NCCPR news and commentary roundup, week ending February 2, 2025

● When the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act, that challenge came from Texas. Now, The Imprint reports, the most comprehensive legislation anywhere in the country to expand the protections of ICWA to all children has been introduced – in Texas. If anything this law would go further than ICWA, in that it’s more specific about the obligations the courts and the state family police agency would have to meet. 

● ICT News and the Montana Free Press report that Montana lawmakers are proposing to reauthorize and expand that state’s version of ICWA. That law applies only to Native American children, but in Montana, that’s a lot of children. Native Americans make up 9% of the state child population – but 35% of children in foster care. 

● Writing in The Imprint Nora McCarthy and Jeremy Kohomban remind us that even when a family police investigation doesn’t lead to foster care, it still can do enormous harm to children.  They write: 

Investigations can leave enduring negative impacts on the family. Research finds that, after an investigation, parents limit social networks and help-seeking to reduce the risk of another investigation. This social isolation places children at even greater risk, and children can suffer when parents fear discussing family needs with educators, doctors and other helping professionals who are required by law to report child safety concerns. 

Clearly, to keep children safer, we must reserve an investigatory approach for children facing real danger. For children at low risk, we must develop methods to address family distress that inflict less harm. 

● In this Newsweek story NCCPR points out the harm of such investigations, and notes that "every parental misjudgment—if that is what happened here—is not child abuse." 

● For another example of how the family police system can be the ultimate middle-class entitlement -- step right up and take someone else’s child for your very own! -- check out this story from WZTV in Nashville. 

● The Imprint has an update on criminal charges against a foster youth advocate – charges that never should have been brought and which the relevant prosecuting agency and/or judge should have had the decency to dismiss out of hand. 

● On the NCCPR Child Welfare Blog: a short trip into the weeds concerning how a state spins “child welfare” data, with lessons for those looking at such data everywhere. 

● Some good news: The University of North Carolina soon will join the growing list of law schools that have family defense clinics. 

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

● From the Topeka Capital-Journal: 

Police in a Wichita-area town have arrested the adoptive parents of a girl whose body was found buried in a backyard five months ago, while officials with the state child welfare agency haven't yet released a summary of its involvement. 

The Rose Hill Police Department on Monday arrested the adoptive parents of the girl, whose birth name was Natalie Garcia and adoptive name was Kennedy Schroer. Her adoptive parents are 50-year-old Crystina Elizabeth Schroer and 53-year-old Joseph Shane Schroer.

Maine family police agency’s “good news” may not be so good

...unless you're a child taken by the Maine family police - in 
which case you might never go home.
(Photo by Jimmy Emerson)

The Maine Morning Star has a good story about some data from Maine’s family police agency, the Office of Child and Family Services.  OCFS is spinning the data, touting the simple fact that more children are leaving Maine foster care than entering as some kind of good news attributable to their efforts.  More likely, it’s what one would expect due to inertia.  It might be good news; it might not.

The exit/entry figure is more likely to mean simply that the foster-care panic in Maine is finally slowing down – as usually happens after a couple of years. So what does that mean? If you suddenly start taking away huge numbers of additional children then, of course, a couple of years later exits will exceed entries – simply because all those children needlessly taken are leaving the system one way or another, while entries have slowed from full-out panic levels. 

Of course, the fact that the panic may be slowing is itself good news – though it’s not slowing nearly enough.  This can be seen in another number: The claim that OCFS took away 900 children in 2024.  Two years ago, Maine took away 1,130 children. 

So IF – and it’s a big if – that 900 figure is accurate, it would mean that Maine’s rate of removal fell from more than double the national average (even when rates of child poverty are factored in) to “only” about 70% above the national average. The state still is a long way from returning to the years when it came so close to getting child welfare right. 

The reason for that big “if” has to do with the data sources.  The 2022 figure is the most recent available from the federal government’s Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System.  AFCARS gets the numbers from the states – but there are specific definitions for an entry into care.  When states publish their own data for the public they can define an entry any way they want.  Several times over the years I’ve found discrepancies between what states tell the public and what they tell AFCARS – and always, the number they give the public is lower. 

I am not saying that is happening here. I suggest only that it would be prudent to ask OCFS if the 900 figure conforms strictly to AFCARS definitions and to check past OCFS self-reported entry data against past AFCARS reports.  (The actual number reported to AFCARS won’t be identical, since AFCARS data are reported by federal fiscal year.) I tried doing that myself, but could not find entry figures on the OCFS website. 

One other bit of clearly bad news: In a state that tears apart so many families needlessly, it is outrageous that more children lose their birth parents forever because of adoption than are allowed to return to their own homes. This begs the question: Is OCFS getting the numbers down with a mad rush to deprive children of their parents forever (that’s what termination of parental rights really means) rather than by doing enough to avoid needless removal?