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‘Parents Are Blindsided’: NYC City Council bills would protect families during an investigation

October 31, 2019 by

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Parents impacted by the NYC child welfare system urged City Council today to pass a package of bills to protect families during investigations and hold ACS accountable for its impact on low-income communities of color.

“Parents are coming in blindsided with no real guidance and no clear information from the start,” said Rise Senior Parent Leader Nancy Fortunato at today’s hearing of the General Welfare Committee.

Bills introduced by the Progressive Caucus would provide parents with legal representation from the beginning of an investigation and require ACS to provide a Miranda-style warning about parents’ rights.

When Schools Use Child Welfare as a Weapon – What a reporter learned investigating malicious reports

October 16, 2019 by

Last November, The Huffington Post published an article that documented how some schools misuse reports to child protective services. These reports were done to pressure parents to send a child with behavior problems to a different school or to agree to a school’s recommendations for services.

Most school personnel don’t make reports maliciously, but the reporter, Caroline Preston, a senior editor at The Hechinger Report, said she thinks mandated reporting laws contribute to these kinds of calls because “there are pretty significant consequences to not reporting, and many fewer consequences to over-reporting.”

Here, Preston tells us about the parents she interviewed—and all the parents who reached out after her story was published to say they’d had similar experiences.

My Broken Life – My kids were never taken but child protective services hurt my son and me so much

October 16, 2019 by

My story is about how my son’s school came into my life and changed it in a way that I don’t know if I can ever be who I was before.

It’s about how I got arrested. Lost my job. Have sleepless nights.

A part of me has been stolen.

If I had the power, I would let the system know that child protective services needs to do proper investigations. Don’t label me without knowing me.

I live in the South Bronx. In my neighborhood, there are a lot of investigations. If I lived elsewhere and my son went to a different school, I think this would have never, ever happened.

A Punishment Worse Than the Crime – I was charged with abuse but my kids were harmed in foster care

October 03, 2019 by

September 20th, 2018 was the worst day of my life. My kids were removed from my custody because on September 19, 2018, my boyfriend used corporal punishment on my younger son.

He did it because my son flooded our new apartment and the basement three days in a row by removing a piece from the toilet. After the third time, my boyfriend hit him with a belt, leaving red marks on his back and arm.

The next day, my son went to the school nurse. When they asked him what happened, he said he fell down the stairs, he went into a wall, he got beat up. He came up with like six different stories. Because he had so many stories, the school called me and then they called child protective services.

I felt terrified. I also felt betrayed. For a year I was asking for help for my son’s behavior and nobody was willing to help.

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