After a harrowing experience with Child Protective Services, Ashley and Daniel Pardo finally have been removed from the state’s registry of child abusers.
“I don't think a family ever gets back to normal after this,” Texas Home School Coalition (THSC) President Tim Lambert said. “They had police officers come to their door with a caseworker and take their 4-year-old child who didn’t understand what was going on.”
The fact that the parents were home schooling their children may have been part of the reason the Pardos were targeted, according to Lambert.
“Their special needs child was in the hospital for three or four days and when the attending doctor never came by to see the child, the parents released the doctor and filed a complaint with the hospital,” he said. “The doctor they released then filed a complaint with the hospital’s child abuse pediatrician.”
That complaint landed their special needs child, Drake, in state custody. It was six months before he would be returned to the Pardo family.
“They are a member of our association, so we provided legal counsel,” Lambert told Lone Star Standard. “When this began, the CPS caseworker and the supervisor refused to tell the attorney for the family what the allegations were, which is required by state and federal law.”
The Pardos are among countless numbers of people who complain of corruption and that their constitutional rights were violated by Child Protective Services or Adult Protective Services state agencies nationwide, according to ParentRights.org.
“The caseworker went to a brand new judge in an ex-parte hearing where the family was not notified of the hearing or represented at the hearing and the judge gave an order for the removal of the child,” Lambert said in an interview.
After acknowledging that Drake was not in danger and returning him to his family, the names of the Pardo parents still remained on the state’s child abuse registry.
An administrative appeal of the decision by CPS was filed in April but denied. A second appeal was then filed with the Office of Consumer Relations within the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (TDFPS)
“When you do the administrative appeal, you are actually going before CPS lawyers, not an elected judge, but people that are basically employed by CPS as lawyers,” Lambert said.
It was not until the Texas Home School Coalition began including state legislators that the Pardos' names were cleared.
“We wrote a letter to the commissioner of the TDFPS outlining the situation, and that letter was signed by us and about two dozen Texas legislators and other organizations asking the commissioner to reverse that position,” Lambert added.
Although the Pardos have had a relatively happy ending that involved reunification, THSC has concerns about this happening to other parents.
“What we are concerned about is CPS’s procedure where they would remove a child on the basis of a complaint by a doctor who'd never even seen the child, the parents or talked to anybody involved or who knew the parents or the family,” Lambert said.
To ensure future safeguards, Lambert is working with lawmakers to pre-file a proposed bill that would improve the appeals process within CPS.
“The current situation in the law is that CPS has the sole authority to remove somebody from the list, and there is virtually no appeal of that decision and, in my view, that’s a denial of due process,” he said. “Our goal is to make that process more transparent and to give innocent families who don't have the means to be able to be removed and have justice from that perspective.”
