Calling Child Protective Services on families keeping their kids home from school
a particularly cruel chapter of this pandemic
This week at The Intercept I have a new story on families that are being referred to Child Protective Services (CPS) for keeping their kids home from in-person learning this fall.
The story is focused on Covid-19, and I hope you’ll read it. But it also explores more broadly the implications of vast referrals to these sorts of agencies. The trauma of dealing with CPS is something middle class and particularly white families spend little time thinking about. But millions of families are investigated each year in the United States. National data suggests about 1 in 3 kids experience a CPS investigation in childhood, and more than half of Black children do. The vast majority of investigations do not result in confirmed maltreatment allegations, but can have lasting effects for families nonetheless.
Jennifer Jennings, a sociologist at Princeton University who focuses on education policy put it to me this way: “Child protective services is very much to Black women what mass imprisonment is to Black men. There’s a very real fear of being caught in a dragnet, irrespective of what the facts are.”
You can read the story here. Illustrated with powerful photos from photographer Cheriss May. I should note: Covid vaccines for the 28 million students ages 5-11 might become available as soon as next week! The president of the American Academy of Pediatrics had an op-ed today detailing why they endorse all parents getting their kids vaccinated.
With each article I report out, it just becomes more clear how connected all these issues are. Schools, criminal justice, labor, climate, health care, housing, reproductive freedom. There is tremendous value in having beat reporters who focus on individual topics, and I learn so much from their work. But I also consider it a great privilege and responsibility to investigate stories that help connect the dots more clearly between all these topics for you. Thanks for reading and for your help.