NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending July 14, 2026

There’s more about the trauma inflicted on the children of former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg as a result of a malicious, false anonymous child abuse report:

● In Medium, Kristen Weber, senior director of child welfare at the National Center for Youth Law, writes:

Pete Buttigieg’s story captured national attention because it happened to someone many Americans know. Our response should be to remember the millions of families whose stories never make the news. 

● On LinkedIn, Shereen A. White, director of advocacy & policy at Children’s Rights, and Kelley Fong, assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Investigating Families, write: 

If we take the rights and dignity of children seriously, then we must examine not only whether suspicions of harm are addressed, but how our response itself affects the very children we are trying to protect. … A child welfare system worthy of its name should be just as careful about the harms it creates as the harms it seeks to prevent. 

● The problems with reporting laws extend beyond the need to replace anonymous reporting with confidential reporting. Mandatory reporting also is a huge problem. Also from Children’s Rights, in the New York Daily News:

One solution before the [New York] State Legislature is the Supporting Families Together Act. Today, mandated reporters can face criminal and civil penalties for not reporting — a threat that drives over-reporting. Professionals across the state have told us that fear of penalties compels them to report even when a child’s safety isn’t at stake. This bill would remove those penalties, letting professionals use their judgment to connect families with help while still allowing any genuine safety concerns to be reported.

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

From WSB-TV, Atlanta:

Law enforcement officials have arrested a former Ridgeview Institute employee accused of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl while she was receiving treatment at the facility. … Records obtained by Channel 2 Action News from the Smyrna Police Department show detectives have investigated 40 alleged sex crime cases since 2021. Six of those investigations were opened this year. Three remain active, and four have been cleared by arrests.

NCCPR in the Washington State Standard: How curbing foster care has saved children’s lives

How many times have you heard it? A child “known to the system” dies, and someone says: “See? Because you’re not taking away as many children, and throwing them into foster care, it’s causing children to die!” 

We’ve known all along it’s not true. And now, thanks to new research from Washington State, we know something else: Washington State’s limited efforts to stop tearing apart so many families have saved children’s lives – anywhere from six to 22 per year. At the same time, by increasing the proportion of foster children placed with relatives instead of strangers, the state has saved another 10 to 30 children’s lives per year. ... 

Read the full column – with a link to the research – in the Washington State Standard 

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending July 7, 2026

● The New York Sun cuts to the heart of the issue at the heart of the harassment of the family of former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg: 

At first glance, it looks like political theater, the kind of thing that happens to a man with a national profile and enemies who know how to use it. Yet the story is really about a system that runs on unverified tips every day, grinding through false or unproven allegations for families who have no public profile and no press corps to speak up for them. 

● In Slate, Chris Gottlieb, director of the Family Defense Clinic at New York University School of Law writes: 

People of all political persuasions should be outraged that this happened—and plenty were—but they should not be surprised. Weaponizing CPS by making false allegations is all too common. And that’s because CPS enables harassment by throwing common sense—and the law—out the window when someone makes accusations involving a child. Current CPS practices allow specious accusations to hurt not only parents, but the children they are meant to protect. … 

● In The Wall Street Journal’s Free Expression newsletter, Emma Camp reminds us what can happen when “forensic interviews” go wrong, and how Buttigieg is not the only public figure to face this kind of harassment. 

● And in her response to what happened to the Buttigieg family, the head of New York City’s Family Police Agency, Rebecca Jones Gaston, demonstrated her political savvy in a column for the New York Daily News. She came out for the New York law replacing anonymous reporting with confidential reporting at a point when it took no courage – the law was passed before she got the job. Then she used the all-purpose bromide of “training” as the way to curb other needless reports. She made no mention of a more effective solution: seeking the power to screen out reports sent down to her agency by the state’s child abuse hotline. And she touted a version of “differential response” that’s so undifferentiated that some New York families find it more oppressive than a full-scale investigation. 

In other news: 

● Every state seems to have its “Senator Soundbite,” that one demagogic pol (or, in some cases journalist, and occasionally both) who scapegoats family preservation for every child abuse tragedy. In Washington State, the pol, amplified by some local media, has been crusading against a law known as the Keeping Families Together Act. In the Washington State Standard, NCCPR documents how that law has helped save children’s lives – and it’s the campaign against the law that puts children in more danger. 

● Finally! From Source NM, a story about the New Mexico governor’s child-confiscation-at-birth edict that tells the part of the story every other New Mexico news organization has largely left out; the side in which we hear from actual families and actual experts.  

You can also see the governor’s flack go full Orwell when he says: 

In each of the cases where a child was placed in safe care, the determination to temporarily remove them from their parents was made by a judge, based on the state’s risk assessment. The important decision to remove substance exposed newborns from their families is never a unilateral one by the state.” 

That is a lie. The policy requires that children covered by the edict be kept away from their parents – confiscated at birth – until a judge decides. So the decision is precisely “a unilateral one by the state.” 

Source NM is the one news organization in the state that’s consistently tried to cover all sides of child welfare debates. Until they took this story, the only place the freelancer who wrote it has gotten anything like it published was in The Guardian. 

● On the NCCPR Blog: The obligatory child welfare “task force” is formed after a child abuse death in Toledo, Ohio. Recommendations include no scapegoating caseworkers, no slandering family preservation, no push to throw more kids into foster care and not one word about a swinging pendulum. Instead, there’s a bunch of good, smart recommendations that will make children safer.  What’s wrong with these people??? :-) 

●How much is an institutionalized child’s life worth? According to the State of Minnesota: $200. I have a blog post about it. 

● Update: Last week, we noted that when family police in Texas can’t even meet the absurdly low standard for “substantiating” an allegation – a finding that can be appealed – but they still want to keep a stigmatizing record on the family, they label the allegation “unable to determine” – which can’t be appealed. We noted that the Austin American-Statesman reported on a legal challenge to that category. It involves a case in which the family police say they’re “unable to determine” if it’s neglect for a parent to give birth at home with the help of a state-certified midwife. Now, KERA Public Radio reports, the court has ruled in favor of the family.

● The Imprint reports that Bethany Christian Services, a large private foster care and adoption agency, has shown its true colors – and it’s not a rainbow flag. From the story: 

Bethany will not license or re-license parents who do not agree to a “Statement of faith and belief” asserting that marriage is “a covenant between one man and one woman” and that “God creates human beings in His image as male and female, as determined by biological sex.” 

Within a year, all staff and board members must also sign a document stating that they “personally agree and adhere to” the new policy, according to a June 10 press announcement. … 

Danni Leader, an attorney who represents foster youth in Georgia, said they have heard from three teenagers who said they’d been moved from Bethany-licensed homes because their LGBTQ+ caregivers didn’t agree with the new statement of faith. 

“Not one of those children’s placements was going to be disrupted if the statement of faith had not happened,” said Leader, who uses they/them pronouns. 

A former Vice President of the agency says: 

“Children in foster care are already navigating a system most adults wouldn’t survive a year in: caseworkers who rotate, courts that move slowly, homes that may or may not last — the last thing any of them needs is a theology test they did not request and were never asked to agree to,” Williams said. “Bethany made its choice. I’m only asking that youth and families who didn’t choose Bethany get one, too.” 

Oh, and by the way: All the LGBTQ taxpayers who help subsidize Bethany through its contracts with governments will not be getting an exemption from having to help pay for this. 

In this week’s reminder that The Horror Stories Go in All Directions: 

● From Searchlight New Mexico: 

The New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department is facing accusations it refused to take responsibility for a runaway teenage boy despite officials knowing his location, including after he was shot and wounded while he and other unsupervised teenagers played with a firearm. 

The 16-year-old boy, identified in a lawsuit only by the initials N.H., was removed from his mother’s custody, but later ran away from foster care back to her home, putting his custody into a gray area the lawsuit alleges allowed CYFD to list him as a runaway and cut him off from resources his family said they needed. The lawsuit was filed in First Judicial District Court last week. …

From The Imprint:

 Youth are being moved from Provo Canyon School, the residential treatment facility that celebrity Paris Hilton centered in her yearslong campaign to shutter the “troubled teen industry.” 

“No child should be hurt in a program that is meant to protect them, particularly programs that require the authorization of the state to operate,” Shannon Thoman-Black, director of the state licensing division, said at a press conference Tuesday. ...

Well, OK, Ms. Thoman-Black but that does raise an obvious question: Why did you allow it to go on for so long? 

Holy Toledo! Is a county learning the RIGHT lessons from a child abuse tragedy?

 

The Lucas County, Ohio, courthouse. (Photo by Joel Rossol)

In Lucas County, Ohio (metropolitan Toledo), a 13-year-old girl, Kei’Mani Latigue, apparentlty living with her grandmother, was kidnapped and murdered, allegedly by her father. There had been at least three reports to the county child welfare agency, but they never found cause to remove her from her home. In the furor that followed, the county created the usual OBRC (Obligatory Blue-Ribbon Commission). That group, the Lucas County Child Protection Task Force, just issued its report. 

So far this is a story you’ve heard over and over. And I was expecting nothing good from a county I’ve criticized for caving to the group home and institutions lobby. Looks like I was wrong. 

Because there’s something different this time: The recommendations from the Task Force are  -- good! They could have embraced the usual cheap-shot, easy recommendations that make the task force and the politicians feel good even as they would make the system worse (for classic examples, see Santa Clara County, California and the State of New Mexico). Instead, the task force opted for doing the hard work and finding real solutions that can make all of the county’s children safer. They've created a blueprint for child safety.

As the Task Force report explains, the members

recognized the complexity of the child protection system and the many partners that influence  child safety and family wellbeing. … Progress will not be defined by any single action, but by the County’s ability to align efforts, adapt over time, and remain focused on outcomes that matter most—family stability, child safety, and community trust.

The first bit of good news is what is not in the report. No cheap shots suggesting that the county was doing too much to keep families together. No scapegoating caseworkers. No drivel about swinging pendulums. No recommendations to make it harder to keep children in their own homes and harder to return them home – as they are pushing in North Carolina and Indiana. The Task Force understood that this is the approach that backfires, exposing many more children to the trauma and the danger of needless foster care and overloading systems, making it harder for workers to find children in real danger. 

Now consider what they did recommend. It’s nothing dramatic, but it’s constructive: 

● Expand community-based visitation, engagement and prevention spaces.

● Map services for child maltreatment prevention and improve family navigation and resource access.

● Implement coordinated prevention networks and post-reunification support.

● Deliver equity-centered workforce training and front-door practice reform.

● Embed lived experience leadership across governance, practice and accountability.

● Launch comprehensive equity-focused kinship and foster care recruitment.

● Increase coordination to reduce placement disruptions and promote stability of foster youth.

● Reestablish a Lucas County ombudsman with public reporting authority..

The full descriptions for each make clear that, while they’re certainly not revolutionary, and the last one could backfire, the recommendations are better than these bland literal “top-lines” suggest. 

Equally remarkable is what top officials are saying. 

Here’s Randy Muth, executive director of Lucas County Children Services: 

“Poverty does not equal child neglect. Poverty does not equal criminality,” Mr. Muth said. “Families can be supported before they’re reported.” 

And from Doris Tolliver, the Task Force facilitator: 

Child services frequently receives reports of families who struggle with parental distress and financial strain, diverting them from helping children who are actively harmed, Ms. Tolliver said. Streamlining support from community-based organizations would allow the agency to focus on families with the greatest needs, alleviating strain on the system. 

What the numbers tell us: 

Although it takes a lot more courage to utter these words than to vomit up the usual (see, again, certain public officials in Santa Clara County, California, and the State of New Mexico), words still are easier than action. What do we know from the numbers? 

I can find no data on entries into foster care in Lucas County, and only limited data on the number of children in foster care on any given day. The picture is mixed. 

The death of Kei’Mani Latigue was discovered in March 2025. But there does not seem to have been a foster-care panic – at least not immediately.  According to data compiled by the Public Children’s Services Association of Ohio, the number of children in foster care on the most recent date I can find,  July 1, 2025, was down slightly from the previous year. But the rate of placement in Lucas County is 36.8 children in foster care per thousand impoverished children, below the Ohio average of 41.6, but above the national average of 30.6. 

And of course, there will be ridicule. The take-the-child-and-run extremists will be out in force. They talk about child safety but advocate an approach that sacrifices safety, suggesting an agenda that’s really about racial and class bias; a desperate desire to see impoverished nonwhite children torn from their homes and placed with white middle-class families. 

To do that, they’ll misrepresent the recommendations, claiming that the Task Force somehow thought they could persuade the killer of Kei’Mani Latigue not to kill. But that’s not what the Task Force is saying at all. Rather, these recommendations will get some of the cases that are nothing like the case of Kei’Mani Latigue out of the system, so workers will have more time to carefully assess every call – including the calls that come in about the next Kei’Mani Latigue. 

It won’t be easy to stand up to that. But at least, it appears, in Lucas County, Ohio, they’re giving it a try.

How much is an institutionalized child’s life worth? According to the State of Minnesota: $200

 

Photo by Doug Wallick

The child is identified only as C. We don’t know the child’s age or gender. We do know that C was institutionalized at a center in East Bethel, Minnesota, run by Nexus Family Healing. We also know that C was prone to self-harm. And, according to the child welfare trade journal The Imprint, the incidents occurred so often when C was in a bathroom that staff were supposed to have “near constant verbal checks” on the child whenever C was in a bathroom.

 

But on May 19, 2025, no one checked when C was in a bathroom for 45 minutes – enough time for C to wrap strips of cloth around her or his neck until C’s face turned blue.

 

The institution paid a price for this failure. The price was $200. That’s how much Nexus was fined.

 

In fairness, the fines weren’t always that low. For failing to maintain the required staff-to-resident ratio, Nexus was fined $1,200 – which, presumably, is less than it would cost to actually maintain the required staff-to-resident ratio.

 

Finally, the state suspended the facility’s license – after piling up violations and incurring piddling penalties almost from the day Nexus took the place over from a prior operator, which also “ran into regulatory troubles.” But then, the state restored the license.

 

At least three other similar Minnesota facilities have similarly ugly records, but none of them has been ordered to close either.

 

In news accounts, there seems to be far more handwringing about the prospect of not having enough places to institutionalize children than about the abuse that children suffer when institutionalized. And no one has confronted the most basic fact of all: Institutionalization doesn’t work, and the institutions aren’t needed.

 

Sometimes parents place their children in these places voluntarily; other times, the children are taken by county child welfare agencies. Either way, we’ve all heard the residential treatment industry’s sales pitch: These children have such severe behavioral problems that no family can possibly handle them. The only option supposedly is to institutionalize them.

 

So the Minnesota Star Tribune tells us that if institutions close 

That could mean more kids remain with family members who are unable to meet their serious needs, go to day treatment instead of the more-intensive residential services, or are stuck in emergency departments or juvenile detention. Others will be sent to out-of-state facilities. 

But none of that has to happen. Because, as a comprehensive report from the Senate Finance Committee and a mountain of research makes clear, the whole residential treatment model is a failure. There is nothing residential treatment supposedly does that can’t be done better and at lower cost with community-based alternatives, such as Wraparound programs. Such programs bring everything a family needs right into the family home or, when the children truly can’t live with their parents, into a foster home – so family members can “meet their serious needs.”

 

Think it can’t be done? If you haven’t already seen it the many other times it’s appeared on this blog, watch the late Karl Dennis, the father of Wraparound, describe how he did it for a youth so difficult the local jail couldn’t handle him.

 

The industry has a ready answer for that, too: They say there’s a shortage of foster homes, so there’s no place else to put the children except our institutions.

 

But the shortage is artificial.

 

Although the state has been making progress, Minnesota still tears apart families at a rate nearly double the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in. That’s not because Minnesota is a cesspool of depravity with double the child abuse of the nation as a whole. In 2025, of all the Minnesota children forced into foster care, 79% did not involve even an allegation of physical or sexual abuse. And 58% did not involve even an allegation of any form of drug abuse.  Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with “neglect.”

 

Get the children who don’t need to be in foster care back home, provide parents and foster parents with all the Wraparound services they need, and there will be plenty of room in good, safe foster homes for the children who really need to be there. And it all costs less than institutionalization, which, in addition to being the worst form of care, also is the most expensive.

 

Instead, this artificial “shortage” becomes a reason to keep shoveling children into institutions and allowing the abuses to pile up (with the occasional $200 fine and brief license suspension).

 

Break the cycle, confront Minnesota’s ugly history of needless family separation, and the system can be rebuilt to the point where the state won’t hesitate to shut down institutions and we can treat such closings for what they really are: cause for celebration.

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

● We begin, of course, with what was done to the children of Pete Buttigieg by an anonymous caller making a malicious false report to a child abuse hotline. Here’s his account. Here’s NCCPR’s full analysis of what happened and why. And there’s also a good op-ed column in the Indianapolis Star.

● New York and Texas are the only states, so far, to replace anonymous reporting with confidential reporting. In this video, Nila Natarajan, director of family defense and policy for Brooklyn Defender Services, explains how the change helps children and families.

● NCCPR in The Imprint: “We’re Making Progress Getting Rid of The ‘Orphan Tax.’ Now Let’s Talk About the ‘Reunification Ransom.’” And for a commendable and rare example of a local news story that calls out both of these obscene practices, see this from Wisconsin Watch. 

● Also in The Imprint, from North Carolina foster parent Ryan O’Donnell: “The Legal Fight to Ensure ‘A Home for Every Child’ Begins With the Family They Already Have.” 

● When family police in Texas can’t even meet the absurdly low standard for “substantiating” an allegation – a finding that can be appealed – but they still want to keep a stigmatizing record on the family, they label the allegation “unable to determine” – which can’t be appealed. The Austin American-Statesman reports on a legal challenge to that category. It involves a case in which the family police say they’re “unable to determine” if it’s neglect for a parent to give birth at home with the help of a state-certified midwife.

● And from the Santa Fe New Mexican, more evidence of that state’s obsession with institutionalizing children: “New Mexico's child welfare agency proposes over $1M in repairs for facility housing two boys” 

In this week’s reminder that The Horror Stories Go in All Directions: 

● From InDepthNH: 

Teenager Kristy Gesse was raped more than 100 times by the group home owner picked out by the state Department of Health and Human Services employees supposed to protect children. 

“They had so little respect for Kristy’s life and safety, that they carelessly and recklessly sent Kristy to go live with a monster,” attorney Nathan Warecki said during Monday’s closing arguments. … 

Deputy Solicitor General Sam Garland conceded bad things happened to Kristy Gesse, but said none of what happened to her is the state’s fault. [Garland said] jurors should not impose 2026 standards on 1980s child welfare professionals. … 

● From WKMG-TV, Florida: 

A 66-year-old St. Cloud man accused of sexually abusing at least two girls was fostering six children at the time of his arrest, according to neighbors, raising new questions about oversight within Florida’s foster care system. 

Paul Renuart was arrested on seven felony counts related to child sexual abuse. Following his arrest, News 6 began asking the Florida Department of Children and Families (DCF) how the alleged abuse could occur under the agency’s supervision. …

NCCPR in The Imprint: We’re Making Progress Getting Rid of The ‘Orphan Tax.’ Now Let’s Talk About the ‘Reunification Ransom.’

In 2021, NPR and its reporting partners exposed two routine, pernicious practices involving child welfare systems and money that should have stayed with children and/or their families. Neither practice was new. Many groups, including my own, had been working to call attention to both of these injustices for years, after first learning about them thanks to the pioneering scholarship of Prof. Daniel Hatcher at the University of Baltimore School of Law. 

But NPR’s superb reporting lit a fire under government officials and others. As a result, there’s been real progress on curbing one of these awful practices — but not nearly as much on the other.

The difference in response cuts to the heart of what’s wrong with the approach we’ve taken to “child welfare” for decades. …  

Read the full column in The Imprint