Originally published in The Intercept on December 3, 2021.
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ON TUESDAY, in a suburb of Detroit, a 15-year-old boy brought his father’s semi-automatic handgun to school and shot 11 fellow students, killing at least four. It was the latest example of a problem that has become endemic in the United States: According to NBC News’s school shooting tracker, it was the third school shooting this year; the 14th since the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida; and at least the 46th since the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012.

As pressure mounts again for action and advocates face familiar opposition from Republicans to gun control, a quieter battle has been brewing between groups on the Democratic side of the aisle, some of which support measures that could increase the role of law enforcement in schools, while others say we need greater focus on dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline. Both camps include parent groups, pitting the parents of school shooting victims against those who have seen their children undergo the harms of chronic overpolicing.

One group of grieving parents has become something of a legislative powerhouse. Organizing under the banner of Stand With Parkland and representing parents of the shooting victims at Marjory Stoneman Douglas, they have successfully pushed for a number of policy changes to school safety both in Florida and nationwide, including a bill to improve the National Instant Criminal Background Check System and a bill to fund investments in school security training.

On the heels of these victories, the Parkland parents have turned their attention to several other pieces of legislation winding their way through Congress, holding more than a dozen meetings with lawmakers in Washington last month. These include the Luke and Alex School Safety Act (named for two of the students who died in the Parkland massacre), or LASSA, which would codify a federal clearinghouse to outline school security recommendations, and the EAGLES Act (named for the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school mascot), which would establish a new program focused on violence prevention in schools at the National Threat Assessment Center, a division of the U.S. Secret Service.

While Stand With Parkland hails both LASSA and the EAGLES Act as critical, proactive safety measures, coalitions of hundreds of civil rights, disability rights, and privacy groups have been working hard to stop those bills from becoming law. In a series of letters sent to Congress over the past year, advocates have criticized the bills for entrenching school safety with law enforcement and for their embrace of threat assessment, a violence prevention strategy pioneered by the Secret Service to protect the president and other public officials.

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In an October letter, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which represents more than 220 national groups, wrote to lawmakers that “Relying on threat assessment systems, as outlined in the EAGLES Act, would be misguided, detrimental, and wasteful.”

Stand With Parkland parents are familiar with the legislative objections raised by civil rights advocates, but they have not engaged with these critics directly. “We have not met with those coalitions, but we are aware of the concerns,” said Tony Montalto, the group’s president, whose 14-year-old daughter Gina died in the shooting. “The idea of identifying someone in crisis or in need is to connect them with the resources they need. It’s not designed to punish, it’s not designed to incarcerate, but to proactively offer students individualized support before they turn to violence.”

One academic researcher and threat assessment proponent went so far as to compare the civil rights groups to anti-vaccine advocates, saying that their objections “are causing harm to many children by undermining a safe and effective practice that protects them.”

IN 2019, Jamari Nelson, a Black first grader with autism, was subjected to a threat assessment that civil rights leaders nationwide now point to as a prime example of how these evaluations can go wrong, especially for students with disabilities. The 7-year-old was temporarily barred from school and assessed after a classroom incident that culminated in Nelson hitting a teacher on the head with a whiteboard. His report indicated that he was “extremely manipulative” and “distrustful” and displayed an “alternate identity” as a force to be reckoned with. Nelson’s mother pulled him out of school following the experience, which was detailed in a shocking investigation in Searchlight New Mexico.

In a school setting, threat assessments generally involve teams that include a mental health professional, an administrator, and school or local police to evaluate potential student threats and propose interventions. The teams deem potential threats either “transient,” meaning that they do not involve serious intent to cause harm, or “substantive,” meaning that they do. The two designations trigger different responses, with the former typically entailing a quicker and ideally less punitive resolution than the latter.

In a report published this spring, the Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center analyzed 67 disrupted plots against K-12 schools between 2006 and 2018 and concluded that threat assessment is the “best practice” to prevent school shootings. While the report acknowledged that many of the disrupted plots had been stopped using arrests and criminal charges, the authors urged intervention before a criminal investigation becomes necessary, using tactics like connecting students with social services, adult monitoring, and conflict resolution support.

Civil rights groups say that the Secret Service overestimates its ability to prevent shootings, as the agency flags as risk factors conditions that apply to millions of students — like receiving mental health treatment, having a history of substance abuse, and being bullied. And while the Secret Service concluded that school-based police play an important role in preventing school shootings, other research has found that school police do not prevent school shootings or gun-related incidents. They do, however, increase suspensions, expulsions, and student arrests.

Threat assessment skeptics like Miriam Rollin, director of the Education Civil Rights Alliance, say that the model is often framed as the “chicken soup” of school shootings — meaning that it can’t hurt and should help — but in practice, it gets implemented in ways that harm students like Nelson. Civil rights groups also believe that threat assessments undermine existing programs like “Child Find,” a program implemented under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act that helps connect students with mental health services.

“We absolutely oppose the use of threat assessment,” Liz King, director of education policy at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, told The Intercept. “It is not possible to implement it in a way that has a positive effect on students.”

The policies promoted by Stand With Parkland aren’t the only measures that support the use of threat assessments making their way through Congress. An additional such bill called the Behavioral Intervention Guidelines, or BIG, Act was passed by the House in May, though Stand With Parkland has not formally endorsed it.

The BIG Act would task the federal departments of Health and Human Services, Education, and Homeland Security with developing crisis intervention plans for students with mental illnesses who have been deemed threatening. In a June letter opposing the legislation, the Coalition for Smart Safety wrote: “We are fundamentally opposed to the notion that behavioral interventions in schools begin with the assumption that the student is a threat and that a threat must be mitigated. … Students of color are over policed and disproportionately disciplined in schools and we should curb this problem rather than further entrenching ineffective and discriminatory systems.”

Both parents of school shooting victims and civil rights groups are pressing lawmakers for more school-based mental health services, but the bills each camp is pushing approach the issue very differently.

“We’re not identifying [students] as a problem, we’re identifying the problems that they are experiencing or are feelings and making sure that they are getting the help that they need,” said April Schentrup, whose daughter Carmen, 16, was also murdered in the Parkland shooting. Stand With Parkland is pushing for the Mental Health in Schools Excellence Program Act, a bill led by Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., and Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., to increase recruitment and retention of school-based counselors. Civil rights groups, in turn, are rallying behind the Counseling Not Criminalization in Schools Act, which would ban the use of federal funds for police in schools and establish a new grant program to hire more counselors, social workers, nurses, and psychologists.

DEWEY CORNELL, a professor of education at the University of Virginia and the country’s leading advocate for school-based threat assessments, has published an array of studies cited by supporters of LASSA, the EAGLES Act, and the BIG Act. He first became interested in school violence while working at a hospital in 1983, after evaluating a 16-year-old boy who murdered a 14-year-old girl. “He was depressed over the breakup of his parents’ marriage and angry at the girl for teasing him and calling him ‘pizza face’ because of his acne,” Cornell told Virginia Magazine. “I thought about this case and how little we understood the causes and determinants of violent behavior.”

Cornell’s data suggests schools that used threat assessment were less likely to use other exclusionary school discipline practices and that racial disparities among those who are suspended or expelled were also reduced. In one randomized controlled trial he led, schools using threat assessment suspended Black and white students at equal rates, whereas schools without threat assessments suspended Black students at a higher rate than their white peers.

“Threat assessment essentially protects students of color as well as students in special education from disproportionate discipline,” Cornell told The Intercept.

Civil rights advocates argue that Cornell’s focus on threat assessment outcomes downplays the trauma that those who are referred to be assessed experience. For example, students with disabilities were referred to be evaluated at nearly four times the rate as the general student population, according to Cornell’s own data. He insists that such referral disparities “should not be alarming,” noting that students of color and students with disabilities are already disciplined at far higher rates than other students — irrespective of threat assessment. In other words, he argues, if threat assessment results in less punitive discipline policies for those groups of students and instead provides them with mental health and social services, that’s a good thing.

Rollin, of the Education Civil Rights Alliance, argues that Cornell’s research conflates students who received referrals for services with those who actually received them, stressing that there has never been enough support available for students with disabilities. Diane Smith Howard of the National Disability Rights Network agrees, calling this process “referrals to nowhere.”

Cornell considers this critique “a bogus argument that just tries to raise the bar high enough to discount our findings.” He also dismissed the example of Jamari Nelson, saying that “from a scientific perspective, anecdotal evidence is not evidence, no matter how dramatic or compelling it is.”

CIVIL RIGHTS ADVOCATES have been scrambling over the last few weeks since they heard that LASSA could be introduced as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, a must-pass piece of legislation still being debated in the Senate. In July, Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., moved the bill out of his Homeland Security Committee to the full Senate, but Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., put a hold on it after communicating with civil rights groups.

“LASSA supporters are now looking for another way to bypass the hold, and since they couldn’t do it with reconciliation, we think they might try with NDAA,” Dara Baldwin, director of national policy for the Center for Disability Rights, told The Intercept. “Their No. 1 goal is to get it passed in the Senate this year, which will make it easier to get it over the finish line in 2022, especially if Republicans retake the House.” Civil rights groups have been ramping up pressure on Democratic leadership to oppose any such amendment. Murphy, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Senate Education Committee Chair Patty Murray, D-Wash., did not return requests for comment.

Baldwin said that her coalition is particularly frustrated with Peters for moving LASSA forward, seeing it as a slap in the face to the Black voters who helped Democrats win Michigan in 2020. A committee aide for Peters told The Intercept that while the senator has not co-sponsored the bill, he agreed to move it forward “with the understanding that it would need more work — including work with other committees — to address many of the concerns that have been raised by key stakeholders before it can be considered by the full Senate.” The aide did not respond to follow-up inquiries about how passing the bill as an NDAA amendment would undermine opportunities for further work.

Alexa Henning, a spokesperson for Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., one of three original co-sponsors of the bill, declined to say whether her boss plans to introduce LASSA as an NDAA amendment. “Criticism of [LASSA] is misguided,” she told The Intercept. “It’s unfortunate anyone would want to prevent schools, teachers, and parents from knowing what resources are available to help protect their students.”

King, of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, said the political momentum around the threat assessment bills is a result of lawmakers refusing to take real action on gun control yet still feeling urgent pressure to respond to mass shootings.

After the Parkland shooting, 19 states adopted so-called red flag laws, which provide police or family members ways to prevent gun purchases and possession by those deemed a threat, and Parkland parents are still pushing for a federal bill that would incentivize more states to follow suit. But momentum, particularly among state Republican leaders, has since fizzled out. Seemingly incapable of preventing violence, governments are often left in a reactive position, as in the case of Tuesday’s shooting outside Detroit, where the 15-year-old suspect could now face life in prison on charges of murder and terrorism.

“It’s a dangerous cocktail of debate framed in ways that refuse to engage in any remedy that is not criminalizing,” King said. “From our perspective, we need action now, we need action yesterday, but we are in a situation where one side is unwilling to do anything to address the underlying problem about the easy availability of guns.”

Originally published in The Intercept on November 9, 2021.
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IN LATE OCTOBER, after a series of student fights broke out at public schools in Prince George’s County, school district officials informed parents in the predominantly Black suburb of Washington, D.C., that they were taking steps to respond. “All has been handled,” wrote Timothy Gover, a school security official, in an email reviewed by The Intercept. With footage of some fights circulating online, Gover added, “Also reached out to A/Sgt Tilus of Homeland Security and they are going to attempt to monitor social media in ref to the Suitland and Wise,” two high schools where fights had recently taken place.

Anthony Tilghman, a local education activist, posted Gover’s email in a community Facebook group. The email listed other measures, including the temporary addition of extra school security to the two high schools and a request to the local police department for reinforcements. But it was the casual reference to “Homeland Security” that stood out.

Two years ago, the Prince George’s County Council voted unanimously to bar all county agencies from working with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a subdivision of the Department of Homeland Security. But if state and local homeland security divisions collect student data, agents could enter that information into any of the many federal DHS databases, creating a backdoor route for federal surveillance and immigration enforcement.

Prince George’s County Public Schools spokesperson Meghan Gebreselassie confirmed in an email to The Intercept that “Homeland Security” was contacted to “support monitoring social media for student conflicts/ to mitigate a possible school fight.” While the county has its own Office of Homeland Security, Gebreselassie clarified that the school district works with a separate Homeland Security division housed within the Prince George’s County Police Department. She said the district contacts the office “regularly for assistance when it comes to ensuring student safety.”

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“This warrantless, dragnet surveillance of minors is a clear violation of their civil rights and is an immediate threat to undocumented students and students with undocumented family members,” wrote Daniel Greene, a Prince George’s County parent, in an email to Board of Education CEO Monica Goldson and 13 board members. Greene raised concerns that the district’s practices were in violation of the 2019 ordinance barring cooperation with ICE and said that he would be filing Freedom of Information Act requests for more information. “I don’t believe federal anti-terror and anti-immigration surveillance is in any way suited to the task of settling fights among minors,” he wrote.

Goldson responded by writing that the district would review its actions to ensure that they were in compliance with the 2019 ordinance and that it is the district’s “desire and intent” to follow the law’s expectations and guidelines.

Gebreselassie referred The Intercept’s questions about the collection of social media posts to the police. The Prince George’s County Police Department did not return multiple requests for comment.

CIVIL RIGHTS AND legal advocates told The Intercept that they had not heard previously of homeland security offices surveilling students following school fights and warned that teenagers would likely have little idea of how their information is later used.

“Given how central social media is to young people’s lives, protecting people’s social media posts and protecting kids from state surveillance is extremely important,” said Vera Eidelman, an American Civil Liberties Union staff attorney focused on protecting free speech online. “It’s even more pernicious for kids who tend to say any number of really strongly felt things in the moment.”

Data collected through youth surveillance could be used to bolster already shoddy and discriminatory gang databases, national experts warn. Individuals, typically Black and Latino men, are frequently added to these police databases for trivial matters like standing on certain street corners, having particular tattoos, or meeting with someone else suspected to be in a gang. Even though the databases are well known to be riddled with inaccurate information, federal agencies still routinely consult them.

“Allegations of potential gang involvement are where we historically have seen and continue to see real collaboration between the Prince George’s County police and ICE,” said Nick Katz, legal director of CASA, an immigrant advocacy organization. “Often individuals will be flagged for baseless gang allegations — like being in a picture with someone else believed to be in a gang — and then entered into local and national databases which can be used in any way [officials] want.” Katz had not heard of homeland security forces surveilling students after school fights before but said he was not surprised given the way high school students of color are routinely branded as public safety threats.

Greene, who studies technology and surveillance as an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, knows from his professional work how federal agencies can leverage the data they collect through surveillance. In 2017, for example, ICE used surveillance data to arrest and deport Rómulo Avelica-González, a father of four who had been living in California for 25 years.

“The first thing a parent said to me when I brought this up was, ‘Well, you know this might sound scary, but if people weren’t involved in those fights, then they’ve got nothing to worry about,’” Greene told The Intercept. “I think that fundamentally misunderstands what this surveillance is for and how it works.”

THOUGH IT IS now the largest federal law enforcement organization and the third-largest federal employer in the United States, the Department of Homeland Security did not exist before 2003. Feeling they had been caught flat-footed by the 9/11 attacks, federal leaders launched the new agency with a mandate to coordinate anti-terrorism efforts and doled out hundreds of millions of dollars to establish so-called fusion centers, which collect, analyze, and share information about alleged terror threats. Blurring the jurisdictional boundaries between local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies, the centers encourage sharing as much data as possible between all three.

Two decades in, critics charge fusion centers as yet another invasive and ineffective national security measure. A two-year bipartisan Senate investigation released in 2012 concluded that fusion centers had “yielded little, if any, benefit to federal counterterrorism intelligence efforts” and often collected intelligence of “uneven quality – oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens’ civil liberties and Privacy Act protections.” In 2020, The Intercept reported that fusion centers were being used to monitor racial justice organizers and Black Lives Matter protests.

“Far from the lofty justifications given for their existence—securing the homeland and so on—the titles of the reports [fusion centers have] produced suggest a focus on criminal activity (supposed or otherwise) so mundane it’s at times comical,” wrote Ken Klippenstein in an investigation for The Nation earlier this year. Klippenstein, now a reporter at The Intercept, found that fusion centers rarely produced reports focused on counterterrorism, opting instead for investigations with titles like “Subscribers of Black Extremism Collaborate Musically” and “Criminal and Violent Extremist Use of Emojis.”

Gover, an operations supervisor for the Prince George’s County school district’s security division, said in his email that he had communicated with “A/Sgt Tilus of Homeland Security” about social media monitoring. The only county police officer listed in OpenPayrolls and other databases with that name is Wantalex Tilus, a Prince George’s County police corporal. In 2011, Tilus was sued by a parent for handcuffing and beating her seventh grade son in a civil case that was ultimately dismissed in 2015. Gebreselassie, the Prince George’s County Public Schools spokesperson, did not answer multiple requests for comment about the officer’s identity. Tilus referred The Intercept to the police department press team, which did not return requests for comment.

In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson for the federal Department of Homeland Security said their department “is not participating in social media monitoring related to PG County schools” but did not deny that it could review any data collected. The spokesperson wrote that the state-operated fusion centers exist “for the receipt, analysis, gathering and sharing of threat-related information between federal, state, local, tribal, territorial, and private sector partners.”

Prince George’s County Council Member Deni Taveras, the lead sponsor of the legislation barring cooperation with ICE, did not return a request for comment. The county’s Board of Education Chair Juanita Miller also did not return requests for comment.

AN EXAMPLE OF how the sharing of this flawed data can be used was on display in March 2017, when six ICE agents raided Wilmer Catalan-Ramirez’s home in Chicago, arrested him, and placed him in deportation proceedings. Catalan-Ramirez’s lawyers later learned that his arrest came from Chicago police erroneously placing him in their local gang database, a measure that effectively stripped him of sanctuary privacy protections he would have otherwise had. The city later acknowledged its mistake, and Catalan-Ramirez was released from ICE custody in 2018. This past spring, national civil rights groups organized a petition calling on DHS to end its practice of prioritizing for immigration enforcement those alleged to be involved with gangs.

“The thing about bulk data collection is, even if you trust the guys now, you might not later,” said Greene, the parent and University of Maryland assistant professor. “Data is used to build categories, and it all justifies more collection tomorrow. It’s far from being this thing where you’re looking for one bad kid. You’re taking all kids, or certain subsets like young Black and Latino working-class kids, and saying, ‘We’re going to hold on to their socials to build patterns.’”

Faiza Patel, co-director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program, noted that in the wake of horrific school shootings, private companies raced to develop new social media monitoring software to sell to districts under pressure to take action. These programs purport to help identify potential future shooters, she said, but they have been of dubious quality and invariably capture loads of irrelevant information in their pursuit for red flags.

“You’re talking about kids who are easily misinterpreted, a system where there are significant racial disparities, and you’re basically encouraging this data sharing that’s not vetted,” she said. “How long does this data even follow a kid around? Once you’re in a database, are you forever flagged as being suspicious?”

Originally published in The Intercept on October 25, 2021.
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KAVITHA KASARGOD-STAUB was looking forward to sending her two kids back to elementary school this fall. After a year of remote learning in Washington, D.C., her kids spent the summer attending day camp. “I’m certainly not in the group of people who avoid all Covid risk,” she said, adding that camp activities were outdoors and there was testing for children if someone was exposed to the virus.

But by August, Kasargod-Staub and her husband were watching Delta variant cases rise across the region. When her husband went to the school to review its safety protocols, he left alarmed, having learned that the HVAC system was broken and there was no plan for outdoor eating. Kasaragod-Staub, who had served as PTA president the year before, called up the principal to discuss.

“The policies were vague, everyone was scrambling, so we decided to keep [our kids] home for the first week of school in the hopes that [D.C. Public Schools] would realize they made a mistake and catch up with things like testing and outdoor eating,” she told The Intercept. “It feels a little dumb now, but I genuinely thought things would change and they’d figure safety stuff out.”

Things didn’t change, and the children stayed home. Pretty soon, Kasargod-Staub was notified that her family was being referred to D.C.’s Child and Family Services Agency due to her kids’ unexcused absences. “I have a lot of privilege, I know the system, and it was still terrifying,” she said. “My mind immediately goes to, ‘Where will this lead? Are they going to take away my kids?’”

Kasargod-Staub was soon contacted by a government social worker for an intake call. “The person I spoke to said, ‘We don’t know what’s going to happen, we don’t have any sense of where this will go,’” she recalled. About a week and a half later, things escalated, and child protective services called to schedule a home visit. (A Child and Family Services Agency spokesperson did not return The Intercept’s request for comment.)

Kasargod-Staub and her husband discussed whether they should formally pull their kids out, but they felt extremely committed to their school. “I was the freaking PTA president, my Ph.D. work is around public education, and I didn’t want my Title I elementary to lose my kids’ per-pupil funding,” she explained. While her unvaccinated kids were not eligible for a remote learning option through D.C. Public Schools, which requires a doctor to certify that virtual school is necessary, she and her husband provided them with learning supplements and later enrolled them in a national online school for more structure.

The questions Kasargod-Staub soon fielded from child protective services felt invasive and inappropriate. “The social worker asked about our monthly income, about the paternity of my own children, are there any mental health diagnoses for the parents,” she said. “I was very clear with them exactly why we were not sending our kids to school and what safety policies would put us at ease.”

A few weeks later, Kasargod-Staub was asked to show a social worker where her children sleep and documented proof that there was food in her kitchen. “We don’t have undocumented status, we don’t have incarceration, we’re not unsheltered,” she said. “If we’re enduring this, I cannot even imagine how terrifying it is for many of our less fortunate neighbors who also have Covid concerns right now.” Her case is still not closed out.

KASARGOD-STAUB IS not alone. In Washington, D.C., at least 90 families with Covid-19 safety concerns have been referred to child protective services for “educational neglect,” which the Department of Health and Human Services defines as a parent or guardian’s failure to provide a child with appropriate schooling. As of October 8, about 30 of those referrals had been upgraded to more serious investigations, Paul Kihn, the deputy mayor for education, said at the time. (His office declined to provide more recent figures.) In one warning letter sent to another D.C. parent and reviewed by The Intercept, the school district threatened referral not only to the Child and Family Services Agency but also to the city’s juvenile probation agency.

Like D.C, New York City has taken a hard line against remote schooling. In both cities, the mayors have resisted petitions and calls from parents for virtual options this fall, in contrast to the majority of large school districts across the United States, which are making such options available.

Though government officials claim that they have strict legal obligations to investigate suspected instances of child abuse and neglect, experts say there exists far more discretion in the strapped systems than officials often admit. Gabriel Freiman, a public defender in Brooklyn who has been helping New York City families facing similar issues, says he thinks that there’s “sufficient room” for the city to ease up on these sorts of probes. And indeed, school districts neighboring D.C. in Maryland and Northern Virginia told NBC4 Washington they are not currently reporting families to child protection agencies for unexcused absences.

“The New York State Education Department does require every school district to have a policy about child neglect and absences — it’s not like this [is] out of nowhere — but it’s being handled here in an extreme way,” Freiman told The Intercept. “Parents who are actively engaged with the school asking for a remote option, asking for home curriculum, wanting to be involved, I think there’s sufficient room for [the New York City Department of Education] to decide that fails to meet the legal standard for educational neglect.” (A spokesperson for the city’s Education Department did not return a request for comment.)

Researchers have long documented racial disparities in child protective service investigations. The Intercept spoke with one white D.C. parent who has kept their children from school but has not received any warnings yet for unexcused absences. And while child protective services nationally declines to confirm maltreatment allegations in roughly 83 percent of cases it responds to — and for cases referred by educators, that figure stands at 90 percent — experts say the terror of the probes can leave lasting trauma. Closed-out cases can also “stay on families’ case records to potentially affect the trajectory of any future reports that come in,” said Kelley Fong, a sociologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology who studies the U.S. child protection system.

Reports, even if unsubstantiated and closed out, can fuel lasting mistrust between the accused and the government. “After being reported, families disengage from the systems [and] people who filed the report,” said Fong. “For instance, they might not share so much with the doctor next time. In the case of schools, reports can undermine school engagement, and parents might even look into changing schools.”

Jennifer Jennings, a sociologist at Princeton University who focuses on education policy, said that “child protective services is very much to Black women what mass imprisonment is to Black men.” There’s a very real fear of being caught in a dragnet, she added, “irrespective of what the facts are.”

DEPLOYING CHILD PROTECTIVE services on families for Covid-19 schooling is not entirely new. Last year, teachers and school staff reported parents whose children were not consistently logging in to virtual school to protective agencies. Reports were most common among Black and Latino families in high-poverty areas.

Things are different this fall for concerned families that no longer have the option of remote school. Many households are also still grappling with grief and death from the coronavirus pandemic; a new study published this month estimated that more than 140,000 children in the U.S. have lost a parent or grandparent caregiver to Covid-19.

With states easing up on their quarantine, testing, and social distancing policies, some parents say they are just not comfortable having their child return to school, at least not before vaccines are available for the 28 million students under 12. (The Biden administration told governors to prepare to administer vaccines to young children early next month.)

And kids are getting infected. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association, there were more than 1.8 million new pediatric Covid-19 cases between August and early October — nearly one-third of the total pediatric cases in the U.S. since March 2020. (Cases have been decreasing since their peak on September 2, though the American Academy of Pediatrics says new cases remain “extremely high.”) As of September, 41 percent of the public thought that elementary schools should provide a remote option to families, and 51 percent thought that high schools should.

Paullette Healy, a New York City parent who is keeping her children home from school this fall, has been pressuring the city for months for a remote option. While her family has not been contacted by New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services — the city’s version of child protective services — she’s been part of a coalition supporting families that have.

“We developed a toolkit on how to respond because the social workers are still knocking on doors, leaving notices, and threatening to take kids away,” she told The Intercept. Healy says her group has worked with about 10 families that have had Administration for Children’s Services visits from caseworkers but added that most reports the group has received have been of threats made by principals to refer families to child protective services if they do not send their kids back to school.

“During any interaction, ACS works to ensure that families have the services and support they need, including educational services,” a spokesperson for the Administration for Children’s Services told The Intercept. “We have also been working closely with the Department of Education to clarify that reports to the hotline should be made only when the reporter has reasonable suspicion that a child has been abused or maltreated.” Agency figures indicate that referrals have been decreasing compared with the same time period last year. Between September 1 and October 14, New York City educational personnel made 69 reports of educational neglect and an additional 61 reports of educational neglect combined with other maltreatment concerns. During the same period in 2020, there were 99 and 87 of such reports made, respectively.

Kihn, the D.C. deputy mayor for education, declined to comment on what the possible consequences are for parents who keep their kids home out of Covid-19 safety concerns, but in an emailed statement, he said his department is continuing to explore “additional solutions and policy adjustments that meet the needs of families” during the pandemic. “While we know our schools remain safe for vital in-person instruction, we understand the uncertainty and anxiety that some of our families are feeling about returning to school,” said his statement. “In their initial referrals, our partners at [child protective services] are focused on offering support and identifying solutions, including providing medical waiver forms and exploring alternative educational options with families.”

Fong, of Georgia Tech, noted that this Covid-19 schooling situation exemplifies how “child maltreatment” is not always a straightforward, objective descriptor and can reflect societal debates around values, culture, and language. “Is it endangering your child to keep them out of school or to expose them to a deadly virus?” she asked. “States [and] authorities view things one way, but it’s easy to flip and frame the other choice as ‘neglect.’”

Originally published in New York Focus on October 14, 2021
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Vivett Dukes made a point to talk by phone with her husband John at least once every day while he was in prison at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison about 30 miles north of New York City. “The goal was once in the morning, and once whenever else if we could,” she recalled. “I felt very alone with this. There aren’t a lot of safe places to talk about the true impact of incarceration on family connection and how it really tries to rip up love.”

Asked about the cost of the calls, Dukes began to cry. “It was very expensive,” she said amid tears. At times I didn’t eat lunch, or I denied myself other things. The fees that I incurred were enough for me to take a second job.” Dukes said she tried to budget at least $200 a month.

A new legislative effort in New York aims to address the exorbitant costs of communicating with incarcerated people, costs that bear heavily on family members and particularly low-income women and people of color. The yet-to-be introduced legislation would aim to make not just phone calls but also email and video conferencing free, modeled off a bill Connecticut enacted earlier this year, the first state in the country to do so.

People incarcerated in New York pay some of the steepest rates for phone calls in the country. A 2019 report by the Prison Policy Initiative, a national criminal justice reform group, found that New York had the 7th highest average cost for an in-state jail call in the nation.

How much New Yorkers pay depends on where they’re incarcerated. In 2007, the state passed legislation to drive down the cost of calls in state prisons, and in 2019, New York City became the nation’s first major city to assume paying the costs of jail calls. But neither action affected local jails in the 57 counties outside of New York City, where the average cost of calls in 2019 was $8.83—50 percent higher than the national average. In some jails, costs run as high as $9.95 for a 15-minute conversation.

Most of this money is collected by the counties, which negotiate lucrative kickbacks in contracts with phone providers. Just under two-thirds of revenue from the average jail call goes into counties’ coffers, according to research published this year by the Prison Policy Initiative. In 22 counties, that figure stood at at least 80 percent.

State Assembly Member Harvey Epstein (D-Manhattan), who is leading the charge in his chamber to make calls free, told New York Focus that he expects towns and counties will resist efforts to end these kickbacks. “Whenever states do things that have fiscal impacts, there is always pushback by municipalities,” he said. “They’ll say we’re doing an ‘unfunded mandate.’ That’s just going to be a fight we expect to have.”

Bianca Tylek, the executive director of Worth Rises, a national group focused on profiteering in prisons, says she anticipates sheriffs mounting some opposition as well. In Massachusetts, where similar efforts to make calls free and eliminate commissions are underway, sheriffs have warned that such measures could result in fewer prison programs and less safe communities.

New York Focus reached out to county executives and sheriffs in eight counties, each of which clawback a majority of call revenue—Albany, Erie, Cattaraugus, Cortland, Delaware, Monroe, Ontario, and Saratoga. Most did not return request for comment.

But Theordore Kusineirz Jr., the chair of the Board of Supervisors in Saratoga County, which takes 80 percent of jail call revenue, told New York Focus that he opposes the idea of making the communications free for the incarcerated. “The hard-working, taxpaying, law-abiding residents of Saratoga County should not have to cover the cost of phone calls for those who wish to disregard the rules of society,” he said.

Spokespeople for the county executives in Erie and Albany referred questions to their counties’ sheriffs, who, like the other sheriffs contacted for this article, did not respond to requests for comment. The New York State Sheriffs’ Association also did not return a request for comment.

All Eyes on the State Budget

For the last few years, advocates and lawmakers have debated whether to push legislation to make phone calls free throughout jails and prisons or just in state prisons, which could be an easier fight politically. Epstein introduced several bills of varying scope last year, none of which received a committee vote.

This year, the coalition—which includes Epstein, State Senator Jamaal Bailey, and the advocacy organizations Worth Rises, Color of Change, and the Fines and Fees Justice Center—have decided to move forward with one comprehensive bill to make all prison and jail calls free.

With promising state revenue projections, Epstein is hopeful that this bill will find greater success in 2022. “The bill cost money and last year with Covid was a difficult fiscal year,” he said. “This year we’re in a better position to move it forward.”

The coalition plans to press Governor Kathy Hochul to include the idea in her executive budget proposal, due to be released in January, and then to pass a bill based on the budget during the next legislative session, which runs from January until June. Epstein says his office is still working on crunching the numbers for his proposal.

The governor has promised to give the idea a hearing. “Governor Hochul is committed to improving justice and safety in jails, and we will review the legislation,” spokesperson Hazel Crampton-Hayes told New York Focus.

Some advocates, including Tylek, have raised concerns that Mike Keogh, the husband of Hochul’s new secretary, Karen Keogh, works for Bolton-St. Johns, a top lobbying firm in Albany that represents Securus, the prison telecom company that covers state prisons and New York City jails.

Securus initially lobbied against efforts to make prison phone calls free in Connecticut, but under pressure from Worth Rises and the private equity firm that owns Securus, the company later announced it would stand down. This year, Securus spokesperson Jade Trombetta told New York Focus that “we have not and will not” lobby against any similar legislation in New York, adding that it is their company policy “to work with any funding model that allows us to provide quality services to the incarcerated and maintain the security technology needed to protect public safety.”

Melissa DeRosa, the former secretary of Governor Andrew Cuomo, also had ties to Bolton-St. Johns. DeRosa’s father was a top partner at the firm, and while the Cuomo administration insisted DeRosa recused herself from anything related to her father’s business, lobbying reports showed the company continued to have access to Cuomo’s inner circle, even when the governor was under investigation.

Rob Galbraith, a research analyst at LittleSis, a corporate watchdog group, told New York Focus that such conflicts of interests were routinely dismissed in Albany for years — which is why paying attention to ties between new executive branch officials and lobbying firms matters now. “The stock response under Cuomo was that it’s misogynistic to even pose the question,” Galbraith said. “But Kathy Hochul has a new mandate for transparency.”

Trombetta, the Securus spokesperson, said Mike Keogh has not worked with them directly. Crampton-Hays said that “recusals have been put in place to ensure that any New York State business relating to the Secretary’s spouse is delegated.”

GTL, another prominent prison telecoms company, covers about 85 percent of jails outside of New York City. GTL spokesperson Natasha Fleury did not say whether her company would support or oppose the legislative push in New York, but said it is “constantly evaluating ways to drive down rates across the country” and noted that it currently provides free phone services in San Francisco county jails. (Last year, San Francisco officials announced that rather than requiring families to pay for calls, the city will pay GTL a fixed monthly rate per phone device.)

As advocates, telecom companies, and government officials hash out the legislation, incarcerated people and their families will continue to foot the bill.

Laron Rogers, who has been incarcerated in New York for nearly a quarter-century, said that legislation to make prison calls free would particularly help incarcerated people communicate with children and the elderly.

“I know some guys [in prison] who have children [but] might not have a relationship with the child’s mother, or the child might live with someone who won’t put money on the phone account, so then it’s almost impossible for them to talk to their kids,” Rogers, who is currently at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, said. “And, you know, my uncle—he puts money on my grandmother’s line, because she doesn’t like the internet, she doesn’t like giving out her personal information. If you have elderly people, that’s a real barrier.”

Vivett said that free prison phone calls would have made a world of difference for her.

“I was so stressed I would miss a call from [my husband]. My blood pressure was up, my anxiety,” she said. “I would sleep with the phone, just every minute, holding it like life support.”