\n\n“In 2018, Nzinga Terrell-Brown was hired as a teacher’s aide: her dream job. But a couple months later, she was fired\u2014and didn’t know why. She got another teacher’s aide job but was abruptly fired again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What was going on?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As Scott Pham details in a thorough and jaw-dropping expose for Buzzfeed News, <\/em><\/a>Terrell-Brown was listed on a registry. Not the sex offender registry, which is public, but the child abuse and neglect registry, which can be accessed by employers and adoption agencies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Terrell-Brown had been placed on New Jersey’s registry almost 10 years earlier after she decided not to wake her fiance’s kids, ages three and five, when she popped into the store to pick up a birthday cake for the five-year-old. The errand was short, the weather was mild, and the kids were fine. Nevertheless, someone called the cops, and Terrell-Brown was charged with “inadequate supervision.” For this, she was placed on the registry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are millions of moms and dads like her, registered for crimes ranging all the way from sex trafficking to letting their kids frolic outside. Recently, I wrote about an Arizona mom facing registration for letting her seven-year-old play at a popular park<\/a> while she picked up a Thanksgiving turkey during COVID-19.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That mom’s registration as a child abuser is pending, because she got a lawyer to fight it. But this is rare. As Pham chronicles with damning stories from across the country, getting placed on the registry is quite easy; getting removed from it is obscenely difficult.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n