NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending May 13, 2025

● The family police agency found all the allegations against Megan Knight to be unfounded. She even passed a background check to care for foster children in residential treatment. But her own children are still in foster care. That’s what can happen when families are literally defense-less. 

As the Missouri Independent reports, in still more stellar journalism from that publication, indigent parents in Missouri are not guaranteed an attorney at all – and when they get one, they’re often far too overloaded to do much of anything. Here’s what that means in the case of Ms. Knight: 

Her four-year-old daughter has been moved seven times since she was taken into foster care in April 2022. Knight said she’s developed behavioral issues Knight attributes to the trauma of separation and being tossed around from home to home. 

“When I was able to see her, she would always beg the caseworker, ‘Please, let me go home to my mom,’” she said. 

Now, her daughter is in care with a foster family and Knight doesn’t know where in Missouri they are or who the family is. Two of her kids are in another stranger’s home. 

● I have a commentary in the Missouri Independent about another of their excellent stories, about the case of a family needlessly surveilled, traumatized and often torn apart over and over  by the state family police agency. 

All of this happens in a state that year after year takes away children at a rate far above the national average. In addition to exposing the failure of the agency, the stories in the Independent also wind up exposing the failure of the Kansas City Star. 

● Now, a personal note: 50 years ago this week I was about to graduate from the City University of New York; I’d be going to Columbia J-School in the fall. Also 50 years ago this week, the New York Daily News published the investigative series that convinced me that I wanted to spend as much time as I could reporting on the child welfare system and what it does to children. I have a commentary in the Daily News about that series’ far more important impact: why I think it started a chain of events that led to real improvement in the City system. 

● Some of that improvement can be seen in the latest report from the New York City Family Policy Project, which documents an overall decline in surveillance and separation since 2019 – the last full year before the COVID pandemic – with no compromise of safety. 

● Perhaps you remember the scandal surrounding the “child abuse team” at Children’s Wisconsin Hospital. That’s the place where other doctors said they would be afraid to bring their own children to their own hospital after accidental injuries.  Now, WTMJ-TV and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel report, one couple is suing. 

● Whenever it's pointed out to people in the Court-Appointed Special Advocates program that research overwhelmingly shows that the work they do in court makes everything worse, they try to divert attention by pointing to things like their work as mentors to foster youth. So why not just turn CASA into program like this program in Montana – a mentoring program without all the things that make CASA so harmful?

● Three more states have passed “reasonable childhood independence” laws, which attempt to give children a right to – childhood. 

● But another one of those bad bills became law in Washington State. This law is not anti-Catholic, as the Trump Administration claims – it’s anti-child.  I have a blog post about it. 

● And speaking of bad bills, it has come to this: Oregon Public Broadcasting reports that the Governor of Oregon personally testified in favor of a bill that would make it easier to institutionalize foster children out-of-state, and easier for their caregivers to abuse them. “The status quo is unacceptable,” the governor said.  That’s true. The problem is, as explained in this series of posts, the bill makes things even worse. 

That’s because, as usual, OPB does not mention that the premise behind the bill is false. The premise is that Oregon has too few in-state placements. Rather, Oregon tears apart too many families. 

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

● Remember how Los Angeles County agreed to pay $4 billion to survivors of rampant abuse in various foster care facilities, including a notorious shelter? San Diego County is smaller. As The San Diego Unon-Tribune reports, it might wind up paying a mere $100 million or so. 

But San Diego County wants you to know that, as the story explains: 

“We prioritize the safety of all children and youth in our care,” the county said in a statement. “The county has comprehensive training, rules, procedures, and additional oversight to ensure the safety of youth.” 

Don’t you feel better already? 

● According to this story from WAGA-TV no one can explain how in the world the adoptive parents who nearly tortured a Georgia child to death ever could have been allowed to adopt the child and four siblings.  But here are a couple of possibilities: 

--Under the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act, states collect a bounty of $4,000 to $10,000 for every adoption of a child over a baseline number. If things turn out as they did in this case, states don’t have to give the money back. So ignoring flashing red warning signs may have been worth up to $50,000 for the Georgia family police agency. 

--Getting those adoption numbers up also is the only time a family police agency is guaranteed good press, via those annual “Adoption Day” stories. 

--And while the story points to a “shortage” of foster parents, Georgia doesn’t have too few foster parents.  As this story and this one, from WABE Public Radio make clear, Georgia has too many foster children.