Powell: Most child neglect involves public-schooled children

By CHRIS POWELL

Abuse of children who are purportedly being home-schooled in Connecticut is an issue again. The case of a boy allegedly kept prisoner by his stepmother in his room in Waterbury for 20 years, which broke in February, has just been followed by the case of an 11-year-old girl who was allegedly killed by her family in Farmington and whose corpse was discovered in New Britain after her family moved there.

There was inadequate checking about the boy by child protection and school authorities after he was removed from school. But court documents indicate that the girl was killed while she was still enrolled in public school, a month before her family filed notice to home-school her. According to police, the girl suffered physical abuse and malnourishment for a long time -- apparently while still a public school student and while child-protection authorities were involved with her family.

Whatever the details of the girl's death, abused and neglected children remain a serious issue and the General Assembly and Governor Lamont should have acted on it during the legislature's regular session this year, since part of the solution is obvious: to require home-schooled students to be presented for an annual interview with school or child-protection authorities.

But the issue is being used to mislead. For the child abuse and neglect problem is overwhelmingly a problem of children who are public-schooled.

Most home-schooled children get far more attention from their parents than most public-schooled kids do, insofar as their households have more money and can spare a parent to do the teaching instead of working full-time outside the home. Meanwhile 17% of Connecticut's public-schooled children are chronically absent. In the cities, where poverty and parenting are worst, the rate is 25% or more.

If, for example, the 13-year-old boy who shot and killed a 15-year-old boy in New Haven a few weeks ago was home-schooled, opponents of home schooling probably would have made sure that Connecticut knew about it by now. The Hartford girl who last September disclosed to the Connecticut Mirror that she had just graduated from high school though she was illiterate wasn't home-schooled either. She was the product of Hartford's public schools.

Indeed, the little standardized testing Connecticut allows in its public schools suggests that most high school graduates in the state never master what used to be considered basic English and math before they are sent into the world to fend for themselves.

There is hardly more checking on these public-schooled kids than there is checking on home-schooled kids.

The 11-year-old girl's case provides a telling detail. Police investigation suggests that the girl's household was full of psychosis and delusion and that her father long had abandoned her and wasn't around to protect her.

About a third of Connecticut's children live without a father in their home. In the cities it's most children. Fatherlessness correlates strongly with poverty, educational failure, physical and mental illness, misbehavior, crime, and unhappiness.

Yet Connecticut hardly notices this problem. Public policy presumes that it's less expensive just to keep throwing money at single people who have children they can't afford and thus to subsidize childbearing outside marriage and fatherlessness. This practice and social promotion in public schools guarantee generational poverty and crime, but no one in authority dares to ask where Connecticut's worsening poverty is coming from unless it already has been decided to blame President Trump.

Maybe the latest case of child abuse will mistakenly prompt state government to require an annual census and interview of home-schooled children. But there probably aren't more than a few thousand of them.

Meanwhile there are tens of thousands of abused or neglected children in the state's public schools, many of them soon to become seriously disadvantaged young adults. As children or young adults, many of these die prematurely every month in criminal incidents that are considered routine, the natural order of things. They are far more deserving of more child protection and yet they are not even on the state's agenda.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. His other columns are here. (CPowell@cox.net)