NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending April 29

● Think you know all about the controversy over “mandatory reporting” laws that require most professionals dealing with children to report their slightest suspicion of “abuse” or “neglect” to the family police? This story, from the New York City online news site THE CITY, adds a whole new dimension of depth and nuance. For example: why the all-purpose cop-out non-solution solution of “more training” does so little good: 

Mandated reporters who spoke with THE CITY said that throughout their careers, they were routinely warned that not reporting a parent could lead to the loss of their professional license or worse, adding that that culture of fear drives many professionals working with children to report parents, even when they have misgivings about the impact that their call might have on a family. 

“Doctors, social workers, teachers often have crippling debt and cannot afford to lose their license,” said Matthew Holm, a pediatrician working in the Bronx. “Even if loss of licensure happens only one time, there’s a huge amount of fear.” 

Some reporters acknowledged that at times, the threat of a call to the hotline had been helpful in getting parents to make changes. As professionals on the frontlines, they said, they know that some children do need to be protected from their parents. 

What they don’t believe is that it helps children for the professionals who know them best to be forced to defer their judgment to hotline operators or investigators, some fresh out of college, who approach the issue from a prosecutorial, evidence-gathering position. … 

Frivolous reports can also terrorize families. One doctor interviewed by THE CITY described an incident in which a patient’s mother was reported by a teacher, who had mistaken a rash for a bruise. That led to investigators strip-searching the child’s body and aggressively questioning the mother in front of her child, leaving the mother in tears. 

● Similarly, adding some kind of alternative number mandated reporters can call to, in theory, direct support to families, such as the plan described here, won’t do much good if calling that number just leads to investigations by another name or if it doesn’t also make reporters immune from penalties for failure to report. 

● At the root of almost every problem in “child welfare” is poverty. So if the federal government is hell-bent on doing everything in its power to make poverty worse, the potential consequences should be obvious. But that’s what happening. ProPublica reports on “The Trump Administration’s War on Children." 

●At the same time, these devastating cuts can’t become an excuse to tear apart more families. But that sounds like what the head of New Jersey’s family police agency (an agency that has made enormous progress in recent years) is trying to do. New Jersey Spotlight News reports that 

potential federal funding cuts that could cost New Jersey’s Department of Children and Families more than $100 million, Commissioner Christine Norbut Beyer told state lawmakers last week. 

A reduction of this magnitude would force the department to “revert to its most basic role — that of child protection — not prevention, not support or empowerment, just surveillance and foster care,” Norbut Beyer told members of the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee during a hearing on the department’s $2.3 billion budget proposal for the fiscal year that begins July 1. 

Yes, $100 million would be a big cut, but it’s only about 4.5% of the agency’s budget.  Even if that turns out to be the final figure and even if the state makes up none of it, it should be possible to find places to cut without wiping out everything except surveilling and tearing apart families. 

● Of course if you swing an ax wildly and cut everything, you’re bound to make the occasional cut that does some good. So we should, in fact, rejoice, that, as The Imprint reports, federal funding to the National CASA Association has been eliminated, at least for now. CASA is both the most sacred cow in child welfare and one of its most harmful programs. Massive studies document that its effects include prolonging foster care and making it more likely that foster youth will “age out” with no home at all. 

This does not mean the end of CASA, just a funding cut to its national office.  And already, local reporters, unfamiliar with the research, are churning out hand-wringing stories about how awful it would be if their local CASA program was curbed. On the contrary, it would be an improvement. 

● New Mexico’s attorney general has announced plans to “investigate” the state’s family police agency – but not for taking away children needlessly. I have a column in Source NM on how he’s stacked the deck from the get-go. 

● Speaking of steps backward, The Imprint reports that a mid-level appeals court in New York has upheld a state plan to allow what amounts to sugar-frosted foster care. The vote was 3-2, and opponents plan to appeal. The story ends with a quote from Judge Stan Pritzker’s dissent: 

“Respondents’ refrain that the intent of the regulations ‘is not and will not be to create a new form of foster care’ will fall deafly on the ears of a child placed outside of their home with strangers. Not only do the Host Family Home regulations lack legislative mandate, they dispense with the hard-fought, constitutionally grounded due process rights of children who have no say as to their fate, no counsel, no permanency hearings, no judicial oversight at all and are trapped in an administrative mousetrap with no way out. What could possibly go wrong?” 

● In The Imprint a former foster youth, Martha Bul, writes: 

When I was with my dad, I went to school and became number one in my first-grade class. After my dad found out that I was number one in class, he put me in a private Catholic school. 

When I went to foster care, a foster care worker falsely labeled me as some kid who was mentally disabled and sent me to be locked up in a mental facility. While in the mental institution, I was not allowed to go to school or question anything. If I asked why I was in a mental facility when I did not have a mental illness, and why I was not allowed to be in school, they would throw me on the ground, restrain me, and stick me with needles that had drugs in them to sedate me. This is inhumane. This type of treatment is slavery. One can tell that these are exactly some of the ways that our ancestors were treated in the historical slavery days…. 

Ms. Bul suggests a system of compensation for young people who endured what she went through. Another term for that might be “reparations.” 

● The terror doesn’t end with the foster care. Also in The Imprint Kristen Nicole Powell, a young mother who spent years in foster care writes: 

One fear has haunted me since the day I became a parent: losing my kids to the child welfare system. For someone like me who grew up feeling tossed around by systems that were supposed to help, the thought of my children being taken away feels like my worst nightmare. Even simple situations, like my kid getting hurt at the park, scare me. I know it’s normal for kids to get hurt, and I know I shouldn’t be scared because I’m not doing anything wrong, but that fear lingers anyway. It’s always there, whispering in the back of my mind, reminding me of the moments when systems stepped in and caused more harm than good. It’s a fear I carry with me every day, and there have been moments when it felt dangerously close to coming true. 

Tragically, the fear is rational – because various risk assessment protocols raise the “risk score” of anyone who is accused of abuse or neglect, just because they themselves had been placed in foster care. 

● The Missouri Independent reports on a great big bill full of mostly small changes to the state child welfare system – most of them modest improvements. The bill would stop the state from stealing foster children’s Social Security benefits, add a “reasonable childhood independence” exception to the definition of neglect, modestly enhance a “family Miranda” provision in existing law, and set in motion a process that might someday mean that children age 14 and older would get an actual lawyer fighting for what they want. On the other hand, the bill also seems to encourage institutionalizing more children.

● The Imprint reports on efforts to strengthen Colorado’s version of the Indian Child Welfare Act. It’s one of three states where such efforts are underway. 

Updates to previous stories: 

● The Washington Post has more about the Texas parents whose child was wrongly taken baed on a report by a doctor who didn’t even name the right person as the mother. They got their child back, but they’re stuck in central registry limbo. 

● Blavity has more on that study of bias in the New York City family police system. 

● The Maine Morning Star reports that a legislative committee is supporting a bill to make it harder to confuse poverty with neglect – well, a little harder.  The committee refused to support the version with some teeth in it, and went for the one even the family police agency supports – so you know the effect will be limited. 

● This update is more of a a 50-years-later story: On the 50^th Anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, The Verge looks at what “operation babylift” was really all about. It was about what it’s so often about in “child welfare”: white saviors enacting their rescue fantasies on children of color. The Vietnamese knew it. From the story: 

A South Vietnamese lieutenant gave this bitter statement to the New York Times: “It is nice to see you Americans bringing home souvenirs of our country as you leave — china elephants and orphans. Too bad some of them broke … but we have plenty more.” 

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

● The Post-Tribune in Indiana has an update on the story of a little boy taken from relatives because they refused to say “how high” when the family police agency said “jump” – only to die in foster care.

NCCPR in Source NM: Torrez’s CYFD investigation will fail if it leaves people out

A child welfare expert weighs in on latest effort to reform NM’s foster system

 New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez says he’s going to launch “a comprehensive and wide-ranging investigation” into how the Children, Youth and Families Department fails children. Allow me to save him some time. I can just write the report now — and I’ll throw in the news story that will follow. The story will go like this: 

The beleaguered Children Youth and Families Department and its embattled leadership are plagued with a shortage of foster parents and high turnover among demoralized, overworked and understaffed caseworkers, according to the blistering conclusions in a scathing report released today. 

We know this is what the report will say for a couple of reasons. First, almost (but not quite) all of that is true. Indeed CYFD’s performance is every bit as awful as Torrez says it is. Second, it’s what scathing reports on embattled child welfare agencies all over the country always say, particularly when those issuing the reports show no interest in real solutions. … 

Read the full commentary in Source NM

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending April 22

 

● Kansas has its own special, ugly little version of hidden foster care. I have a blog post on How the Kansas “child welfare” agency makes hundreds of foster children “disappear.” 

● Indiana has a law limiting the number of cases family police are supposed to carry – at least it has one for now. WRTV Indianapolis reports on efforts by some lawmakers to sneak repeal of those limits into the state budget – including NCCPR’s perspective on how it all traces back to Indiana’s obscene rate of tearing apart families. 

● Gotthamist and Black Enterprise both have stories on a new report about racial bias in the New York City family policing system. 

● It’s not just New York City, of course. KERA Public Radio and  The 19^th each have stories on Black Texas parents whose child was wrongly torn from them at birth. Now reunited, the family is still trying to fight its way out of what amounts to a child abuse registry Twilight Zone.

● Even as a white middle-class foster parent who doubles as a state legislator in the Child Removal Capital of America, West Virginia, tries to weaken laws protecting the rights of siblings to stay together in foster care, The Imprint reports on a national group founded by those with actual lived experience, that works to strengthen those protections. 

● For children and families who are survivors of sibling separation and all the other harms of family policing, Imani Worthy, co-founder and executive director of Black Failies Love and Unite has a column in The Imprint about what reparations should look like. 

● Here’s something you don’t see every day – in fact hardly ever: a child welfare “ombudsman” who recognizes that agencies make terrible errors in all directions. But Virginia’s ombudsman gets it. The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports on a “blistering” report by the ombudsman which finds that workers often make decisions “in arbitrary ways with little planning or thought.” 

Among other findings, the story notes, the report echoed concerns of other advocates that decisions sometimes 

-- can be more about the convenience of social service department staff than a child’s needs;
-- do not take account of earlier problems that put a child at risk;
-- result from personality conflicts with parents;
-- are based on hasty judgment calls about parents;
-- and can reflect unsubstantiated worries about children’s safety. 

It’s quite a contrast to the willful blindness of ombuds / “child advocates” in, for example, Maine and Massachusetts. 

● Speaking of Massachusetts, the Legislature there did the right thing when it slightly curbed the number of different conditions mandated reporters are mandated to report. But even that was too much for the state family police agency – which is trying to overrule state law with a regulation.  I have a blog post about the Department of Children and Family’s great big “DCF-U!” to the legislature. 

● Florida Politics reports that Florida is the latest state to introduce Reasonable Childhood Independence legislation. 

In this week's edition of The Horror Stories go in All Directions:

● From Searchlight New Mexico: 

Sometime between Friday night and Saturday morning, 16-year-old Jaydun Garcia took his own life at a makeshift home for youth who lack foster placements.  Jaydun’s family included four brothers and a baby sister. He was very close to his siblings, those who knew him said, and a close friend to many kids in foster care. 

“He was always building us up, like helping us all,” said Jacie, a friend of Jaydun’s who lived with him for months in the Albuquerque office building of the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department, where case workers have often housed kids who don’t have foster homes available to them. … 

And finally … 

● Columbia Journalism Review has a fascinating interview with “Alec Karakatsanis on the Media’s Role in Spreading ‘Copaganda’  So what is an interview about covering the police doing in a list of stories about family policing? Well, you don’t have to change the wording much to see the similarity.  Just change a sentence like this: 

[W]hen you report as an objective fact that there’s a shortage of  prison guards foster parents as opposed to too many people in prison too many children in foster care, you’re actually taking a side in a very consequential political debate.

Mass. family police try an end-run around the State Legislature on child welfare and drug use

But don’t worry, the “cannamoms” will still be safe

The Massachusetts family police agency, the Department of Children and Families, recently solicited comment (presumably only because they had to) on a proposed change to regulations defining child abuse. The change is an attempt to get around a wise decision by the State Legislature.

Indeed, it is entirely consistent with the way DCF helped the Massachusetts “Child Advocate” try to sucker a special commission into recommending all sorts of expansion of mandatory reporting. The commission wasn’t fooled. 

Neither was the legislature. They actually passed a good change which, ever so slightly, narrows the long list of conditions mandatory reporters must report.  But DCF isn’t having that!  They’re trying an end-run by changing regulations. 

It all amounts to a great big DCF-U! to the State Legislature.  Let's see if the lawmakers tolerate it.

Here’s the comment I sent to DCF: 

[Your proposed change] contradicts best practice, contradicts the evidence base concerning substance use and child welfare – and flouts the intent of the Legislature. 

The Legislature recently changed state law so mandated reporters no longer must automatically report any instance of “prenatal substance exposure.” They remain free to report it when, in their professional judgment, they believe such a report is necessary to protect a child. This is a clear recognition that this knee-jerk response of automatically reporting every such instance did nothing to improve child safety. On the contrary, it compromised safety by driving pregnant women away from prenatal care and hospital delivery. 

Rather than respect best evidence-based practice and the intent of lawmakers, you now propose to change regulations defining what constitutes “physical injury” – which of course is something mandated reporters have to report. 

Right now, that definition includes “addiction to drug at birth.” That’s bad enough. But your proposal would change the definition so that physical injury includes “exposure to harmful patterns of substance use.” What does that mean? Presumably whatever you want it to mean. (I’m guessing the groups you have in mind are those against whom DCF always comes down hardest: Poor people, especially poor people of color.  I doubt that it means you’ll be going after the “harmful patterns of substance use” displayed by the celebrated Cannamoms of Massachusetts’ affluent suburbs.) 

Here’s what this would mean for mandated reporters: Under state law mandated reporters don’t have to report “prenatal substance exposure.” But under the new proposed regulation, they would have to report “exposure to harmful patterns of substance use” – which, presumably would include “prenatal substance exposure.” 

In short, DCF seeks to overrule the Massachusetts Legislature. It is a classic example of the arrogance that leads Massachusetts to tear apart families at a rate 60%above the national average, even when rates of family poverty are factored in. And there certainly is no evidence that Massachusetts children are 60% safer than the national average. 

It is in keeping with the decades-long habit of DCF, and before that DSS, and before that DPW of failing to balance the potential harm of parental substance use (or any other alleged parental failing) against the known severe harm of tearing children from everyone they know and love – and the known risk of abuse in foster care itself, where independent studies find far higher rates of abuse than your agency acknowledges in official figures. 

For all of these reasons, and most importantly, for the safety of the children DCF claims it wants to protect, this proposed change should be rescinded.

How the Kansas “child welfare” agency makes hundreds of foster children “disappear.”

Even the Wizard of Oz couldn’t do that. But at last, we’re getting a peek behind the curtain. 

Seventeen years after we first raised the issue, an ugly little practice that leads to hundreds of needless foster care placements in Kansas every year finally is getting some attention – though far from all of the attention it deserves. 

The Kansas Legislature passed, and the governor signed, a bill that may slightly reduce the number of times this practice is invoked – but it still allows the family police agency, the Department of Children and Families, to keep such placements “off the books” – so no one will know how many children really are taken from their homes in Kansas each year. 

The practice is known as placing children in “police protective custody.” It’s a special Kansas twist on the ugly practice of “hidden foster care.” What Kansas allows is so awful that it earns the state a special note in the narrative for the NCCPR Rate-of-Removal Index. 

After decades, it appears that DCF finally has leadership that is concerned about the practice and how it leads to the needless removal of children. They supported the modest reforms.  But they’re still sticking to the disingenuous claim that these placements are not foster care. 

Why are police protective custody placements not foster care? Because, DCF says, they’re police protective custody placements, that’s why! 

And no wonder: 

In a foster care placement, an agent of the government demands that parents surrender their children. The government then decides where that child will go – perhaps to a relative, perhaps to a stranger, perhaps to a group home or institution. The government decides when – or if – the children ever will see their parents again. 

In a police protective custody placement, on the other hand, an agent of the government demands that parents surrender their children. The government then decides where that child will go – perhaps to a relative, perhaps to a stranger, perhaps to a group home or institution. The government decides when – or if – the children ever will see their parents again. 

See the difference?  

Well, actually there is that one difference. When the police take the child (hence the term “police protective custody”) and the child is returned home at or before the first court hearing – which can be as much as six days later – DCF pretends it never happened!  In other words, when Kansas tells the public, and the federal government, how many children were torn from their homes and placed elsewhere by force of law, they don’t count police protective custody placements. 

How many such placements are there? No one knows for sure, but apparently quite a lot – so many that it can take the rate of removal in Kansas from outrageous all the way to obscene. Even worse, it appears that a significant proportion of these placements involve dumping children into the worst, most traumatic form of placement of all – institutionalizing them in parking place “shelters.”   

Officially, in 2022, the most recent year for which data are available, Kansas consigned 3,096 children to the chaos of foster care – that made the rate of removal in Kansas well over double the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in. (DCF gives a lower figure for 2024, but the number nationwide also probably has declined, so it’s unlikely Kansas’ relative position has changed.)

But in March, DCF finally released some figures on police protective custody placements. While not precise, they suggest that anywhere from 979 to 1,076 children were taken into police protective custody and then “thrown back” – much the worse for the experience – before the first hearing, and so would never be counted in official figures.  (A link to DCF’s figures and an explanation of the estimate can be found at the end of this post. If anyone wants to suggest an alternative figure, I’d be glad to take a look.) 

National Average   Kansas1         Kansas2

1=Rate-of-removal based on officially acknowledged entries.
2=Rate-of-removal based on likely real number of entries (including 979 PPC placements)

Using the low-end estimate, that would mean Kansas really took away 4,075 children in 2022. That would make the rate of removal in Kansas more than triple the national average and the fourth highest in the country. 

The practice goes back a long way 

We first discovered the practice in 2007, while working on our report about Kansas child welfare. We discovered it when it was referenced in passing in an op-ed column written by the public official who, then as now, might be Kansas’ foremost proponent of a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare. That would be Ron Paschal, then as now the deputy district attorney in charge of the Juvenile Division in Sedgwick County (metropolitan Wichita). His op-ed hinted that the number was huge, but offered no specifics. 

Just as in 2007, the most extreme use of police protective custody placements is still in the Wichita area. In that region, it appears that more than half of all entries into care were police protective custody cases in which the children were returned to family within six days. 

The excuse for hiding all these placements 

Although DCF has more concern about these placements now than it did in 2007, it still uses the same excuse now as then for failing to report them as entries to the public or to the federal government: It’s not foster care because DCF doesn’t have custody of the children – the police do. In other words: Sure, they’re in exactly the same places and subject to exactly the same control as if DCF had them, but hey, so what? That’s our technicality and we’re sticking to it! 

At best DCF is exploiting a loophole in federal regulations concerning what must be reported as an entry into foster care, at worst they may not be following those regulations. 

Those regulations do not say a child has to be in the custody of a given agency to be counted as in foster care.  Rather, the state family police agency must have “responsibility for placement and care of the child.”  In the case of Kansas police protective custody placements, children may be placed in foster homes group homes or institutions that are licensed and overseen by DCF. That sure sounds like responsibility for placement and care.  But, in fairness to DCF, when we asked the federal Administration for Children and Families about this in 2007, they were just fine with letting Kansas do this and looking the other way. That may be in part because if Kansas doesn’t call a case foster care, the federal government doesn’t have to pick up part of the tab for that case. 

So maybe DCF can get away with it legally – ethically it’s a shameful misrepresentation of the full scope of the extent to which Kansas destroys families.

Six-day placements are almost never necessary 

The new data also tell us something else: In nearly 1,000 cases – and maybe more – a Kansas law enforcement officer decided that something was happening to a child that was so awful it required tearing that child from everyone she or he knows and loves and throwing that child in with strangers – at worst dumping them into an institution. And yet, that child could be returned, typically to the home from which she or he was taken, within six days. 

A sadistic, brutal parent out to beat and torture a child does not suddenly reform in six days.  Neither does a parent who’s been deliberately starving a child. In these sorts of extremely rare cases, the problem is not likely to be remedied in six days.  Where the danger is not severe and immediate, odds are there are things that can be done without taking away the child. Here’s a good example, from next door in Missouri, of a police officer who understands that.  

But Ron Paschal doesn’t understand that. In legislative testimony, he cited horrible situations supposedly requiring police protective custody, and declared in written testimony that when the child then is returned home from this supposedly impossibly horrible situation within six days “THIS IS AN INDICATION THAT [POLICE PROTECTIVE CUSTODY] WAS SUCCESSFUL.” (Capitals in original(!)) 

That’s like saying that kidnapping a child does the child no harm, and even declaring success, if the child is rescued in a few days.  I think most people – especially the children in question – would consider it far better not to be kidnapped in the first place.  And make no mistake, particularly for a young child, the trauma is every bit as great as a kidnapping – no matter how “short” the time in foster care – oops, sorry, I mean “police protective custody.” 

If anything, Paschal suggests Kansas still isn’t tearing apart enough families.  He cites claims that child abuse is underreported, and the fact that his position has popular support – as evidenced by viewer comments on a television station website. 

This is a longstanding belief on Paschal’s part. You can read more about him in NCCPR’s 2007 report on Kansas child welfare. 

One other thing about police protective custody placements. They don’t always end with a return to the birth parents. Sometimes they end with an informal arrangement to place the child in the home of a relative – in other words, the classic version of hidden foster care. So Kansas’ special version of hidden foster care – police protective custody placements – probably increases the number of classically hidden placements. 

______________

How we estimated the number of unreported foster care entries in Kansas. 

In written testimony to the Kansas Legislature, Deputy DCF Secretary Tanya Keys includes several tables on Page 5. One of those tables puts the total number of Police Protective Custody (PPC) placements in 2024 at 2,509.  Another table states that of all the children Kansas officially admits they put in foster care in 2024, 1,433 of them started off as PPC placements. So if 1,433 out of 2,509 PPC placements ultimately became officially recognized foster-care placements, that leaves 1,076 that did not. That would be 1,076 children taken from their families but never officially counted as foster care placements. 

But the number might not be that high. In an email, Keys explained that's because the 1,433 figure is actually an estimate, extrapolating from various data sources. (By the way, however much I disagree with the agency, Keys sure works hard – she answered my emails on a Sunday night.) 

But there’s an alternative, simpler way to estimate: The Kansas Reflector reports that during a legislative hearing 

Keys said, the Kansas Department of Corrections reported 39% of children dropped off at juvenile facilities last fiscal year by law enforcement officers across the state were subsequently released to a family member. 

“Forty percent of those children are returned to a parent or relative. That’s their placement outcome after a juvenile intake an assessment worker is alongside that family,” Keys said. 

That would be 979, and that more conservative figure is the one I’ve used to estimate the real rate of removal in Kansas.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending April 15, 2025

● The family policing system in Philadelphia tears apart families at the second highest rate among America’s largest cities, even when rates of family poverty are factored in. In an extraordinary three-part series, the Philadelphia Inquirer looks at how that city’s system destroys children in the name of saving them – and what can be done about it. Part One deals with widespread abuse in foster care. Part Three compares Philadelphia to the state-run system in neighboring New Jersey, which has improved child safety while dramatically reducing the number of families it tears apart.

But most extraordinary – and perhaps most significant for a national audience - may be part two.  It is the best examination I’ve seen by any news organization into the horrors of “hidden foster care.”  Be sure to read it to the end.

The revelations all were shocking enough to prompt the City Council to plan public hearings.

● Not that we’d ever say we told you so, but NCCPR first wrote about the use of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families funds as a family policing slush fund in 2010. ProPublica did a superb story about it in 2021. So it’s good to see, as The Imprint reports, that the Government Accountability Office is getting into the act.

● Here’s another media myth from news organizations in West Virginia: the claim that the Child Removal Capital of America underspends on child welfare. On the contrary, it spends at a rate above, possibly far above, the national average – but it wastes the money on needless foster care.  I have a blog post about it.

● In an earlier post about West Virginia, I discussed dreadful legislation – sponsored by a lawmaker who’s also a white middle-class foster parent – that would make it easier, yes, easier, to keep foster children apart from their siblings. I hope he reads this commentary in The Imprint by a former foster youth describing what that did to her.

● There may be better news from the legislature in Maine. After years of retreating from reform, lawmakers may be reconsidering. As the Maine Morning Star reports, they’re looking at legislation to make it more difficult to confuse poverty with neglect.

● The Observer, in Sacramento, Calif., begins a multi-part series on the racial bias that pervades family policing. 

● And speaking of racial bias, MindSite News reports that 

Black children are disproportionately diagnosed with a mental health condition known as oppositional defiant disorder, which serves to label them as “bad kids” and perpetuates systemic racism, says a California psychiatrist in a new report released this month.

“I often say ODD greases the school-to-prison pipeline,” Dr. Rupi Legha, a Los Angeles-based child and adolescent psychiatrist, told MindSite News. “It becomes a way to shove kids quicker. They’re going to slip and fall a lot more and it’s going to go a lot faster.” 

Of course, this also has implications for which foster children wind up trapped in “residential treatment” – and what happens to them when they’re there. 

● The New York Times has a story about the horrifying implications of Elon Musk’s attempt to gather all the information the federal government has on us into one giant database. Why is that here? Because if you happen to be an impoverished family in Pittsburgh subjected to a call alleging child neglect – it’s already happening to you.  And in that case, The New York Times ran an article (by a white, middle-class foster parent) praising it to the skies! 

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

● KSDK-TV, St. Louis reports: 

A Lincoln County woman is facing multiple charges after police said she assaulted and abandoned a teenage girl for whom she was supposed to be caring. … 

[The foster mother] collects exotic animals,[Lincoln County Prosecutor Mike] Wood said, and they're investigating allegations that she traded the girl in exchange for a monkey. 

● NBC6 South Florida reports that 

A man has been sentenced to two life sentences in a Miami-Dade human trafficking case involving a child who was in foster care and an adult, prosecutors said. 

And finally,

 ● File this story from The Imprint under “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

West Virginia does NOT underspend on “child welfare” – it MIS-spends

West Virginia probably spends on child welfare at a rate anywhere from 9% to 44% above the national average.

 All posts in this series are available here.

West Virginia Watch is at it again. 

That’s the publication that has published thousands upon thousands of words about the child welfare system in the Child Removal Capital of America – and not one of those words that I can find comes from a parent who lost a child to foster care. 

That’s the publication that repeatedly presents as fact the false claim that West Virginia’s status as Child Removal Capital of America is some inevitable consequence of substance abuse. In fact, as we have pointed out previously, if all substance abuse disappeared in West Virginia tomorrow the state still would be tearing apart families at a rate double the national average. 

And now it offers up a commentary (labeled as one for once, at least) in which a foster parent condemns another foster parent for daring to tell the truth about money: Money, or rather the alleged lack of it, is not the reason the West Virginia foster care system is so awful. 

To read West Virginia Watch and other news outlets constantly bemoaning a supposed lack of funding for child welfare, you’d think West Virginia was spending at or near the lowest rate in the country.  You would hope that before repeating that mantra someone at West Virginia Watch would have checked to see how West Virginia actually compares. 

Apparently, they never have.  So I guess we’ll have to do it for them. 

Comparing rates of child welfare spending 

A precise comparison is impossible – but a rough comparison can be done.  And that comparison shows that West Virginia probably spends on child welfare at a rate at least nine percent above the national average – even when rates of child poverty are factored in. And that probably is a significant underestimate. 

Here’s what we know, and what we don’t: 

Every couple of years ChildTrends attempts the herculean task of trying to figure out how much every state spends on child welfare. This is incredibly difficult because there are a vast number of federal, state, and local funding streams, some of which are reserved for child welfare expenditures, many of which are not. NCCPR then takes these state totals and divides them both by the total number of children in each state and by the number of impoverished children – which we think is the fairer comparison. It’s based on these cost-per-child estimates that we say West Virginia is spending on child welfare at a rate above the national average. 

Some important caveats 

Because the task takes so long – and requires trying to get answers from every state – the data typically run well behind. Unfortunately, now they are five years behind – the most recent are from 2020. So that’s the first crucial caveat; the spending data are old. But there is nothing to indicate that anything happened in West Virginia to prompt child welfare spending to plummet – and certainly not to plummet more than any other state. 

The other caveat explains why the West Virginia spending figure probably is too low: As I said, ChildTrends tries to get the data from every state. A few states couldn’t or wouldn’t supply the data. Guess which state was among them. Yep. So for West Virginia, and a few other states,  ChildTrends had to craft estimates based on federal data sources – and for some very large categories, it could provide no estimate at all.  Categories that, on average, account for 35% of a state’s total child welfare spending are missing for West Virginia. 

So the real spending total for West Virginia in 2020 probably was significantly higher than the ChildTrends estimate. Indeed, West Virginia may spend at a rate more than 44% above the national average. 

Spending so much, getting so little 

So how is it that West Virginia spends so much, but we’re constantly hearing about overload and shortages? It’s because of the great paradox of child welfare: The worse the intervention, the more it costs. Safe, proven alternatives to family foster homes cost less than family foster homes which cost less than group homes which cost less than in-state institutions which cost less than out-of-state institutions.  So of course, when you’re the Child Removal Capital of America you’re going to spend vast amounts of money and children will get nothing – or sometimes worse than nothing – in return. 

So take it from a proud tax-and-spend liberal: West Virginia does not need to spend more on child welfare – but it sure needs to spend smarter.