Education Law

Psychic Vision Leads to Child Protective Services Call on Parent

By Charles Fox

    I have seen school districts using calls to child protective services agencies as a means of chilling parental advocacy. Of course, these calls are couched under the heading of "doing our jobs", "better safe than sorry", and "we are mandatory reporters." All of these justifications would have more credibility if the calls were more even-handed and applied to school personnel who may have committed acts of abuse in the classroom. These claims are met with wide-eyed innocence with the administration dismissing such accusations with a blanket immunity that "school people do not commit acts of abuse." My glib answer is that school personnel do not take virtue pills in the morning and they are just as able to be an abuser as any parent.  At a minimum, any call to child protective services also needs to be grounded upon a reasonable basis.

    Well, one district in Canada left reason and reasonableness outside of the front door of the school. A classroom aide visited a psychic who reported that a child in her class was being abused. On this basis, the school called child protective services on a parent, who had expressed safety concerns over the handling of elopement in school. After a heart-wrenching investigation, the allegations were unfounded.  Schools everywhere need to review their internal policies as to when and on what evidence they make that hotline call to child protective services. I would hope that psychic reports without more evidence would generally not fall within any school's policies.

Full post as published by Special Education Law Blog on June 18, 2008 (boomark / email).