"Unfortunately What's Right Isn't Always What's Best": Exploring Teacher and School Staff Experiences with Mandated Reporting

Background and Purpose: Research has begun to elucidate the racial biases present in the child welfare system and its resulting harm to youth and families, particularly to Black families. In response, advocates and community members have called for substantial reform to the current system. While this has resulted in policy orientation changes such as the implementation of differential response tracks, there is a dearth of research that details the impact of the current mandated reporting system among school personnel, one of the largest groups of mandated reporters. Without a clear understanding of how and why school personnel implement mandated reporting laws, there is a critical gap in evidence needed to determine the societal impact of mandated reporting. To address this gap, this study employed a qualitative design to describe how school personnel identify and respond to suspected cases of abuse and the resulting individual and systemic impacts of these reports.

Methods: Purposive sampling was used to recruit 14 school personnel including teachers, administrators, and counselors from 3 high schools in southern California. Semi-structured interviews took place over the phone or zoom and were audio recorded and transcribed. Data were analyzed by two coders using thematic analysis. Two of the authors coded each transcript using process, descriptive, and in-vivo coding modalities. Coders met weekly to calibrate their coding and create an agreed upon codebook. Upon completion, codes were grouped into categories based on their similar/dissimilar properties. Analytic memos were then used to determine the greater meaning and relationships between the categories which were then grouped to identify themes.

Results: There were three salient themes identified throughout interviews. The first is the subjectivity of the decision to report which identifies the individual factors that influence why and how participants decided to report suspected abuse of their student. These include factors such as the teachers' biases, upbringing, trauma history, and confidence in the child protection system. Next, the absence of youth voices describes how participants report suspected abuse without the consent of the youth themselves. Oftentimes, youth explicitly asked that their information be kept confidential and expressed feeling betrayed when teachers reported their families. Finally, throughout the interviews participants described navigating inadequate systems of support for all those involved in the mandated reporting process, including students, families, and the school staff themselves.

Conclusions and Implications: Findings highlight the implicit and explicit bias inherent in the mandated reporting process and underscore the need for substantial policy reform in order to advance racial and social justice for youth and families who have been harmed by the current child welfare system. This work underscores the ethical tensions school personnel hold when their legal requirement to make a mandated report directly negates what they believe will be in the best interest of students and families. Present findings highlight the harmful impacts of mandated reporting and reinforce calls to transform mandated reporting policies into the implementation of supportive services to uplift those historically marginalized by the child welfare system.