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Former DCF social worker formally charged with enrolling as a student at three Boston schools

WCVB reports Shelby Hewitt, 32, is facing two felony counts of forging documents and five other charges related to the way she managed to enroll as a student at English High School in Jamaica Plain, Burke High School in Dorchester and Brighton High School.

Boston Police sought the complain today in West Roxbury Municipal Court.

Innocent, etc.

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Can anyone please explain to me why someone would do this? I can understand immature nineteen year-olds who can't pry themselves away from the high school parking lot social scene, we all know one, but a thirty-something? What's the attraction and how would they be able to play it off for more than five minutes?

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A sequel to this one?

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Miss Hand?

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One and only valid reason I can come up with is an undercover journalistic venture?
Doesn’t seem so though.

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I would guess that it's one of three broad categories:

1) She was planning on writing a book

2) She is a culture warrior along the current conservative lines looking for evidence of educational malfeasance

3) Untreated/undiagnosed mental illness

I figure number two has the lowest odds since she was a caseworker for DCF which is hardly the realm of conservative social warriors unless that job was also part of her plan.
From some of her behavior as described by students it sounds more like #3 as they described some unstable behavior on her part.

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There's always the bullying angle, when her cover got blown, it looked like she might have been setting up for a lawsuit against BPS for the bullying forcing her to switch schools multiple times. The plan would have been to settle out of court and run with the money before folks figured out the ruse.

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They are basically a conservative army though. There is a high rate of the workers, particularly the supervisors, being married to cops. They defer massively to police reports and frequently find them too moderate and assume that things were left out or minimized. If you're unfamiliar with the work of Dorothy Roberts, read up on how this system was created to control Black families.

MA DCF is extremely homophobic and transphobic. Their training materials still state that youths expressing same-sex attraction or gender-expansive expression is a sign of abuse, despite my employer and others attempting for years to get this removed since it's complete bullshit. DCF as a whole loves white same-sex middle-class foster parents, but the prevailing view tends to be that queer youths or queer parents they encounter in investigations mean that the parents are sex traffickers and sexual abusers. They are completely unfamiliar with the various LGBTQ/SGL/2S presentations that are common in communities of color, and there's a lot of "a random stranger lives there and is allowed to care for the child" and "is misrepresenting an individual as her boyfriend who is actually a female with a different name according to the background check." Just no cultural competency, of the queer sort or otherwise.

My employer gets frequent consultation requests from foster families and residential programs who have had kids placed who are clearly trans and living as their affirmed gender, but DCF appears to have no idea and misgenders the kid, despite meeting with the child weekly and testifying about them in court regularly. As a queer advocacy program, most of our staff are queer, and we all have pronouns in our signatures and on Zoom. My colleagues who use they/them/their or who have names that suggest different pronouns than they use will e-mail DCF with their name and pronouns, and DCF will create a reply chain and use the wrong pronouns and incorrectly gendered titles for the staff who just e-mailed them.

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Some combination of the above.

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#2 interpreted more broadly could be done by either right or left wingers - schools are constantly being attacked from both sides for not being every solution to every social ill so a liberal crazy could easily decide to go investigate educational malfeasance on the schools not doing whatever task. While the distribution of crazies is skewed, there are individuals on both sides that do wild things, and somebody in social work / a helping profession could be seeing results with their charges that make them think the school is dropping the ball on idk, sex ed, or the school is punishing the kids too harshly without making absurd exceptions for home life situations, etc.

Personally I think she was writing a book.

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I read somewhere that the theory was human trafficking, such as convincing girls to run away and become prostitutes. It appears from the most recent article that she had accomplices, so it's unlikely to be an innocent "I wish I were back in high school" scheme.

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They interviewed the woman and it sounded like she was adrift after some recent personal troubles and was trying to return to a time when she felt more happy with her life. She wasn't trying to do anything malicious, just longed to return to a time when she was happier.

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If she can be charged with fraudulent use of a student Charlie card on the MBTA.

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I don't understand why anyone would want to go back to high school after graduating. It was not a good time and once is enough. Middle school was worse.

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I didn't enjoy high school, but some people think it was the best time of their lives.

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Every time I have a fond memory of high school, I find out I'm actually remembering a Saved by the Bell episode.

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