Connecticut’s children’s agency failed to protect 11 year old Jacqueline “Mimi” Torres García, then helped turn her death into the emotional engine for a bill to regulate families who homeschool instead of fixing its own system.
AbleChild submitted emergency testimony to defeat the bill based on Mimi. It laid out that DCF already had extensive involvement with Mimi’s family, the courts, and mandated reporters, and still allowed a faked Zoom “welfare check” to stand in for real protection. Now, as lawmakers head into a Thursday floor debate on HB 5468, homeschoolers have gone on offense, backed by a formal legal demand to follow the money.
Attorney Deborah G. Stevenson, on behalf of National Home Education Legal Defense, LLC (NHELD) and Connecticut taxpayers, has filed a complaint and request for an immediate investigation and audit of the State’s “School Fund” and Education Cost Sharing (ECS) monies. She explains that NHELD has “reason to believe that certain monies in the ‘School Fund’ have been used to pay public school districts per pupil funding for students who are no longer enrolled in the public school system,” a practice “euphemistically called ‘double funding’.” In plain language, districts may be receiving ghost per pupil funding, money for children who have already left public school, at the same time the state is trying to build a system to track and report those very families once they’re gone.
Stevenson’s filing links this practice directly to the pending legislation. She notes that double funding has been happening in the past, “is going on currently, and is planned to continue in the future, as well, due to pending legislation in at least two bills about which we are aware – SB6 and HB5468.” Fiscal notes on those bills show that hundreds of thousands of dollars per year would not go to classroom instruction, but to hiring new staff and building a regulatory framework to process withdrawal forms, contact families no longer enrolled in public schools, report them to various state agencies, track their data, and run records checks on them with DCF. The audit request asks a simple question, how much of that money is coming from funds that, under the Connecticut Constitution, are supposed to be “inviolably” used only to support public schools, not to finance a tracking regime aimed at families who have left.
The constitutional stakes are explicit. The Connecticut Constitution’s “School Fund” provisions say that the fund must remain perpetual, that its interest “shall be inviolably appropriated to the support and encouragement of the public schools,” and that “no law shall ever be made” that diverts that fund to any other use. Stevenson’s complaint asks the State Auditors to determine, among other things, whether there is a clearly identifiable School Fund, how much is in it, how its interest is handled, whether ECS per pupil payments come from that interest, whether public schools are being paid for students who are no longer enrolled “in case” they return, and whether money from that fund or ECS is being used to hire staff and build systems that identify, process, report to DCF, correspond with, and data track families who are no longer in the public school system. If misuse is found, the filing calls for all responsible parties to be held fully accountable, civilly or criminally, so that public funds are truly safeguarded.
Hellbound and Down 