Gabriel Freiman, head of education practices at the legal nonprofit Brooklyn Defenders said the sheer number of reports of abuse and neglect made by school staff — over 11,500 from August 2020 to November 2021 — “demonstrates to me that our school system is really intertwined with the family regulation system.”

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Since November, the most recent month for which data are available, Freiman said that several clients have continued to navigate new child welfare reports — especially during the Omicron surge when the sheer volume of COVID cases often complicated school attendance.

“We were working with people where the parents had COVID so [were] required to quarantine, but their children didn’t and so the school was expecting them to come to school. But the parents didn’t have a way to get them there,” explained the attorney. “We have had situations where those kinds of problems have resulted in a call to the state central register.”

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