Run Rood

'I represent the extremes of what can happen to women in divorce courts' That's why I advocate for others.

HHS wants to cut the federal reporting required of agencies that take children from their parents by 60.78%. The regulations would no longer require them to put in writing what they set out to do, whether they did it, or who they heard from, parents included. Parents fighting to bring their children home need that record. Cutting it protects the agency, not the child. In 2025, Congress required states to consult parents with child welfare experience when writing these plans. HHS's proposal describes that law without them. No state has ever passed the federal Child and Family Services Reviews. Not one in 25 years. HHS's answer is less paper. If these agencies take federal money, every decision goes on the record. Full transparency. No exceptions. Comments close Nov 4. regulations.gov, docket ACF-2026-0562

Signed orders. Passing grades. Logged sessions. Fine on paper. The children underneath are not fine. Open the records. #FineOnPaper #FamilyCourt

I don't particularly care what you choose to call it. I'm far more interested in what you understood. What did you take from it? What did it reveal to you? Did it disturb anything you previously accepted as true? Did it cause you to reconsider a judgment, question an authority, examine a contradiction, or recognize something about yourself that you hadn't been willing to see? And if it did, what changed? There is a difference between possessing information and allowing it to inform one's judgment. There is a greater difference between recognizing something as true and accepting the responsibility that recognition creates. Consider how often people demand evidence, insist upon facts, and profess an unwavering commitment to truth, only to become strangely uninterested when those facts threaten a conclusion they've already accepted. What was the purpose of demanding proof if no conceivable proof could alter the judgment? And what becomes of reason when the conclusion is protected from the very examination supposedly undertaken to establish it? We have become remarkably comfortable treating the consequences imposed upon people as evidence of what those people must have done to deserve them. A parent is separated from a child, so there must have been a reason. A person is discredited, so there must be something wrong with them. An institution makes a determination, so the necessary examination must have occurred. But the consequence does not establish the cause. Authority does not establish accuracy. And the existence of a decision tells us nothing, by itself, about the integrity of the process that produced it. What makes this particularly revealing is how readily people recognize the defects in such reasoning when the circumstances are hypothetical, yet abandon that scrutiny when confronted with an actual person whose circumstances challenge their assumptions. A person may insist upon due process as a constitutional principle while accepting its absence in another person's life. Condemn abuses of authority while deferring to an authority whose conduct has never been examined. Preach the sanctity of the family while presuming its destruction must have been justified. Speak of mercy, justice, and reconciliation while remaining indifferent to whether the conditions necessary for any of them exist. These are not minor inconsistencies. They reveal the distance between a principle someone is willing to profess and one they are willing to be governed by. And that distance has consequences. Institutions do not operate independently of the people who populate, administer, defend, and defer to them. Their failures are not sustained by official misconduct alone. They can also be sustained by the willingness of otherwise reasonable people to substitute institutional confidence for independent judgment. Eventually, the original question disappears. Nobody asks whether the allegation was established, whether the evidence was examined, whether the procedure was lawful, or whether the decision was justified. They ask why the person affected cannot simply accept what happened. Consider the reversal. The institution's exercise of authority is no longer the subject of examination. The person questioning its legitimacy is. The absence of an adequate explanation becomes something that person is expected to endure rather than something the institution is expected to remedy. Their refusal to accept an unsupported conclusion is then treated as further justification for the conclusion itself. An assumption produces a consequence. The consequence is cited to validate the assumption. Resistance to that consequence becomes additional evidence against the person resisting it. Nothing in that sequence establishes the original claim. Yet each repetition makes the conclusion appear more settled, until the appearance of legitimacy begins to substitute for legitimacy itself. This is not merely a failure to recognize a logical error. It raises a more difficult question about the relationship between judgment and conscience. What happens when someone recognizes that the reasoning is defective but continues to accept its consequences because reconsideration would require them to question an institution, a colleague, a professional judgment, or their own previous conduct? At that point, ignorance is no longer an adequate explanation. Nor is disagreement. Disagreement requires an examination of what is being disputed. It does not consist of preserving a conclusion by refusing to examine the grounds upon which it rests. And judgment carries obligations that cannot be discharged by claiming neutrality. Neutrality does not require accepting an official account without examination. It does not require treating an unproven allegation as established fact. Nor does it excuse applying one standard of scrutiny to an institution and another to the individual subjected to its authority. The responsibility is not necessarily to agree, intervene, or accept every assertion presented. It is to distinguish what is known from what is assumed, examine the basis for a conclusion, and remain willing to correct it when that basis cannot withstand scrutiny. That should not be an extraordinary expectation of people entrusted with authority, education, professional responsibility, or the moral instruction of others. It should be fundamental. And where children are concerned, the cost of failing that obligation cannot be measured solely in procedural errors, institutional embarrassment, or the eventual correction of a record. Children continue growing while adults defend decisions they have not examined. Their relationships change. Their understanding of their parents, their history, their faith, and themselves can be profoundly altered. The passage of time creates consequences that no subsequent ruling can simply reverse. A correction may restore a legal position. It cannot return the years in which a child lived under the consequences of an unsupported or improperly reached decision. That distinction ought to matter enormously to anyone who speaks about protecting children. Yet even here, the discussion can become so consumed with defending the authority to intervene that it neglects the responsibility to establish whether the intervention was justified, whether its continuation remains justified, and what happens when the intervention itself causes harm. The stated purpose of an institution cannot be permitted to stand in for an examination of its conduct. Neither can good intentions, professional credentials, religious convictions, or the assumption that someone else must already have asked the necessary questions. Someone else may have made precisely the same assumption. And perhaps that is how some of the most consequential failures persist. Not because nobody possesses the intelligence to recognize them, but because responsibility becomes so widely distributed that no individual feels personally obliged to exercise it. Everyone has a role. Everyone has an explanation. Everyone can identify someone else whose responsibility supposedly came first. Meanwhile, the person bearing the consequences is expected to demonstrate patience, respect, restraint, and confidence in a process whose integrity may be the very matter requiring examination. There is something profoundly revealing about that expectation. We demand accountability from those who question authority while too often treating accountability for the exercise of authority as an affront to the people who possess it. And then we mistake the resulting silence for consensus. So I return to the questions that matter to me. What did you understand? What did it reveal about the standards by which you judge other people? About the assumptions you make when you know the outcome but not the facts? About the difference between respecting an institution and presuming the correctness of everything done in its name? Did it require you to reconsider anything? And if you recognized a contradiction between what you profess and what you were prepared to tolerate, what did you do with that recognition? These questions are not demands for agreement. They are questions about whether the principles people claim to hold have any governing authority over their own reasoning and conduct. Because the real measure of a conviction is not how confidently someone can articulate it when nothing is at stake. It is whether that conviction survives contact with circumstances in which honoring it becomes inconvenient. Truth is not made less true by the consequences of acknowledging it. Nor does refusing to examine it relieve anyone of the responsibility created by what they already know. There comes a point when the question is no longer whether a person has been given enough information to understand. It is whether understanding was ever permitted to change anything. And that brings me back to the question I cannot dismiss: If the truth can reach your intellect without ever reaching your conscience, what, exactly, have you understood?

This part of the record doesn't lie.

She told me, "No joke. My ex's family has a motto: 'If they won't do what you say, call the cops, and they'll listen real fast.' And now I'm hearing he's engaged to a female cop who has the body of a young child and the horrifying face of a demon. He doesn't date ugly women - he's after her authority and power. Why doesn't she see it?"

Illinois parents in divorce or custody cases, your right to your child's school records is protected by statute, and the bar to take it away is high. Under 750 ILCS 5/602.11(a), access to your child's records "shall not be denied to a parent for the reason that such parent has not been allocated parental responsibility." The Illinois School Student Records Act backs it up. Under 105 ILCS 10/5, a parent "shall have the right to inspect and copy all school student permanent and temporary records," and the school must grant the request within 10 business days. Both statutes name the same single exception. "No parent shall have access to the school records of a child if the parent is prohibited by an order of protection from inspecting or obtaining such records." That means an order of protection, issued on a finding of abuse, that specifically prohibits access. Outside an order of protection, restricting a parent under 750 ILCS 5/603.10 takes a hearing and a finding, by a preponderance of the evidence, that the parent seriously endangered the child's mental, moral, or physical health, or significantly impaired the child's emotional development. Without that hearing and that finding on the record, there is no lawful restriction under 603.10. Federal law says the same thing. Under 34 C.F.R. § 99.4, a school must give either parent full rights unless it is given a court order, statute, or legally binding document that "specifically revokes these rights"; the order has to revoke the right expressly. A custody order, a decision-making allocation, or a no-contact clause does not do that. In Illinois, the only basis the statutes name for cutting off school records is an order of protection. None of the following takes away your right to your child's records. Losing custody or decision-making. Reserved, suspended, or supervised parenting time. An order barring "contact" with a school. A pending or court-ordered psychological evaluation. A GAL recommendation. Requesting the records. Watch for this in court. A parent's records requests get recast as harassment, and the remedy offered is cutting off access. Asking for your child's records is diligence, not harassment.** If opposing counsel moves to cut off your access, or drafts an order that does it, without an order of protection or a 603.10 finding, that order has no basis under 602.11 or 105 ILCS 10/5. Object on the record and cite both statutes. Do not assume the attorneys or the court have checked these statutes. Bring them yourself. A later judge relying on that order doesn't fix it. The finding still isn't there. This isn't a substitute for co-parenting. You just shouldn't have to rely on anyone else's account of your own child's education and well-being. Requesting your child's records is part of being their parent. #FamilyCourt #FERPA

A school board agreed to restrict a parent's communication over emails the board was never shown. Not one was distributed. Not one was read aloud. Two months later, in another closed session, another parent's emails were read aloud because the evidence was actually in the emails. This is not a procedural distinction. Decisions made this way can alter the course of a child's life. When adults are persuaded to treat an allegation as fact, they don't just change how they treat a parent. They can change a child's relationship with that parent, the environment that shapes them, and ultimately who that child has the opportunity to become. That kind of harm cannot be measured by the minutes it took a room full of adults to abandon their responsibility to independently assess what was put before them and simply say yes.

Judgment itself isn't the issue; assuming that someone's circumstances must be evidence of something they did is. Reasoning backward from a consequence to presumed guilt isn't judgment grounded in truth. The consequence alone doesn't establish the cause. And when what is actually known doesn't explain the outcome, the question should be why. Assuming there must be wrongdoing somewhere behind it doesn't answer that question. It changes how we respond to the person, allowing an assumption to shape the care, mercy, and willingness to look closer that the circumstances should have called for in the first place.

Taxpayer money. Public dollars. Public school districts. Most of those legal bills come from fighting parents over things the law already requires the district to do. Compliance is cheaper than counsel. And every one of those invoices gets approved by the school board in open session. Read the consent agenda. Almost nobody does, and they count on that. Closed session? They can talk about litigation behind closed doors. They still have to vote in public. Boards are elected to oversee the district, not to rubber-stamp its lawyers. Not to sit quietly at the table, ask no questions, and look the other way. Do the job you ran for! #FERPA #SchoolBoards