Number of foster children in Maine declines – from obscene down to merely outrageous

Maine State Capitol

Also: 

● Part of the decline isn’t even real – the news story reporting the decline left 143 children out.

● When it comes to the least harmful form of foster care, kinship foster care, Maine’s record is getting worse. 

One of the many reasons Maine has one of the saddest recent child welfare histories is a lack of institutional memory. Logan Marr was torn from her mother because their family poverty was confused with neglect. She died in foster care at the hands of a foster parent who had been a child welfare caseworker. After that, there was real reform. For a while, Maine was a national leader. 

But that was decades ago. The lawmakers who pushed for change are gone thanks to term limits. The journalists who covered the story and chronicled the progress are largely gone thanks to drastic cutbacks in newsrooms.  

So it was easy for a demagogic governor, Paul LePage, to set about undermining reform. His successor, the current governor, Janet Mills, failed to undo the damage. With no one around who remembered what the take-the-child-and-run mentality had done to Logan Marr and so many children needlessly taken before her, it was easy for that mentality to take hold again in the wake of high-profile deaths of children “known to the system.” 

And perhaps that’s also why, in a story about progress in finally reducing the number of children in foster care, the Portland Press Herald didn’t look back far enough. 

Some, but not all, of the progress is real, and the Maine Office of Child and Family Services deserves credit for that. But in context, the story says more about how far Maine has fallen than about how much it has progressed. And that’s before we reach how some youth were left out of the data. 

The story reports that 

“The number of children in Maine in state custody has dipped below 2,000 for the first time since 2019, continuing a downward trend officials credit in part to more focus on preventing abuse and neglect.” 

The story reports that, according to OCFS, the number of children trapped in Maine foster care on any given day is down to 1,801. That’s compared to a high of 2,579 in July of 2024.  

For starters, as is discussed below, the real number isn’t 1,801. It’s 1,944 –under 2000, but barely. 

Even at 1,944, that probably represents real progress.  But Maine has become such an extreme outlier that, compared to most of the rest of the country, its record still stinks. 

In 2024, the most recent year for which comparative data are available, when the number of children in foster care on any given day is compared to the number of impoverished children in each state, Maine held proportionately more children in foster care than all but four other states – the rate of placement was well over two-and-a-half times the national average. The current figure used in the Press-Herald story, 1,801, still leaves Maine tearing apart families at the 12^th highest rate in America – a rate more than double the national average. The real figure, 1,944, would leave Maine’s rate of removal 11^th highest in America. 

Sources: Impoverished child population: Census Bureau
Children in foster care: Maine DHHS

In other words, no matter how you count it, Maine’s rate of holding children in foster has indeed declined – from obscene to merely outrageous. 

And here’s where I wish the story had looked farther back. On Sept. 30, 2011, the first year LePage took office, but before he started undermining reform, there were only 1,296 children in foster care. That still was above the national average at the time, but only by 9%. 

What didn’t get into the story 

Now, let’s get into the weeds to see the missing context: 

● Older foster youth aren’t included in the 1,801 figure. In response to emailed questions from NCCPR, Lindsay Hammes, press secretary for the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees OCFS, mentioned that the 1,801 figure did not include foster youth age 18 or over. Hammes said that with those youth included, the total would be 1,944. She said they gave both figures to the Press Herald. In response to NCCPR’s queries, Hammes says DHHS has  asked the Press Herald for a correction. Hammes also said that, in a Press-Herald graphic comparing the number of foster children over time, the figures for prior years do include older foster youth. That makes the decline look bigger than it really is. (The federal government requires that older foster youth be included in the figures states provide to its national database, and Maine does that.) 

● Hidden foster care. We also don’t know how much of the current decline is a mirage – simply a function of hidden foster care. These are essentially blackmail placements. They may not use these exact words but, in effect, the caseworker is telling the family: “Sure, you can try to fight us and go to court, but you’ll almost certainly lose, and if you fight us, we’ll place the kids with strangers and we might have to split them up. But if you just sign this ‘voluntary’ agreement (or sometimes, in some states, there’s no paper at all), we’ll place all of them together with grandma or another relative.” 

By signing the paper, the family signs away what few rights it may have – and also, these “informal” placements typically are not reported in the official figures a state sends to the federal government. That makes the state’s numbers for tearing apart families look artificially lower than they really are. 

In Maine, this takes several forms. When the hidden foster care is the result of a so-called “voluntary” or “informal” placements, Hammes says OCFS doesn’t track them. In fact, not all such placements are foster care – but if OCFS is in any way involved, they should be counted. 

Where the placements are a result of what OCFS calls “a short-term alternative care plan” Hammes says the number has decreased since 2019 – but she didn’t give the current number. Without such data, we can’t be sure how much of the decline in foster care numbers is real. This would not necessarily affect Maine’s standing compared to other states, however, since no state is completely candid about this. 

● What about entries? All of the above is a measure of the “snapshot number,” the number of children in foster care on any given day. This is a very important measure, but it can rise or fall for reasons unrelated to a state’s propensity for taking away children in the first place. The story doesn’t examine the number of children taken away over the course of a year – the key measure of a state’s propensity to tear apart families. It’s not just the story that doesn’t mention it. The OCFS Child Welfare Data Dashboard also measures the snapshot number, but not the entry number. 

But, because states have to report entries to the federal government, we know that in FFY 2024, Maine tore 967 children from their parents and consigned them to foster care – a rate more than double the national average. In response to our query, Hammes said that in FFY 2025, the number was 731. To the extent that the decline is real and not a function of hidden foster care, that’s a genuine improvement. But it still would leave Maine tearing apart families at a rate over 50% above the national average. And back in 2011, the state took 552 children, well below the national average at that time. 

Sources: Impoverished child population: Census Bureau
Entreis into foster care: Maine DHHS

● Regressing on kinship foster care. When it comes to the kind of kinship foster care that actually can be measured, Maine appears to be moving backwards. In 2024, OCFS told the federal government that 44% percent of foster children were in kinship foster care. They just told the Press Herald that it is now down to 36.6%. While it is reasonable that, if foster care numbers are declining, the raw number of children placed with relatives would decline, there is no good reason for the big decline in the percentage of children placed with relatives. 

There’s no excuse for Maine being such an outlier 

More disturbing than the omission of 143 foster youth is the fact that the story buys into the excuses OCFS and others have used for years to account for Maine’s extreme outlier status. According to the story: 

Maine’s child welfare system has struggled for years to meet rising caseloads. Long court backlogs, a struggling mental health system and limited access to facilities that treat substance use disorder created more demand for services, pushing many kids into a system without the resources to manage them. 

But mental health issues and substance abuse are problems everywhere. Other states have coped with them without rushing to tear apart families and forcing them into foster care at one of the highest rates in America. 

Nor is the problem nearly as prevalent as the fearmongers, nationally and in Maine, want us to believe. In 2024, in 57% of cases where children were thrown into foster care, there was not even an allegation of any form of substance abuse. Not just no allegation of a fentanyl overdose or a meth lab – no allegation of any drug abuse of any kind.  As for the long court backlogs – that’s a function of flooding the system with children who never needed to be taken away. 

No, the reversal of reform and the foster-care panic that swept through Maine were not a function of actual need – it was pure politics. 

It reflects the demagoguery of Paul LePage and the failure of Janet Mills to counter it, goaded every step of the way in recent years by Maine Child Welfare Ombudsman Christine Alberi. She exploits horror stories about families the way Donald Trump exploits horror stories about immigrants while showing the same respect for science as RFK Jr. This can be seen in her rejection of random sampling in favor of extrapolating from horror stories and how her fearmongering about drug abuse compares to what science tells us. But lawmakers appear hellbent on giving her more power, with no accountability. 

And the way OCFS has chosen to make progress makes that progress especially vulnerable. Their approach boils down to a form of noblesse oblige: We’ll give families a little money when we feel like it, we’ll provide more “training” in the way we want things done. There is no recognition that children have a right to live in their own families – because for the overwhelming majority of children, the overwhelming majority of the time, it is not only better for their well-being, it is safer than foster care. 

So OCFS opposed a stronger, more meaningful version of poverty-is-not-neglect legislation than the much more limited version that actually passed. OCFS opposed a bill that simply would require it to prove to a judge that leaving a child in her or his own home would be more harmful than tearing the family apart. And OCFS has failed to push hard for high-quality legal representation for families, one of the most effective “preventive services” of all; not because it gets bad families off, but because that kind of representation can craft alternatives to the cookie-cutter “service plans” so often dished out by OCFS. 

But because they’ve chosen a noblesse oblige approach, it can all be washed away as soon as there’s another high-profile fatality and efforts to keep families together are scapegoated. There is nothing in Maine’s recent history or its current leadership to suggest that, when the next tragedy happens, they won’t just let what little progress has been made be obliterated. 

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

● A federal judge has refused to dismiss a lawsuit in which a disabled couple alleges that the family police agency in metropolitan Pittsburgh tore their child away from them because of their disabilities. WPXI-TV reports that a lawyer for the family alleges that  “the county has an unconstitutional policy of terminating the familial rights of intellectually disabled parents.” 

But while only humans are named as defendants, if the case is not settled, an algorithm also will be on trial – perhaps the most notorious “predictive analytics” algorithm in family policing, the Allegheny Family Screening Tool. Because this is the case in which, according to the family’s lawyers, a caseworker told the family their child was being taken because “The machine has labeled you as high-risk.” During the Biden Administration, the Associated Press reported, the U.S. Department of Justice also was investigating this case and others where AFST allegedly discriminated against the disabled. (I have no idea if that investigation is continuing; for obvious reasons, I doubt it.) There’s much more about the case here. 

● One of the most common excuses for needlessly tearing apart families is substance use by parents. The knee-jerk assumption is that any “drug abuse” endangers children – that is, if the alleged drug abuser is poor and especially if the alleged drug abuser is poor and nonwhite. (Whereas, presumably, tearing children from everyone they know and love and consigning them to the chaos of foster care is no problem.) In a comprehensive analysis, the Reason Foundation debunks the myths and offers better alternatives. 

● The problems cited in the Reason Foundation’s analysis are compounded by the very way stories are told within family police agencies. This was illustrated by an experiment in which more than 400 caseworkers in Poland read a case summary. In one version, the “voice” of the summary was that of a professional filing a report. In the other, the voice was that of a family member. In both cases, the facts presented to the workers were identical. Yet those who read the professional version reached more negative conclusions about the family. From the study: 

The findings indicate that apparently objective, professional descriptions of families are not impartial. Rather, they have the capacity to systematically amplify perceptions of risk while obscuring aspects of care, commitment, and potential for change that are characteristic of family life. This finding aligns with the findings of previous analyses of social work reports, which demonstrate that the concept of the “child at risk” is constructed through the use of selective description, deficit-focused language, and narrative choices rather than being a straightforward “discovery” based on the facts of the case.

● Compare that to how some former foster youth tell their own stories, as in this story from Honolulu Civil Beat: 

Patty Chin believes her life would have been very different if Hawaiʻi’s child welfare system worked the way it should. 

She landed in foster care at age 10, she said, because the state mistook the poverty in her mother’s chaotic home in Waiʻanae as a threat to the safety of Chin and her siblings. All six children were removed from the home, and Chin spent more than six years in Hawaiʻi’s foster care system. 

She was shuffled among half-a-dozen foster homes and a shelter, lost contact with her siblings for extended periods, and was sexually abused in one of the foster homes. Chin kept much of her ordeal a secret because she worried no one would believe her, and feared what might happen if she told. 

Chin believes she could have stayed home and avoided much of that suffering if her family had been helped before it was splintered. … 

● In Michigan, children were removed in a case where that was clearly the right call. But then, WOOD-TV in Grand Rapids reports, a private child welfare agency dropped the ball. Friends and relatives in other states were ready to step in and take the children, but the private agency never got around to the paperwork. 

● I’ve previously noted how, in Tennessee, the state family police agency wants formal permission to effectively jail any foster youth they don’t like. But some states aren’t waiting for permission. The Imprint has a story about a report issued by Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff and Virginia Rep. ​Jen Kiggans that finds many states already stash foster youth who have committed no crime in juvenile detention when they have no place else to put them. 

But, as has always been the case with Ossoff’s reports so far, he buys into the foster care establishment’s party line that the problem is too few foster homes, rather than too many foster children taken needlessly from their homes. As long as Ossoff keeps framing the issue that way, he can issue all the reports he wants, but nothing is going to change. 

● Throwing foster kids out of court is nothing to gloat about (even when it wasn’t a very good lawsuit that got them into court in the first place), and the fact that Asaka’s family police agency is gloating at kids’ expense says everything you need to know about that agency. I have a blog post about it. 

● And the New York University School of Law has published a great summary of a truly joyous event: The dedication of this year’s edition of NYU’s Survey of American Law to Prof. Martin Guggenheim, the founding father of the family defense and family advocacy movement (and a founder of NCCPR). The summary ends with a video of the full event.

Throwing foster kids out of court is nothing to gloat about

…and the fact that the Alaska family police agency is gloating at kids’ expense says everything you need to know about that agency. 

A federal judge in Alaska has thrown out one of those typical McLawsuits brought by the latest group Marcia Lowry founded to bring such McLawsuits, A Better Childhood. (ABC is the group Marcia founded after leaving Children’s Rights, which now has effectively rejected Lowry’s approach. She founded Children’s Rights after leaving the ACLU, which now has effectively rejected Lowry’s approach. She joined the ACLU after leaving the New York Civil Liberties Union, which now has effectively rejected Lowry’s approach.) 

Alaska’a family police agency, the Office of Children’s Services, is gloating about this, falsely claiming it's some sort of vindication for them. For reasons discussed below, it is nothing of the sort. 

I wrote a column for the Alaska Beacon criticizing the lawsuit – for the same reasons I criticize almost all the nearly identical McLawsuits Lowry has brought. But unlike OCS, I’m not gloating. That’s because the reason the Alaska McLawsuit would have failed, even had it been allowed to proceed, is not that it was wrong about the problems – its condemnation of Alaska foster care was almost certainly spot on. The problem is that, as usual, the McLawsuit ignored the only solution that has a chance of working: Alaska needs to stop tearing apart families at the fifth-highest rate in America, a rate nearly triple the national average. 

Dismissing the lawsuit won’t advance real solutions – it will just make it easier for OCS to hide the problems. 

Contrary to what OCS implies, the lawsuit was not dismissed because of anything having to do with the merits of the case against the system. It was dismissed only because A Better Childhood and its co-counsel couldn’t show that the children chosen to represent an entire class of foster children, known as “named plaintiffs,” were personally affected by the alleged failures. (This is not the first time there have been questions about how Marcia Lowry has chosen named plaintiffs.) 

The real failing in the lawsuit also is the failing at the heart of a column in the Beacon by Les Gara. Gara writes from personal as well as professional experience. He’s a former foster child as well as a former state legislator. But he condemns OCS only for not doing things the legislature ordered it to do in 2018: lower caseloads, recruit more foster parents, recruit more caseworkers – in other words, the usual. But whether it’s caseworkers or foster parents, you can’t recruit your way out of a crisis caused by tearing apart families at one of the most obscene rates in America. A laser-focus on curbing wrongful removal is the essential prerequisite for fixing any system, especially an extreme outlier like Alaska. 

One constructive solution Gara does embrace is making greater use of kinship foster care. OCS replies that Alaska’s percentage of children placed in this form of foster care is above the national average. Gara replies that the proportion actually appears to be declining. Both are correct. But as Gara points out, “The reality is most states do poorly on foster care work. Comparing bad apples to bad apples isn’t much of a goal.” 

So, what next? A Better Childhood might appeal the dismissal of the suit. A better option would be for better lawyers to start over and bring a better lawsuit.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending April 1, 2026

● You know what the take-the-child-and-run crowd says about the rampant confusion of poverty with neglect, right? Well, it’s not poverty alone; thry say, there’s something else, like domestic violence. Often that’s not true. But it certainly was true in the Georgia case described in this column for The Imprint. But as you read the story, consider how things would have played out if the domestic violence that started it all took place in, say, a McMansion in Berkeley Lake, instead of a homeless shelter. And consider what it was that kept the family apart for three years – because it wasn’t domestic violence. Or, just compare the handling of the case to this other, actual case from Georgia. It all illustrates why the “it’s not poverty alone” argument is a red herring.

● The first time California’s private foster care agencies sought a $30 million taxpayer bailout, they said the sky would fall if they had to close. They got the bailout. Twenty-four agencies closed anyway. As I write in Cal Matters, before giving them another bailout, perhaps lawmakers should step outside and look up. 

● The Imprint reports on a new study finding that, when it comes to tearing apart indigenous families, the United States has a record that is, of course, awful. Other countries are even worse. From the story: 

Discussing the study with The Imprint, [one of the authors] said he was most struck by the study’s findings that despite disparities in these “very different societies, we see these continuous patterns.’’ 

● Sometimes in other countries, as in the United States, to have your children taken, you just have to be different. Fox News reports on what happened to a deeply religious Romanian family living in Sweden. From the story: 

[The father] shared videos with Fox News Digital of his daughters pleading to be reunited with their family and of his eldest daughter describing her suicide attempts while in state care. 

That should come as no surprise, given that a Swedish study found that children in that nation’s foster care system were four times more likely to die by age 20 even than comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes (and in this case, there appears to have been no maltreatment at all). The most common cause of death for the foster children: suicide. 

● And finally, NCCPR’s annual reminder: If it’s April Fools’, it must be Child Abuse Hype and Hysteria Month.

Our annual reminder: If it's April Fools', it must be Child Abuse Hype and Hysteria Month

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED APRIL 1, 2010 , MOST RECENT UPDATE:  MARCH 21, 2026.

Back in 2003, one of the groups most responsible for fomenting hype and hysteria about child abuse came remarkably close to admitting that they did just that – and that it had backfired. 

Rather like Dr. Frankenstein admitting he’d created a monster, in a 2003 Request for Proposals concerning how to improve their messaging, Prevent Child Abuse America wrote: 

While the establishment of a certain degree of public horror relative to the issue of child abuse and neglect was probably necessary in the early years to create public awareness of the issue, the resulting conceptual model adopted by the public has almost certainly become one of the largest barriers to advancing the issue further in terms of individual behavior change, societal solutions and policy priorities. 

In 2020, PCAA went further. They actually branded what they had done “health terrorism” – but refused to apologize for it. 

This is especially worth remembering as we begin “Child Abuse Awareness Month” – a month, which, appropriately, starts on April Fools Day. 

So I’ve reprinted below our 2010 blog post on the topic – with some updates and links to newer data – since, unfortunately, aside from those data, little has changed. Because it's a lot easier to create a monster than to bring it under control.

If it's April Fools', it must be Child Abuse Hype and Hysteria Month

Get ready for a seemingly endless stream of cookie-cutter news stories and Astroturf op-ed columns (the kind written by national groups with blanks to fill in to make them sound home-grown) touting "Child Abuse Awareness Month" – based on the bizarre premise that the American people are blissfully unaware of child abuse. 

There is something appropriate about the fact that "Child Abuse Awareness Month" starts on April Fools' Day, since it involves fooling the public in order to push an agenda of hype and hysteria that obscures the real nature of the problem, and real solutions, in favor of approaches that only make a serious and real problem worse. Your typical Child Abuse Awareness month news story or op-ed column follows a standard formula: 

1.  1. Take the most horrifying case to occur in your community over the past year, the more lurid the better.

2.   2. Jump immediately from that story to a gigantic number which actually is only the number of "reports" alleging any form of child maltreatment. Ignore the fact that the vast majority of those reports are false and most of the rest are nothing like the horror story. Rather, they often involve the confusion of poverty with neglect. Or…

3.   3.  Use only the total number of cases that caseworkers guess might be true, but call them "confirmed," giving the guesses, which are simply the opinion of a worker checking a box on a form, far more credibility than they deserve. A major federal study found that workers are two- to six-times more likely to wrongly label an innocent family guilty than to wrongly label real child abusers innocent.

4.   4. Pile hype onto hype by reasserting the racist, discredited COVID-19 “pandemic of child abuse” myth.  (Now that we know child abuse actually went down when COVID forced the family police to step back, and simply because memories of COVID are fading, that myth seems to pop up less often.)

5.    5. Throw in huge lists of "symptoms" or "warning signs" that "might" be "signs" of child abuse – and might as easily be signs of any number of other things.

6.     6. Instruct us all that it is our duty to phone the local child abuse hotline with any suspicion of anything no matter how vague and how dubious – instead of cautioning us about the harm of even well-meaning false reports and advising us to report when we have "reasonable cause to suspect" actual maltreatment - not poverty -- the same standard theoretically used in law to guide "mandated reporters."  

      7. Remind us that we are welcome to call the hotline anonymously – thereby encouraging those who want to harass an ex-spouse, a neighbor or anyone else against whom they may have a grudge to go right ahead, secure in the knowledge that they'll never get caught because they can conceal their identity. (Fortunately, in most cases in Texas and New York, you can't do that anymore.)

Of course, given that the child welfare establishment has no shame, in recent years the usual op-eds have included token boilerplate statements about racial justice – even as these establishment groups propose making a profoundly racist family policing system, one that will, at some point investigate the families of more than half of America's Black children, even bigger and more powerful.  But watch what they do, not what they say.  Are they proposing anything that would actually curb the power of the family police, or just tacking on the usual “prevention” programs and blathering about “more training."

All of this can do enormous harm to children.  

Hotlines wind up with more false reports and trivial cases; children are harassed and traumatized by needless child abuse investigations – often including stripsearches as caseworkers look for bruises - and some of those children are forced needlessly into foster care. The caseworkers wind up even more overloaded by these false allegations, so they have even less time to find children in real danger.  

Reality check 

NCCPR has some resources on our website for any journalists and others interested in putting all this into context, countering the hype and hysteria and pressing for real solutions: 

·        -- Issue papers on Understanding Child Abuse Numbers, False Allegations: What the Data Really Show. The Failure of Mandatory Reporting,  and many more.

·        -- Solutions pages: Our Due Process Agenda, Doing Child Welfare Right and the NCCPR Good Bill Bank.

·        -- Our presentation on how to really prevent child abuse: take a social justice approach instead of a public health approach. And our warning to be cautious when you hear the phrase "child and family well-being system."

If the people behind "Child Abuse Awareness Month"  (also known as "Child Abuse Prevention Month") really want to prevent "child abuse" then how about campaigning to ameliorate the worst effects of poverty?  

Poverty increases the stress that can lead to actual abuse and, as noted above, poverty itself often is confused with "neglect." This can be seen by the fact that study after study shows even small increases in income significantly reduce what child welfare systems call "neglect."

The problem of child abuse is serious and real, but the solutions have been phony. The distortion and exaggeration that typify child abuse "awareness" campaigns only promote phony solutions and make those serious, real problems even worse.

If only there were a Statistics Abuse Prevention Month.

NCCPR in Cal Matters: California shouldn’t bail out beleaguered foster family agencies

California’s private foster care agencies are running back to Sacramento, demanding another taxpayer bailout to cover rising insurance costs. Cal Matters reported recently that the state’s foster family agencies want another $30 million, on top of the $31.5 million they got last year. 

One of the many reasons these agencies should not get a bailout — or any other help — can be found in the very reason they’re in trouble: … 

Read the full column in Cal Matters 

NCCPR in the Louisiana Illuminator: Who’s doing child welfare better than Louisiana? Here’s the answer.

Confronted with the failure of the Department of Children and Family Services, lawmakers and administrators in Louisiana have responded the way they do in most states … None of this worked. It never does. But at least now one Louisiana lawmaker, Sen. Thomas Pressly, is asking the right question.

“Someone has to be doing it better,” Pressly asked DCFS Secretary Rebecca Harris last week,  wanting to know who. … 

Read the answer, and the full column, in the Louisiana Illuminator