abuse or neglect,” the agency wrote. However, when a child is killed as a result of being beaten or neglected by a family member, the agency frequently for failing to investigate or properly follow through on earlier reports of abuse.

‘School-to-ACS pipeline’

In New York City and across the nation, involvement with child protective services breaks decisively along racial lines.

Citywide, some of children named in ACS investigations are Black or Hispanic, while, together, those racial groups make up 60% of NYC young people. Even among neighborhoods with similar poverty rates, those with greater shares of Black and Hispanic residents face higher rates of investigations, shows.

Child protective services involvement becomes so normalized in many low-income communities, Merritt has noticed, it changes people’s vernacular.

“These ACS-impacted moms literally say, ‘Well, I caught an ACS case,’” as if they’re referring to the criminal justice system, the social work professor said.

Meanwhile, more privileged communities are often unaware of the disastrous effects that system can have, said her NYU colleague Anna Arons, assistant professor of law.

“It is really easy to be a person with money in this country, … particularly white, and not have any sense of child welfare services as anything more than people who are genuinely helping children,” she said. “You might never know there are 50,000 investigations every year in New York City, which is really an astronomical number.”

Curtis-Hackett, for her part, has taken the situation into her own hands. After being reported to child protective services, she no longer wants her family to participate in a system she calls the “school-to-ACS pipeline.”

Last year, she pulled her kids from the public school system. Now, they homeschool.

“I don’t trust the [Department of Education],” she said. “I will not allow my children to be collateral damage.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story stated national figures for the number of children in 2020 who had died, suffered abuse or neglect, and been reported to CPS by any source, not just educators. Those contextual data have been corrected to reflect New York City’s rates.

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.”