Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 40 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Our School Enemy is Within the Locked Doors
Is this where we are in 2025? I have friends who are elementary school teachers, and two of them are principals. I was shocked at my own initial reaction, thinking the school at least had a point.
Here is someone in my town explaining her experience. In this case, she absolutely needs to be anonymous, but the point is taken here in the hopes that someone cares enough to see this and blow it up to the level it deserves. (I am re-typing because it may be hard to read.)
He
llo everyone! Just wondering if anyone has had issues with East Brookfield (MA) elementary? Issues like making claims to dcf? (Department of Child and Families). My daughter told a teacher she fell off her bike…. They called dcf and alleged abuse! I tried to speak with the school and asked why they would not reach out to me first? What do they say??? For the safety of the child they are not required to report to the parents… she is 7. She’s learning to ride a bike with no training wheels. And now I am scared to let her leave my sight. I have to record every interaction and take pictures of every mark she gets on her body, because the school has now put in 2 calls against me after I stood up for myself and tried to schedule a meeting!! They then allowed DCF ro(sic) come into the school and interrogate my 6 and 7 year old without any parent present?! What is going on!!! I’d homeschool but I’m sure the school would file a 51a for neglect- this is unreal!!
I asked a teacher about this. She said there are many parents that abuse their kids. They can’t tell the parents in case it blows back on the kids.
I agree, there are those kinds of parents. (Man, the COC makes it hard to express yourself.)
I started siding with the school, then… “Wait,” I said to myself. There is no circumstance whatsoever where the parent shouldn’t be informed. In the worst case, if it actually was abuse, the parent would know the DCF was coming at them. This poor mom should not be terrified that the town was taking her child after riding her bike, falling off, and getting scrapes! This is absolutely outrageous.
Severing the mother/child bond and replacing it with the state/subject bond seems like an elusive, communistic utopian dream that has never worked.
The claim is that a teacher and administrator aren’t medically qualified to say what abuse is and what isn’t abuse. I somewhat agree with that, but common sense can go a long way. Under no circumstances, whether it be an abusive parent or not, should they not be notified. That is as anti-American as it gets.
My girls are out of this school system, but my granddaughter will be entering in a few years. So I have a new mission.
On the whole, I am happy the Department of Education is getting dismantled to leave it up to the states, but God help us in these crazy blue states. It will be the wild blue yonder out here.
You can find this post under the East Brookfield Residents page. I only have my baby toe in on Facebook, so I don’t even want to associate a link.
I feel so bad for this mom. It shouldn’t be like this.
Published in General
No, it should not.
Romney had an excellent idea when he was governor, but I don’t know what became of it. He wanted there to be citizen committees in every town that would have to approve of any Department of Child Services (DCS) action to remove a child from his or her parents.
It would be a small brake in the system, true, but I believe it would do a lot of good. As one teacher said to me, social workers often confuse poverty with neglect. I don’t know what became of it. It would be a little like our school committee. I really liked the idea. These would be people from walks of life other than social work and education.
I wouldn’t mind so much that the state is so quick to remove children if they did a better job as substitute parents. But they are awful substitute parents. Hundreds of children go missing from foster care every year. (See this story that you have to disable your ad blocker to read.) Good parents love their kids and don’t lose them. And if the kids ran away, good parents would at least try to find them. The state doesn’t even try to find them. Shouldn’t the state, if they are to stand in judgment of all parents, be good parents? They are not. Who are they to criticize other parents when they themselves do such a poor job?
Especially when they and their associates profit from it. Susan Bassi on YouTube covers a lot of that stuff, especially in California.
“All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” – Benito Mussolini
You didn’t really think that your children belonged to you and not the state?
It’s every school district. This child is not the only or first. NH came this close this week to sending a bill (HB553) up to the Gov that changed the definition of reportable offenses such that looking cross eyed at a child constitutes abuse. Go to school board meetings and take some other parents with you. Don’t wait for the Feds to change anything. Work to change your local school board. Help your children protect their children by going on offense. Or – help them homeschool their children.
Vouchers. For. Every. Child.
Its the only way we are going to break the stranglehold of the government schools, bureaucrats and teachers unions..
They produce an equine excrement of “education” ( indoctrination) while costing extravagant amounts.
Illinois had 30 schools where not a single student was proficient at reading or math.
“It takes a Village”.
Hillary Clinton
Great story! I am sure this mom will never loose her kids to the state. However, the tragedy here is the total disregard and disrespect aimed at the parents. If a child is a minor, the parents need to be informed of any interaction with the state.
And here’s real irony: parents who overprotect their children in almost every circumstance readily hand them over to people who demonstrate that they cannot be trusted and will not protect their children.
Sometime in the last twenty or so years many school districts, and even some entire states, have decided that schools and parents are in opposition to one another, that parents don’t have the best interests of their children at heart, and that schools and school personnel know the children and what’s “best” for the children better than the children’s parents do.
When our children were in school, and especially elementary school in the 1990s, the schools they attended (in California even, before California went completely crazy) were adamant that the schools were partners with parents in the education of the children, assumed that the parents were the children’s primary teachers, and that communication between parents and school was a big deal. But now school districts adopt policies that discourage, or in some cases prohibit, communication between the school and parents. There have been efforts to adopt such policies for entire states, but so far I don’t think those efforts have been successful.
The most conspicuous topic on which such policies are applied relate to sexual topics like “transgenderism” and sexual orientation.
I think our grandchildren’s school district is unlikely to adopt such non-communication policies. It’s a relatively small town, so parents and teachers see each other all over. It would be nearly impossible to keep teachers and parents from communicating with each other. Just among the lower grade teachers at one of the elementary schools, one teacher also helps out at the private dance studio my daughter takes our granddaughter to; another teacher’s husband is the T-ball coach for both grandchildren; another teacher’s husband is our grandson’s hockey coach, and the teachers come with their husbands to the games and practices; some of them have their own children in the same recreational activities as our grandchildren. They all shop at the same grocery store. When teachers and parents see each other in a variety of circumstances, it is harder to assume the worst about each other.
I wish we knew why schools decided parents were the enemy, as knowing that might allow us to try to fix that problem.
I’m torn by stories such as this one.
My daughter is an elementary school teacher and from the things she tells me, today’s parents are nothing like our parents or even like us.
There are a lot of dysfunctional and traumatized kids out there because their parents are screwy.
My first reaction was the same. There are two distinctly different issues. I really don’t have a problem with the school reporting to DCF. If they have screwy parents they should still be told. If the messed up parents then take it out on the kids then the children should be removed from that abusive situation. Face it, they would probably be beaten whether told or not.
Not telling the parents doesn’t do anyone any good in any situation. There is no justifiable reason to withhold anything from the parents.
I’m bothered that so many schools seem to be adopting policies of non-communication based on the schools’ assumption that MOST parents are screwy and are traumatizing their children.
And, based on the behavior of schools and school teachers the last five years, I’m not sure I trust their judgment on what is “screwy.”
In any event, even if the parents are screwy in some objective sense, not communicating with them is only going to make matters worse.
I have noted before that it always struck me that the excellent government elementary school our children attended in the 1990s had about 2/3 of its draw area from a neighborhood of houses with families of very high income and/or very high net worth (for which private school was easily affordable), and the school administration regularly acknowledged that the administration knew it was in competition for student attendance with several excellent private schools in the area.
Oh, that less wealthy parents would have that option.
Ah, times were different. These days, they have no concern for competition and get paid the same regardless.
A parent who punishes his child for having a DCF incident of any kind isn’t screwy, they’re monsters. Punish them if you come across them, but they can’t be a significant percent of the population. Certainly not enough to warrant this bizarre secret policy.
It’s a bit like working for the EPA or in DEI. There’s no endgame. If its your job to patrol child abuse, and you want your job to go on forever, you need to keep redefining “abuse” to create more victims.
Intact families always have an advantage. Advantage + if they read to their children.
CPS comes as close to the definition of a blunt instrument as any organization I have ever seen. In my long teaching career I was always what is called a mandated reporter. If I suspected or believe that child abuse was being committed by law I had to report it to Child Protective Services. I was fortunate in my 45 year career to have only had to file one case. There were a very large number of cases which were suspect, but which upon examining the evidence realized should not be reported because no abuse had actually occurred.
One that came immediately to mind when I read this piece had to do with a student of mine who reported to school one day with a few cuts and bruises on his hands and arms. He reported to me that his foster mother had pushed him through a storm door during an altercation. That certainly would have been considered a reportable event had it actually happened as the student claimed. I called the foster-mother and talked to her. She told me that in actual fact the student had pusher her through the storm door, and as a consequence she had had to go to the emergency room for stitches and other care. However, had I made the call to CPS she would have been harassed and investigated unrelentingly.
An example of CPS’s unrelenting and absurd investigations happened at the same school, an agency school in Seattle specifically emotionally/behaviorally disabled children, Seattle Childrens Home. A young man in one of the elementary classes went home one day and reported to his mother that he had been sexually abused and mishandled by a teacher who came into his classroom during a lesson. The child told his mother that the teacher had entered the classroom and begun to touch him in his private parts while the teacher in charge of the room and her aide looked on making only mild protests.
The absurdity of these statements, particularly given the nature of the program and the unblemished reputation of the school should have been obvious. That the child was a pathological liar should have been a consideration. However, the mother called CPS and made a report. They came to the school the next day, interviewed the “offending” teacher, the classroom teacher in whose room the event allegedly occurred, the aide, and the school administrator. As a result of these interviews the “offending” teacher, a 20 year veteran with a PhD, was put in a paid leave for 30 days while CPS continued the “investigation.” This situation which I witnessed personally proved the total insanity of CPS, and the absolute need for real discretion before ever contacting that agency with a claim.
On the other hand, when I filed a report on another student with some very serious and obvious signs of abuse and neglect the outcome was that CPS felt there was nothing they could do about the situation because the young man refused to tell them what his home situation was like. In this case, his mother was drug addicted, essentially incapable of providing the most basic care for her two children, and by any standards foster care should have been mandated. Nothing happened.
Working as I did with children with serious emotional problems for as many years as I did, I always felt that reasonable judgment was essential in any situation. Contacting parents every week by phone was a very important part of my program. Having no more than 10 students assigned to my class made that possible. The Individual Educational Program mandated by the Department of Education may have been a very big waste of time, but it did provide an opportunity for me to meet the parents in person, often in their homes, and to establish a good working relationship with them. As a parent myself, I always felt that one primary responsibility was to keep parents appraised of all aspects of their child’s education. That school districts which in my day would not give a child an aspirin without a doctor’s authorization are now witholding information about a child’s sexual fantasies from parents strikes me as well beyond the pale. Something is very wrong in the schools, in our society in general, and it is well passed the time for a correction.
This is not in defense of schools but rather a possible data point: it is possible that fewer children are learning to ride bikes (and staying home to endlessly scroll or game on devices) and that normal scrapes and bruises are no longer the norm.
The local mom in this post has already been called on twice. Terrific insight on your comment by the way.
For every twenty stories I read like the one you detailed Chowderhead, there is one where neighbors insistently complain to authorities that they hear a neighbor child being beaten and hear the screams, but authorities from CPS visit and claim that nothing was wrong.
Then the kid ends up in the ER and dies from the further inflicted injuries. But authorities state they are baffled at how the child could possibly have come to harm from the kid’s devoted parents.
The system seems designed to deliberately ignore real risks to kids and at the same time, hurt the parents that do everything right.
I get the feeling most of the parents in my neighborhood would have been locked up. All the boys in my neighborhood knew what a belt to the backside felt like. Slaps and spanks only made an impression on the little ones, but still common thing. Teachers dished out behavior modification with pointers and rulers.
Our elders proudly proclaimed “Spare the rod and spoil the child!”
I can also say that if a social worker approached a parent in my neighborhood, he might limp away.
Different world.
I suspect this has less to do with the Dept of Education and a lot more to do with mandatory reporting.
I don’t know Massachusetts, but many states have mandatory reporting for child abuse.
In Texas, school teachers, lawyers, health care providers, and a few others are required by law to report suspected child abuse. There are criminal penalties involved if a report is not made and a mandatory reporter should have known of a possibility of abuse.
So, I’m required to make such a report to a hot line. I don’t tell the parents. I don’t tell the police. I don’t tell anyone except this hotline. If there is abuse and it’s of a child currently involved in a court case for that same abuse, I still have to report it even though I know CPS and a judge are already looking into it.
So, I doubt this is a dept of education matter, though it does seem fine to me to blame them for everything.
Don’t overlook how easy it seems to be for some people to take that as a suggestion, rather than a warning.
Indeed, they may very well have been behind it.
It does take a village. A village is not a totalitarian police state like Hillary envisions. Quite the opposite.
More like 120 years than twenty. It’s worse now, of course.
There are so many false positives and false negatives that I wonder if there is a ‘system’ per se.
It was striking how every single “solution” Hillary envisioned was “more government.”
When our son was in (government run) high school (early 2000s) one of the run-ins he had with a teacher (I never found out about these run-ins until after he took care of them himself) was over some assignment in which the “correct” answer to having a problem the student wouldn’t discuss with the student’s parents was “go to the school counselor.” Our son adamantly said there were several people he’d go to first, including our church pastor, the father of his best friend, a couple of my good friends, his grandparents. The teacher gave him a lot of flack because he would not go to school personnel first. Our son did not want us to intervene, and he figured out how to navigate that conflict. We (his parents) were pleased that he recognized that he had plenty of “resources” (people in his life) who could and would help him.