I need a quick and easy way to help a friend who is having some issues with child services.
A while back my friends kid was hauled into the middle school principles office because the kid got caught with a very small amount of weed, very small. I'm talking the .05g size of small. The child's explanation is that the kid found it on the way to school and picked it up and showed a couple friends, one of the kids said they wanted it and could they have it so the kid gave it away and there you go. Somehow this gets around that there is a tween drug dealer in the school so when my friend is called into school to face the inquisition my friend speculated that maybe the kid had gotten the weed from my friends stash that my friend uses very rarely instead of the Ambien prescription.
Bad move, I know. Never admit to anything, ever. My friend has been sufficiently chastised.
Anyway since the school administrators are required to notify social services of the allegation by 11 and 12 year olds that there is illegal activity in my friends home, the county feels the need to contact my friend (the childs only living parent) and 'tour' the home to make sure the allegations of pre-teens are truly incorrect. Thinking it was in my friends best interest and having nothing to fear, my friend set up the appointment with the social worker who came to the house and was invited in for a 'look around'.
Again, bad move I know, but 'when you have nothing to hide, you shouldn't be afraid to prove it' will sway a lot of people who don't know better. My friend used to fit that bill, not so much anymore.
So naturally the conversation heads for the big one...
'How about you come on down to the office and take a drug test and we put all this behind us, you'll test clean of course, what do you have to worry about.'
Thankfully my friend had enough sense to call a halt to it all at that point and asked if that was all then it would be best if the social worker go. Nothing aggressive, just an admission that at this point it would be a better decision on my friends part to just dummy up until my friend asked someone who knew better. The social worker said fine and told my friend that the report would be turned over to the supervisor and the supervisor would decide how to proceed with the case 'but if you could show a clean drug test, it would go a long way towards how the supervisor would pursue the case' unfortunately my friend was alone with the social worker and the kid as the only other witness. This has since been corrected, I told my friend to call anyone, even a neighbor to be present while the social worker was there as is my friends right.
Skip ahead two weeks and a phone call about some random irrelevant missing information that a record search from a county employee could turn up in two seconds comes into my friend from the case worker. My friend supplies the unimportant, irrelevant information and then asks the question that the whole call was really about.
"So what's going on with this case."
To which the case worker replies that it hasn't gone to the supervisor yet for review since there were 'loose ends' to tie up however if he could come on down and show a clean screen then it would pass right through to the supervisor and we can call it a day and get on with our lives.
My friend said thank you, no. Noting my friend was fairly sure under both the fourth and fifth amendments to the U.S. constitution it was not required in any way shape or form to submit to a test nor was it ethical if not illegal to dangle this out there like a carrot in front of a horse.
What letter do we write to whom in order to make this entire thing stop as it is unfounded and damn near malicious on the part of the case worker.
So, which one of you is the lawyer again?
