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
Right, I apologize, it should read "some".
BUMP FOR LATER.
It's supposed to cover the entire case to resolution. However, their biggest problem from my point of view is that they won't take a whole lot of cases, especially those involving child custody issues where homeschooling becomes a contentious issue. While I can appreciate that child custody involves a lot more than just the homeschooling issue, they won't even provide support for even the homeschooling part of that type of case.
I should have said it covers the initial consult even when the whole process isn't covered. The $100.00 does cover a whole homschooling trial.
Yes, if the parents are refusing to identify said therapists and medical professionals, and/or if the therapist is refusing to submit to such an interview (a licensed medical professional would risk losing his/her license for such a refusal, but a self-styled "therapist" doesn't need to worry about that). And I highly doubt that any licensed medical professional is involved with this child's treatment.
RK isn't maintaining anything of the sort. Even if the state has no more evidence than what is mentioned in the posted story (which was authored by the accused parent, so can hardly be presumed to be totally objective), they did not attempt to remove the child based only on an allegation by a 16 year old babysitter. The babysitter first told her mother about what she had seen/heard/smelled, and the mother then decided it should be reported to authorities. CPS workers first attempted a voluntary entrance to the home and were denied. They then went to court and got a warrant, only to discover that all the children and the mother had disappeared by the time they went to use it. We don't know what the CPS workers saw/heard/smelled when they were at the open front door of the home, or what the father may have said to them. But it may well have partially confirmed the report by the babysitter that something was seriously amiss there.
It is certainly possible that no abuse is occurring, but the father is making it awfully hard for anyone to find out. And he is apparently offering no information (at least in his public plea here) as to what sorts of "therapies" are being used on the child, or what therapist or doctor recommended the therapies. Either he is refusing to provide the info to the court, or he did tell the court some things which he neglected to mention in his public plea, and those things alarmed the court.
It's also possible that things are a lot worse than even what we've been speculating about here. Since all the children are now missing, can we be confident that the children who gave the babysitter details about the "therapy" weren't beaten to a pulp for telling? Was the mother beaten as punishment for her failures as a housekeeper, that led to the smell of urine in the house? No, I'm not assuming those things are true, but things like that do happen. I recognize that the court probably has a lot more information than we do, and may have good reason to be concerned that major abuse of the difficult adopted child, and possibly of other family members, is occurring.
Thanks! Considering our last two run-ins were negative.
"There are two likely scenarios: 1. CPS is running roughshod on these people, or 2. The therapist has questionable practices. Finding out who the therapist is would very quickly resolve much of the questions here."
And there is zero information being offered as to who the therapist is.
Members of HSLDA can call and receive help immediately from an attorney, 24 hours a day. If CPS comes to your door, you can call HSLDA, they will have an attorney on the phone almost immediately and you hand the phone out the door and they will talk to the CPS officer. I would have called HSLDA also, if it had been my family. Peace of mind for $115 a year. Priceless!
Investigators are not there to presume innocence; that is the role of the court. The investigator is there to ascertain facts. This email is very careful to avoid giving out much in the way of hard fact, and the emailer's tactics seem to be very carefully aimed at avoiding prison time as opposed to actually protecting his family.
Flight to avoid investigation has always been viewed as a sign of guilt from the first days of the Republic. It is a case of actions speaking louder than words.
Different day, different debate. :~D
When CPS gets an allegation about abuse of a homeschooled child, statistically it is more likely to be true than an allegation about an outside-schooled child, for the simple reason that a child who is being seen by a variety of other adults and children outside the home every day, is more likely to have already come to the attention of police and/or CPS if there is real abuse going on. And out of all the confirmed cases of severe child abuse, a much higher percentage are in children whose parents claim to be homeschooling them, than in children who have been attending outside schools. This is due both to the phenomenon of deliberate use of phony homeschooling to conceal abuse, and the fact that severe abuse or neglect of a child who is attending an outside school, is usually detected before it reaches the national headlines level. One has to think that the Yates children would still be alive if they had been attending even the lousiest public schools, because their appearance and the things they said about their home life would certainly have tipped off authorities that intervention was urgently needed.
The bias against homeschoolers is very real, though, and ought to be formally addressed. Homeschooled children rarely grow up to be low paid government workers, so CPS workers have virtually never been homeschooled themselves, nor do they usually have any colleagues who were homeschooled. As a result, their experience with homeschooled families is seriously skewed toward those who have been the target of abuse reports, and while plenty of perfectly innocent homeschool families have been the targets of such reports, I'm sure the percentage of truly abusive homeschool families who've been reported to CPS is far higher than the percentage of all homeschool families who are trulyabusive. HSLDA would do well to start a program in which sane and healthy homeschool families invite CPS workers and social work students planning to go into CPS-type work, into their homes to see how it works.
Indeed. And in this regard, FReepers should apply the same standards to homeschoolers, as we generally apply to people who are shot while fleeing police.
When I read about "discrepancy in furniture", I thought of the beds you see in pediatric hospitals. They are enclosed, like cages, so small children can't fall or crawl out of bed and hurt themselves. It would be shocking to a child to walk into a room and see a cage and smell urine.
"HSLDA would do well to start a program in which sane and healthy homeschool families invite CPS workers and social work students planning to go into CPS-type work, into their homes to see how it works."
There is a truly original idea.
As a homeschooling family, that would have been the first thing we did as well.
Maybe one of the HSLDA members on this thread will send it in to them. I know there really is a lot of innappropriate government interference with homeschoolers, but by focusing only on the negative, I think HSLDA is inadvertently inducing excessive paranoia in a lot of homeschooling parents. That only fuels the problem, because it tends to cause families who really aren't doing anything wrong, to adopt a paranoid defensive posture the minute a CPS worker calls or knocks on the door -- a posture which makes normal people (and some CPS workers do fall into that category) suspicious that something bad really is happening. HSLDA should work both sides of the problem, not just one.
See my post #279
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