NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending March 26, 2025

● What happens when you tear apart families at a rate more than double the national average and find yourself with no place to put them? For starters, as this story from the Concord (N.H.) Monitor makes clear, you make sure to turn a blind eye to rampant abuse in the places where you’ve now forced the children to live. 

● Meanwhile in Oregon, which tears apart families at a rate “only” 20% above the national average, this is happening: The governor and some lawmakers are pushing legislation to make it easier to go back to the horrendous practice of shipping children to hellhole out-of-state institutions. (It’s the bill I wrote about here.)  Oh, but you see, they assure is, this time it will be different! Oregon Public Broadcasting does a good job of calling b------t on that. (Though, unfortunately, without mentioning the taking-too-many-kids-in-the-first-place part.) 

● But no place is worse than West Virginia, Child Removal Capital of America. In that state the bad bills keep on coming. One would, if enacted, send worker caseloads soaring by more than 48%. I have a blog post on it.  Another would force the state to open still another parking place shelter to dump some of the kids it never needed to take in the first place. I have a blog post about that one, too.  And WTAP-TV has an update to the story that was the subject of this post. 

● Once you’ve dumped children into group homes and institutions, how do you keep them docile for the overwhelmed strangers who oversee them? Dope the kids up on potent, sometimes dangerous psychiatric meds.  The Imprint this week begins a comprehensive series documenting how 

For decades, advocates, public health experts and foster youth … have expressed alarm about the child welfare system’s heavy, haphazard reliance on psychotropic medications for traumatized children. 

“They’re just not allowed to have a bad day,” said Cassandra Simmel, a social work professor at Rutgers University whose research has involved interviewing foster youth across the country about consent, mental health and medication. “‘We have a bad day, that means we get put on medication.’ Those kinds of stories I’ve been hearing for 30 years.” 

And this gives an excellent sense of just how lackadaisical states are when it comes to protecting children from this kind of abuse: 

Kansas Department for Children and Families spokesperson Erin La Row said her agency “does not have specific policies for the use of psychotropic medication with children in foster care.” But she pointed to other protections, such as the state Medicaid agency’s “prior-authorization” rules that apply to all pediatric patients and best-practice guidance manuals for doctors treating foster youth. 

La Row added that “it’s possible” additional oversight is conducted by private foster care providers contracted by the state that “may have their own policies.” 

Teresa Woody, litigation director for the nonprofit Kansas Appleseed and co-counsel on the 2018 lawsuit, reacted to the state’s response: “What does that tell you? In other words, ‘We have no idea what our contractors are doing on this issue’ — right?”

Among the states with no policy at all on the use of these meds: West Virginia.

● Speaking of West Virginia, this horror ended there but, in fairness, the blame rests primarily with Minnesota, where, this Associated Press story reports, the children were first adopted. (If the story sounds eerily familiar, it’s because it’s so similar to another adoption horror out of Minnesota (among other states), the one described in Roxanna Asgarian’s book, We Were Once a Family. 

● On the legislative front, there is better news from Kansas, where, The Beacon reports, the legislature is considering a bill to make it harder to confuse poverty with neglect. 

● And also Alabama, where, the Alabama Reflector reports, the legislature is considering a “Family Miranda” bill. 

● And also Georgia, the latest state to pass a Reasonable Childhood Independence law.  

● In New York, the Legislature is considering a bill to replace anonymous reporting with confidential reporting – much as Texas has done. The New York City Family Policy Project breaks down the data on anonymous reports and why they’re so harmful.  

● And in Texas, The Imprint reports on children who are not taken directly by the family police but are relinquished by desperate parents: 

Now, two pieces of legislation calling for expanded mental health services in Texas offer lawmakers an opportunity to assist families early on — before desperation and thin hope push parents toward the drastic decision to relinquish custody just to get help. 

In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories Go in All Directions: 

In addition to the story above from Minnesota and West Virginia: 

● From the Honolulu Star-Advertiser 

A lawsuit has been filed on behalf of the estate of Geanna Bradley against four adults living in the Wahiawa house where the 10-year-old girl was found dead from years of abuse and starvation, and against the state of Hawaii, including the Department of Human Services and its employees. 

● From Arizona Public Media:

 The San Carlos Apache Tribe wrote to Governor Katie Hobbs, the state Legislature, and Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, calling for an investigation into the death of 14-year-old Emily Pike. Pike was found in multiple garbage bags on a forest road northeast of Globe after missing from her group home in Mesa starting in late January. Investigating authorities have yet to arrest or name a suspect in her case. 

According to the Tribe, over three years, about 30 children have run away from Sacred Journey, the group home where Pike stayed. “What happened to these other children?” Chairman Terry Rambler said. … 

● Texas Public Radio reports 

An 11-year-old girl living in a hotel under the Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) care as part of its Children Without Placement (CWOP) program was abducted and nearly trafficked by a 42-year-old man on Valentine’s Day, according to a police report. … 

Police reported a possible sexual offense occurred, a weapon was used and that the child suffered minor injuries. Police collected video footage, images and DNA evidence. The child said she escaped the man after hours and returned to the hotel. It was not clear if CPS workers knew she was gone. …

In West Virginia, the bad bills keep on coming

First came the bill that would send caseloads skyrocketing. Now, there’s another well-intentioned bill that would produce horrible results.

ENTRIES INTO FOSTER CARE PER THOUSAND IMPOVERISHED CHILDREN, 2022

This is what we mean by "Child Rremoval Capital of America

Of all the options for placing children torn from their homes, among the very worst are so-called “shelters.” These are first-stop dumping grounds where children are parked while agencies that took too many children needlessly in the first place try to figure out where to put them all. 

Of course, that’s not how they are described by backers of such institutions and the “providers” who usually run them (and often are paid per day per child for every day they hold children in them). Nope. It’s always treacly rhetoric about how “loving, warm, inviting” they will be, and of course how “home-like.” 

After nearly 50 years of following these issues, I am so sick of people describing their institutions as “home-like.” I’ll bet not one of the people who casually call their institution “home-like” would tolerate having their own children dumped in such places for so much as a minute.  Children damn well know the difference between “home-like” and home. 

And no matter how “inviting” they seem at first, shelters have a horrendous history of deteriorating – as with this shelter and this one, and this one, and all of these. 

All of which brings us back to the Child Removal Capital of America, the state that tears apart families at a rate more than quadruple the national average:West Virginia. 

As in many states, West Virginia takes so many children it has no place to put them all.  So some wind up sleeping in hotel rooms or campgrounds.  According to West Virginia Watch, Jonathan Pinson, a member of the state House of Delegates who also is a foster parent, declared:  “I cannot fathom losing my child to a hotel room.” 

But apparently he can fathom institutionalizing them in shelters – because he’s introduced a bill to require the state family police agency (a more accurate term than “child welfare” agency) 

on its own or through a contract, a “central reception center” and emergency resource homes for foster children for up to 72 hours. 

And here comes that gooey rhetoric, about how, magically, this shelter is going to be different: 

“As s children are being taken into custody, there’s a loving, warm, inviting atmosphere for them to have as their first stop in this very emotional journey,” Pinson said while presenting the bill on Thursday in the House Committee on Health and Human Resources. 

A representative of an agency that says it will gladly run such a place did the rest: 

The space would be home-like, he explained, with medical staff and therapists on site. 

The West Virginia family police agency, which already runs emergency shelters warehousing 156 children, opposes adding another.  Again from the story:

Lorie Bragg, interim commissioner for the state Bureau of Social Services, told lawmakers this bill wasn’t addressing the overall lack of appropriate child placements, something she said the agency is currency working on. A center like the one outlined in the bill could put children at risk because the center may shelter in one room both a toddler and a teenager with an aggression issue, she said. 

“Making a temporary housing or shelter doesn’t really fix the problem of having a placement for these children,” she added. 

But neither does anything Bragg mentioned – which apparently consisted largely of telling the lawmakers that they’re holding lots and lots of planning meetings, with the idea being ultimately to create better institutions. 

As usual in West Virginia, no one is talking about the only thing that works: Stop taking so many children needlessly at the highest rate in America. Odds are West Virginia Watch is never going to tell readers about that, or about how it can be done, or about how other states do better – not in this story or any other – since it is wedded to the myth that West Virginia’s horrible distinction is mostly because of drug abuse.  It isn’t.  

And Pinson is quick to buy into and amplify vile smears about any parent who loses a child to foster care, telling MetroNews that when the West Virginia family police rip apart a family it’s

oftentimes for excellent reasons — these children are at risk of danger, they’re at risk of harm, they’ve already been harmed. 

So let me repeat a few things West Virginia lawmakers probably don’t know – because neither the family police agency nor media focusing on these issues is likely to tell them. 

● West Virginia takes away so many children that if all drug abuse disappeared in West Virginia, and only West Virginia, tomorrow, the number of children taken for reasons unrelated to drug abuse still would leave West Virginia tearing apart families at a rate double the national average. 

● 85% of children torn from their homes in West Virginia were taken in cases in which there was not even an allegation of sexual abuse or any form of sexual abuse. 

● 51% of children torn from their homes in West Virginia were taken in cases in which there was not even an allegation of any form of drug abuse. 

● Not all drug abuse compromises parenting.  Not every case of drug abuse involves a fentanyl overdose.  West Virginia even tears apart families when a parent is on medication-assisted treatment for drug abuse. 

● In 14% of cases, the family police agency admits it tore apart a family because of housing.

So now imagine what would happen if West Virginia stopped being worst in the nation.  If West
Virginia could reduce its rate of removal to only double the national average that would mean 2,235 fewer children taken in a typical year.  If West Virginia cut the number of children trapped in foster care on any given day in half, that would mean 3,450 fewer children in foster care. 

That would open up lots of spaces in family foster homes, so no child would need to be institutionalized anywhere, let alone parked in a shelter. 

But while West Virginia Watch and another online site, Mountain State Spotlight, stereotype the parents, Bragg, from the Bureau of Social Services, stereotypes the kids. Again from the story: 

“These kids are not the kids that foster parents are willing to take in,” Bragg said. “These are your autistic kids, nonverbal, [children with intellectual and development disabilities], physically aggressive teenagers, kids that may be doing self-harm, the kids that are difficult to place. That’s the kids [who] are ending up in a hotel.” 

That’s the standard party line from the shelter/group home/residential treatment industry.  And while it’s true the most difficult kids are likely to end up in a hotel, it’s not true that few families will take them.  Few families will take them without help. 

But if West Virginia actually focused on providing the help, that would change dramatically. 

● First, the family police agency could focus on intensive help to birth parents so the children never need to be taken. 

● When children really must be taken, they could provide that kind of help to extended families providing kinship foster care, so more of them can step forward. (West Virginia actually has a good record of finding such families but a lousy record of supporting them. Even Mountain State Spotlight, which seems to view all birth parents on a continuum from unperson to sick person to monster, is ok with extended families.) 

● When kin aren’t available provide the intensive help to stranger family foster homes. 

You do it with intensive Wraparound services.  Want to know how that works? Watch this short video of remarks by the father of wraparound, Karl Dennis: 

But in West Virginia, lawmakers don’t know it, most media don’t want to tell them, and the family police agency doesn’t seem interested. 

And don’t believe for a second that if West Virginia builds still another parking place shelter the children will be there for only 72 hours.  

Because here’s the first rule about what usually happens with a parking place shelter: If you build it they will come.  If you keep it open they will stay.  If it stays open long enough it will become a hellhole.

Just what West Virginia child welfare doesn’t need: A 48.7% INCREASE in “child welfare” investigator caseloads

West Virgina State Capitol (Photo by O. Palsson)

But that’s what West Virginia is likely to get if a well-meaning, but ill-thought-out proposal by one legislator becomes law. 

It’s entirely reasonable that West Virginia Del. Adam Burkhammer is horrified by the fact that some children who are horribly abused are overlooked by the state’s family police agency. All of us should be. Given that in some cases, there are plenty of seemingly obvious warning signs, It’s entirely understandable that he would propose a solution that is simple and obvious. 

Unfortunately, that solution is simple, obvious and disastrously wrong. 

Indeed, were his proposal to become law, I estimate that it would lead to a 48.7% increase in the number of allegations caseworkers would have to investigate over the course of a year.  That estimate is rough; based on multiple assumptions. But it’s also conservative. (The full methodology for deriving it is explained at the end of this post.) 

Every state child abuse hotline screens out a certain percentage of “reports” that operators believe are clearly false reports or don’t meet the threshold in law to be considered abuse or neglect. But Burkhammer wants to prohibit West Virginia’s family police agency (a more accurate term than “child welfare” agency) from screening out any report from a “mandated reporter” – and they make the overwhelming majority of reports. 

If there’s one thing everyone following West Virginia child welfare agrees on, it’s that caseworkers already are terribly overloaded. We disagree profoundly on why that is happening and what to do about it, but no one doubts that there’s an overload and this has terrible consequences for West Virginia’s children. 

Earlier this month Mountain State Spotlight, one of the two worst offenders in falsely stereotyping families wrote an editorial disguised as a news story called “5 ways lawmakers could help foster kids right now.” West Virginia is the child removal capital of America, tearing apart families at more than quadruple the national average even when rates of family poverty are factored in. But none of those “5 ways” involved not taking so many children in the first place or returning more children to their own homes.  The first two recommendations were: Hire more caseworkers and lower caseloads. 

But instead of lowering caseloads, the no-screening provision of Burkhammer’s bill would send them skyrocketing.  That means less time for every investigation and more snap judgments – in all directions. So even more children will be needlessly torn from everyone they know and love and consigned to the chaos of foster care.  More will emerge years later unable to love or trust anyone. More will be abused in foster care. 

But it also means something else: With workers making judgments that are even more rushed, more of those few children in real danger will be missed.  Burkhammer told The (Wheeling) Intelligencer that the legislation was 

borne from several incidents over the years where child abuse and neglect cases fell through the cracks

But this approach won’t seal the cracks.  On the contrary, this proposal would turn those cracks into fissures.

There is no approach that will find and rescue every child in genuine danger. It is true that as long as states have screening mechanisms some children in real danger will be missed. And when that happens, news accounts lead to demands for less screening. That backfires, there’s another tragedy and the cycle repeats. 

That’s because without screening, even more children will be missed. 

There will always be screening in child welfare: The choice is between rational screening by a hotline or irrational screening by overloaded workers based on which case floats to the top of the pile among the deluge on a worker’s desk or what looks worst at first glance. 

The way to make sure fewer children “fall through the cracks” is to go in the opposite direction from what Burkhammer proposes. 

● Mandatory reporting itself has been shown to backfire, overloading workers and driving families away from seeking help.  It should be replaced with permissive reporting.  Allow professionals to exercise their professional judgment in determining when a family should be reported to the family police. That would be the safest and most effective screening mechanism of all. 

● Revise the training for what would now be permissive reporters to help them better distinguish poverty from neglect, as New York and Washington State are doing (though they’re not doing it all that well). 

● Bolster basic, concrete help for families and teach permissive reporters how to help families get the help – in other words, as Joyce McMillan puts it: turn mandatory reporters into mandatory supporters. 

● Improve the screening protocols at the hotline, to help hotline operators better distinguish poverty from neglect – and help them explain to people who have reported when it’s a poverty case – and how they might help the family. 

● Narrow West Virginia’s breathtakingly broad definition of “neglect” which currently encompasses any child 

Whose physical or mental health is harmed or threatened by a present refusal, failure, or inability of the child's parent, guardian, or custodian to supply the child with necessary food, clothing, shelter, supervision, medical care, or education. 

But Del. Burkhammer has no reason to know any of this. I’m sure he reads the same constant de facto demonization of families from Mountain State Spotlight and West Virginia Watch (the only places that “cover” these issues regularly) as anyone else. Both sites systematically shut out dissent from their skewed master narrative. 

West Virginia Watch, for example, repeatedly claims that the state’s foster-care-capital-of-America status is mostly because of drug abuse.  That is demonstrably false. 

So once again, a failure of child welfare is worsened by a failure of journalism. 

See also our post about still another bad bill in West Virginia.

How we calculated the increase in investigations that the Burkhammer bill would cause

 

Unless otherwise noted, all data for this section come from the federal government’s most recent Child Maltreatment report, which covers 2023. In some cases, where the 2023 report doesn’t have the relevant statistic, we used the report for 2022. In both cases, a search for “West Virginia” will lead to the relevant tables. One caution: Among the reasons to consider this a rough estimate: submitting data for this report is voluntary, and so prone to error.  And in some cases, though not the items discussed below, what is being measured is, itself, subjective.  As a result the report rightly urges caution when comparing states. 

As noted above, investigations of alleged child abuse or neglect typically start with a call to a child abuse hotline. As with every other decision point in child welfare, from initial call to termination of parental rights, West Virginia has a hair trigger. West Virginians probably call the hotline at one of the highest rates in the country. Given that West Virginians are drenched in false media stereotypes about child abuse and neglect, it’s no wonder. 

That makes it even more important in West Virginia than in most states that the hotline does a careful job of screening out reports that obviously are false or obviously do not constitute abuse and neglect. Every state does this. Given the extreme rate at which the hotline is deluged with calls, West Virginia should screen out at a rate above the national average. Instead, it is probably below that average. In 2023, the last year for which comparative data are available, West Virginia’s family police agency says it screened out 41% of calls.  The national average probably was about 50.5%) 

In 2023, West Virginia says it screened in 20,873 reports – 59.3% of all reports. That means 14,327 reports were screened out. 

Of course, not all of those 14,327 reports were from mandatory reporters.  We could find no figure specific to West Virginia, but nationwide, 71% of reports come from mandatory reporters.  If that also is true in West Virginia, it would mean that, if Burkhammer’s bill becomes law, an additional 10,172 reports would have to be investigated every year – 48.7% more than are investigated annually now. (By early 2025, according to the state’s own dashboard, the screen-in rate had fallen to 53%, still above the national average.  But that means even more reports would automatically have to be investigated under the Burkhammer bill.)

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending March 18, 2025

● Remember when Tennessee pulled over a couple for no good reason and then took away their children? In that one, the offense was Driving While Black.  We don’t know the race of the couple in this case reported by Tennessee Lookout; but in every other respect, it’s eerily similar. 

● And there was this in Washington State, as reported by the Seattle Times: 

Concluding a federal lawsuit that has spanned nearly a decade, a jury found Tuesday that the Washington State Department of Children, Youth and Families wrongly removed an autistic boy from his immigrant parents’ home and awarded the family $7 million. 

● Courts in New York, Texas, Arizona and at least 11 other states demand that fathers control the mothers of their children, punish fathers who don’t and, worst of all, deprive children of loving parents who have done them no harm. New York’s highest court is being asked to put a stop to what amounts to Handmaid’s Tale jurisprudence. I have a blog post about it. 

● What might it look like if mandatory reporters really did become mandatory supporters? In The Imprint Sarah Winograd, co-founder of Together With Families, offers an example from Georgia. Most notable: All the necessary resources were mobilized without so much as a call to the family police agency. But it’s disturbing that the school that referred the mother to Together With Families even threatened to make such a call. 

Still, as this story, also from Georgia, reminds us, it’s a hell of a lot better than what happens when the family police do get involved. 

● The Colorado Legislature named a “task force” to study why children run from “residential treatment” and what could be done about it. I have a blog post about the disconnect between what the young people themselves said and the proposed solutions. The young people said they run because they want to go home. The task force said: Fence ‘em in and lock ‘em up! 

● And I have a blog post about whether this is what it’s going to take before we ever again see basic federal data about foster care:

"Psst. Hey, bud. Ya wanna see an AFCARS report?"

In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories Go in All Directions: 

● From KPNX-TV, Phoenix, concerning a 14-year-old murdered after she ran from her group home: 

Mesa PD records show over the past three years, police have been called at least 89 times to the group home where Emily Pike lived before she was murdered.

 Watch the video here: 

● From KTUL-TV, Tulsa: 

A woman who started a foundation to help foster kids aging out of the system was arrested on charges of child endangerment, child abuse, and neglect.

Colorado task force’s solution to stop children from running from residential treatment: Fence ‘em in & lock ‘em up!

 

When NCCPR released a comprehensive report on Colorado “child welfare” in September 2023, we included a section called “Tapeworm in the System.”  It’s about Colorado’s love affair with the worst form of “care” for children – group homes and institutions.  At the time, we noted that, as of 2021, Colorado was using them at a rate 33% above the national average.  By 2022, use of group homes had fallen, but Colorado was using the worst of the worst, institutions at a rate 40% above the national average.

We wrote this about a “task force” the legislature created, overseen by the state's child welfare "ombudsman," to spend two years

determining “the root causes of why children run away from out-of-home placements” and figure out how to stop them from running.

Allow us to save the state a little money and a lot of time: Children run away from out-of-home placements because they are in out-of-home placements. You stop children from running away from awful places by not putting them in awful places.

Alas, the “task force” did not take us up on this offer.

Ignoring lived experience

They did, however, meet with adults who, as children, had run away from placements.  According to the task force report:

All the panelists … recalled their desire to return to their home of origin and/or parents, regardless of circumstances

They also commissioned a study which found that

Youth stated that they feel disconnected from family, friends and experiences while they are in residential care. They stated a strong desire to remain connected to family and friends and to remain connected to familiar environments or places. This desire to feel connected is often a reason for running away from care.

But these young people were ignored. The task force report says nothing – nothing – about reducing the “need” for residential treatment, shortening time in care or even increasing “connectedness” for the inmates residents.

Instead, recommendations include this:

[M]embers agreed that residential facilities should not resemble jails or prisons and should remain inviting for children or youth. … However, the task force also noted that perimeter security is essential for keeping dangers out. There was unanimous agreement that fencing could be an effective method for preventing children and youth from running away from care.

Presumably, they mean inviting fences – painted in pretty colors perhaps?

If you’re wondering why fencing also might be “needed” to “keep dangers out” – it illustrates another reason why residential treatment is so harmful.  When you bring a lot of troubled, vulnerable children into one institution it becomes a magnet for predators – because predators go where the prey is.

The task force also called for a study of

the use of delayed locks, fencing and alarms. Funding should also be provided for the implementation of these mechanisms, if the study finds their use to be appropriate.

The alarms they have in mind include “motion sensing alarms” for when children leave their rooms at night.  According to the report: “This was also presented as a way to support facilities working with minimal staff.”

The report notes that these recommendations are not meant to apply to family foster homes – not because the idea of fencing a foster home necessarily appalled them, but because of

the diverse needs of children and youth in foster home placements and the large volume of foster homes located throughout the state.

The false premise at the heart of it all

Part of the problem is that the task force started with a fundamentally false premise. The report claims that

Colorado’s state-licensed residential treatment facilities provide critically important services to some of the state’s most high needs children and youth, including those with severe behavioral health needs.

That is not true. 

On the contrary, as a U.S. Senate Committee report points out:

[Residential treatment facilities] are costly, not as effective as community-based behavioral health treatment options, and often harmful to youth in their care.

The report added:

The risk of harm to children in RTFs is endemic to the operating model.

There is much more documentation concerning why residential treatment is worthless, how there are alternatives that are far better and far less costly, and why the usual excuses for using group homes and institutions don’t hold up to scrutiny in the Colorado report excerpt below.

Stacking the deck from the start

The reason the task force ignored all this evidence – and the young people whose time they wasted – is clear when you look at the makeup of the task force; who was on it, and who wasn’t. That, too, is discussed below. Suffice it to say that Colorado’s residential treatment task force was like a task force to study climate change that included no environmentalists but lots of representatives of the fossil fuel industry.

Worst of all, the task force exploited two of the members, parents of two children who died after
running away from such places. Of course, a parent whose child ran from an institution and died would want a fence. But surely even more they would want the kind of help that would have made it unnecessary for their children ever to be institutionalized in the first place.*

And on that score, if anything, NCCPR’s 2023 prediction about the task force was too optimistic. We wrote:

The residential treatment industry will make sure that when the task force issues its report it will include claims that the industry is all for Wraparound and they love foster families and they really, truly want to keep children in their own homes “whenever possible.” They’ll say they just want a “full continuum of care.”

But what stands in the way of a full continuum of care is – the residential treatment industry. 

We were wrong. Apparently, the residential treatment industry is so confident that Colorado lawmakers and media will buy anything they sell that they don’t even have to pretend to support alternatives. The word “wraparound” does not appear in the task force report even once.

Two bills

So far, the Colorado Legislature has not gone as far as the Task Force. But there is a bill “sailing through the legislature” to build a fence around a new residential treatment facility scheduled to open in Denver next year. In other words, a plan to make a facility the state doesn’t need in the first place even worse. It requires legislation because under current law you can’t force youth to be institutionalized behind a fence if they haven’t committed a crime.

Another bill, (also "sailing through the legislature) based on another task force recommendation, calls for creation of a standard pre-admission “risk assessment tool” to predict how likely it is that a given child will run. 

And then what?  The task force says a consultant should draw up the tool and determine “how the information obtained from the tools may be used to adjust a treatment plan for the child or youth while they are in out-of-home care.” 

And what, exactly, does that mean? Even more restrictions, more onerous “treatment” for any child the assessment tool thinks might run away?

The report makes no mention of the fact that, in other child welfare contexts, such tools have an ugly history of bias.  According to the report “several members cautioned” that objective criteria are necessary and that the assessment of risk can vary “depending on the professional performing the assessment” but there was no mention here of racial bias – something that might have come up had the task force itself been a bit more diverse.

And, what happens if, despite the assessment tool, and the alarms, and the fencing, children still run away? The task force has an answer: Create a whole new type of institution just for them! Or at least a whole new name: “Short-term stabilization units.”

In short, the Task Force did exactly what we thought it would do: pander to the residential treatment industry at the expense of the children. They’re feeding the tapeworm in the system  Because, remember …

 *-The institutions serve two populations, foster children taken from their own parents by force of law, and children placed voluntarily by desperate parents unable to cope, and who have no other option. 

Getting basic federal data on foster care: Will it come to this?

 

"Psst - hey bud. Ya wanna see an AFCARS report?"

Yesterday (March 13, 2025) was an anniversary of sorts.  It marked the first anniversary of the last time the federal government published something called The AFCARS Report.  

AFCARS stands for Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System. The annual reports are the most important single source for national data about the family policing system.  In addition to the national report, there’s one for every state. The reports tell us things like how many children were taken from their homes over the course of a year, how many children are trapped in foster care on the last day of each federal fiscal year, their race, age and gender, why family police agencies claim they were taken, where they were placed, and where they go when released from the system. 

The advantage of AFCARS, aside from being a one-stop shop, is that states are required to provide the data, and there are specific definitions of what counts as foster care and what counts as an entry into foster care. In contrast, states can define these things any way they want when posting the information on their own websites, if they post the information at all. 

The disadvantage is that the definitions still leave far too much wiggle room.  In particular, they don’t count coerced so-called voluntary placements that are not voluntary at all.  That’s why such placements are called “hidden foster care.” 

Another downside to AFCARS is the time lag. The data are released by federal fiscal year. Most years, they’ve come out one year later.  So, for example, data for the year ending Sept. 30, 2020 were published on Nov. 19, 2021.  

During the last year of the Biden Administration, it got worse.  The data for the year ending Sept. 30, 2022 weren’t released until March 13, 2024.  The federal Administration for Children and Families said this was because the FY 2022 submissions from the states were the first to require many more things to be counted, along with other technical changes.  As a result,  ACF said, they needed to “take additional time to fully assess and evaluate” the data. 

Now, here we are one year and one day later, March 14, 2025, and there’s still no AFCARS report for 2023 – and no indication that one will be coming soon.* The current administration is on a tear hiding information about almost everything, sometimes seemingly just for the heck of it.  And even if no one has targeted the AFCARS Report, it’s not clear if there will be enough federal employees left standing to produce it. 

The child welfare trade journal The Imprint does its own annual survey, and their data typically run six months ahead of the latest AFCARS release (the most recent covers the year ending March 31, 2023). Filling out that survey is, of course, voluntary, but the results are impressively close to AFCARS, suggesting that states are not fudging the figures – or at least not fudging them any more than they do with AFCARS.

But because there’s only so much one can ask the agencies to do voluntarily, the number of data elements is quite limited. 

So the question remains: Have we seen the last of AFCARS, at least for the next few years? Will we be largely blind to trends in foster care, and if so, is that intentional?  Yesterday, we emailed the ACF media office to try to find out. If we hear anything, we’ll update this post. 

*-People who spend way too much time “refreshing” webpages from the Administration for Children and Families have noticed a pattern: If you change the URL for an existing report for the expected URL for the next one, and if that next one is coming out within a month or so, you’ll get a page that says you’re not authorized to see the document in question.  But if you try that here: https://acf.gov/cb/report/afcars-report-30 by changing "30" to “31” you don’t even get that.

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Challenging Handmaid’s Tale jurisprudence in child welfare

Courts in New York, Texas, Arizona and at least 11 other states demand that fathers control the mothers of their children, punish fathers who don’t and, worst of all, deprive children of loving parents who have done them no harm. New York’s highest court is being asked to put a stop to it.

See also the press release about the litigation from Pregnancy Justice

A New York City mother, known in court papers as Ms. W., used drugs during her pregnancy.  When Ms. W. gave birth, the newborn tested positive for methadone – which had been prescribed to Ms. W. to control her addiction.  But New York City’s family police agency, the Administration for Children’s Services, charged her with neglect. 

The agency didn’t stop there. They also charged the father, known in court papers as Mr. B., with neglect – because ACS said, he didn’t do enough to stop Ms. W. from using drugs. The family court (New York’s term for what other states sometimes call “juvenile court,”) agreed.  So did a mid-level appeals court.  

Now Mr. B’s lawyers, The Bronx Defenders, the Family Justice Law Center and the New York University School of Law Family Defense Clinic, are asking New York’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, to take up the case and overturn the lower courts.  Forty-four organizations and scholars have joined amicus briefs in support of Mr. B.

The Court of Appeals has never heard the issue, even though bad decisions like this are fairly common in New York. To what may be a greater degree than any other state, New York courts have deemed fathers neglectful for failing to stop a pregnant partner’s drug use, or not knowing about a pregnant partner’s drug abuse when they supposedly should have. The neglect finding can lead to anything from constant, onerous surveillance of the family to confiscating newborns at birth and depriving them of the chance to live with either parent.  

Texas and Arizona also do this often. As Pregnancy Justice explains in a comprehensive report on the practice, in those states, a father’s failure to control his pregnant partner has led directly to the child losing the chance to be with either parent forever – it’s grounds for termination of parental rights, though in Texas language on page 750 of this 2022 State Supreme Court decision may have improved things a little. Similar decisions have been handed down in at least 11 other states. 

The problems are legion: 

● For starters, the whole scheme is based on the assumption that using drugs during pregnancy automatically makes you an unfit parent, or that using drugs, period, inherently makes you a danger to your child.  Sometimes that’s true; often it’s not.  Just ask the “cannamoms” of Massachusetts - or the children raised by Betty Ford. 

As Pregnancy Justice explains: 

[K]nowing that someone uses drugs tells us nothing about that person’s ability to parent. That is even more true where the allegation is mere use—not an allegation of excess or the loss of control—or that a person did not stop the other parent from using drugs during pregnancy. 

(Just guessing here, but had Betty Ford been an alcoholic and addicted to prescription opioids while pregnant (which, in fact, she was later in her children’s lives) child protective services probably wouldn’t have taken any children from her husband.) 

● This line of decisions is, in effect, a judge-made backdoor fetal personhood law – something there’s no way the New York State Legislature would enact overtly.  The decisions are based on the concept that the fetus was neglected by the mother, and the father is guilty of neglect for not preventing the mother from neglecting the fetus.  

● Then there’s the whole “Handmaid’s Tale” vibe -- the idea that women are mere vessels for reproduction who are to be under the strict control of men. If anything these decisions go farther – depriving children of their mothers and their fathers if the fathers exercise insufficient control over their partners’ pregnancies. 

In fact, the control the government demands can predate conception.  Mr. B was found neglectful in part because, the lower court said, he was aware his partner was using drugs at the time they were “planning to conceive.” 

● The decisions don’t explain how much control is enough. Is simply providing help sufficient? Apparently not, since Mr. B. repeatedly provided help and support when Ms. W. went into treatment. So what are the men supposed to do? Lock the women up in their homes? Pregnancy Justice cites the father in a California case who said: 

“How am I supposed to force her to stop? I have been supportive and sent her to get help. I don’t own her; she is not a pet. I cannot force her. Even if I was married to her, I could not force her to stop using drugs.” 

The extremism reflected in these decisions can be seen in these examples, cited by Pregnancy Justice: 

From New York: 

“The petitioner established by a preponderance of the evidence that the father neglected the subject child. Despite his knowledge that the mother continued to abuse marijuana during her pregnancy, he failed to exercise a minimum degree of care to protect the child.”

From Texas: 

In [one case] the father’s legal bond with his child was terminated even though he did not use drugs or have a history of use, completed recommended services and regular visits, provided diapers and toys for the child, and had a suitable home, but only because he knew the mother used drugs during the pregnancy and “failed” to prevent her from doing so. 

From Arizona:

In one case, the father originally lost his parental rights for failing to stop the mother’s drug use during pregnancy, when he did not know the mother was pregnant, did not have a relationship with her, and did not know he was going to become a father until after the birth. 

In another case, the court, lacking direct evidence of the mother’s substance use, inferred her continued substance use and used that as a basis to find the father had an “inability to discern [her] use” and to terminate the parent-child bond. In other words, the court terminated the father’s rights and created a legal orphan because the father failed to observe something the state could not prove existed. 

In another case, both parents’ rights were terminated based on the mother’s legal medical cannabis use. 

There is one drug for which we are aware of no similar cases: We know of no children ever having their right to be raised by their father terminated because the father did not stop his pregnant partner from smoking cigarettes. But hey, if courts started doing that, it could affect, you know, people like us. 

But the worst harm is that inflicted on children – forced at best to endure needless harassment and surveillance by family police agencies, at worst denied the chance to live with their own loving fathers and instead consigned to the chaos of foster care. 

That brings us to what may be the most perverse part of this whole scheme of judge-made law, something discussed in an amicus brief filed by Children’s Rights and the Columbia Law School Family Defense Clinic. The brief explains how these lower court decisions create incentives that push prospective fathers away from their partners. (The quotes  below omit citations): 

Prospective fathers should be able to be involved during a pregnancy without being legally required to infringe on their partners’ bodily autonomy or fear that their involvement will lead to a charge of neglect. The lower court’s decision punished Mr. B because of his involvement during the mother’s pregnancy, despite Mr. B’s efforts to support Ms. W. in her attempts to become sober. … 

Had Mr. B not been involved and not provided support, he would have been under no burden to take steps to prevent Ms. W’s drug use. Instead, the lower court’s decision—and similar precedents—punishes prospective fathers for their involvement during a pregnancy and thus disincentives fathers from becoming involved during the crucial prenatal stage of development. … 

[U]nder the line of precedents at issue in this case, the more a father is involved with and supportive of his pregnant partner, the more likely it is that a family court will later deem him neglectful and take his baby from him … This creates a perverse incentive: if a father lives with or supports his pregnant partner, he risks being labeled neglectful; if he disengages, he avoids such a finding—even if that disengagement deprives the mother of essential support. 

The New York State Court of Appeals should take this opportunity to reverse this line of decisions.  Courts in Texas, Arizona and at least 11 other states should be reconsidering as well.