He wasn’t unsafe. He wasn’t unloved. He was just missing too many days of school: seven, to be exact, the unexcused limit. And that was enough to trigger an investigation. Just like that, he became one of more than investigated by child welfare services each year — over 8,000 every single day. Overare for “neglect,”  a vague, inconsistently defined category that often just reflects poverty. 

Education personnel — teachers, counselors, and school staff — make the second-highest number of reports to child welfare services every year, I’ve found in my work researching the child welfare system. While the intentions are often good, the system often punishes families struggling with poverty, addiction, or trauma — not abuse. And once inside, these children are placed into systems that deepen, rather than heal, the original pain.

This is not protection. It is harm, simply by another name.

Children placed in foster care are to experience sexual abuse than those who remain at home, and 10 times more likely when placed in group homes. The trauma doesn’t end there. involved in child welfare today were themselves in foster care. California reports a rate within one year of reunification, driven largely by untreated mental health or substance use, not new abuse. 

And most chilling of all, in the U.S. have spent time in foster care. Many are trafficked while missing from foster care. In 2024 alone, over from state custody — and a significant number were later identified as victims of sex trafficking.

Without mental wellness at the center, the child welfare system doesn’t just fail. It recreates and sometimes exacerbates the very harm it claims to prevent.

Across the country, models centered on healing are showing what’s possible when we meet families with care instead of immediately extracting their children. As a World Bank scholar and the founder and CEO of , an organization that has supported efforts across the world to end the cycle of trauma, I have seen the impact of community-rooted, trauma-informed programs that prioritize wellness over surveillance. 

Drawing on my training, I conducted an 18-month of the PACE program, an educational neglect prevention program in Olmsted County, Minnesota. I found that re-entry rates dropped significantly, both in the short and long term. The program primarily served children of color, who made up 60% of neglect reports despite comprising only 35% of the student population. PACE created safe spaces, trust, and skill-building — addressing risk factors early and reducing long-term involvement in child welfare.

Similar results exist nationwide. program uses specially trained peer navigators and reduces re-entry into foster care, showing that youth-led healing is effective. In New York’s Initiative, judges partner with mental health professionals to stabilize families through therapeutic interventions, resulting in faster reunification and better long-term outcomes. 

What unites these models is their focus on healing, not punishment. A truly healing-centered system has three defining characteristics:

First, systems awareness, not just individual blame. These approaches look beyond isolated “cases” to ask: What happened to this family, and what systemic forces shaped their situation? They take into account poverty, racism, community disinvestment, and intergenerational trauma. That means working with community organizations, investing in housing and mental health care, and rewriting policies that punish poverty instead of addressing its root causes.

Second, psychological and emotional safety, not just physical safety. Traditional child welfare systems focus almost exclusively on physical harm. But healing requires us to ask: “Will this child be harmed more by staying, or by being removed?” A healing-centered system weighs both forms of harm. As legal scholar Shanta Trivedi has argued in , separation is not a neutral act; it often inflicts its own kind of trauma, particularly for children of color who are disproportionately separated from their families. 

And third, rebuilding from within. Healing-centered systems support the emotional resilience of the adults who shape a child’s daily environment: teachers, social workers, family coaches, and therapists. They must not only regulate their own stress, but also help caregivers and children build emotional tools to stay grounded. It also means embedding supports — like supervision, peer learning, and trauma-informed training — so this work is sustainable.

Many people still picture child welfare as a virtuous system that rescues battered children and places them with loving families. But that’s not how it actually works. Anyone can report you to child protective services: a neighbor, a teacher, even a stranger. When the person reporting doesn’t understand the trauma of removal, or the realities of foster care, well-intentioned calls often end up making things worse.

So instead of asking, “Should I report?,” we need to ask: “How can I support this family better?”

We deserve better. Our children do too.

For the third year in a row, New Mexico is last in the nation for child welfare, according to the released this week.

The Annie E. Casey Foundation prepares the report for all 50 states. Its mission to track child well being in the country focuses on compiling federal data on four factors: family and community, education performance, overall health and economic reality.

New Mexico historically falls at the bottom of this report. Its best placement was in 2021 when the state climbed to 49th in the rankings.

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The 2024 report shows (42nd) and (43rd) as states with similar issues to New Mexico’s. (17th) and (3rd) are neighboring states leading on child welfare, the report shows.

Utah was also listed as number one in the nation for the Family and Community indicator that measures teen pregnancies, the number of children in single parent households, living in poverty and the education outcomes in their households.

New Mexico sits near the bottom of the list for that indicator but it is also the one where the state has shown the most improvement since 2019 with more kids living in economically stable homes with better educated parents. Teen births are also down in New Mexico since 2019.

On the other hand, education outcomes in New Mexico and across the country saw declines in three of the four indicators, specifically in reading and math proficiency.

Deficiencies in education

New Mexico’s education performance tracked with the rest of the nation while starting with a notably higher rate of children not proficient in fourth grade reading (79% up from 76% in 2019) and eighth grade math (87% up from 79% in 2019).

“New Mexico’s ranking in the education domain is heavily impacted by national standardized test scores, including fourth grade reading proficiency,” Emily Wildau, KIDS COUNT coordinator at New Mexico Voices for Children, said in a news release. “These scores do not reflect the ability of our children, but rather an education system that is not designed with our multicultural, multilingual students in mind.”

The state’s K-12 Plus Program is mentioned in the report as an example of a state “bolstering services and resources that equip kids to learn.” and signed by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham.

House Bill 130 changed part of the Public School Code to extend instructional time requirements for elementary and secondary education. It also allows for an increase in funding from the state if local school districts and charter schools extend the learning calendar past 180 days, or 155 days for districts with four-day school weeks.

However, the decision to extend the school year is a topic lawmakers, schools boards, educators, students and parents have had differing opinions on. The law setting school calendars based on hours,

Health indicators help then hurt New Mexico’s score

Health indicators over the last decade have helped improve the state’s scores, but improvements appear to have stagnated over the last couple of years.

The number of New Mexico children without health insurance improved between 2019 and 2022, according to the data book. But the state also reported an increase in babies born at a low birth weight and an increase in deaths of children and teens.

In 2022, New Mexico experienced 40 child or teen deaths per 100,00 compared to the national average of 30 deaths per 100,000. And nearly 10% of babies born in New Mexico were born at low birth weight.

Meanwhile, the state also reported some improvement in the family and community sector, including a decrease in teen births.

Solutions for addressing overall child well being

The KIDS COUNT report offered several solutions for states to consider when addressing overall child well being, including the implementation of more community schools throughout the school districts in the states.

Community schools are public schools that work to meet the needs of children outside of traditional education. This includes providing regular meals to children and families, mental health services and connections to other areas of support.

According to the New Mexico Public Education Department, , with 91 schools receiving state grant funding through the department.

The wraparound services provided through community schools were highlighted in the databook as beneficial for addressing factors in children’s home life that might make it a struggle for them to learn in school.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Source New Mexico maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Shaun Griswold for questions: info@sourcenm.com. Follow Source New Mexico on and .

Parents and advocates held a virtual rally on Thursday calling for New York state to eliminate mandatory reporting practices in child welfare — a policy under which New York City school staff make thousands of unsubstantiated child abuse or neglect allegations each year, mostly against poor families of color.

State legislators had scheduled a Thursday to examine “potential biases” in mandated reporting and “how the system can be reformed,” but the meeting was postponed two days prior with no rescheduled date announced.

“We show up even when they don’t,” said Joyce McMillan, who organized the rally attended by some 85 people. McMillan, founder of the nonprofit , has lobbied for years to reduce the share of professionals who are mandated reporters. In her remarks, she called the practice a “harmful weapon” that “prevents people who are in need from asking for help.”

The New York state Assembly press office said it could not disclose how many individuals had signed up to testify at the hearing, which was supposed to take place in Manhattan, and that the list would be posted online just before the rescheduled hearing. Neither Assemblyman Andrew Hevesi, D-Queens, nor Assemblywoman Taylor Darling, D-Long Island, who called the meeting, responded to requests for comment.

The online rally came on the heels of a Wednesday from New York’s Office of Children and Family Services that the state would be strengthening its anti-bias training for all mandated reporters, requiring more than 50 professional groups to complete a self-directed online course by April 1, 2025.

“New York State recognizes that mandated reporters provide a key defense for vulnerable children,” acting Commissioner Suzanne Miles-Gustave said. “However, a family’s race and/or lack of adequate financial resources should never be the basis for a call to the [State Central Registry]. This updated training is not only a step in the right direction, it is downright necessary to put an end to the practice of punishing race and poverty.”

However, advocates dismissed the changes as tweaks to a system they say can’t be reformed.

“I do not believe that supporting [families] and mandated reporting go together,” said Teyora Graves-Ferrell, who works at the nonprofit . She said she had given feedback to the Office of Children and Family Services on possible improvements, but was disappointed by this week’s announcement. “I really do believe that this system needs to be abolished.” 

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. State-level mandatory reporting laws began to proliferate in response to high-profile reports of violence against children and instances of child deaths that adults later admitted they suspected abuse but had not taken action to prevent.

But those suspicions can be prone to personal biases. In an internal December 2020 obtained last year by the legal organization Bronx Defenders, employees of New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services said the agency “specifically targets Black and Brown parents and applies a different level of scrutiny to them.” 

The audit cites mandated reporting as one of the “most significant drivers of racial disparities” in the child welfare system and blames school employees for sending the lion’s share of biased reports.

“[Department of Education] staff frequently file reports based on the cleanliness of a child’s clothing or whether they bring food to school,” the report found. Caseworkers said these teachers and principals should be connecting families to financial and nutritional assistance programs instead of involving child welfare. 

Nationwide, more than half of Black children experience a child welfare investigation before they turn 18, compared to 28% of white children and 37% of children overall. Affected families say the process — which often involves intrusive questions, refrigerator probes and strip searches of children — casts a far-reaching mental health and legal shadow even when the allegations prove false. Several rally attendees said they had been subjected to such investigations in their youth, as parents or both.

Investigations that do lead to child removal — a trauma associated with — disproportionately involve Black and Hispanic children in New York City and in most cases hinge on charges of neglect. Advocates argue neglect alone does not meet the threshold of “” set by the city for child removal and researchers contend many such families are in need of financial assistance, but instead are met with punitive measures rather than support.

“They say that we have neglected our obligations to our children, but it’s actually the other way around,” parent Desseray Wright said during the rally. “Systems have neglected their obligations to our families, which is to keep our families together.”

Isuree Katugampala is a pediatrician in the Bronx who introduced herself as a “mandated reporter who wants mandated reporting to end.”

“I come into work everyday hoping to help families, not tear them apart. And yet I see how poverty is renamed as neglect and abuse. Our training is minimal. Our training is sparse. Our training tells us to trust a gut feeling when in doubt about a family. They don’t tell us that that gut feeling is racism,” she said. “ I didn’t become a pediatrician to become a cop.”

The advocacy is personal for McMillan. When she was a young mother, caseworkers took away her 3-month-old daughter, McMillan said, after someone anonymously reported that she was using substances. McMillan was financially comfortable at the time, she said, but fell into depression, debt and homelessness after she failed the agency’s drug test and was separated from her baby with only once-weekly visitations for two-and-a-half years.

“A drug test is not a parenting test,” she said. “[My daughter] was born living in a four-bedroom house. When she was returned, we were in a shelter.”

Now a young adult, Kaylah McMillan joined the virtual rally and shared a poem she wrote. Her message ended with a call to action.

“Foster care didn’t protect me. / Tore me from my mother’s arm. / Worked hard to shatter our family bonds. / Now I stand here with an ask / to repeal mandated reporting. / That would be / a real child protection act.”

On Nov. 9, the court heard oral arguments in Haaland v. Brackeen, which pits three non-Native families and the state of Texas against four federally recognized Native tribes and the U.S. government. The families seek to reverse a clause of the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act preferencing kin and tribal members in the adoption of Native children, arguing it discriminates against non-Native families on the basis of race. 

Tribal communities fear the case puts the landmark law commonly known as ICWA in jeopardy, and with it, key provisions designed to protect Native youth from unjust family separation. Nearly 500 tribes, 87 members of Congress, 23 states, along with several Indigenous and child welfare organizations, have signed amicus briefs in support of the government’s case, led by U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, who is a Laguna Pueblo tribal member.

Nationwide, Native youth are already among those most likely to be placed in out-of-home care and are involved in the foster system at the rate of white children, with school often being the focal point for intervention by child protective services. 

It’s “horribly ironic and twisted,” said University of Michigan law professor Matthew Fletcher, that Native families could soon face a loss of protections when, in his view, they need more. Fletcher is a member of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians.

Family separations often begin because educators, who are required by law to flag abuse or neglect, report suspected maltreatment. In Alaska and Minnesota, more are investigated by child protective services due to calls from school staff than from any other group of mandated reporters. In Alaska, educators make abuse or neglect allegations roughly five times as often for Native school-aged children as for those who are white; in Minnesota, they do so at approximately eight times the rate.

“We have deputized teachers to be the eyes and ears of the family policing system,” said Rutgers University sociologist Frank Edwards, who authored a recent on the topic. “For Indigenous children, we see this play out to devastating consequences.”

Even when Native kids would be better off staying at home, investigations often conclude that removal is necessary, Fletcher said.

“There’s still an enormous amount of bias. A lot of Native people are poor, they’re brown-skinned, they have different cultural leanings. And almost all social workers are white and more privileged,” he said.

Nationwide, the vast majority of child welfare investigations involve low-income parents of color. Some 80% charge neglect, which can be an amorphous allegation prone to case workers’ subjective judgements.

In New York City, the nation’s largest school district, a previous investigation by ����Ӱ�� found school staff sent over 13,750 unsubstantiated reports of maltreatment over the span of a year and a half, often plunging families’ lives into invasive and sometimes traumatic investigations. Less than 1 in 3 teacher calls yielded any evidence of wrongdoing.

Across the country, K-12 workers are the most likely mandated reporters to flag abuse or neglect and the least likely to have their allegations find evidence of wrongdoing, show.

ICWA was passed by Congress to keep American Indian families together whenever possible at a time when as many as 1 in 3 Native kids were being taken from their parents. In addition to preferencing kin and tribal members in the adoption of American Indian children, it also requires an expert witness in Family Court proceedings and allows tribes to intervene in cases on behalf of Native children, giving them the power to transfer the proceedings to tribal court.

“If ICWA goes, I expect a dramatic increase in the number of Native children going into foster care,” Edwards said.

The adoptive families’ lawyer, Matthew McGill, acknowledged that the “history of unjustified breakups of Native families was a terrible injustice.” But reversing ICWA’s adoption placement preferences would not impact the number of Native kids in out-of-home care because the rules “come into play only after a child already has appropriately entered the foster care system,” he said. 

The attorney added it would “not be appropriate” to speculate on whether the ruling might impact other ICWA provisions designed to curb Native family separation.

Reversing the harm

The law’s provisions sought to correct nearly two centuries of government policy erasing Native cultures by removing children from tribal communities — tactics that tribal advocates say fall within the United Nations’ definition of .

From the early 1800s to late 1960s, tens of thousands of Native youth were taken from their homes and forced to attend federally sponsored boarding schools, brutal and sometimes deadly institutions where students were forced to use English names, wear Americanized haircuts and perform military drills. 

As those schools shut down, officials pushed another assimilation tactic. In the 1960s and 1970s, roughly were put into foster care or adopted — 90% of the time by non-Native families.

“[ICWA] is trying to reverse the harm of boarding school, of child removals and saying we have to make active efforts to … keep a child connected to their family, their community and their culture,” said Jessica Saniġaq Ullrich, a social work professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

“You try to maintain them within their culture,” added her colleague, professor Yvonne Elder Chase. “ It’s not rocket science. It’s good casework.”

In Ullrich’s home state, Alaska Native and American Indian children still make up roughly two-thirds of all children in out-of-home care despite representing only a fifth of the state’s overall youth population.

“It’s been disproportionate like that for years,” said the Inupiaq tribal member of the Nome Eskimo Community. “These are families, these are communities, these are future generations affected.”

When child welfare proceedings under ICWA are transferred to tribal courts, she said, outcomes tend to be better. Judges have a level of “kinship” with families and work with them to address issues like food insecurity or unstable housing rather than separating children from parents.

“Tribes are not in the business of punishing poor people because they’re struggling,” Fletcher added.

It’s an approach to child welfare that experts outside of tribal communities also recommend, calling for care-based responses over punitive ones in instances where children are not being intentionally abused. On Nov. 17, the ACLU and Human Rights Watch released a 146-page report titled “” on what the organizations called the “family separation crisis.”

Trauma in schools

Schools can be a site of ongoing trauma for Native children. In light of the ICWA case, Kimberly Cluff, who is non-Native, recalled a case she litigated two decades ago in which she represented a tribal family in California’s Central Valley. The son had been required to shave his head by school administrators due to a lice outbreak on campus. But in his culture, hair was sacred and only to be cut on specific occasions, usually after the loss of a loved one, so the family refused. Rather than finding a compromise, the school reported the family to child protective services for educational neglect. 

“This child could have easily been taken from his family,” said Cluff, who was a staff attorney at California Indian Legal Services at the time.

Instead, the tribal representation and expert witness allowed under ICWA helped the family successfully argue that they were simply following their customs and not neglecting their child.

Still, the process of being investigated by child protective services can be highly traumatizing even when no evidence of maltreatment is ultimately found, impacted families say. For the evaluations, case workers typically open cabinets and refrigerators to check for adequate food and can ask children to strip down to their underwear to check for bruises.

When those investigations lead to their most drastic results, separating children from their parents, those youth go on to face .

Child welfare threats aside, Native students routinely find that their culture — and very existence — are erased in school curricula, Ullrich observed.

“If it’s only a celebration of Columbus Day [in school] and this colonial view, then there’s a whole population of people that are sitting in those classrooms hearing this history and feeling like they’re invisible and that they don’t matter,” she said.

Gorsuch could be pivotal

Cluff, the California attorney, was in Washington, D.C. for oral arguments earlier this month, assisting tribal leaders from the Morongo Band of Mission Indians with preparing their arguments. It’s a “fool’s errand,” she said, to try to predict how the justices will rule.

Broadly, however, there are a few ways the case could fall, she explained. If the justices side with the adoptive families under equal protection grounds, saying that Native families cannot be preferenced in adoption because doing so amounts to racial discrimination against non-Natives, it would reverse centuries of precedent considering tribal status a political identification rather than a racial one. Such a ruling could possibly undermine Native sovereignty itself. 

Short of that, in what Cluff called the “lesser bad outcome,” the justices could carve out individual provisions of ICWA for reversal, saying certain parts of the policy represent federal overreach.

During oral arguments, Justice Neil Gorsuch signaled skepticism toward the contention that the federal government overstepped its powers. The conservative justice spent years working in the Western U.S. where reservation land is vast. He is considered a pivotal vote, having in the past on issues related to Native rights.

“Is there some irony in your position that you’re here to vindicate state’s rights?” Gorsuch McGill, the families’ lawyer. “We have 23 states who’ve lined up on the other side, and we’ve never had a state court near as I can tell, in the 40 some years since ICWA was adopted, complaining about this arrangement.” 

There was not as much discussion about equal protection and the question of race, which two lower courts included alongside the issue of federal overreach in their rulings finding certain ICWA provisions were unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling in June 2023.

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.

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.”