MILWAUKEE — The details from last week’s child neglect case were hard to stomach for neighbors near 71st and Dixon. Deplorable conditions of a hoarding case.
Garbage everywhere, feces on the walls, and the stench of urine filling the home. It’s not something that happened overnight, which is arguably the most concerning part of the whole ordeal.
How did this happen?
For starters, neighbors near the home say they had no idea there were kids living in the home in the first place.
“We never seen any kids in there,” Rick Eder said. “We’ve been in the neighborhood for 30 years. I was really shocked there were two kids living in that house.”
“If the child isn’t exposed to the village, what good is it?” Dr. Sandeep Nurang at Children’s Wisconsin said.
Nurang works as a child abuse pediatrician. He says there are safety nets in place to prevent things like this from happening. The Department of Children and Families lists more than three dozen people in professions that are considered “mandatory reporters.” They are people who work in positions where they may interact with kids. People like doctors, teachers, and childcare workers among others.
The problem here is, none of those touchpoints had a chance to interact with the children in the home near 71st and Dixon. Their mother, Katie Koch, kept the children isolated in the house according to the criminal complaint.
Koch had lived in the house for at least 3.5 years, according to the criminal complaint. She told investigators she hadn’t taken the children to see a medical provider and she claimed she was homeschooling the children.
The I-Team contacted the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) to verify if Koch had indeed registered her kids to be homeschooled, but DPI could not confirm or deny their status due to privacy laws. Koch told police her 9-year-old could not write, and her 7-year-old couldn’t put sentences together. Kids that age are generally in third and first grade respectively.
So while it may take a village to raise a child, these children were nonexistent to the neighborhood, had not seen a mandatory reporter at a medical facility in years, and had no interaction with teachers other than their mother.
Three touchpoints meant to help that failed to catch the kids during their freefall from innocence.
“It’s incumbent on all of us to be vigilant of kids who are both within our family structure and within our neighborhood or community,” Nurang said. “While we could increase the number. Of mandatory reporters, I think all of us have an innate responsibility to watch out for children. At any point, if the child does come to light, obviously a report to a child welfare agency should be made.”
Nurang says some of the most common mandatory reporters are school personnel. For these children, their school personnel consisted of the person accused of neglecting them at home.
According to DPI statistics, in the 2022-2023 school year, there were 947,251 students enrolled in public and private schools. Additionally, there were 28,853 homeschooled students.
“Isolation is the single greatest risk factor when it comes to any kind of abuse, including child abuse,” Samantha Field, Government Relations Director at Coalition for Responsible Home Education said. “The way homeschooling is legally set up, it legally allows parents to completely isolate a child.”
In Wisconsin, Field says, is notification only. That means parents have to fill out a simple online form, called a PI-1206. The form is an affirmation the parent or guardian is planning to homeschool and meet recommendations for instruction; 875 total hours during the year and a course outline of a sequentially progressive curriculum.
And that’s it.
“Once a parent has filled out that piece of paperwork,” Field said. “There is nothing more that anyone can do. In the State of Wisconsin, if someone notices that there is perhaps educational neglect happening, the local school district can ask to talk to the parents but they’re not really given the power to really follow up on those kinds of problems.”
DPI provided a statement to the I-Team saying in part, “…there is no mechanism or express authority in law for the DPI or a local school district to monitor the progress of a homeschooled student or to verify the hours of instruction provided or the use of a sequential curriculum.”
“New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island have a system in place where they make sure that all of that is happening,” Field said. “They are keeping records and have portfolio reviews that would prevent this from happening.”
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