CPS sicced on a dad after his daughter came home from school with antidepressants
There’s an amazing news story out of Maine. According to a father there, he objected when a school-affiliated clinic sent his daughter home with a plastic bag of loose pills. When he complained, someone sicced child protective services (“CPS”) on him. If true, it’s another reminder that leftists despise parents and are desperate to remove parents’ influence over the children they raise and love.
Preliminarily, we need to acknowledge that there is (or once was) a right in America so fundamental that it didn’t occur to the Founders to put it in the Bill of Rights, and that’s the right of parents to be the dominant force in their children’s upbringing. It’s an ancient right, present in all societies, and one that appears repeatedly in the Bible, both in terms of manifest parental control over children and in the Commandment that children must honor their parents. In 1790s America, it was taken so for granted that the Founders would just as soon have included in the Bill of Rights a right to “breathe air” as they would a right to “family integrity and responsibility for children.”
Given the West’s Biblical and Enlightenment fealty to the notion that parents get to raise their children, it’s no surprise that leftists, who aim to destroy Judeo-Christian, Enlightenment culture, hate parents. Indeed, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot…all sought to separate children from parents so that the children, who are infinitely malleable, would owe their fealty to the state instead of to the strongest counterweight there is to an all-powerful state; namely, the nuclear family.
Image by senivpetro (edited).
It is with this background knowledge that you should contemplate a report out of Fairfield, Maine. The school district in question hasn’t responded to requests for information, so the story is one-sided and may not be accurate. However, it certainly conforms to what we’ve been seeing in school districts across America.
According to The Maine Wire, Eric Sacks’ 17-year-old daughter came home from school one day clutching a plastic baggy containing Zoloft, an antidepressant. (Actually, given that we now know that SSRIs don’t affect depression, she just came home with a bag of potentially harmful pills.)
Sacks acknowledges that he or his wife may have signed a form allowing the school to provide medical treatment, but he didn’t believe that extended to psychotropic drugs. (I signed those forms, too, and understood them to mean band-aids and Tylenol.)
As much as anything, Sacks was angry at how his daughter received the pills. Rather than being placed in a child-proof container, they came home in a baggy. Sacks’ daughter has younger brothers, and the bag put those children at risk.
It turned out that the pills came from a “School Based Health Center” located on the campus. When Sacks complained to the school principal, Dan Bowers, the principal said that, while the clinic was on school grounds, he had no control over it.
When Sacks called the clinic to complain, he was told it had the right to prescribe medicines to his daughter. No one acknowledged his complaints about the unsafe packaging.
Many parents recognize this frustrating runaround. Moreover, given his daughter’s age, this was going to be a tough road for Sacks to hoe. It was after these interactions that things got despotic.
Unhappy with what had happened, Sacks pulled his daughter out of the school and took her to a doctor and a therapist. In response, someone at the school or the clinic sicced CPS on him:
After Sack withheld his daughter from school, someone at either the school or the health clinic contacted the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) Office of Child and Family Services, the division of state government tasked with investigating allegations of child abuse.
On Thursday, an agent from Child Protective Services (CPS) called Sack and informed him that he would be arriving shortly to make a surprise visit to his home to conduct a child welfare investigation.
“They called and said it was an emergency situation at my house, that I was pretty near holding my daughter hostage, is what the gentleman that came yesterday told me,” Sack said.
“He had information that only the school and Bulldog Health Center had,” he said.
Fortunately, the CPS representative backed off. Many do not. I’ve known numerous parents caught in their local CPS’s toils, and it’s been a horrible experience. I’ve also heard terrible stories about children in dire circumstances whom CPS wouldn’t protect. There are good people working in children’s welfare agencies, but there are a lot of power-hungry leftists, too.
In this case, while the CPS rep turned out to be a decent person, someone on the school property, whether in the school or the clinic, tried to destroy Sacks’ family. According to The Maine Wire report, parents in another school district found themselves on the receiving end of CPS visits on child abuse grounds, which they believe happened as “retaliation for their criticizing transgender ideology.”
Glenn Reynolds frequently writes that, nowadays, public school is a form of child abuse. Stories like this (if true) support his claim.