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

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

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

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

• Exclusive Data: Educators’ ‘Careless’ Child Abuse Reports Devastate Thousands of NYC Families
  
• They Stood Up to NYC Schools For Their Disabled Child. Then Child Protective Services Arrived
  

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

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

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

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

Read the 49-page complaint here

A bill to allow home-educated students to participate in Missouri public school activities is back for the upcoming legislative session — and has been coupled with provisions rolling back state oversight of homeschooling families.

Sen. Ben Brown, a Washington Republican, pre-filed a 52-page bill that largely resembles the version he sponsored that cleared the Senate last session.

While it initially was only two pages and focused on giving homeschool kids the opportunity to play sports and join clubs in public schools, it now would add a new category for home-educated students and rescind attendance officers’ authority over homeschool families.

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“As a former athlete myself whose childhood was greatly impacted by my participation in the sport of wrestling, I feel strongly that it is wrong to deny these potentially life-changing opportunities to children,” Brown told the Senate Education and Workforce Development Committee during a March hearing.

The Missouri State High School Activities Association policy is to allow homeschooled students to participate in their local school districts’ sports if they are enrolled in at least one credit hour of instruction, which is typically two classes in non-block-scheduled schools. School districts are allowed to be more restrictive and ban homeschool participation.

Brown’s bill would prohibit schools from requiring enrollment in classes, but any instruction or training required for the club or sport would still be allowed.

No one testified in opposition to the bill in March, but that was expanded to remove local oversight of homeschooling families.

Oversight

State Rep. Maggie Nurrenbern, a Kansas City Democrat, said what concerns her about the legislation is “simply not knowing which students are being homeschooled.”

“It’s imperative… that when parents make the decision to homeschool their child, we have some reporting procedures in place so that we know which students are actually being homeschooled,” she said in an interview with The Independent.

The bill would remove a section of state law that says families “may provide…  a declaration of enrollment stating their intent for the child to attend a home school” to the local school district or the county recorder of deeds.

Kim Quon, a regional director for the Missouri homeschool advocacy organization Families for Home Education, told The Independent that the statute’s wording “causes confusion for everybody.”

She said the declaration of enrollment is optional because the law says they “may provide” that document. Quon recommends families notify a school in writing if a child is homeschooled, but some have felt obligated to do this by school administrators.

The bill also would rescind a law allowing attendance officers to investigate compliance with the state’s . The law requires home schools to offer at least 1,000 hours of instruction, with at least 600 of those in core subjects like reading and math.

Quon said families document their hours of learning but do not submit that information for review.

“We don’t submit our hours,” she said. “It’s not anybody’s business.”

She is also opposed to attendance officers checking on homeschooling families, saying: “There just doesn’t need to be that level of scrutiny.”

School attendance officers and the Department of Social Services’s Children’s Division can assess whether a child is being neglected after being removed from public school.

found that 36% of families that pulled their children out of public school in a three-year period had at least one accepted report of child abuse or neglect. A majority had multiple reports of abuse or neglect.

Quon said the Children’s Division could still investigate instances of neglect, but she is worried attendance officers may abuse their power.

The Independent asked if she heard of attendance officers investigating families that are tracking hours and homeschooling.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not aware of this happening too terribly much. But the fact that it’s there leaves that option for anybody to do that.”

Homeschooled athletes

Quon said homeschooling families have different reactions to the idea of their kids in public-school sports and clubs.

Some value the privacy of being detached from the school district while others desire access to the amenities their tax dollars help pay for.

Brown’s bill could help alleviate some homeschooling families’ privacy concerns, said Zeke Spieker, legislative assistant to Sen. Jill Carter, a Republican from Granby. Carter testified in favor of Brown’s bill in March.

“There’s always a concern that when you give school students access to these activities that there are going to be some strings attached that would cause a loss of homeschool freedom,” Spieker said. “So last year, in an effort to try to assuage some of those concerns, they created the FLEX category.”

Brown’s bill calls for the defining of “FLEX schools,” or family-led educational experience schools. The differences between FLEX students and homeschool students are that FLEX students can participate in public-school activities and obtain K-12 scholarships through the state’s MOScholars tax-credit program.

Spieker, who was homeschooled himself, said some homeschooling families are still concerned about the FLEX language.

He and his family have talked with home educators for years and made trips to the Missouri Capitol to ask for the ability to play in public school sports.

Spieker said he’s watched opportunities for homeschooled children grow during his family’s advocacy. His brother Jonah, a high-school senior, was homeschooled but played on Webb City’s football team.

Quon said the bill could benefit students further away from Missouri’s major cities the most, where there aren’t many options outside of public school activities.

She said the Families for Home Education’s position on the legislation is “neutral as long as nobody does anything crazy with the bill.”

Last legislative session, the bill expanded in a House committee to include provisions about four-day school weeks, school board vacancies, foster-child enrollment and other education matters. It was never debated on the House floor.

Nurrenbern said the amendments will likely determine the bill’s fate.

“There will be hopefully some good amendments that can be attached to this and make it,” she said. “If there’s more good than bad in the bill, I think it will pass.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com. Follow Missouri Independent on and .

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.”