In the largest county in Nevada, child welfare officials typically are required by state law to investigate when a student repeatedly misses school. But recently, they made a striking request to the state. They asked to stop reporting serial absences.
Across Minnesota, a band of school districts joined the same movement — seeking to handle absences in-house and stop relying so much on child protective services.
And in New York, some advocates want the nation’s largest school system to follow their lead.
The three recent developments illuminate a vexing and urgent question in education. Urban districts are struggling to reverse a surge in absenteeism as millions of American schoolchildren continue to miss significant class time. Some schools try calling families or mailing letters home.
But what if children are still missing class?
Should teachers turn to child protective services for help?
It is anything but a simple calculation, fueling a growing number of high-stakes debates in U.S. education systems about if — and when — schools should call child welfare agencies to report excessive absences.
The country’s second-largest teachers’ union and some advocates argue that mandates to report repeated absences do little to solve the problem. Homeless children, for example, miss school more often because of all the obstacles their families face.
Yet other advocates warn that teachers play a vital role in spotting warning signs of deeper problems for children at home. They argue that keeping a close eye on chronic absenteeism is crucial — and fear that overlooking the issue can end in tragedy.
The quest to find the right balance is especially fraught in New York, where a crushing affordability crisis has left many public school families struggling. The city’s child welfare agency has previously been criticized by some of its own caseworkers, and Black and Latino families are overrepresented in cases compared with their enrollment in the education system.
Nora McCarthy, the executive director of the New York City Family Policy Project, a think tank that analyzed city data, said that these investigations — known as educational neglect cases — are often a terrifying prospect for families, even when investigators do not find evidence of maltreatment.
Across the nation, about half of all states, including California, Illinois and Texas, do not regard educational neglect as a reason to contact child welfare hotlines. And as lawmakers in New York convene for their annual session, Ms. McCarthy believes the state should follow in their footsteps.
“We just don’t really have a good response on kids missing school — and it shouldn’t be penalizing and frightening parents” through the child protection system, she said.
At the heart of the debate is the nation’s network of mandated reporters. These are the officials required to report suspected cases of child abuse or neglect. Their ranks generally include doctors, police officers, social workers and school staff members.
Yet the role of school employees is a lightning rod. They are responsible for roughly one in five calls to child protective agencies across the United States. But their reports are far less likely to be borne out.
In New York City, school employees call in roughly 10,000 cases of suspected abuse or neglect each year, according to the most recent data. Educational neglect is a frequent claim, featured in more than a third of their reports. But it rarely results in an official finding of neglect or abuse.
Advocates argue that as a result, many parents are unnecessarily ensnared in the child protective system. In recent years, the city’s education leaders acknowledged that invasive welfare investigations “can have deeply traumatic and lingering consequences for our young people and their families.”
Andrew Hevesi, a Queens assemblyman who chairs a committee on children and families, said he believes that too many workers remain “afraid they are going to be sued or lose their job.”
He recently sponsored a measure to eliminate civil and criminal penalties for mandated reporters who fail to report, and said that he wants to prevent “people being forced to call in cases on families they don’t think should be.”
Yet this movement has been met with resistance and alarm. It may be worth reviewing whether fewer investigations are needed, some experts say, but the answer should never be to dissuade teachers from reporting their concerns.
Emily Putnam-Hornstein, a child welfare expert and professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, described efforts to reduce calls to welfare agencies as “very, very concerning.”
When students, especially younger children, are repeatedly absent, it prompts safety concerns and signals that “something is going on in the home,” she said.
Ms. Putnam-Hornstein said she fears that if states ask adults who work with children to be their “own individual keepers of information” — rather than reporting concerns to a central agency — “we really probably reduce child safety and increase child harm.”
In New York, recent city guidance notes that calling child protective services should be an “option of last resort.” Poor attendance alone is not “reasonable cause to suspect maltreatment.” Still, the city says schools should go further than simply sending home a note or leaving a voice mail message.
City officials said that they spent recent years training school workers on when it was appropriate to report concerns regarding child safety, and pointed to a steady reduction in educational neglect reports since 2019. They said those calls have declined by more than a third.
“The child protective system plays a vital role in ensuring the safety of children,” the guidance from the city’s Education Department and child welfare agency says, while noting that, “where there is no suspected abuse or maltreatment, schools can better serve struggling families with direct assistance.”
Looming over the debate — and atop the minds of many teachers — are times when the welfare network failed. A decade ago, the beating deaths of young children in New York prompted a surge in reports and the resignation of the city’s welfare commissioner. And since then, other alarming cases have prompted renewed scrutiny on the relationship between school attendance and children’s well-being.
Michael Arsham, a former longtime high-level official in the city’s child welfare agency, the Administration for Children’s Services, said that he witnessed firsthand the complexity of these questions in practice.
He saw it all: a disabled caretaker struggling to bring her grandchildren to school because of a decrepit elevator in her building.
A child who shared a bed with a sibling prone to bed-wetting and was reluctant to attend school after they had an accident.
A teenager avoiding a school that failed to address his academic struggles.
Mr. Asham said that “in the vast majority of families that I worked with over the course of a near 50-year career, no, there were reasons that really had nothing to do with parental neglect.”
He added, though, that he still believes that educational neglect should be taken seriously because of the cases in which “there is something dangerous underlying it.”
Some schools might sidestep these dilemmas if they teamed up more effectively with parents and social workers, said Jessica Chock-Goldman, the director of clinical services at Bard High School Early College in Manhattan.
Ms. Chock-Goldman, an adjunct assistant professor at New York University, said research shows that excessive absences can be rooted in many challenges, including homelessness, students refusing to attend school, parental substance use and mental health problems.
It means that to find answers, she said, “the families need to be part of the mix.”
Troy Closson is a Times education reporter focusing on K-12 schools.
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