Good morning. It’s Friday. Get ready for rain, sun and snow, in that order. Today we’ll look at the debate about whether to report a family to child protective services over excessive school absences. We’ll also talk about why Gov. Kathy Hochul is putting the brakes on driverless taxis.
Thousands of times a year in New York City, teachers and other educators report families to the child welfare authorities because students in the families are chronically absent.
They are required to do so by state law, and at one level the law sounds reasonable. After all, if a student does not come to school consistently, it could be a sign of more serious problems at home that warrant looking into.
But in 2023, only 8 percent of those reports by educators arising solely from chronic absenteeism led to a family court finding that a child had been neglected or abused.
That means that the vast majority of families who are reported over absences are unnecessarily put through the wringer of a child-welfare investigation — a process many find intrusive and even traumatic, their advocates say.
For this reason, my colleagues Troy Closson and Samantha Latson reported Thursday, there is a growing movement to have chronic absence no longer prompt a child welfare report, known as an “educational neglect” case. About half of all states, including California, Texas and Illinois, do not require the child welfare authorities to intervene in cases of educational neglect. And there is a push to have New York join their ranks.
It’s not that chronic absenteeism or truancy is not a problem. It is linked to many bad outcomes, and it spiked nationwide after the pandemic, though it has come down a bit since then. In New York City public schools, the percentage of students classified as chronically absent jumped from 26 percent during the 2018-19 school year to 40 percent in 2021-22 and was at 33 percent in 2024-25. The rate for high school students is even higher.
But it is not clear that mandated reporting to the child welfare authorities is the answer.
Nora McCarthy, the executive director of the New York City Family Policy Project, a think tank that analyzed city data, said that chronic absence often has causes that can be addressed by offering the family help, not by dragging them into the legal system.
“A lot of families have housing instability, or the person taking the child to school is struggling with a health issue,” she said. “There are children with mental health problems who can be connected to therapy. You see kids with undiagnosed learning disabilities who have fallen behind and don’t want to be in school and just need better services. There are responses where you do more outreach and send a parent coordinator to visit the home.”
A report released last year by the American Federation of Teachers called for doing away with mandated reporting for teachers altogether and replacing it with “mandated support” by school systems for families having problems.
The report, “Nobody Wins,” said that mandated reporting by teachers might do more harm than good. It included a nationwide survey of teachers in which nearly half said that mandated reporting had damaged their relationships with the families they most needed to help, and fewer than 25 percent observed improvements after making a report.
In New York, there is even a group called Mandated Reporters Against Mandated Reporting whose members include “social workers, social service & mental health workers seeking to dismantle mandated reporting & end family policing.” Many of them work in school systems.
New York State has already taken steps to require teachers to try to connect families to help. Since 2019, the state-run hotline that screens abuse and neglect reports has been required to reject reports of “educational neglect” from educators unless the educators show that they have tried to work with parents first. That has led to a substantial drop in educational neglect reports, McCarthy said.
But Emily Putnam-Hornstein, a child welfare expert at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told Troy and Samantha that efforts to reduce calls to welfare agencies were “very, very concerning.” She cautioned against asking adults who work with children to be “their own individual keepers of information” rather than reporting concerns to a central agency.
Weather
Today: Rain and gloom, with a high around 41. A bit more springlike on Saturday, with some sun and temperatures creeping into the mid-40s. Then snow on Sunday, with a high of 37. How much snow, and whether it will stick, are unknown, but expect no more than an inch or two.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until March 3 (Purim).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“Time is money.” — Charles Iwuoha, an Uber driver who uses an electric vehicle, said as the company took steps to expand E.V. charging stations near drivers.
The latest New York news
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Living rent-free in a Manhattan hotel: After checking into the New Yorker Hotel for one night, Mickey Barreto exploited an obscure New York City housing law to stay there for five years. Barreto admitted this week to forging property records in what prosecutors said was a criminal scheme to claim ownership of the building.
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Mamdani seeks another deputy mayor: Mayor Zohran Mamdani is planning to hire a new deputy mayor to oversee the Department of Community Safety, a civilian corps that would respond to mental health emergencies.
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Sex-trafficking laws: Lawyers build sex-crime cases, like those involving Sean Combs and Jeffrey Epstein, around trafficking laws because the statutes are broad and use language that can encompass a variety of crimes, experts say.
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An abrupt resignation: Jamiel Altaheri, an assistant police chief hired to help lead the law enforcement agency at New York City’s public hospitals, abruptly resigned after reporters inquired about allegations that he engaged in misconduct while he was a police chief in Michigan.
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Shakespeare returns to Broadway: A boisterous reimagining of Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing,” starring two Marvel alumni, Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell, will be staged on Broadway this fall after a successful London run.
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What we’re watching: The historian David Levering Lewis, Pulitzer-winning biographer of W.E.B. Du Bois and author of the new memoir “The Stained Glass Window,” appears on “New York Times Close Up With Sam Roberts.” He talks about how one family’s journey from slavery through Jim Crow and civil rights reframes American history and Du Bois’s unfinished legacy in Trump’s America. The program is broadcast on CUNY TV at 7:30 p.m. on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.
Driverless cabs aren’t coming to upstate streets after all
Driverless taxis have been popping up in cities all over the country, including Los Angeles, Phoenix, San Francisco and Miami. But riders cannot yet hail a “robotaxi” anywhere in New York State, and on Thursday, Gov. Kathy Hochul reversed course on a move that would have paved the way for them outside New York City.
After opposition from cabbies and labor groups, Ms. Hochul withdrew a proposal that would have let companies like Waymo and Uber seek approval from local governments to pick up passengers, my colleagues Stefanos Chen and David McCabe wrote.
“Based on conversations with stakeholders, including in the Legislature, it was clear that the support was not there to advance this proposal,” a spokesman for the governor said.
Waymo said it was disappointed but would keep trying to enter the market in New York State. It has been testing eight of its cars in New York City since last year, but they can’t pick up passengers and are required by state law to have a human driver at the wheel.
The test period in the city ends on March 31, and Ms. Hochul favors extending it. But such a move would also need city approval, and the office of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has voiced skepticism about having driverless taxis on the streets of the nation’s biggest city, did not respond to a question about extending the testing period.
Groups representing human cab and ride-share drivers have raised concerns about the safety of autonomous taxis and warned that they could destroy jobs. The head of a group that represents more than 140,000 drivers statewide called the governor’s move “a major win for ride-share workers and an important step for public safety and working families.”
Supporters of driverless cars say robotaxis can make for-hire vehicles more accessible to people with disabilities and maintain that they are safer than cars with drivers.
METROPOLITAN diary
Working cat
Dear Diary:
I was in Hell’s Kitchen when I noticed a tomcat sitting between two open sidewalk cellar doors outside a deli.
He was perched on the top step of the stairs to the basement, his head peeking above street level. The contrast of his white coat against the black doors caught my eye.
Perhaps he was on duty, monitoring for intruders. Or maybe he was on his break, enjoying a moment outside.
I can’t resist petting every cat I see. So I reached for him. Despite his professional aloofness, he obliged me.
It was almost as if it was part of his job.
— Ana Boavida Caflisch
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. A.N.
Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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Andy Newman writes about New Yorkers facing difficult situations, including homelessness, poverty and mental illness. He has been a journalist for more than three decades.
The post Should Child Welfare Be Called Over School Absences? appeared first on New York Times.
