By Schaefer Edwards, HoustonPress, June 28, 2021
Renequa Burch still wonders why exactly Child Protective Services moved so quickly to take four of her five kids away from her in the summer of 2018, but she’s convinced the fact that she and her children are Black had something to do with it.
A social worker and mother of five kids between the ages of one and eight at the time (three of them adopted out of foster care), Burch’s first run-in with CPS happened in May 2018 at her children’s first daycare, when her then three-year-old daughter supposedly told someone on staff that her father had hit her. When CPS called Burch to ask about the situation, she said that couldn’t have happened; She and her then-husband were separated, he wasn’t living with them at the time, and her daughter hadn’t seen him recently. CPS closed the case.
Several weeks later, Burch and her children moved from Houston up to Conroe, trying to get as far away from her soon-to-be-ex-husband as possible. At their new daycare, one of the workers asked about her adopted four-year-old son, who they’d caught eating out of a trash can. Burch said it wasn’t the first time (before she adopted him, Burch said he was found on the streets eating out of dumpsters, and that he was later diagnosed with fetal alcohol syndrome and autism). She explained the situation and told the daycare worker he just needed to be redirected.
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