Child Welfare Interviews at School: A Review of Statues and Policies
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Child Welfare Interviews at School: A Review of Statues and Policies Jeffrey McCabe1
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018
Abstract Child welfare investigators have come to expect access to interview children at school as a means to ensure their own safety. Court cases have questioned if interviews at school without a warrant, court order, exigent circumstances, or parental consent violates the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights of child and parents. This review paper uses the 2011 Supreme Court case, Camreta v. Greene, to set the stage for the need to conduct a review of relevant statutes and policies from all 50 states that regulate interviews at schools. Guidelines with variation in the amount of detail offered by each state leaves a need for further examination of what are best practice standards for child welfare investigators who interview children at school. Keywords Child welfare interviews · Child welfare policy · School social work · School policy
Purpose School employees have been recognized as the leaders in making the most mandated reports of alleged child abuse and neglect out of any professional sector (Gilbert et al., 2009; Sinanan, 2011). The role that school employees have in reporting allegations to child welfare agencies is well known. Less information is available that depicts how schools and the child welfare system collaborate when a child is interviewed at school as part of an investigation. The purpose of this review is to synthesize the findings from a review of available policies and statutes from all 50 states that regulate what access child welfare workers are granted to interview children at school, and what precepts apply to the interviews. To fully grasp the context by which regulations are based, a review of a pertinent case that contested a child welfare investigative interview at school having reached the Supreme Court attempts to explain why the need for governance of school interviews exist. The Supreme Court had the opportunity in 2011 to offer guidance in the case of Camreta v. Green as to whether child welfare investigators violate the Fourth Amendment protection from illegal search and seizure when minors are * Jeffrey McCabe [email protected] 1
Knoxville College of Social Work, University of Tennessee, 1618 Cumberland Avenue, 300 Henson Hall, Knoxville, TN 37996‑3333, USA
interviewed at school as part of an abuse or neglect investigation (Gupta-Kagan, 2012). At issue, was if on February 24, 2003, an Oregon Child Protective Services worker, Bob Camreta, infringed upon the Fourth Amendment rights of a 9-year-old girl, S.G. (Kwapisz, 2012). Camreta, along with Deschutes County deputy sheriff, James Alford, responded to an allegation that Nimrod Greene had molested his two daughters by interviewing S.G. at her school about the alleged abuse for almost 2 h (Gupta-Kagan, 2012). In response, S.G.’s mother, Sarah Greene, sought a court remedy regarding whether Camreta’s actions were a violation of her daughter’s Fourth Amendment righ
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