Addressing Over-reporting of Child Maltreatment from Schools

A county in New York

2021-2022

New Tomorrow worked with Casey Family Programs and a cross-system collaborative to provide technical assistance to stop unnecessary and spurious child maltreatment reports made by school-based personnel, one of the highest sources of unfounded reports in New York and nationally.

In this county, while the foster care census has shrunk dramatically in the past 20 years, the number of calls made to the state child abuse and maltreatment hotline have remained the same.

The goal of this project was to identify the drivers of this issue, to develop solutions and tools to address it, and recommend a process to facilitate community-driven solutions to support families of color that have been disproportionately investigated by CPS.

We supported our partners in identifying the schools of most concern through an extensive quantitative data analysis, in understanding the real and perceived barriers school personnel face in connecting families to services through developing survey and focus group tools, and by developing an implementation toolkit to support schools and communities in authentically supporting families in the highest impacted neighborhoods.