AITA for reporting my sister to CPS after realizing she hasn’t actually been homeschooling my niece?

I (36F) have a younger sister, Renee (33F), who pulled her three kids out of public school five years ago to homeschool them, citing a mix of religious reasons and a bad experience her oldest had with a teacher. I didn’t love the decision, but it wasn’t my call, and Renee always seemed to have it together — she posted about lesson plans, nature co-ops, all of it.

Three weeks ago, Renee was hospitalized for what turned out to be a severe case of pneumonia that kept her inpatient for eight days. Her husband works long haul trucking and was mid-route, so I took my niece Ivy, who’s 10, for the week.

On day two, Ivy asked me to help her write a birthday card for a cousin, and I realized she couldn’t spell most of the words in “happy birthday” without sounding them out letter by letter, the way a much younger kid would. I figured maybe she was just tired or anxious about her mom being sick, so I didn’t think much of it. But over the week I noticed more. She counted on her fingers for anything past single digits. She didn’t know what state we live in. When I handed her a chapter book I had as a kid, she looked at it like it was in a foreign language.

I called Renee’s husband, Dale, when he got a signal on his route and asked, carefully, what curriculum they were using, because I wanted to keep Ivy on track that week. He laughed and said something like, “Oh, we’re pretty relaxed about all that, Renee handles it, school wasn’t for either of us so we don’t stress it too much.” I asked to see her workbooks. He didn’t know where they were.

When I went back to their house to grab more of Ivy’s clothes, I found a small stack of homeschool workbooks in a closet — the same three subjects, all only filled in through the first ten or so pages, all clearly purchased years apart, like they’d been started and abandoned every September for five years running.

I sat with this for four days. I have a friend from college who’s a middle school teacher, and I called her without using anyone’s name, just to ask what a 10-year-old should reasonably be able to do. What she described was so far from where Ivy is that she gently suggested I consider a report, not necessarily to punish anyone, but because in our state a formal educational neglect concern is sometimes the only thing that triggers an actual assessment and support plan for the kid.

I filed the report the day before Renee was discharged from the hospital.

CPS and the school district got involved within two weeks. Ivy is being evaluated. From what Dale has told my mother, in the meantime Renee is being required to either enroll all three kids in school or submit to a formal homeschool review with quarterly assessments, going forward, if she wants to keep them home.

Renee has not spoken to me since she found out it was me who called it in — a caseworker apparently isn’t supposed to confirm who reported, but it wasn’t hard for her to guess. My mother says I “went behind my sister’s back at the worst possible moment, while she was recovering from a serious illness,” and that I should have just talked to her directly first. My other sibling, Todd, won’t say who he agrees with but has stopped inviting me to things where Renee will be there, which tells me enough.

The only person on my side, quietly, is my college friend, and my aunt, who was a special ed teacher for thirty years and told me privately that a review like this can be the difference between a kid like Ivy getting help now versus at seventeen.

Update, three weeks later: Ivy’s assessment came back showing she’s testing at roughly a first-to-second-grade level across the board. The school district is requiring a structured intervention plan either way, whether she goes back to public school or stays home. I found out, through my aunt, that Renee has been dealing with postpartum depression since her third child was born four years ago, undiagnosed and untreated, and that the “relaxed” homeschool approach was less a philosophy and more what happens when a mother who is drowning has three kids at home and no help. That makes me sadder about all of it, not less certain I did the right thing for Ivy, but sadder, and unsure whether there was a version of this where I could have gotten her that help without also reporting my own sister.

So — AITA for reporting my sister for educational neglect instead of confronting her directly first, even though it may have been the only thing that got my niece real help?