A strongly worded memo raised new questions about how much work Department of Children and Families (DCF) staff were doing from home, and whether that level of teleworking was hurting child protection. 

Telework expanded during the pandemic and later became part of the state’s labor agreement, allowing some DCF employees to work remotely up to 80% of the week.

While social workers continued to handle court appearances, home visits, and foster placements in person, they were allowed to start and end most workdays at home. Staff must reapply for telework permission every six months and face losing that privilege if performance slips. 

Concerns over the workflow quickly followed. The state’s Office of the Child Advocate (OCA) warned that extensive teleworking could be undermining case practice and supervision inside an agency already struggling with high turnover and many inexperienced workers.

In a critical letter sent Thursday, the Child Advocate suggested that telework should be limited unless workers met specific, data‑driven performance standards, citing the loss of in‑office collaboration, supervision, and real‑time support. 

NBC Connecticut Investigates also spoke exclusively with a longtime former DCF employee who remained in the child welfare field. That former worker said telework simply did not function on multiple levels at DCF, describing widespread belief among current staff and those in the judicial system that bringing people back into the office was a necessary step toward restoring the agency. 

Lawmakers from both parties echoed those concerns. House Minority Leader Vincent Candelora (R) said staff working remotely were missing daily interaction, training, and support, instead operating in silos. House Speaker Matt Ritter(D) said the newly formed oversight committee was expected to examine the policy. 

Those warnings were backed up by troubling findings. According to the OCA’s report, a review of in‑home cases in 2024 and 2025 found face‑to‑face interactions did not happen in about 40% of cases—something the OCA called alarming and in need of urgent attention. 

As scrutiny over DCF intensified, teleworking became the latest flashpoint in a broader debate over accountability, supervision, and whether the systems meant to protect vulnerable children were being stretched too thin.

The remote Washington County town of Topsfield voted Thursday to close its five-student school, opting to send a shrinking student population elsewhere.

Residents voted 42 to 18 to shutter the East Range II School after high costs began to drive students from out of town elsewhere, bringing the number of students down from 25 in 2023 to the small total it has today. Turnout was robust in a town with only about 175 residents and 130 registered voters.

School district officials projected that the school, which had once served pre-K through eighth grade but would have been left only with pre-K through early elementary school students, would teach no more than seven students at a time over the next five school years. They also expected it would cost nearly $500,000 per year to keep the school open.

“I had no idea how the vote was going to go,” Eastern Maine Area School System superintendent Amanda Belanger said Friday. “I’m glad that a decision has been made and that we can move forward.”

The school board will finalize the closure plan and weigh what to do about the staff at East Range, at a meeting on May 7. The school would have likely had only one full-time teacher working there next year. That teacher, Paula Johnson, said she wasn’t sure what she would do if the school closed. She has worked there for 11 years.

Students will now likely be bused from Topsfield to schools in Princeton or Baileyville, about 30 minutes south. East Range will close at the end of this school year. After that, the town will take over the property.

It’s not clear what will become of the building. At an April meeting to discuss the future of the school, some residents were already speculating about whether it could turn into a senior center or similar community facility.

The result of Thursday’s vote was not unexpected. Many residents at the April meeting said they could not afford the taxes required to keep the school open. They will still have to pay for maintenance of the building but that cost is expected to be much lower than the cost of maintaining the school.

Taxpayers will also have to continue to pay for students, but the cost of busing kids out of town is also expected to be much lower than maintaining the local school.

The NBC10 Boston Investigators have been uncovering so-called professional tenants for years now, and now we’re getting a behind-the-scenes look at the reporting process on perhaps the most shocking story yet.

Ryan Kath joins JC Monahan on this week’s Just Curious with JC to discuss a story that is drawing attention from thousands — the story of an elderly Boston resident trapped inside her own home with the “tenant from hell”.

An elderly homeowner reached out to the NBC10 Investigators about her ordeal with a tenant living on the first floor of her property in Dorchester. Despite not paying rent, it took more than a year and numerous housing court appearances to get an eviction.

Since airing in April, the story has struck a nerve with tens of thousands of people, highlighting the broad scope of the issue.

See the full interview to learn how the story came to be, and what the reception has been, in the player at the top of this story and on NBC10 Boston’s YouTube channel.