NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending January 27, 2026

● Parents of disabled children often need to fight tooth and nail to get schools to provide the services their children need, and are entitled to under law. A lawsuit in New York City documents a common way schools fight back: Filing false child abuse reports alleging “educational Neglect.” The Daily News has a story, and I have a blog post about the lawsuit – and how the practice is not limited to New York. 

● In still another case of alleged harassment, this time by the New York City family police agency itself, the New York Post reports, in a follow-up to a story first reported earlier this month, that the agency even harassed a family after their removal of a child from the home allegedly led to her death. 

From the story: 

The city’s Administration for Children’s Services “stole” a vibrant but mentally ill teenager from her family months before she leapt to her death from the Brooklyn Bridge in despair, her mom told The Post. 

Jade Smith was just 13 — but had already spent years battling hallucinations and suicidal thoughts — when ACS took custody of her for 4 1/2 months and began bouncing her between foster homes, her family said in a lawsuit. 

She committed suicide in January 2023. 

“They made everything so much worse,” mom Terri Nimmo claimed in her first public remarks. “She should be here and she isn’t — and it is ACS’ fault. Their behavior resulted in my daughter dying.”… 

● In 2023, a new law in Washington State took effect that said, in effect, you can’t tear children from their families based on broad, vague definitions of neglect or some caseworker’s gut feeling. That led to a torrent of media stories scapegoating the law for an increase in child abuse deaths that actually began well before it took effect. KUOW Public Radio took a different approach: The public radio station actually spoke to people on all sides of the issue, allowed all sides to be heard – and then checked the data, including details such as this: 

[T]he numbers don’t support that taking more kids out of struggling homes would reduce the number of deaths. The year the most children on CPS’s radar died in Washington was 2012, long before the Keeping Families Together Act. At that time, case workers took nearly twice the number of kids from their families as they do today. 

Although that’s been well-known for years, I am aware of no other Washington State news organization that has bothered to point that out.

● The Kentucky Lantern reports on legislation that “would allow judges to consider an alternative sentence for parents charged with low-level, nonviolent crimes to keep families together.”  Said Amber Duke, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky: “Kentucky kids should not serve their parents’ sentences.” 

● Speaking of child welfare and drug use, this ProPublica story illustrates still another reason not to rely on drug testing when deciding whether to tear apart a family:  

A ProPublica investigation found that Averhealth’s lab practices have not only been faulted by its own accreditor but also targeted in lawsuits, and prompted Michigan’s child welfare agency to order its employees not to use Averhealth’s tests as evidence in court and to withdraw any petitions based solely on the lab’s results. 

The state has since stopped using Averhealth. But what about all the children victimized by needless removal due to faulty drug tests before Michigan issued this order?

● In Missouri, some legislators are bemoaning the horrendous workloads of caseworkers for their family police agency, the Children’s Division (as they should). They’re also saying that, therefore, the Children’s Division should hire a whole lot more workers (which they shouldn’t). I have a blog post about it. 

In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories Go in All Directions: 

● Here’s what happened, according to a lawsuit that was the topic of a story in the Dayton Daily News:

 A mother did something the county family police agency found inexcusable when her children were home on overnight visits from foster care. When they appeared to be very sick, she – horrors! -- took them to the ER to be checked by a doctor.  The family police agency was so furious about this that they not only cut off visits for a time (thereby punishing the children for the “transgression” of the mother), they also threatened to terminate the children’s rights to ever live with her. 

So she gave in. Instead, over and over, she would notify caseworkers and plead with them to act. According to the lawsuit, they didn’t. Now, after another untreated illness, her son is dead.