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Comment by genewitch | Hacker News Reader

My wife is LMSW (not CPS!) and sees ~5 people a day. 153,922 population in the metro area. Mind you, this is adults, but they're all mandated to show up.

there's only ~3300 counties in the USA.

i'll let you extrapolate how CPS can handle "4000/day". Like, 800 people with my wife's qualifications and caseload is equivalent to 4000/day. there's ~5000 caseworkers in the US per statistia:

> In 2022, there were about 5,036 intake and screening workers in child protective services in the United States. In total, there were about 30,750 people working in child protective services in that year.

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37% of children obviously do not experience a CPS investigation before age 18.

not what i am speaking to. I don't know the number, and neither do you. you'd have to call those 5000 CPS caseworkers and ask them what their caseload is (it's 69 per caseworker on average across the US. that's a third of a million cases, in aggregate across all caseworkers)

my wife's caseload (adults) "floats around fifty."

> not what i am speaking to

My misunderstanding then - what are you speaking to? Even reading this comment, I still don't understand.

>> 37.4%? That's 27m kids! How can CPS run so many investigations? That's 4k investigations a day over 18 years,

> 800 people with my wife's qualifications and caseload is equivalent to 4000/day. there's ~5000 caseworkers in the US

I don't know what the number of children in the system is. as i said in the comment you replied to, here. but the average US CPS worker caseload is 69 cases. which is over 300,000 children per year, because there are ~5000 CPS caseworkers in the US.

I was only speaking to "how do they 'run' that many investigations?" as if it's impossible. I pointed out it's possible with ~1000 caseworkers.

Yeah OK I can see that. Mostly you inspired me to do a little napkin math based on the report I linked, which says ~3.1m kids got CPS investigations (etc) in 2023, which is ~8,500 a day. But, the main author in a subsequent paper shows that only ~13% of kids have confirmed maltreatment [0]. That's still far lower than the 38% for homeschooled kids.

[0]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5087599/

I wonder if the CPS on homeschooled children rate is from people who had their children in school and then "pulled them out" vs people who never had their children in school at all. As some comedian said "you're on the grid [...], they have your footprint"; i know it used to be "known" that school districts go after the former because it literally loses them money to lose a student, whereas with the latter, the kid isn't on the books.

also i wasn't considering "confirmed maltreatment" - just the fact that 4k/day isn't "impossible"

> i know it used to be "known" that school districts go after the former

Maybe, but this sounds like some ideologically opposed groups slandering each other to get the moral high ground to me. The papers linked show a pretty typical racialized pattern of CPS calls (Blacks high, Asians low, Whites and Latinos somewhere between) that maybe contraindicates this, for example.

> also i wasn't considering "confirmed maltreatment" - just the fact that 4k/day isn't "impossible"

Yup I think you're right here. I think there's something fuzzy happening with conflating "CPS investigation" with "abuse", but I'm not sure where the homeschool abuse rate comes from.

> racialized pattern of CPS calls (Blacks high, Asians low, Whites and Latinos somewhere between)

Predominantly "black" schools receive less funding in general (per student over $2000 less), and as such, need all the student-age people in class. So a "black" family removing their child(ren) from school becomes a fiscal issue, coupled to racial issues, coupled to history; like >60% of "black" children live in a 'single parent household' due to "no man about the house" policies dating back to the 1960s, just as a single example.

I am quoting "black" because i am sensitive to this, and if i had started out with ADOS or NBA/FBA (native black american, foundational black american) i just assume it'd brook argument.

To wrap this all up - "more testing equals more cases."

I think for this argument to have any weight you have to have evidence that schools are calling CPS on families who are pulling their kids out to homeschool them. I don't see any so far.

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