Missouri’s shame: Rampant confusion of poverty with neglect, and skyrocketing numbers of children torn from their homes, is exposed to the nation by The Nation

For want of an air conditioner, a family was lost.

A foster-care panic, set off by the head of the state family police agency, is making everything worse. Her predecessor laments: “Missouri’s leadership is not interested in preventing children from coming into foster care.” 

Second of two parts (Read Part One here) 

Last week, Hearst Connecticut Media exposed the extent to which children are barred from living with the families they love, and sometimes are taken forever, because the families lack adequate housing. We discussed that story in yesterday’s post to this blog. 

At about the same time as the Hearst story was published, The Nation exposed the same problem, on an even larger, even more appalling scale, in Missouri. 

The Nation tells the story of one child denied any contact with his mother for months after being taken because the mother’s rental apartment didn’t have an air conditioner. The mother explained that “To get her son back, a judge told her, she had to have decent housing, a job, and $3,000 in a bank account.” 

In another case, a nine-year-old boy was taken because the family was living in an extended stay hotel.  Excellent local reporting from the Missouri Independent has uncovered similar cases. 

The Nation adds more context, including some stunning comments from the former head of the agency that is taking all these children. 

For decades, Missouri has torn apart families at a rate well above the national average.  That improved a little under former Children’s Division Director Darrell Missey. But as of 2024, Missouri still was taking away children at a rate more than 45% above the national average, even when rates of family poverty are factored in.  And that doesn’t include what appears to be a large number of hidden foster care placements.  But already, there are signs that Missey’s successor, Sara Smith is making things exponentially worse. From the story: 

In Missouri, a substandard apartment is reason enough for judges to agree to removals, said Kathleen Dubois, a retired family court attorney in St. Louis. “Nobody blames the landlord,” she told me. “They just take away the kids.” Kathy Connors, the executive director of the St. Louis homeless shelter Gateway180, sees the same thing: There are an “awful lot” of instances in which mothers living in her shelter have their children taken away if they can’t find permanent housing fast enough. … She has seen many families who come to the shelter working to reunify with their children. But since she began working there in 2016, she has seen only four successful reunifications. “It does seem like it’s a situation where the goalpost keeps getting moved further and further,” she said. 

And what does Smith have to say about this? 

Sara Smith

“In and of itself, we wouldn’t take homelessness as a report,” Smith asserted. “We would be looking at if the child’s basic needs are met, if the family does have some kind of housing.”

But, uh, isn’t shelter a “basic need”? So yeah, they’ll take away children because they’re homeless, or even for lack of an air conditioner. Just look at the agency’s own “risk assessment” form – as The Nation did:

A point gets added to a family’s risk score if “current housing is physically unsafe,” while homelessness adds two points.

Note to journalists: Odds are there’s a similar risk assessment form in your state. 

And here’s where differences in agency culture from state to state show up. As is made clear in Prof. Kelley Fong’s brilliant book, Investigating Families, caseworkers in Connecticut are overloaded, but most of them probably would try to find a family an air conditioner. Even in Missouri, you can sometimes find compassion for families and an understanding of the harm separation does to children – from the Kansas City police. 

But not in Sara Smith’s Children’s Division.  Again from the story in The Nation: 

Even if all a family needs, as in Ortega’s case, is an air conditioner, caseworkers may not have the funds—and might resist calling around to find an organization that does. 

Caseworkers may also feel that this kind of work isn’t in their job description. … Dubois, the retired family court attorney, said that many caseworkers feel they shouldn’t “enable people” by helping them: “‘If [clients] are unable to handle things, we’re not going to do it for them.’” 

Oh, it’s not that the Children’s Division won’t spend money on concrete needs; it just depends on whose needs: 

Sometimes all that families need to remain stably housed and prevent a child’s removal is some extra money. But while the Children’s Division doesn’t use its funds to help these families with housing, the agency does directly fund the housing needs of foster families, as federal law requires. In Missouri, licensed foster-care families receive between $509 and $712 a month for a child, depending on the child’s age, to cover housing and other basic needs, plus an additional $91 a month for children 3 years and younger to cover things like formula and diapers. They receive between $320 and $700 a year for clothing, as well as monthly payments of as much as $2,034 for children with “elevated needs.” 

(Still, they can’t top North Carolina, which is paying some so-called “professional foster parents” $100,000 per couple per year, plus fringe benefits and -  free housing!) 

Paradoxically, it’s better if families don’t have to turn to a family police agency for concrete help, for reasons that should be obvious: Families are afraid, often rightly so, to seek help from an agency that can take away their children. There should be alternative sources. But in Missouri there are no alternative sources anywhere near able to meet the need. The Children’s Division not only isn’t helping, it’s even undermining such efforts. 

This is the culture Darrell Missey, a former judge, was up against when he tried to reduce needless foster care in Missouri. (I was too hard on him at the time for the way he was going about it. For that, Judge Missey, I apologize.) 

Missey is remarkably candid about how much worse things are getting now: 

“I was trying to get people to give folks the opportunity to come up with answers besides separating the family,” Missey said. Still, he often felt forced to remove children because he didn’t have any housing to offer their families. Missey left the position in late 2024. Smith, his replacement, reassigned the person Missey had hired to work on removal prevention to a different role and fired his deputy director, he said. There is a “mentality” that “pervades the state” of removing a child instead of finding a way to fix or find housing, he added: “Missouri’s leadership is not interested in preventing children from coming into foster care.” [Emphasis added.] 

Sara Smith’s actions make that abundantly clear. And the numbers show she is succeeding. The Nation story documents a surge in court petitions after Smith issued a memo warning that, in some cases, even Missouri’s hidden foster care system, which is a problem in itself, wasn’t severe enough. 

And when we compared entries into care for August 2025, the most recent month for which data are available, to August 2024, when Missey still was in charge, we found they’d skyrocketed by nearly 50 percent. From 325 in August 2024, to 462 in August 2025. If that trend holds for an entire year, Missouri’s rate of child removal could approach triple the national average. 

The Nation story also highlights a unique problem in Missouri, the fact that there are two agencies that can tear apart families and keep them apart, and one of them is uniquely unaccountable: It’s the Juvenile Office, the bizarre, and probably unconstitutional fifth wheel in the Missouri system. I’ve written about it several times, but the Nation story highlights something I’ve overlooked. For technical reasons related to how federal funding works, the Juvenile Office doesn’t even have to pretend to follow federal law requiring states to make “reasonable efforts” to keep families together. (By the way, Sara Smith loves the Juvenile Office.) 

A lesson about laws 

The Nation story points out that 

About half of states exempt parents’ financial inability to provide things like shelter for their children from the definition of child maltreatment. At least three states have statutes saying homelessness does not constitute neglect. Missouri does not. While it has exceptions in its maltreatment statutes for corporal punishment and refusing medical care on religious grounds, it has none for poverty or homelessness. 

But back in Connecticut, the Hearst Connecticut Media story about very similar problems, discussed in the previous post to this Blog, notes that 

State law restricts the Department of Children and Families from determining that a child is neglected — and can then be removed from their family and put into foster care — because of poverty. 

But they’re doing it anyway, as they do in every state, whether it has such a law or not. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have such laws. Rather, it means the laws need to be tougher. They need to require states to show what they’ve done to, in the words of one activist group, “take our poverty, not our children,” and require courts to enforce it. 

An example is this good bill proposed in Maine. But it didn’t pass; instead they passed the vague, unenforceable type of law that many other states have. 

A tough law would be a good first step in Missouri – and it would have to apply explicitly to the Juvenile Office as well as the Children’s Division. At least that might curb the rate at which Sara Smith is sending the state careening full-speed backwards.

Two outstanding stories expose the vast scope of family destruction when family police tear apart families because of housing

In one of the richest states in America, lawmakers leave hundreds of children
trapped in foster care because their parents can't afford adequate housing.

Hearst Connecticut Media exposes the problem in that state, where it’s bad. The Nation exposes it in Missouri – where horrible leadership has set off a foster-care panic, making it even worse

First of two parts (Read Part Two here)

● Virginia Ortega didn’t have an air conditioner in her rental apartment in Missouri. She couldn’t afford one, and the landlord wouldn’t provide one. So the Missouri family police agency (a more accurate term than child welfare agency), known as the Children’s Division, took away her 16-year-old autistic son. For months, she did not even know where he was. 

Now, as The Nation explains in this story 

To get her son back, a judge told her, she had to have decent housing, a job, and $3,000 in a bank account, she told me. But after Cesar was removed, she was fired—someone at work had spread a rumor that she’s a bad mother. Ortega suffers from leukemia, which makes it hard for her to find another job.

● Lauren and her nine-year-old son John were all set to move from Missouri to live with a cousin in a spacious house in Oklahoma. They were just waiting for a transfer of medical records for John, who has kidney disease. 

But that wasn’t good enough for the Children’s Division. They* tore John away from his mother – because they’d been living in an extended-stay motel. 

● In Connecticut, the children of Kelly Toutain and Zachery Lyons were taken for exactly the sort of reason foster care apologists love to cite when they say children aren’t taken because of poverty: They had mental health problems – but nothing that affluent families don’t handle routinely, because they have the money for good doctors and therapists.  

Now the mental health problems are under control. But, as a story from Hearst Connecticut Media explains, to allow their children to be placed with a relative, they had to move out of the apartment they had in the same house. So while mental health problems (and the lack of money to deal with them) may have triggered the removal, homelessness is what kept the family apart. 

Connecticut is bad; Missouri is worse 

The two in-depth stories shed new light on one of the prime examples of the confusion of poverty with neglect: children taken because their families lack adequate housing. (Or sometimes when they just lack housing not good enough to meet the arbitrary standards of the caseworker who showed up at the door that day.) 

In Part Two, available here, we take a close look at what The Nation found in Missouri. But first, Connecticut: 

In 2024, 391 Connecticut children were taken from their families for reasons including homelessness or lack of housing – and that’s just the number the state admits to when reporting entries to the federal government. 

And, the Hearst story reports, 

During the first six months of this year, the families of 452 children currently in foster care were on that [housing] waitlist, according to agency data. Another 635 children with open DCF cases but who remain with their parents who are at risk of homelessness or living in unsafe conditions are also waiting for housing. 

The wait list for housing is so long that some children lose the right to ever live with their families again for their entire childhoods. Under the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act, states are required to seek termination of children’s rights to their parents (a more accurate term than termination of parental rights) if a child has been in foster care for 15 of the last 22 months. (In fact, there’s a lot of leeway, but “ASFA made me do it” is the family policing equivalent of “the dog ate my homework.”) Said one Connecticut family defense attorney: 

“I have so many clients who are FaceTiming me from their campsite, or going into court unhoused,” Custody of their kids is terminated (permanently) before they even get a case manager.” 

But, hey, it’s not housing alone, right? (Except when it is.) It must be mentalhealthdrugabusedomesticviolence, the three excuses for taking away poor people’s children, chanted like a mantra as if a single word.  But that confuses cause and effect. Again, from the story:

Elizabeth Berman, a child-welfare attorney for three decades, said … addressing other issues that contribute to child removal is impossible until parents have stable housing … 

“They can't work toward reunification because they're living in a tent,” she said of one client. “Having to figure out, with no money, what little wooded area am I going to sleep in tonight, or what bridge am I going to be under? It's all consuming. So you can't really focus on mental health treatment or substance abuse treatment or education or anything else because your energy is tied up in fundamental basic survival needs.” 

And, as has been pointed out for decades, mental health issues, domestic violence and substance abuse all can be caused by poverty – and as affluent sufferers from those sorts of ailments, such as Betty Ford – taught us long ago, they often can be cured with money. 

Connecticut once understood this. Again from the story: 

DCF’s supportive housing program has landed national recognition for successfully connecting parents with long-term affordable housing and the services needed to safely reunify with their children. Research shows that those in the program were more likely to get their children back and were less likely to face new substantiated abuse or neglect allegations within five years. Research also found the short-term expense of the program to the agency was cost neutral. 

Even if it weren't cost-neutral, Connecticut sure as hell could afford it. Connecticut spends on child welfare at one of the highest rates in the country, a rate nearly triple the national average when rates of child poverty are factored in.

The program still exists, but it provides nowhere near enough assistance to meet the demand. That may help explain why, while entries into foster care are going down in most states, they're going up in Connecticut.

But at least Connecticut still takes children at a rate slightly below the national average. And at least in Connecticut, the entire system, starting at the very top, doesn’t ooze contempt for impoverished families. For that, we must turn to Missouri. 

We do that on this blog in Part Two. 

*-The Children’s Division will tell you they can’t take away children themselves. For a detailed discussion of why this is disingenuous claptrap, see this post.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending November 11, 2025

● In Rochester, New York, WHAM-TV and WXXI Public Radio have stories about a new report from Hope585 and The Children's Agenda documenting still more harm caused by mandatory reporting laws and laws that allow anonymous reports. In addition to the cost in trauma inflicted on children and families, and the time stolen from finding the relatively few children in real danger, there’s also a huge financial cost to families, and to taxpayers.

As Hope585 Executive Director Dr. Ashley Cross explained: 

"This county spent roughly $11.5 million responding to investigations that ultimately found no safety concerns. Families themselves lost an estimated $2.2 million in wages due to lost time at work, travel and appointments tied to the investigative process." 

Here’s the full report. 

● There’s always money to pay foster parents and ultra-expensive ultra-useless “residential treatment” providers. But if a loss of SNAP benefits means the children are hungry – well, say systems in Pennsylvania and Georgia, we’ll just have to take away the kids. I have a blog post about it. 

● It’s bad in Canada, too. CBC News reports on data from Manitoba, which suggest the family policing system in that province is devoted almost exclusively to taking First Nations children from their families. 

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

● From the Salt Lake Tribune: 

Discovery Ranch Academy health care workers physically neglected a 17-year-old boy who died by suicide a year ago at the Utah County teen treatment center, Utah child welfare workers have found.

Food or foster care? Places that say they never take children because of poverty get ready to take more children because of poverty

Pittsburgh, Pa. and the State of Georgia are prime examples

Georgia makes its child welfare priorities clear

Got time for a one-question pop quiz? 

With SNAP benefits cut off, poor families are under even more stress. Faced with a family going hungry and desperate to find food for the children, the stress causes a parent to “maltreat” the children. Do you: 

A) Put the family under investigation, interrogate everyone, rifle through cabinets, drawers, cupboards and refrigerators, stripsearch the children (often standard practice regardless of the investigation) and leave the entire family traumatized.

B) Do all of the above and tear the children from their parents, consigning them to the chaos of foster care, from which only one in five is likely to do well in later life: a system that leaves emotional scars so great it may make it more than four times more likely they’ll die by age 20, while putting them in places where there’s at least a one in four chance, and probably more, they will be abused.

C) Get the family some food.

The answer should be easy, of course. But in Allegheny County, Pa. (metropolitan Pittsburgh), they seem to prefer A or B.  Because this is how a story from the Pittsburgh Media Partnership Newsroom begins: 

Fewer families are stepping up to foster, just as experts warn a surge of children could soon flood the system if the state and federal budget standoffs drag on. 

Allegheny County is now preparing for an increase in referrals to the Office of Children, Youth, and Families. 

“Parental stress is a big predictor of child maltreatment,” said Julia Reuben, an administrator for Allegheny County’s Department of Human Services. “And so, when there’s not enough money to feed your children … I think we can surmise that that will lead to increased maltreatment.”

Well, it certainly will lead to increased maltreatment if more children are forced into foster care, which often is an act of maltreatment itself, and, as noted above, a place where independent studies keep finding high rates of abuse. 

It’s another indication of how much child welfare in Pittsburgh has deteriorated.  Once a model for reducing needless foster care, the county turned its back on its own success. Now it’s a leader in targeting families using an algorithm that its own co-designer described as “Big Brother,” an algorithm that reportedly was* investigated for bias by the Biden Justice Department.  

The county also is a leader in tearing apart families. The most recent comparative data for Pittsburgh are from 2022, but they show a rate of removal more than 50% higher than the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in. 

Pittsburgh does continue to be a leader in using the least harmful form of foster care, kinship foster care, but for how long? Kin are also likely to be poor and so also likely to face additional stress due to the cut-off of SNAP benefits. 

As it happens, Pennsylvania is in the midst of a state budget impasse as well. That threatens payments to foster parents.  So Allegheny County has been dipping into reserve funds to pay the foster parents.  Maybe they should try using more of those funds to get food to birth parents so their children aren’t “maltreated” due to all that extra stress. 

It’s not just Pittsburgh 

Notice how in Pittsburgh, they use a rhetorical fig leaf to cover the naked truth about taking children due to poverty.  Oh, no, it’s not the poverty, they say, it’s the maltreatment caused by the stress caused by the poverty. 

In Georgia, they’re not even pretending.   

Kate Blair, director of the Savannah Court-Appointed Special Advocates Program (which expanded into additional services and now calls itself “Brightside”), offered up exactly the sort of comments one would expect – if you know CASA. She told WTOC-TV: 

“For a lot of our parents working towards reunification, they need to have a safe place for their children to return to, as well as food in those cupboards,” Blair said. “And without SNAP benefits, they may not have both.” 

The organization is anticipating families needing to be separated longer, and even more children possibly entering the foster care system. 

When a child is removed, parents need to come up with a case plan for the court to determine that their home is safe. Those factors include having warm shelter and food. 

“We’re taking away one really important piece,” Blair said. “And in the end, who’s going to suffer the most are not the politicians, are not adults like myself. It’s the children.” 

It’s not that Blair wants this to happen, in fact, she was appealing to people to donate food. But there’s something else her agency could do: Those CASA volunteers could oppose delaying reunification because of poverty and demand that the Georgia family police agency (a more accurate term than child welfare agency) find a way to put food in all those cupboards. 

DFCS makes it worse 

Instead, that agency is making things even worse. 

The Imprint reports that 

In emails sent late Friday to child welfare agencies in Georgia, state officials announced that the federal government shutdown has required them to suspend new services that protect children from entering foster care and ensure family reunification — unless approved in writing by the state. 

Under the directive, without that level of approval, caseworkers cannot initiate contracted services for child and family assessments, aides for parents, wraparound care, measures to prevent foster care, including “unnecessary out of home placement,” and “early intervention” services. [Emphasis added.] 

The only exceptions are “court-ordered or emergency services.” 

Local offices of the state Division of Family and Children’s Services remain free to shovel children into foster care and even ultra-expensive ultra-useless institutions,  with no new restrictions. 

Of course, this makes explicit that Georgia is willfully violating federal laws. One law – almost universally ignored – requires states to make “reasonable efforts” to keep families together. Another requires states to make “active efforts” in cases involving Native American children. Neither law has an exception for government shutdowns. 

Yet now DFCS is explicitly cutting back on services to prevent “unnecessary out-of-home placement.” 

As for where Georgia might come up with the money to pay for all those services it’s cutting back, there’s actually an untapped gold mine.  

The most expensive form of “care” for foster youth is institutionalization. It can cost hundreds of dollars per day per child. It’s also the least effective – in fact, it’s not effective at all. As a U.S. Senate Committee then chaired by Georgia’s own Sen. John Ossoff recently reminded us, the entire model is a failure. 

And that’s before we get to the fact that institutions are the placements where children are most likely to be abused, as can be seen in scandals that have engulfed institutions in Arizona, Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, Utah, Iowa, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Washington state , Arkansas, New York, Connecticut, Idaho -- and Georgia. 

Here’s what else is so significant about places that institutionalize children: They cost a fortune, often hundreds of dollars per day per child. 

Which brings us to the goldmine. 

Nationwide, two percent of foster children are institutionalized.  But in Georgia, it’s 12%. As of Sept. 30, 2024, Georgia was institutionalizing 1,331 children! And while Georgia institutionalizes children at what is probably one of the highest rates in the nation, it uses the least harmful form of foster care, kinship foster care, at one of the lowest rates, 22% - barely over half the national average. 

So what DFCS should be doing is reexamining the case of every institutionalized child. Figure out which could go straight home (yeah, I know, these are supposedly the most difficult children, but that’s often according to those who run the institutions), which can go to the homes of extended families as kinship foster care placements, and which really do need more intensive help – the kind that can be provided far more effectively and at far less cost through the very wraparound services DFCS is now cutting back. 

The children would be far better off, and, though the federal government would reap some of the savings, Georgia still would have millions in additional funds to provide the help needed to keep children out of the system in the first place. 

*-If there was such an investigation, as the Associated Press reports, it may still be going on, but given who’s in charge of the Justice Department now, that seems less likely.

 Image designed with deepai.org

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending Nov 4, 2025

● Research overwhelmingly shows that, almost always, the least harmful form of foster care, by far, is kinship foster care – placement with extended family. Consider that as you read this story from USA Today about how the State of Texas threw every possible barrier in the way of a heroic grandmother who stepped up to take care of her grandchildren. 

● In Kansas, which tears apart families at one of the highest rates in the nation, the leader of a private foster care agency describes conditions in her own agency as “pandemonium.” She tells a legislative committee about a six-year-old sleeping in their office for 48 nights before being institutionalized. Then she says the agency needs a taxpayer bailout because insurance premiums are going up. To the surprise of no one who regularly reads this blog, I have a blog post about this. 

● File this next one under “those who cannot remember the past…” I always worry when I ask reporters if they’ve ever heard of cases like the McMartin Preschool, and they say no. That’s understandable; that case happened more than 40 years ago. But it seems that a lot of people, from caseworkers to therapists to journalists, forgot. How else to explain the horrific injustice exposed in a very recent case in Washington, D.C. by former Washington Post reporter Radley Balko on his Substack, The Watch. It could have been called McMartin Redux. And in this recent case, some of the biggest failures were those of the D.C. family police agency. 

Given that none of the individuals or organizations most responsible for whipping up the hysteria over cases like McMartin all those years ago ever has been held accountable – indeed, some are still treated as reliable sources by journalists today, perhaps it was inevitable. 

As for the media, the then-media critic for the Los Angeles Times, David Shaw, won a Pulitzer Prize for a series critiquing their failure in the McMartin case. Balko hasn’t gotten one of those for this story (and media were not the primary focus) – but he did get a “laurel” from Columbia Journalism Review. 

● Libertarian journalist John Stossel offersa refreshing take on these issues. Refreshing on two counts: First, he hears out all sides, then he offers a candid conclusion: 

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

From The News-Review in Oregon:

A boy who said he was sexually abused by another child while both lived in a Douglas County foster home is suing the state, claiming the parents of the home knew about the alleged abuse yet allowed it to occur. … 

J.A., who was born in 2014, lived in the foster home between 2019 and the first half of 2020. During that time, J.A. was sexually assaulted by a female foster child who also lived in the home. The girl reportedly made the boy touch her private area, insert objects into her, and drink her urine, the lawsuit said. 

The foster parents in the home reportedly learned of the abuse, but “simply moved Jane to another bedroom,” according to the lawsuit. Further, the foster parents reportedly continued to allow the girl back into the boy’s bed at night. …

In Kansas, an agency that institutionalized a six-year-old is looking for a bailout

Stock photo from Pixabay

Add Kansas to the list of states where private foster care agencies are looking for a bailout to cover high insurance costs. So far, California has caved, New York has resisted, and it looks like Illinois is going to study the matter. 

Insurance premiums are skyrocketing because of laws making it easier for victims of horrific abuse in foster care and institutions to sue. Those lawsuits are what insurance companies needed to notice something a lot of us have been saying for decades: Though foster care is portrayed as a safe haven for children, it’s rarely a haven – and often it’s not safe. 

So now agencies are running to government seeking either near-immunity from lawsuits, taxpayer bailouts or both. 

The real solution is to curb needless removal of children. That way, group homes and institutions no longer will be needed, and for the few children who really need to be taken from their parents, safe, loving family foster homes will be available. 

In few places is this more apparent than Kansas. When you count only the removals of children to which the state Department of Children and Families admits to taking, Kansas tears apart families at a rate more than double the national average. Add in Kansas’ own special form of hidden foster care, so-called police protective custody placements, and it’s probably closer to triple. 

                                        Nat. Avg.                 KS official      Estimate: KS+ "police                                                                                                                      protective custody"

Enter Brenda Watkins, president of EmberHope Connections, the latest subcontractor handling foster care for the Wichita region, telling the Kansas Legislature her agency needs a bailout – even as she admits to “pandemonium” in her own agency. 

As a story in the Kansas Reflector explains: 

She described “pandemonium,” staff and child injuries and security troubles. One security company fired EmberHope, and off-duty Wichita Police Department officers now help in place of private security guards. 

The issue arose in connection with the Wichita region’s dismal record for stashing children in makeshift night-to-night placements, such as offices. It happens across Kansas hundreds of times. And in 2024, the Wichita region, with roughly 27% of the state’s population, had 83% of such incidents.

Which brings us to the matter of institutionalizing six-year-olds. From the story: 

One 6-year-old boy spent 48 nights in an EmberHope office and 40 nights in a hospital in a three-month span. … 

The boy, who was eventually diagnosed with a neurological condition, has been living in a residential psychiatric treatment facility and is expected to soon be discharged into a therapeutic foster home, Watkins said. 

So was this child actually abused? Neglected? Abandoned? How exactly did a neurological condition call for any form of foster care, much less what this six-year-old is being forced to endure. 

Perhaps most disturbing is how Watkins spins this as some kind of success.  Now, at last, she says, 

“He has been wrapped around with community services and supports to meet his needs,” Watkins said. 

Yes, private agencies can pervert any term to suit their interests. No, warehousing a six-year-old in an agency office, a hospital, and a residential treatment center and then providing a supportive home is the antithesis of Wraparound. For the benefit of anyone who may be confused, here’s a brief video refresher course in what Wraparound really means: 

There are more details here. 

Of course, Watkins blamed a shortage of placements. But neither she nor anyone else explains why the so-called “shortage” apparently is even worse in Wichita than the rest of the state. 

One place to look might be back at those police protective custody placements.  When it comes to officially acknowledged foster care placements, the Wichita region does not appear to be out of line with the rest of the state in its rate-of-removal – it’s horrible everywhere. 

But when it comes to those off-the-books placements, Wichita is far worse. We don’t know why, but I can suggest one place to look. 

In Kansas child welfare, caseworkers come and go, private contractors come and go, commissioners come and go, even agency names come and go (DCF used to be SRS - the Department of Social and Rehabilitative Services). But for decades, there has been one constant: Ron Paschal, the deputy district attorney in charge of the Juvenile Division in Sedgwick County (metropolitan Wichita). 

Based on what I am sure is a sincere belief he is protecting children, there is no stronger advocate for a take-the-child-and-run approach to “child welfare” – and no stronger defender of police protective custody placements – than Paschal. Seventeen years ago, his office was accused of bullying caseworkers into including things in sworn affidavits that the workers didn't actually believe. Paschal’s staff also was accused of cussing at, screaming at, yelling at and threatening the caseworkers. 

The accusations came from none other than the head of SRS at the time – Don Jordan. Paschal strongly denied the accusations and, ultimately, so did Jordan. When Jordan found out his comments had been taped and would be made public, he called Paschal and apologized. He didn’t mean it, he said; he was merely “pandering” to the family advocates with whom he was meeting. (Details on all this are in the report on Kansas child welfare that we released at the time.) 

But there is no doubt that Paschal has spent decades pushing a take-the-child-and-run agenda and opposing any attempt to curb it. 

So he, too, really should watch the video above. 

And then he and Watkins should read that new study from Sweden -- the one finding that, by age 20, foster children were more than four times more likely to have died than those alleged to have been comparably-maltreated but left in their homes. So no, the horrifying finding is not because the foster youth were in worse shape to begin with. 

The major cause for all those foster child deaths: Suicide. 

So after reading the study, I hope that Paschal will reconsider his approach. And I hope Watkins, whose agency is not responsible for the initial act of removing children, will speak out about those who are responsible and are taking too many needlessly. 

I also hope Watkins will move heaven and earth to wrap real help around that six-year-old for a long, long time. Because it sure sounds like he’s going to need it.

#CASAsoWhite: Our annual Halloween reminder to CASA: No, it’s not a good idea to raise money by holding a talent show with a blackface act. (And yes, one CASA chapter actually did that.)

 We suggest that the National office for the Court-Appointed Special Advocates program use this item from The Daily Show as a training video

In 2018, responding to former Today Show anchor Megyn Kelly’s appalling attempt to justify blackface, (for which she has apologized) her colleague Craig Melvin noted that, as a CNN story put it, “this controversy is an opportunity to inform people — but [Melvin] said most people already knew how offensive blackface is.”

Most people, but apparently not one chapter of that most sacred cow in child welfare Court-Appointed Special Advocates.  Oh, they’ve learned in the years since they included a blackface act in a fundraiser, especially since they apparently eventually apologized – but that is just one example of the racial bias that plagues CASA.  And that, of course, raises fundamental questions about the role of CASA in deciding the fate of children who are overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately children of color.  Even more questions are raised by the latest study of CASA's effectiveness. And there's much more about CASA in NCCPR's presentation at the 2021 Kempe Center conference. and in this 2024 story from The Imprint.

So every Halloween, I plan to reprint this post from 2017:  

This Halloween, The Daily Show offers a useful history lesson. The topic: why it’s a really bad idea for white people to dress up in blackface:

But the lesson isn’t just useful for Halloween. It’s also something that anyone involved with that most sacred cow of child welfare – Court-Appointed Special Advocates -- needs to know.

CASA is a program in which minimally trained volunteers, overwhelmingly white and middle-class, are assigned to families who are overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately nonwhite. Then they tell judges if the children should be taken from those families, sometimes forever.   That, of course, raises problems of inherent bias.  But some CASA chapters have made their biases depressingly obvious.

Consider what happened nine years ago in Arkansas City, Kansas. To raise funds for the local CASA chapter, they held a talent competition. The winning act featured the mayor of Arkansas City – dressed in blackface.  The head of the local CASA chapter couldn’t understand why that was a problem.   "It wasn't black black," she said. "It was all really just tan." That’s only the beginning. All the awful details are here.

It would be one thing if this were just an isolated example of racial bias. But it’s not.

● There was the CASA chapter in Marin County, California, which fell apart when the state CASA association merely asked that they strive for more diversity among the volunteers.

● There was the appalling racist rant by someone who says he volunteered in a scandal-plagued Washington State CASA program for 20 years.

● There’s the fact that the most comprehensive study ever done of CASA, a study commissioned by the National CASA Association itself, found that CASA volunteers spend significantly less time on a case if the child to whom they are assigned is Black.

● And then there’s the question of whether the very structure of CASA makes it, in the words of a law review article, “an exercise of white supremacy.”

Showing the Daily Show video won’t solve all these problems; not even close. But it might help prevent the worst excesses of racial bias in CASA programs.

Originally published, Oct. 30, 2017