NCCPR in the Richmond Times-Dispatch: Child welfare won’t change until help reaches the families 'struggling for support.'

The Times-Dispatch series this summer “Struggling for Support” paints a picture of children enduring horrific suffering while overloaded caseworkers look the other way, refusing to investigate cases or remove children in time. That’s half the story — or maybe less than half the story. 

Because for every such case there is another in which children were torn needlessly from everyone they know and love and consigned to the chaos of foster care, perhaps, as your series notes, because of “homelessness [or] inability to pay rent …” 

Read the full column in the Richmond Times-Dispatch

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending October 21, 2026

● Last week, an NCCPR Blog post asked the question: “How often is institutionalizing children, and the foster-care system in general, not the cure for children’s “behavioral problems” – but rather the cause?”

An investigation by Hearst Connecticut Media helps answer the question. It’s the latest in a long, long line of stories across the country exposing hideous conditions in “residential treatment” – this time it’s the Albert J. Solnit Children’s psychiatric center. But consider one case the story examines: 

"Her behaviors are much worse, I would argue, in Solnit than they were when she was not hospitalized," [her attorney, Josh] Michtom said. "She's miserable now, and she wasn't miserable then." 

She is regularly placed on restriction and prevented from going outside when she misbehaves, he said. Her preferred language is Spanish, but Solnit has no Spanish-speaking clinicians, making it difficult for her to communicate, Michtom said. … 

She can't be released from Solnit until her behaviors improve, but Michtom says, her behaviors are unlikely to improve as long as she's there. 

"In this highly restrictive environment, she gets frustrated," he said. "So it's been a cycle of not being able to take her out of this restrictive environment because the restrictive environment itself provokes behaviors in her that lead to more restriction." 

A follow-up story looks further at this case.

Unfortunately, however, the solutions offered all focus on trying to make the institution bigger and better, instead of focusing on the issues raised in this other excellent Hearst Connecticut Media story: the need to stop taking children when their poverty is confused with neglect. 

Speaking of which ...

● NCCPR in the Richmond Times-Dispatch on what really works to reduce child abuse tragedies – and what doesn’t:

Wrongful removal drives everything else. That’s why curbing it should be the first and foremost “way forward.” That requires more than heaving a sigh and saying, if only we made more use of the Family First Act — which, in fact, doesn’t allow funding the kinds of basic, concrete help most families need. It requires more than saying: We wish we had more preventive services but until then we’ll just have to hold children in foster care in a state with one of the worst reunification rates in America.

● Guests on this edition of The F Word podcast, include Prof. Josh Gupta-Kagan discussing the lack of due process in family policing. 

● Last year in New Mexico, the governor issued a child confiscation at birth decree. Even as she was bragging that, supposedly as a result, no child had died, one child was dead – possibly as a consequence of that very approach. I have a blog post about it.

● Georgia Public Broadcasting reports on a judge’s decision to curb, slightly, the practice of the state family police agency of forcing parents to pay ransom to get their children back. But the ruling applies only to the most ludicrous cases. The general practice can continue. 

The lawyer representing the parent in this case points out that which is obvious to everyone except a vindictive family police agency: 

"The children were seized because of poverty in the first place," he said. "So then to turn around and bill those parents hundreds of dollars per month serves no purpose." 

● In The Conversation, Prof. Jennifer L. Brinkley of the University of Dayton writes about the harm done when family police agencies go after parents for letting their children exercise reasonable childhood independence: 

In my scholarship and in my work as a family lawyer, I’ve seen how overly broad child neglect laws can fail families. 

These statutes are being revisited as scholars, psychologists and journalists are increasingly finding fault with “helicopter parenting,” or overprotective parenting that limits children’s independence and autonomy. 

Yet cases like Parkinson’s suggest that when the boundaries of neglect are unclear, the law continues to give parents a powerful incentive to err on the side of constant supervision.

Was Skylar Magana a casualty of child-confiscation-at-birth in New Mexico?

 

Last year in New Mexico, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham issued a child-confiscation-at-birth decree. Any child said to have been born exposed to certain substances is taken away on the spot, no matter what the circumstances. The rationale, of course, was the claim that it would save lives. In fact, for reasons discussed here, it is likely to lead to an increase in child deaths. The general failure of New Mexico’s plunge into foster-care panic is discussed here. 

Now it turns out that even as the governor was bragging that since the imposition of her decree no child has died, one child already was dead. And confiscation-at-birth might have been part of the reason why. 

Even before the official confiscation-at-birth edict, New Mexico’s family police agency, the Children Youth and Families Department, was glad to confiscate children at birth in these situations. That’s what happened to Skylar Magana when she was born in August of 2024. In May 2025 – just before the governor issued her edict, as it happens -- Skylar died, allegedly at the hands of her foster mother. The foster mother has been charged with intentional child abuse resulting in death. 

But her death has gotten almost no attention from New Mexico news media. Indeed, this story last week that touches on it – but de-emphasizes the circumstances – is only the second I can find in any mainstream New Mexico news outlet. The first, and a commendable exception, is this story from KOB-TV. 

Perhaps because the death of Skylar Magana calls into question the “master narrative”* of many New Mexico news organizations. 

Some news organizations practically swooned over the confiscation-at-birth directive. And some of them looooved it when the state’s foremost proponent of tearing apart families declared that “there is no other metric that matters.” 

One of the organizations that appears most keen on the confiscation-at-birth approach and on tearing apart more families in general is the Santa Fe New Mexican. Their reporter on this beat has managed to churn out scores of stories about child welfare without, as far as I can tell, even once including a comment from a birth parent. (I concede I might have missed one or two, so I emailed him yesterday morning (Oct. 19) to find out. So far, I have received no response.) 

In other words, a reading of his stories suggests that he views birth parents as so subhuman they can’t possibly have a perspective readers should know, and of course their children will be better off rushed into the arms of strangers, so let’s be sure readers never hear otherwise. 

That may explain why, in his story for the New Mexican, this reporter downplays the underlying facts in Skylar’s death.  Instead, the story focuses on CYFD’s refusing to turn over records to the lawyer representing Skylar’s estate in a wrongful death suit. Reporters love that issue since it touches on their own vested interests. 

Yes, the open records issue is in the public interest as well, and, when it comes to family policing, it’s especially in children’s interest. That’s why NCCPR has long favored a strong rebuttable presumption that almost all such records are open in all cases, not just fatalities or near fatalities. 

But it’s also in children’s interests not to effectively promote bad public policy that falsely equates child removal with child safety, allowing only occasional token dissent. And it’s journalistic malpractice when your biases are so blatant that you systematically shut out the perspective of parents who know how much their children are suffering when they are taken away when there are better, safer options.

*-The phrase “master narrative” was coined by the late William Woo, when he was editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. It is not something handed down from above. It's not some kind of media conspiracy. (As a former editor of mine liked to say, "There are no media conspiracies; we're not that well organized.")  Rather, the master narrative is simply the preconceived notions reporters bring with them to a story.  The best reporters seek out a wide variety of sources, including those who might challenge their master narrative. With some notable exceptions, most New Mexico reporters covering child welfare have not done that.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending October 13, 2026

● The Imprint reports on the child welfare finance reform plan proposed by United Family Advocates, the group that represents true bipartisanship in child welfare. But the most revealing part of the story may be a comment from one of those who has “concerns”: 

Wendy Henderson, the former leader of Wisconsin’s child welfare agency said it was worth discussing reform ideas given the steep decline in foster children’s eligibility for Title IV-E reimbursement. But she questioned setting a baseline for new grants based on recent years, when foster care entries have been at a historic low. As recent changes to welfare cash assistance and food aid take effect, Henderson and others expect to see more families becoming involved with child welfare. 

In other words: More families will be poor – so we have to take their children! 

● See also UFA Executive Director Joanna Lack’s op-ed column in The Hill about the urgent need for this reform.

● Who really has mental health issues? Who has the real “behavioral problem” – the children who respond normally to being forced into hideous institutions and shelters and having to endure horrible conditions or the adults who force the children into these places and then rationalize their actions to themselves and the rest of us? Ella Bat-Ami offers remarkable insights on the first episode of the latest season of a podcast aptly called “The F Word.” As Bat-Ami puts it, “When you’re in foster care, your brain is perpetually on fire.” I have a blog post about her insights, with a link to the full podcast. 

● Bat-Ami said what made the biggest difference for her was 

having non-system-involved adults involved in my life … Most of what went right actually had nothing to do with the system doing the right thing; it was the community of Tennessee and my local community stepping up … 

Former foster youth said something remarkably similar as they spoke to NPR about the enormous harm they suffered as their mental health problems were misdiagnosed – and often worsened – as they were moved from one institution to another. Yes, occasionally they would find a helping adult who understood what they really needed. “But often, that key adult was someone totally outside the foster care system.” 

● Also on The F Word podcast, Lily Colby, another former foster youth who is founder of the National Network for Fostering Sibling Connections, discussed the forced separation of foster children from their siblings, often for mind-bogglingly stupid bureaucratic reasons.  

● You’ve all heard Joyce McMillan’s call for people involved in “child welfare” to become mandatory supporters, not mandatory reporters.  New York City schools have taken an impressive step in that direction. 

Rachel Fee, a housing activist, got an email when her child was out sick. Instead of a threat to call the city’s family police agency, the email was a menu of ways various city agencies can help. Ms. Fee tweeted out the full email here and here’s a screenshot:

● Here’s a good rule of thumb when judging the accuracy of a news story. If someone whose agency has been exposed for allegedly doing awful things says at a community meeting: “The information and the reports that are out in the community are just factually wrong,” but then can’t name a single factual error, odds are the information and the reports that are out in the community are just factually right. Case in point: The Tampa Bay Times expose of hidden foster care, discussed in this follow-up story. 

● The Tampa Bay Times also took a broader look at the alleged reduction in the Florida foster care population  -- alleged because no one really knows how much is real and how much is, yes,  hidden foster care. 

● Imagine a law so manifestly just and necessary that even the current U.S. Supreme Court won’t overturn it, and won’t even hear the latest attempt to overturn it. The Imprint reports on the failure of the latest challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act. See also the statement from the Native American Rights Fund. 

● The Imprint also has another reminder of the ugly history that makes ICWA essential. 

This week’s reminder that the horror stories go in all directions: 

● From West Virginia Watch: 

Child victims in a gruesome abuse case have been awarded $4.4 million in a settlement with the state Department of Human Services due to Child Protective Services failures in the case.  

A white couple living in Sissonville, West Virginia, had kept their adopted Black children in deplorable conditions, treating them as slaves. Some of the children were forced to live in a shed without running water or a bathroom.

● From The Sun in San Bernardino County, California: 

Riverside County has agreed to pay more than $4.2 million to two siblings who alleged in a lawsuit that they were sexually abused in their foster home by a boy with a history of sexually deviant behavior. 

The settlement is just the latest in Riverside County resulting in a multimillion-dollar payout to families who accused county social workers of placing youths with documented histories of sexual abuse and/or sexually violent behavior into foster homes with children they subsequently abused.

“When you’re in foster care, your brain is perpetually on fire.”

How often is institutionalizing children, and the foster-care system in general, not the cure for children’s “behavioral problems” – but rather the cause?

 

On this podcast, Ella Bat-Ami and Lily Colby speak truth to family police power.

It’s become almost a mantra in news stories. Some lobbyist for institutionalizing children or some family police agency leader looking for excuses stops blaming the parents just long enough to blame the children.

It’s their mental health issues, they say; it’s their severe behavioral problems, they say, which are soooo much worse than they used to be. So they “blow out” of foster homes and simply must be institutionalized. 

In fact, such people have been making exactly these claims for decades. I heard it when I began reporting on child welfare as a journalist 50 years ago. When I was researching my book on the topic, the earliest example of this claim I could find dated back to 1948. And given the enormous turnover in “child welfare,” I wonder how in the world all those people saying the kids have gotten worse have any idea what the kids were like in the good old days? 

But hey, slap a label onto a kid, throw in a reference to COVID, and voila! Too many reporters all over the country buy into it all, and write stories parroting this party line without question. 

As with almost every other claim from the foster care-industrial complex, there’s a molehill of truth under the mountain of hype. Some mental health problems almost certainly were exacerbated by COVID. But even when there really are serious behavioral issues, there are vastly better alternatives to group homes and institutions. 

And that still begs the question: What’s causing those so-called behavioral problems and mental health issues? 

Perhaps if some of these reporters and others would take a few moments to listen to Ella Bat-Ami, they might ask themselves: How often is institutionalizing children, and the foster-care system in general, not the cure for children’s “behavioral problems” – but rather the cause? 

Bat-Ami was a guest on this season’s first episode of a podcast aptly named The F Word. The episode also featured Lily Colby, another former foster youth who is founder of the National Network for Fostering Sibling Connections, an organization devoted to another quiet crisis, the forced separation of foster youth from their siblings, often for mind-bogglingly stupid bureaucratic reasons. 

Ella Bat-Ami spent nearly two years in the Tennessee foster care system before aging out at 18. During the podcast, she described the level of toxic stress that is inherent in the status of foster child – regardless of whether a given placement is good or bad: 

When you're in foster care, your brain is just perpetually on fire. You don't know if you're going to be in the same place the next week. You don't know if you're going to have to say goodbye to all your friends. You don't know if you're going to be given a trash bag and 10 minutes to pack your stuff. That's just the reality. 

What I think people need to understand and remember is that we are still children. Regardless of our age, we are still children. … We forget the kids part. And you have to understand that kids make mistakes. Kids make age-appropriate mistakes, and we are told from the beginning that those mistakes will cost us our home. Instead of getting grounded, we'll lose our home. 

And so we are just operating in fight or flight. That's what it is. And even when we trust somebody while we're in the system … we're always going to be defensive. It's going to be perceived as acting out, but you have to understand that what we are experiencing is not normal; it is not natural, and our brains - especially a developing brain - were not built for the level of stress that we endure in foster care. 

Being moved from placement to placement also meant constantly having to adapt to new rules, like getting in trouble for saying “yes,” instead of “yes, ma’am.” As Bat-Ami put it: 

As a foster kid, you feel like an invasive species in your own home. 

And that’s best case. That assumes no actual abuse or neglect in foster care itself – though such abuse occurs in at least one-quarter to one-third of placements. It also assumes a home, and not some kind of institution, like the makeshift night-to-night placement where, Bat-Ami explains:

 The water [was not] potable, so there's lead in the pipes. You are able to shower maybe once a week. There's barbed wire around it so you can't get out, and it's just a bunch of kids in a room. … it's one big room, and so we have cribs on the wall, … and then the big kids sleeping on the floor. 

You don’t suppose all that might lead to “behavioral problems,” do you? 

But the response from Margie Quin, the commissioner of the state family police agency, the Department of Children’s Services, was to attack the kids at a legislative hearing – and support legislation to make it easy to just throw them in jail if they so much as threatened to get out of line in any way. (You can read more about the bill and Quin’s cruelty here.)  As Bat-Ami explained: 

The commissioner of DCS has said really degrading things about foster youths who are in these night-to-night … offices. She said that they are violent. She said all these things; but we act out because we're literally not able to leave. I met kids on night-to-Night when I was in the offices who had been taken into custody for truancy. Only truancy, but they don't bring us to school. … And so he was reasonably upset because he had been removed from his mother for not being taken to school, and then we still weren't being taken to school, and we were in a worse position. 

And so, those are the conditions that we're forced to endure. Like bugs, not being allowed to shower, sharing just a giant room, and so, yeah, sometimes we do act out. 

Bat-Ami said one thing more about “acting out:” 

The only way anyone would listen to me is when I was getting into trouble. 

As for how she endured and became successful, Bat-Ami says that, unlike many foster youth, she was able to stay in the same school, where caring adults knew her from before she entered care. She also got an internship with a public defender’s office where, again, at first, her mentors didn’t know she was in foster care.  As she put it: 

Most of what went right actually had nothing to do with the system doing the right thing. It was the community of Tennessee and my local community stepping up. 

That echoes, almost word for word, the comments of former foster youth in this NPR story. They said, repeatedly, that, while sometimes they encountered supportive foster parents and caseworkers, as the story put it: “Often, that key adult was someone totally outside the foster care system.” 

So who really has mental health issues? Who has the real “behavioral problem” – the children who endure these conditions or the adults who force the children to endure these conditions and then rationalize their behavior to themselves and the rest of us?

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending September 30, 2026

● First and foremost this week: A new development involving one of the most crucial issues in child welfare: the perverse financial incentives that encourage foster care and discourage better, safer alternatives.  

I’m proud to be part of United Family Advocates, a group that brings together Left and Right where we have common ground on these issues. This is real bipartisanship, not a group dominated by one ideology with token representation from the other. And it’s not limited to centrists who lean slightly one way or the other. 

UFA has released a comprehensive plan to change the horrible financial incentives that have dominated child welfare for decades; incentives in which foster care is funded through a huge federal entitlement, and alternatives get extremely limited flat funding. UFA’s plan does not increase funding; it realigns funding so every dollar does the most good. You can read UFA’s press release, with a link to the full plan, here.  

● Speaking of bad financial incentives in child welfare: 10 years ago, when it was introduced, I explained why the Family First Act would fail & how child welfare establishment would exploit the failure to push for more foster care. As my latest column for The Imprint illustrates, if Kalshi had been around back then, I’d have made a fortune. 

● Everything bad about foster care is worse for children who are disabled. NPR has a harrowing story about the treatment of disabled foster children. None of the examples involve children who were abused before they were placed. One involves an Arizona family that “relinquished” the child because they couldn’t get enough help to care for him at home. He died in a group home. In another, in California, the parents were accused of drug use, but the child already was living with her grandmother and great parents. She was taken anyway, and died in foster care.

As you read about all the horrible failings of the group home in that first case, don’t overlook this: One month after the child died, the company running the group home “won accreditation from the state and an accreditation agency to operate for another three years.”

● In Washington State, the family was living in squalor, in a park in a tent; the mother was being trafficked. She kept refusing help. The knee-jerk response would be: take the child and run. But as NBC News explains, a police officer saw a better way: Get the trafficker out of the way. From the story: 

The breakthrough came on New Year’s Eve, when the man who had been trafficking the boy’s mother was hospitalized. The mother and son were there with him when a social worker contacted police. An officer who knew The More We Love called [executive director Kristine] Moreland, and around 1 a.m., mother and son arrived at the organization’s crisis center. 

Check out what happened next. 

There are three interesting court cases in Georgia: 

● If the circumstances that prompt a state to want to tear apart a family are not an emergency, that means there’s time to have a court hearing first. But Georgia family police want the right to run to a judge whenever they feel like it and get an order without letting the family defend itself. The Georgia Recorder reports that, in a case in which that action compounded a family tragedy, the State Supreme Court appears skeptical. 

● In another case, The Imprint reports that a federal court has set some limits on Georgia making parents pay ransom to get their kids back from foster care. (Well, no, they don’t call it ransom, but that’s what it is.) The federal court ruled that Georgia can’t do this when the children already are out of foster care because they’ve been adopted or aged out – in other words, in cases including those where the parents have been totally cut out of the child’s life, will never get the child back but still must pay ransom. Unfortunately, the decision goes no further, but the litigation is continuing. 

● And then there’s the case of the man whose children have not spent so much as a minute in foster care – even though their father is charged with driving drunk while the children were in the car, rear-ending another vehicle and then fleeing the scene. Earlier this month, The Imprint reports, he pleaded not guilty. Of course, unlike the parents in the previous two cases, this father not only is a high-powered Georgia political operative; he’s also married to the head of the state child welfare agency. 

● In Maine, a man overseeing a mother’s drug test allegedly forces her to strip and stares at her. Then, it allegedly gets worse. The family police agency, on the other hand, is only too glad to look the other way. I have a blog post about it, with links to two news stories. 

● I also have a blog post about the real “oomph” deficit in Santa Clara County, California. So far, no one will stand up to the bullies driving the nation’s worst foster-care panic and endangering children’s lives. 

● Writing in STAT, Sandy Santa of Children’s Rights and Kristen Weber of the National Center for Youth Law explain why the consequences of cuts in the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program “go beyond hunger.” 

Research suggests that when families lose access to food assistance, they may face a greater risk of investigation by child protective services — and, ultimately, being separated. 

That is because poverty and neglect are too often conflated in America’s child welfare systems. When parents cannot afford enough food, stable housing, child care, or other necessities, the conditions created by poverty can bring them to the attention of child protective services. Cutting material support can therefore create a perverse and devastating cycle: The government takes away resources families need to care for their children, and then the child welfare system may intervene because families don’t have the resources to provide for their children. 

● In Tennessee, WSMV-TV reports, families whose children have suffered the trauma of needless removal are beginning to organize. 

● While in Kansas, it sure sounded like the unfortunate influence of one individual kept coming up at a recent legislative hearing, but no one would say the name. We say it in this blog post. 

● It’s great to see Clara Bates and Anne Spoerre win a prestigious state journalism award for their outstanding child welfare reporting at the Missouri Independent. If you want to see why, follow the links in this paragraph from the Independent’s story: 

Bates and Spoerre’s reporting examined persistent problems in Missouri’s child welfare system, including children remaining in foster care longer than federal standards, uneven legal representation that can leave families and children stuck in the system and the experience of a teenager who spent nearly her entire life in foster care and later fought the state to keep her own baby. 

This week’s reminder that the horror stories go in all directions 

● The headline on this story from WLOX-TV in Mississippi sums it up well: “’Held like prisoners’: State spends millions keeping kids in hotels, fails to keep some safe.”

Want to fix child welfare in Kansas? There’s a name that needs to be said out loud

 

It sure sounded like his unfortunate influence kept coming up at a recent legislative hearing, but no one would say the name.

The Secretary of the Kansas Department of Children and Families, Laura Howard, didn’t say it. Instead, when discussing dumping children into makeshift placements, she just said that, as the Kansas Reflector reported: 

The state should be “laser focused” on Wichita to improve a youth placement measure that has consistently fallen short of court-ordered standards. … “I think it’s a larger issue than the case management provider and DCF,” she said. 

Well then what – or who – might it be? Is Wichita, Kansas really a cesspool of depravity, with vastly more child abuse than anywhere else in the state (Or given the incredibly high rate of removal in Kansas, almost anywhere else in the nation)?  

The private agency overseeing foster care in metropolitan Wichita doesn’t think so. Again, from the story: 

Erica Case, an attorney for EmberHope, said Thursday that Kansas can improve its foster care system by [among other things] limiting entry to children experiencing abuse, neglect or immediate safety concerns … 

“I understand that Sedgwick County is risk averse, and I’m fine with that,” Case said, “but we have to reimagine those prevention pathways to make sure that we truly are reserving out-of-home care for those that have been abused, neglected or are in immediate danger.” 

But she never said who was preventing this. 

To be clear, by risk-averse, she must mean averse to the risk of bad press and the wrath of politicians if they leave a child home and something goes wrong. Because the Wichita approach is enormously risky to the children, given the high rate of abuse in foster care, and the vast numbers of studies showing the enormous inherent harm of foster care placement in typical cases – including a greater likelihood of early death. 

But Kansas is, theoretically, at least, a state-run system. Why is the state’s largest county so different? 

Could it have something to do with a name neither Howard nor Case dared to speak? Could it have something to do with someone who genuinely wants to do good, but is doing enormous harm? Could it have something to do with Ron Paschal? 

Here’s what I wrote about Paschal last year, slightly updated: 

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 Kansas’ unique, ugly form of hidden foster care known as “police protective custody placements” – than Paschal.

Eighteen 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 reacted like a Republican caught criticizing Trump. He groveled. 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. 

The class-action consent decree in force in Kansas won’t change any of this because it doesn’t address wrongful removal – in a state that wrongfully removes children at one of the highest rates in the nation. Vague comments about “prevention pathways” won’t change any of this. Neither will suggesting a “laser focus” on Wichita without explaining exactly where to point the laser.

None of the horrors of Kansas child welfare will change until someone has the guts to stand up to Ron Paschal. They might even have to say his name.