Responding to the Presidential Order addressing Neglect:
Keeping neglect as a primary gateway into CPS is essential because what looks like “just poverty” on the surface is often a pattern of chronic educational, emotional, and safety failures that permanently damages children and fuels intergenerational harm.
1. Neglect shows up early as school un‑readiness and absence
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In many states about 3–8% of kindergarten‑age children are late or completely missing from school, with the highest gaps in low‑income, Black, Latino, and Native communities, drawing on enrollment and “missing students” analyses such as Brookings’ work on declining enrollment and Hechinger/Urban Institute coverage of early‑grade non‑enrollment (for example, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/declining-public-school-enrollment/ and https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-public-school-enrollment-decline/).[1]
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These children are not simply “unenrolled”; they are disproportionately in homes and neighborhoods marked by housing instability, parental substance use, violence, and chronic stress—classic neglect risk factors that directly block school readiness and attendance, as summarized in your memo’s discussion of housing instability and chronic absenteeism (for example, studies highlighted via https://nlihc.org and https://www.attendanceworks.org).[1]
2. Early missing/late starts lock in failure by 3rd grade
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Chronic absenteeism in kindergarten and 1st grade, and late or missing starts, sharply lower 3rd‑grade reading and math scores, with effects 75% worse for low‑income children and particularly severe for Black and Latino students, using longitudinal analyses such as those summarized by Attendance Works and state early‑grade studies (e.g., https://www.attendanceworks.org and related research briefs).
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Because most of the 3rd‑grade literacy gap by race and income is already visible by the end of kindergarten—drawing on third‑grade reading warning reports and “double jeopardy” research like https://www.fcd-us.org/double-jeopardy-how-third-grade-reading-skills-and-poverty-influence-high-school-graduation/—failure to address neglect‑driven absence and un‑readiness in the early years effectively “locks in” a lifetime of academic struggle for the most vulnerable children.
3. These educational failures are not benign—they track maltreatment risk
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The same neighborhoods and families that produce high rates of late and missing kindergarteners also experience high CPS involvement, housing instability, and exposure to violence; this overlap signals that educational neglect is part of a broader pattern of harm, not an isolated schooling choice, using CPS–poverty–housing studies and neighborhood‑risk research.
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Ignoring neglect as a CPS trigger means ignoring children who are already off track educationally and socially at age 5–6, even though research aggregated in your document shows these early deficits are strongly associated with later poverty, justice system involvement, and poor health (for example, early literacy and dropout research plus long‑term maltreatment outcome studies available through NIH and AJPH).
4. Removing neglect from CPS would hide, not solve, poverty‑related harm
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A few percent of age‑eligible children in many states never appear in school records at all, and that these “missing” children are concentrated in high‑poverty, high‑ACEs environments, based on analyses like Brookings’ missing‑students estimates and state enrollment‑gap reports (e.g., https://www.brookings.edu/articles/understanding-covid-19-era-enrollment-drops-among-early-grade-public-school-students/).[1]
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If CPS is barred from acting on neglect that manifests as chronic non‑enrollment, extreme absence, or total failure to prepare a child for school, these children become administratively invisible just when intervention is most likely to change their trajectory—before academic failure, addiction, and crime are entrenched.
5. CPS should refine how it responds to neglect, not pretend it isn’t there
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The data support rethinking how CPS responds—prioritizing supportive services, school–CPS partnerships, and community solutions for educational neglect—rather than redefining neglect out of existence whenever poverty is present, a stance that is consistent with “distinguishing poverty from neglect” scholarship but not with erasing neglect as a CPS category.
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Keeping neglect as a primary factor for CPS involvement, especially when it is evidenced by late/missing school entry and chronic absenteeism, is the only honest way to confront the real conditions children live in and to disrupt the cycles of abuse, school failure, and generational poverty that KARA documents and that are reflected across the research base your memo compiles.
For further reading about the Presidents Order read the full post here.
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