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.