The Free Patriot – by Allison Martinez
Texas home school families need to take note of this case. While the parents won, and should never have had their children taken, it is still an lesson in how the attitudes and beliefs of social workers can override the law. It seems to me that these judges and case workers need some kind of in-service training on home school laws.
Mr. and Mrs. Tutt are a Christian family who has their own children and foster children. They home school. Unlike most couples, they are equipped to handle special needs children who are particularly difficult to place. They recently had a temporary placement, a small child with autism, who wondered off. While he was found a short way from the home (the father was looking for him) by a police officer, Child Protective Services (CPS) followed up the investigation with a home visit.
“According to a recent article from the Texas Home School Coalition (THSC), a CPS caseworker investigated the Tutt family’s home and concluded by saying, “There is no problem here.” However, the caseworker also remarked,“Nobody in their right mind would want to stay home all day with so many children!” and ordered Mrs. Tutt to enroll in parenting classes and take a psychological examination.
Despite the fact that Mrs. Tutt showed CPS workers numerous parenting class certificates and paperwork certifying her mental health, a local judge ordered the Tutts’ seven children to be removed from the home. In November, armed constables seized the children and kept them under government custody for nearly two months.”
The removal of the children was clearly illegal. Texas law precludes taking the childrenunless a clear threat to the children. Furthermore, Texas law gives parents the right to home school. At the first hearing, the judge upheld CPS’s decision. The hearing lasted 8 hours and Mrs. Tutt’s faith and home school liberties were attacked.
“The hearing quickly devolved into a relentless attack on this family’s religious beliefs, community service, and right to home school their children—with no legal basis at all,” Lambert reports. “CPS attorneys berated Mrs. Tutt for not using a ‘state-certified home school curriculum,’ in spite of the fact that there is no such thing in Texas. The guardian ad litem denigrated her for not submitting documentation of her home schooling to the state on a regular basis, including state-mandated tests. This, of course, is not only not required, but there is no way for someone to do so in Texas.”
Even though no evidence of parental abuse or neglect was ever mentioned in the hearing or the original removal affidavit filed with the judge, Judge Graciela Olvera ruled that the Tutts’ children should be kept under government foster care and not returned to their parents, based on CPS arguments about the children being home schooled. The parents were further ordered to take parenting classes, submit to psychological evaluations, drug and alcohol testing, and psychiatric tests.
The couple appealed the decision. The judge ruled that the state return the children. Based on the facts o the case, she determined that the children were removed due to homeschooling, not abuse or neglect. She overturned Olvera’s ruling, which was not based on abuse findings, but rather complaints about homeschooling.
The reversal is good news, but the warning here is clear. There is a generation of bureaucrats who simple don’t accept homeschooling. Christians need to be diligent and steadfast in upholding their rights.
Allison Martinez
Allison Martinez writes as the “Arctic Conservative” lives in northern Alaska. She has served as a public policy analyst and an economist in both the public and private sector. She earned the reputation as the “Dr. of Doom” in her predictions of major losses in 2002 and again in 2005 by incumbent governors for their policy actions. In recent years, most of her activism has been part of greater liberty and tea party efforts to keep the power with the people of the state and out of the hands of special and foreign interests.
CPS is government sanctioned human trafficking for profit.
The entire agenda is to destroy families to make ‘jewish’
moral degradation of america easier.
Homeschooling is a strong and direct threat against that agenda.
The khazar’s certainly can’t have any independent critical thinkers or they’d be rubbed out overnight. That’s why homeschooling is being attacked from every angle.
It’s high time to fight them from every angle.
It’s high time for the sleeping giant of pissed off patriots to wake up,
stop dreaming, and fix this.
“There is a divine moment in our lives when we all become one. It’s called procreation and it is reborn, continually and forever, in the future we call children. They are our legacy. Our responsibility. They are our destiny and we are theirs. The extent to which we fail as parents, we fail as God’s children.” -Dirk Benedict Actor, Author, Director, Woodchopper, Dad
-flek
time for this family to pack their shit up and move, no forwarding address, no forward of their mail, ditch all I.D.’s and start over, mark my words, this aint over yet
That’s a good temporary solution, Bart, but they’ll eventually have the same problems regardless of where in the U.S. they flee to.
Recall Associate Judge Graciela Olvera. Sign the petition!
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/recall-associate-judge-graciela-olvera/
You’re going to have to fight for your kids, just as you’re going to have to fight for everything else you want to keep. Get used to it.
yes, on TV they’re all about “protecting the children”, but you should know by now that their real motives and plans for your kids are very different.
This will stop when enough CPS workers get their heads blown off, and not before then.
This is how you come to work for Child Protective Services: 1. you go to a liberal/progressive university and major in Sociology 2. You get a MSW degree (Master of Social Work) 3. You have already become a community organizer and are either black, hispanic, or bleeding heart liberal white person and a registered Democrat (and are likely a member of ACORN, LaRaza, or are Jewish)
This is NOT a stereotype, folks. This is the truth, as explained to me by a college professor in the 80s (I forgot what ACORN was originally called) from the college I got my Bachelor’s degree in. the profession of Social Worker or CPS REQUIRES that one be a leftist with nanny state leanings and libertarians or conservatives–and certainly folks who would tend to home school (like me, for instance) need not apply.
There is, I forgot to mention, a number 4: you MUST speak Spanish in certain states (Texas being one of them). In my neck of far west Texas (Brewster, Presdio, Jeff Davis, Culberson and Hudspeth counties), if you don’t speak Spanish you don’t work for CPS, period, end of story.