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.

HB 5468 has drawn national attention precisely because it attempts to normalize this model. Under its framework and the earlier SB 6 language, a regular family decision to withdraw from public school becomes a government incident, local boards must notify the state education bureaucracy, which must notify DCF, which then checks for open cases and flags the withdrawal. The bill layers on new regulatory requirements and ongoing reporting around homeschool “equivalency,” effectively treating exit from public school as a presumptive risk marker rather than a lawful parental choice. More than 300 families showed up and testified in person at a marathon public hearing, and thousands more filed written testimony, because they recognized that once this trigger is established, homeschoolers and other nonpublic school families become permanent entries in state systems they deliberately left. The public outcry was so intense that lawmakers eventually cut off live testimony in the late hours of the night, a heavy handed move that itself drew national headlines and confirmed for many that Connecticut was not interested in listening.

AbleChild’s work on Mimi shows how off target this approach really is. Mimi did not die because a typical homeschool family slipped through the cracks or because the state lacked a withdrawal form. She died under the nose of an agency that already had her family in its files, already had mandated reporter and court linked information, and still accepted a staged video call as proof of safety rather than insisting on seeing the child. The failure was not a lack of data, it was a lack of will, diligence, and accountability inside DCF and the surrounding network of professionals. Using Mimi’s name to justify blanket DCF cross checks and databases for homeschoolers is not child protection, it is misdirection.

AbleChild stands with NHELD in demanding that Connecticut stop exploiting the death of a child in state custody to expand control over families who have done nothing more than leave a system they no longer trust. As the nation watches Thursday’s floor debate on HB 5468, lawmakers must decide whether to steamroll that public revolt and advance a bill built on ghost per pupil funding and a failed agency’s misuse of a child’s death, or step back, demand a full audit of the School Fund and ECS monies, expose any unconstitutional diversions, and finally confront what went wrong inside DCF instead of punishing families who chose to leave the system.