BS. Nineteen is past the age of compulsory attendance to begin with.
He was neglected, plain and simple and it wouldn't surprise me if drugs were involved.
When we lived in a welfare town in NYS, there was a little 5 year old girl of someone who was on public assistance and a public school family, who was doing the same thing. Rummaging through garbage, eating the bread crusts she found. The girl was also being molested by her mother's boyfriend.
I’m a homeschool parent in NJ, and I remember the case of the 19yo who weighed 45 pounds.
But some information about that case is missing from the article:
First of all, there were a few boys in that family who were found to be very small and lightweight for their age.
What the article doesn’t mention is that ALL of those boys had been placed into the home by the Department of Youth and Family Services. And DYFS agents visited that family for years and never questioned the height/weight of the boys. One boy came to the family with an eating disorder after he’d been severely abused, and the parents claimed that the other boys picked up the disorder from him. Who knows whether that’s true.
But, what is true is that DYFS placed the one boy into the home, and after many visits, DYFS agents were so convinced that the parents were doing a great job that they continued to place other children into that home.
Then, one night, a neighbor saw one of the boys eating from a trashcan, and he called the police. And then the newspapers learned about the boys. And the public was appalled. That’s the only reason that anyone even knows the story at all.