NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending June 10, 2025

● In Missouri: more good journalism about a bad system. This time, The Journal reports on a foundation-funded effort to curb the confusion of poverty with neglect. But the most interesting part of the story is the lengths to which the state’s family police agency is going to sabotage the project by fear-bombing the reforms. I have a blog post about it, with a link to the full story. 

● It’s a long, slow process but, The Marshall Project reports, states are beginning to consider laws to curb secret non-consensual drug testing of pregnant women. From the story: 

“We know when there’s secret drug testing, families are often torn apart,” said New York state Rep. Linda Rosenthal, a Democrat from Manhattan, who noted cases of women who were reported to child welfare over positive tests caused by poppy seeds and prescribed medications. “This is not some theoretical discussion we’re having here. This is really something that occurs.” 

● Following up on a superb series of stories in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Billy Penn reports on efforts by two members of the City Council to take action. One of them, Councilmember Cindy Bass, wants to refocus on the report of the Council’s Special Committee on Child Separations, which issued what I refer to as a comprehensive “Blueprint for Child Safety.” (NCCPR was represented on the committee.)  As the story explains: 

Grounded in interviews with families who experienced foster care, the committee’s first report determined that the city often defines conditions of poverty as “neglect” and needlessly separates families, who then receive insufficient support. 

●The Inquirer reports that another member of the Council, Nina Ahmad, held a hearing focusing largely on the private agencies that oversee most foster care in the city. But, unlike the Special Committee, this hearing apparently did not focus on the problem at the root of all the others, Philadelphia’s ongoing high rate of tearing apart families. 

The head of Philadelphia’s family police agency, Kimberly Ali, correctly noted that there has been real progress in reducing entries into care. But as of 2024, the most recent year for which comparative data are available, Philadelphia still was taking away children at the second highest rate among America’s largest cities. Meanwhile, the private agencies that oversee foster care in Philadelphia and have been the subject of repeated exposés for tolerating rampant abuse have a solution of their own: Make it harder for their victims to sue them! To her credit, Ali has rejected this idea. 

Now, three dispatches from the frontlines: 

● In Minnesota, The Imprint reports, Foster Advocates released a report 

… spearheaded and produced by former foster youth. It takes glaring aim at the “promise” the state makes when it removes a child from its parents and home — on the premise that the system can provide better care. 

“It is a promise the state struggles and, too often, fails to keep,” states the report. … 

Also from the story: 

Dez was taken from her birth mother at age 1 along with her sister, and spent four years in foster care before they were both adopted into a home, where she said they were physically and emotionally abused. … 

A woman identified as Deddtrease … entered foster care at the age of 14 and stayed until she aged out of the system. The 26-year-old single mom said the report highlights the “mistreatment and underlying problems that nobody sees that we have to live with for the rest of our lives.” 

In her case, “I wish they would have left me with my mother,” she said. “They exposed me to more trauma than what I was going through at home.” 

This excerpt from the report summarizes its many recommendations. 

● Also in The Imprint, a former Child Protective Services worker writes about gaining new insight about substance abuse – when it happened in her family. She writes: 

I am grateful that I was divorced and that my children lived with me, avoiding the immediate threat of child protective services (CPS) intervention. I shudder imagining the potential intrusion and added trauma of having to prove the ability to keep our children safe while grappling with the chaos of addiction. And as someone who was once a CPS worker and intervened in the lives of other families, I now ponder how CPS involvement compounded the stress level of families in need and destabilized them in an already overwhelming time. Many families I worked with had been affected by substance dependence and resulted in family upset and child removal. 

● And there’s this from The Observer, in Sacramento: 

Given how it has historically shown up in the African American community, the child welfare system has earned its critics. They point to a history of systemic racism and inequality that leads to a disproportionate number of Black children being removed from their homes and spending more time in foster care than children of other ethnicities. Some of the most outspoken detractors are former social workers, legal experts and adults who have been scarred by their experiences in the system. … 

Among those profiled: Malachi Chaney-McClain of California Youth Connection. From the story: 

When they did have a legit apartment, Chaney-McClain purposefully took the bed near a window. 

“If CPS came, I wanted to be able to jump out the window,” he recounts. “It was on the second floor and there were bushes. I wanted to be able to catch my sisters and to just not be taken anymore.” 

● The headline from this story in Reason sums up the breathtaking cruelty of authorities in this North Carolina case “A Car Hit and Killed Their 7-Year-Old Son. Now They're Being Charged for Letting Him Walk to the Store.” 

And finally, two items seemingly unrelated to child welfare – except that they are: 

● Immigration raids are, of course, a great way to spread misery by separating children from their families. CNN reports that when the Trump Administration staged its immigration raids in Los Angeles, once again tagging along was – Dr. Phil. You know what else separates children? Court-Appointed Special Advocates. Though the volunteers almost always mean well, massive studies show that CASA prolongs foster care, reduces the chances of reunification and makes it more likely that foster youth will “age out” with no home at all. So it’s somehow appropriate that a longtime celebrity spokesperson for CASA is – Dr. Phil. 

 ● Carole Cadwalladr, the journalist who exposed the Cambridge Analytica scandal – in which the data of millions was harvested from Facebook and then weaponized without their consent, was interviewed last week by John Stewart on The Daily Show. She painted a truly frightening picture of what happens when government agencies are allowed to take all the data they have in separate databases, put it all together and use it any way they damn well please. Yeah, we all know it’s scary when Elon Musk does it. But the reason this item is here is because when it comes to this kind of massive, dangerous invasion of privacy the trendsetter is – child welfare. Yet initially, at least, most journalists not only weren’t alarmed by it, they applauded it. The Electronic Frontier Foundation warns of a "toxic combination of secrecy and bias."  You can read more about all about that here.

Child welfare in Missouri: The family police are fear-bombing a reform effort

Missouri's "child welfare" agency, the Children's Division, offers a lesson in how to sabotage reform

Missouri officials’ work undermining a reform effort makes clear that such efforts will have only limited success unless mandatory reporting is, at a minimum, curbed 

Last week The Journal, a publication of the Kansas Leadership Center looked next door to Missouri as part of a project exploring “health solutions” in that state. 

They published an excellent story zeroing in on the problem of confusing poverty with neglect and a foundation-funded program in several counties, known as Connected Communities Thriving Families, intended to deal with it. 

The idea behind the program is to create alternatives for mandatory reporters, who are required to call the child abuse hotline run by Missouri’s “child welfare” agency, the Children’s Division. Mandatory reporting has been proven to backfire – doing enormous harm to families needlessly investigated and overloading systems, making it less likely they will find the relatively few children in real danger. 

As the story explains: 

Started in 2022, Connected Communities’ underlying premise is that the Children’s Division is creaking under the weight of unrealistic expectations – that its hotline is the default response of teachers, social workers and other professionals required by state law to alert authorities when they suspect abuse or neglect. 

Connected Communities’ overarching goal is to tilt the system toward community-level social service interventions that ameliorate home life issues – often caused by poverty – to keep families intact. 

The aim is to limit calls to the child abuse and neglect hotline to truly life-threatening situations, persuading mandatory reporters to become mandatory supporters. 

The program is run by the Missouri Coalition for Children. CEO Mary Chant says that the communities themselves are designing solutions, as opposed to how family police agencies typically operate: 

“We have a long history of dropping services into communities that is sort of like, ‘Well, we hope whatever you have is appendicitis, because no matter what, you’re getting an appendectomy,’” she said. 

The story cites as an example of potential success … 

a teacher referring struggling parents to a community provider that can give them laundry detergent or get their water turned back on rather than hotlining the family because the children continually come to school dirty and smelly. 

“We do not want anyone to not make a hotline call when they suspect there is abuse or willful neglect,” Chant said. “What we are saying is, ‘If the family is stuck, are there other ways we can support them? How can we remove the issue, not the child? How can we remove the danger, not the child?’” 

The story then nails precisely the biggest barrier to making anything like this work: 

… overcoming a fear among mandatory reporters who can lose their licenses or face misdemeanor charges for failing to report suspected cases of abuse or neglect. 

And the story makes abundantly clear that the Children’s Division not only doesn’t want to allay that fear, it wants to encourage it. Watch how Kayla Ueligger who, when interviewed for this story, was the interim director of the Children’s Division, does it: 

Ueligger … said it puts too much pressure on teachers and staff to make a judgment call about whether an issue rises to the level of a hotline call. 

But, of course, mandatory reporters already make that decision. Ueligger is repeating the mantra that got us into the god-awful mess in which one-third of all American children, and more than half of Black children ultimately will endure the trauma of an investigation by Ueligger’s agency or one of its counterparts across the country. She’s saying don’t make any judgment at all, just phone in your slightest suspicion – act on that “gut feeling” – even though gut feeling often is just another term for bias. 

And then she throws another fear bomb into the mix: 

“I would never want to be the teacher that didn’t call on something because I was unsure, and then something bad happens,” she said. “We’re the safety authorities. … There are other ways for us to address (the situation) rather than telling mandated reporters that maybe they should make the decision when to call.” 

But apparently, Ms. Ueligger would have no problem being the teacher whose mistaken call to the hotline brought hell down upon a family whose only crime was poverty, traumatized the children with interrogations and stripsearches and/or took the children, consigned them to the chaos of foster care and put them at high risk of abuse in foster care itself. 

This is exactly what Ueligger and her counterparts defending the failed status quo don’t want mandatory reporters to think about: There is no easy decision. Yes, sometimes not making the call carries a risk – but so does making the call. If we are ever to stop destroying so many children in the name of “saving” them, mandatory reporters are just going to have to start doing the hard work of thinking before they make the call. 

Ueligger continues: 

The best approach, she said, is to call the hotline and also help address the family’s needs. 

Except that calling the hotline has traditionally been a way to avoid doing anything else to address the family’s needs – something made clear by the comments of a school official that I’ll get to below.  But also, once you call the hotline when it isn’t necessary, you’ve made everything far worse, even if you also try to be helpful. So no, the best approach is to use professional judgment concerning when a call is so urgent that the good the call will do outweighs the harm. 

But here’s the biggest whopper of all: 

Ueligger said the department has an effective triage system to determine whether a situation calls for the removal of the child or some other intervention. 

In fact, the Children’s Division has nothing of the kind. Data from 2023, the most recent for which comparative figures are available, make clear that at every stage of the process, the Children's Division “triage system” stinks: 

● Nationwide, despite extremely low standards for accepting a call, more than half of all calls to child abuse hotlines are screened out. In Missouri, fewer than one-third of calls are screened out. 

● Nationwide, after investigation, even though “substantiation” requires little more than a caseworker’s guess, 56% of reports are found to be false. In Missouri, it’s only 30%.* 

● And of course, Missouri does the ultimate harm – tearing a family apart and throwing children into foster care at a rate 50% above the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in. 

ENTRIES INTO FOSTER CARE 

PER THOUSAND IMPOVERISHED CHILDREN

The only thing Missouri’s “triage system” is effective at is traumatizing children and destroying families. 

To see that system in action, check out this story from the Missouri Independent.  And this one. 

As for what Ueligger herself points to as reform – it’s just replacing foster care with – foster care. She brags about “temporary alternative placement arrangements” – but that’s just hidden foster care. 

Ueligger is no longer running the children’s division. But her permanent replacement, Sara Smith, already has shown indications of being as bad or worse. 

Ueligger isn’t the only one out to undermine reform. 

Meet Robert Webb, who is about to retire as school superintendent in Kirksville, one of the cities where Community Connections is trying to do its work. From the story: 

[Webb] said it’s unrealistic to expect teachers and administrators to be educators and social service navigators for families. 

Webb said he is more than happy to feed kids and provide other such services but working with parents to resolve issues like poverty and homelessness is out of bounds. That’s an adult issue, he said, and “we don’t deal in the adult world.” 

First of all, no one is asking the educators of Kirksville to perform their own investigations or navigate anything. Rather, Community Connections is attempting to coordinate resources, make them easier to find, and get the word out.  So all the educators of Kirksville are being asked to do is call a different phone number – one that connects a family to help instead of policing.

 Even better would be placing a Community Connections employee in the schools to personally help guide mandatory reporters toward alternatives, but clearly, that would be a bridge way too far for Superintendent Webb.  Rarely does one encounter an educator so unwilling to acknowledge that what happens in the home – the “adult issues” -- just might have something to do with how children are doing at school. And you are doing those children no favors if your only response to poverty and homelessness is to turn in their parents to the family police. 

Fortunately, more and more educators are seeing it differently. The American Federation of Teachers, a union with 1.8 million members, says educators should be exempted from mandatory reporting laws. In a comprehensive report based in part on a survey of more than 1,000 educators, the union concludes:  

We must challenge school cultures rooted in regulating families, valuing compliance over compassion, and funneling marginalized students into foster care or prison. Educators are sensitive to both state and local policies. To move away from the ineffective intervention of mandatory reporting, policymakers must decriminalize absenteeism. They can also remove educators from state laws on mandatory reporting, making reporting an option rather than a requirement. [Emphasis added.] 

Citing the phrase coined by JMACforFamilies (the one that’s also in the article from The Journal), the AFT calls for replacing mandatory reporting with mandatory supporting. The AFT has an overview of how to do it here. 

In short, thousands, perhaps more than a million educators are ready and willing to do what Robert Webb will not. 

What all of this illustrates is the limits of any effort to change the approach of mandatory reporters that isn’t backed up by changes in mandatory reporting itself. How many teachers in Kirksville, or anywhere else in Missouri, are going to be brave enough not to call the hotline, and risk job loss or prosecution, when the leadership of the family police agency is demanding that they call in anything and everything – and their boss, the school superintendent, wants them to do the same? 

Ideally, what the AFT recommends for educators would become the norm for all of those who now are mandatory reporters: Mandatory reporting would be replaced by permissive reporting in which professionals are free to do exactly what Kayla Ueligger says they should not do: Exercise their professional judgment. At a minimum, laws should be changed to give mandatory reporters an “off-ramp” – that is, if they take advantage of programs like Community Connections instead of calling a child abuse hotline they are immune from any retaliation. 

Now that would be an effective “triage system.” 

*-Another 64% of reports accepted by the Missouri hotline received a “differential response” assessment. In theory this is less onerous than a full-scale investigation, but practice varies. Missouri was among the first states to adopt this model but also, as we explained in our 2003 report on Missouri child welfare, among the first to screw it up.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending June 3, 2025

● Gothamist has a story about a new report from The Bronx Defenders that documents in case after case the bias that prompts the city’s family police agency to needlessly tear apart nonwhite families. From the story: 

“All parents are in situations where they need support," said Anne Venhuizen, a supervising attorney for the Bronx Defenders. "All parents are in situations where they wish, looking back on it, they could have done something different. All parents are in situations where they did nothing wrong. All parents are in situations where someone criticizes their parenting, where they're like, this is the parenting I want to do, that I think is best for me and my family." 

“Parenting is constant small and large decisions about what to do, what's best for your children, and it is inherently subjective," she added. "White parents get a grace that in this city, Black parents don't.”

● In March on this blog I wrote about a case challenging what amounts to Handmaid’s Tale jurisprudence: demanding that men control the behavior of the women in their lives and terminating their children’s rights ever to live with either parent if they don’t. Now, in The Imprint Prof. Cynthia Godsoe, a former children’s attorney discusses the case.

● Speaking of children’s lawyers: The New York City lawyers who wrote this column in The Imprint calling for an end to anonymous child abuse reports don’t represent parents; they lead an agency that represents children. They see the harm such reports do to children every day. Maybe lawmakers should listen to them.

● Could there really be anything good in an analysis of the intersection of poverty and neglect signed by 23 professors of social work and allied disciplines? In this case, also in The Imprint, yes. They argue when poverty is confused with neglect the solution is likely to be money. But they go on to argue that when poverty is not “alone” – that there also are other problems, often the solution still is money. 

● Minnesota Public Radio talks to Kelis Houston on her journey to becoming a champion of child welfare reform in that state. She was a prime mover behind the Minnesota African-American Family Preservation and Child Welfare Disproportionality Act. And now she has a Bush Foundation Fellowship to continue her work – including speeding up the implementation of the law.

Turning to entertainment news (but be warned, this part includes spoilers): 

● One of the most realistic portrayals of family policing in a Hollywood movie was in the original animated version of Lilo and Stitch, as can be seen in this 32-second clip 

But the remake is, uh, the Disney version, as suggested by artist Erin Kidd:

A pretty irresponsible message at the best of times, but right NOW? Sheesh. #liloandstitch #stitch #hawaii #disneymovie #ohana

[image or embed]

— Erin Kidd (@thebabygoat.bsky.social) May 27, 2025 at 12:21 PM

You can read about the undermining of the whole point of the original and the whitewashing of family policing in Slate, Flicksided, and The Daily Beast. 

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

● From WFAA-TV 

State knew of history of abuse at facility where 11-year-old foster child died 

Records show that despite documenting years of violence and abuse, the state allowed the operators to open two other facilities. … 

● Two from the Santa Fe New Mexican. One about a place now closed … 

A worker was allowed to sexually abuse a teenage boy in 2018 at a long-shuttered Albuquerque-based residential treatment center for youth, according to a new lawsuit. 

Desert Hills of New Mexico, initially operated by Youth and Family Centered Services of New Mexico Inc., faced numerous allegations of abuse and neglect — including sexual assaults — before it was closed by the state in early 2019. … 

…another about one that’s still very much open: 

The state Department of Public Safety, which handles records request for the New Mexico State Police, has failed to provide documents for nearly five months related to an apparent assault that took place at a state Children, Youth and Families Department office in Albuquerque. … 

The office is near Interstate 40 and San Mateo Boulevard in Albuquerque. CYFD has long struggled with having to house children in its offices, in many cases due to challenges finding proper placements for them. The practice has led to instances of abuse, neglect or other harm to children staying there. … 

● And have you heard about the Washington State residential treatment program that used to be on an island accessible only by boat?  KIRO-TV reports that residents called it “Juvenile Alcatraz”: 

Two men who say they were repeatedly abused while living at a group home on Cypress Island decades ago are now suing the facility’s operator, alleging it failed to protect vulnerable children from rampant sexual and physical abuse. 

The facility moved to the mainland; but it’s still a residential treatment center.