Republished with permission from AbleChild
On Thursday, Connecticut lawmakers take to the House floor to vote on HB 5468. A bill that would force every family withdrawing a child from public school into an automatic DCF referral and government approval process before they can legally homeschool. Tonight, the ground just shifted beneath that vote.
Attorney Deborah G. Stevenson, founder of the National Home Education Legal Defense (NHELD), has announced that the U.S. Department of Justice has officially accepted NHELD’s formal complaint against Connecticut’s Department of Children and Families — Docket #715248 — and forwarded it to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for further investigation. The federal government is now doing what Connecticut’s own officials have refused to do for eight years.
The Waterbury child was reported to DCF for abuse and neglect repeatedly. DCF got involved. That child was then held captive for twenty years, until he set his own house on fire to escape. The little girl in New Britain was in DCF’s files from the day she was born, taken from her mother at birth due to neglect convictions. DCF later returned her to that same mother. Her body was found stuffed in a storage bin. Eleven-year-old Jacqueline “Mimi” Torres García was murdered while Connecticut’s oversight apparatus was actively in place around her, with DCF accepting a staged Zoom call as proof she was alive. A child in Hartford starved to death in 2018, also on DCF’s watch.
Not one of these children was homeschooled. Every one of these tragedies happened on DCF’s watch, inside the very system this bill would now expand.
Since 2018, NHELD has demanded an independent investigation of DCF. Eight years. Repeated calls. Complete silence from every Connecticut official who had the power to act. Instead of investigating the agency responsible, they blamed homeschoolers, families who had nothing to do with Waterbury, New Britain, Mimi, or Hartford. Attorney Stevenson called it exactly what it is: a calculated move to deflect scrutiny from DCF and use the deaths of children as political cover to regulate a community they have long sought to control.
Tomorrow’s floor debate isn’t about child safety. It is about an agency, now under federal scrutiny, protecting itself from the accountability it has spent eight years avoiding, using the names of children it failed to do it.
Homeschoolers and Connecticut citizens flooded the Capitol and overwhelmed the process, thousands strong between those who stood in line through the night to testify in person and the waves of families who filed written testimony from across the state.
Tonight, with Docket #715248 now in federal hands, the record is clear: the problem was never the homeschoolers. Lawmakers should reject this bill to ensure that federal probe findings are disclosed.
AbleChild is a 501(3) C nonprofit organization that has recently co-written landmark legislation in Tennessee, setting a national precedent for transparency and accountability in the intersection of mental health, pharmaceutical practices, and public safety.
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