Can We Make Mandated Reporters Mandated Supporters?

When Brendan Chan, Ed.L.D.’25, started looking into where he wanted to spend his residency for the third and final year of his doctoral program, he met with a ton of organizations — nearly 100. In the end, there was one that really stuck with him: Foster America, a national nonprofit working to reduce the number of kids in foster care and better support families.

Chan was new to the child welfare world, but as a former high school math teacher, he wasn’t new to seeing the strong — and often not positive — overlap between kids in foster care and education.

As he wrote in his final capstone paper, which he recently defended, “youth in foster care experience disproportionately worse academic experiences and outcomes.” Compared to their peers, he discovered, they are almost twice as likely to receive out-of-school suspensions and be chronically absent and about three times as likely to be expelled. On average, only 64% of kids in foster care complete high school, compared to 87%. Few go on to obtain a bachelor’s degree.

When Chan joined the Foster America team for his residency, one of the questions the organization was tackling was, what if educators could help change those daunting statistics?

School staff — teachers, counselors, nurses, administrators — are considered “mandatory reporters,” meaning they are legally obligated to call their local child abuse line if they suspect a child is being abused or neglected. Every year in the United States, about 4.4 million reports are made involving 8 million children, with educators, legal professionals, and law enforcement making the majority of the calls. One issue is that almost half of those reports are screened out without any investigation into the family’s circumstances, leaving those students and their families with no additional support.

What this says to Marie Zemler Wu, Foster America’s co-founder and executive director, and Chan’s residency supervisor, is that educators are calling hotlines because they know something is off — and they don’t have other options.

“Educators are longing for ways to support families,” she says. “They know when there are emergent needs, but they don’t necessarily have at their fingertips information and tools to really get what they most aspire to for their families. We’re currently supporting a number of states that are noticing in their data that educators are frequent callers to child protection hotlines and that a very large number of the calls coming to those child protection hotlines don’t actually constitute instances of child abuse and neglect, but they do often have underneath them signals that families have unmet needs and needs that are bigger than the educator who’s making that phone call feels themself able to support or respond to.”

What if there was a more nuanced hotline where an educator calling in would have options beyond just “report abuse?”

This summer, in partnership with Mile High United Way, state and county leaders, and those who have experienced the child welfare system, Foster America will pilot a new “warmline” program in three counties in Colorado.

“We have a body of people who have experienced child welfare in their own lives sitting at the same table where state and county child welfare leaders are sitting and they’re figuring out how to have a ‘press one’ if what you really want to do is report child abuse and neglect,” Zemler Wu says, “and ‘press two’ if you want to report something different than that.”

There were a lot of questions to work out, she says, such as what would a “press two” call mean, exactly? “What kinds of supports should be on the other side of this connection that isn’t an investigation and isn’t an entry into foster care but is some other kind of available support to families,” she says. “What do teachers need if this kind of alternative is going to work for them? What do families need and want if this is going to work for them?”

Zemler Wu says the Foster America team has been out in the field, talking to educators and child welfare advocates about what it would take to flip from mandated reporter to mandated supporter, and not just for teachers, but for anyone who’s calling that hotline.

“Have you supported first and reported when support doesn’t work?” Zemler Wu says. “Not to expand the role of teachers, who I think are already asked to do so much in our country, but how do we lead with the idea that parenting’s really hard and parents love their kids and are doing their best and oftentimes do need more helping hands and more connection.”

The limited, current reporting system, she says, “disconnects families from the people who might be part of their network.” In schools, for example, if a parent fears that a teacher might call the hotline and the result is they might lose their child, “it makes it really hard for that parent to lean on someone for help.”

The program in Colorado will include mapping out what resources are needed and tracking data to see how the pilot is working, including if it reduces the number of families that end up being referred unnecessarily to child welfare and being investigated. 

The hope, Zemler Wu says, is that the child welfare system becomes smaller, resulting in fewer investigations and family separations. “We’re really trying to demonstrate that we don’t need to use foster care the way we are using it today and demonstrate that other things work better for families.”

Chan says it’s this kind of thinking that initially made Foster America stand apart from the many other organizations he considered working with for his final year of the Ed.L.D. Program.

“This sort of systems-level change questioning is largely why I wanted to go into Foster America for residency and is, in some ways, what my capstone is about,” he says. “Thinking, what are the conditions or reasons this is the case, and what to change, so that it isn’t up to a specific educator but rather a broader level of change systemically and that kids and families have what they need in order to be successful in school and outside of school.”

Zemler Wu says working with Chan has helped her see even more how those who work with kids and families — whether from the education world or the child welfare world — are strongly connected.

“Even those of us who think that we’re thinking about systems need to open our aperture just a little bit wider and see the interlocking systems that we’re a part of,” she says. “That has been an inspiration to me, in having Brendan here, for future education systems leaders to use the chance they have, while in pursuit of their higher degrees, to take an interest in and think about the intertwined nature of child welfare and education.”

As Chan writes in his capstone, it’s another way for educators to lead.

“The unique role that education plays in the lives of kids and families means there are unique ways to lead,” he writes. “I hope that the many incredible leaders within the education sector will take up the mantle in helping to accelerate child welfare transformation efforts by being more vocal and leading from the seats they occupy.”