Posted on 10/17/2005 12:14:30 PM PDT by Carry_Okie
Interested Parents,
Tuesday, October 18th at the Biltmore Hotel & Conference Center – 7:00 – 8:30pm, we are holding a meeting to inform, educate, and rally the public around the egregious abuse of power by the Santa Clara Social Services, Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) – Child Protective Services (CPS) as they attempt to rip my family, and many others apart. The Biltmore is located just south of Montague Expressway, east of highway 101 at 2151 Laurelwood Rd, Santa.
At issue are three key points that will be of interest to you as a parent:
Because we are home schoolers, we initially consulted the HSLDA who advised us not to allow CPS into our home or to interview our children unsupervised. We were further advised to seek the services of a local attorney to ensure that our rights as parents were not violated as we work to clear our names related to the allegations of child abuse, which we did.
The DFCS, as a result of our refusal to allow them to interrogate our young children without supervision, together with the fact that we home school and therefore they are unable to gain access to our children without our permission (as is commonly done when children attend school outside of the home), went to court and swore out a Protective Custody Warrant to force themselves into our home, to have their way with our children, and to remove my oldest son into their protective custody. Today, my wife and children are in hiding to protect our family, in a location not even know to me, while I have been engaged in a very distressing and disruptive court battle in an effort to have the Protective Custody Warrant quashed, a request that was denied last Friday.
To date, no one at DFCS has been interested in understanding our unique parenting needs, the resources we have used and the third parties who can speak to quality of our parenting, and love that we have for of all of our children. Their action, based on our stance of “tell us what you are concerned about so we can give you reasonable access to our family to resolve them”, has been to take the child and ask questions later. They have leveraged the courts in this effort.
Since DFCS has no interest, nor apparent requirements to ascertain the facts before they have ripped our family apart, we’ve decided to share them with you. Perhaps when you speak out someone in the agency will finally listen to how they are about to destroy yet another family in an effort to “protect” a child that does not need protection and initiate policy based changes. This is why I urge you to come out Tuesday evening! This is a completely free event paid for out of my paycheck.
Thank you for your support,
Mark I. Johnson
"Should the police be able to enter your home without a search warrant? Then why is it acceptable for CPS?"
CPS does require a warrant in order to search.
The state knows better how to raise our children? Gimme a break.
Don't know, but it wouldn't surprise me.
"Any conservative that supports this bureaucracy should be ashamed to call themselves a true conservative."
I support abolishing CPS. But you probably would not like my solution to the problem.
If a parent is convicted of inflicting death or grievous bodily harm on their child, the parent should be executed right there in the courtroom as soon as the jury finishes reading the verdict.
My son peed through his pullup the other night and his room smelled like urine until I stripped his bed, which I forgot to do til mid afternoon. How's that for a plausible scenario?
Certianly a possibility, but the fact that this kid is diagnosed with a quack diagnosis and possibly in a quack therapy, and that the babysitter was freaked out suggests something different entirely.
Some states use child abuse laws to persecute homeschoolers. If I were in that sort of state, I would be a member of HSLDA and I would call them first if I had a problem with DCF. It is a very common thing to do among homeschoolers. Giving a government flunkie access to your children or your home without legal representation is not a good move for a homeschooler.
Was that girl diagnosed by a medical doctor? If not, you can be sure that CPS intervened based on the RAD therapy, and not based on the girl's wild tales about Michael Jackson and President Bush.
I'll grant you that we don't know the whole story, but I do know that CPS in many states have a history of overreaching, so I'm willing to give dad the benefit of the doubt for a while.
"Actually, as I read the story they asked to enter, were refused, and then went and got a warrant. Therefore, I don't quite get what your point is."
The issue is what happened to a friend of mine. They assume guilt first, and then they go in and take the child away "just to be sure". It was a custody battle going on and there was no foundation to any of the charges.
Once they take the children they return them only when they choose to, which can take days or weeks. During that time the young child has to go through hell after being torn away from his parent for no good reason. The damage done to these kids (at least my friend's) in the name of protecting them is absurd.
They should have to prove a case before removal. That way they would make sure that these situations don't inflict undue trauma on small children.
On the other hand, a girl I knew was a SW for awhile. The stories she told about real abuse and really bad situations that kids were in would curl your hair. She couldn't handle it and had to quit after a few years.
My youngest daughter was allergic to everything except breast milk and threw up all other food and formula that was given to her. County Public Health noticed that she was below normal weight and marked her chart as "failure to thrive" and suggested that CPS should pay a visit.
At that point I went to my regular pediatrician who verified that she could not take anything except breast milk and told CPS to BACK OFF.
Sheesh. BTW my baby girl is now 18 and she hasn't been "below normal weight" for a long, long time.
I understand all that, that CPS can be evil. But, in this case, it seems that they have good cause to be concerned.
"They should have to prove a case before removal."
Frequently, the "proof" is a dead or severely injured child. What do we do then?
I agree, but they should also be able to obtain a warrant and do a search if they have a reasonable beleif that a child is being harmed, which in this case it seems that they do.
"Frequently, the "proof" is a dead or severely injured child. What do we do then?"
Please state your evidence for this.
There are Freepers who have discussed how there was no proof of anything, just an anonymous allegation, and yet the children were removed. Do you agree with this practice?
"I agree, but they should also be able to obtain a warrant and do a search if they have a reasonable beleif that a child is being harmed, which in this case it seems that they do."
This case is a bit unusual but in many cases they don't have this much evidence, i.e., a baby sitter's observations. Many times it is an anonymous phone call. Do you believe that is sufficient evidence for a search warrant?
"Please state your evidence for this."
I was trying to point out that if you require proof before removal, then your "proof" will consist of a dead or seriously injured child. Sorry I worded it badly.
"There are Freepers who have discussed how there was no proof of anything, just an anonymous allegation, and yet the children were removed. Do you agree with this practice?"
Having had contact with several of these cases, I will tell you this much: the FReepers are most likely not telling you everything about the case(s) in question.
Sorry, I call BS on this statement. By law no school employee can take a child to a doctor for testing without approval from the parents. In addition, Ritalin is a controlled substance and cannot be "called in" to a pharmacy by the doctor and then picked up by a school employee and then given to a child. Nope, no way, can't be done. There are holes so big in that claim a truck would fit through.
If the version of this dad's facts are true and verifable, then he just hit the lawsuit jackpot. There are dozens of lawyers salivating to take this case. The school violated so many sections of the IDEA that it is truly mind-boggling.
I'm not saying that the rest of this guy's story is not true, but considering that it is, he hurts his case and ultimately the child by making wild statements like "they put my child on Ritalin" without his knowing it.
I'll go even further, have someone freepmail me and I'll email sections of the IDEA law that pertain to this so he is ready to go with a laywer.
Actually, I was one of the people who sided with the Christine from a legal standpoint, though I don't endorse what I read about their childrearing methods. But the facts of that case were really troubling.
I don't recall all the details, but one serious issue was that the youngest girl , who IIRC was only around 4, was snatched from the family's bus-home by authorities and then subjected not only to interviews, but also to a physical exam which included a pelvic exams, photos of which one of the judges involved in the case deemed "pornographic". Neither the parents, nor an attorney for the parents was present for any of this. By the time a young child has been subjected that kind of trauma, even assuming she wasn't deliberately "coached", it is utterly impossible for a child psychiatrist to reliably determine what kind of abuse, if any, may have been perpetrated on the child by the parents. E.g. if you gave that little girl one of those anatomically correct dolls BEFORE all that, she'd react to it in one way, but would almost certainly react very differently if it was given to her after the pelvic exam, which was conducted by strangers while she had no idea where her parents or siblings were or whether she'd ever see them again.
While I thought it was pretty clear that the Christine family did warrant some intervention by authorities, there was no evidence that anything short of grabbing the children and keeping them away from their parents, had been seriously attempted first (or attempted at all). That case might well have been handled by court-ordered parenting classes and social worker visits. Given the heavy-handed and child-traumatizing methods by which the authorities initially dealt with the family, I felt the Christines needed to be cut some slack and offered some alternatives that didn't involve terminating their parental rights.
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