Harris told the station Child Protective Services called a week later wondering why her kids weren’t in school.
“I told them that my kids were homeschooled now and that I could furnish the documents if they need to see them,” Harris told WKBW.
Then she told the station that less than a month later CPS officials and police confronted her and said they had a court order to take her children.
Harris told WKBW she asked to see the court order, and when that didn’t happen, she refused to give up her kids — so she said she was arrested for obstruction and her children were placed in foster care. But in a video Harris posted to Facebook on Jan. 18, she said she was handed a court order, noting charges of “neglect.”
Buffalo Councilman Ulysees O. Wingo Sr. is calling on Family Court to return Harris’ children to her immediately, WKBW-TV reported in a separate story. He added that it’s “utterly unacceptable” that a mother was arrested for “educational neglect” because she decided to homeschool her children.
“Someone, somewhere messed up,” Wingo said at a Buffalo Common Council meeting Tuesday afternoon, the station said, “and that someone needs to face the music.”
Good and loud, so to speak.
Homeschooling parents need legal protection from this kind of harassment, and stiff punishment for the harassers — perhaps codify it as the equivalent of criminal mischief.