We’re breaking a little news on the blog today:
The federal Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families yesterday released the annual “AFCARS Report,” vital data on foster care for Federal Fiscal Year 2024.
In an email to NCCPR this afternoon, HHS explained that the data went live yesterday, but the formal announcement didn't come until today, after we posted an earlier version of this blog. That's because, HHS says, they needed to be sure the dashboard would work. (Previous versions of this post noted that we were not sure if the release was intentional or complete. It was both.)
Here are some of the key data points:
● There were 328,947 children known to be trapped in foster care on September 30, 2024, down from 340,050 on September 30, 2023.
Both these figures leave out Washington State and Wyoming, because they still haven’t managed the basic task of submitting these data for 2024 or even 2023.
As usual, most states saw relatively small decreases in the number of children taken away; a few saw relatively small increases. But there were two alarming exceptions:
● In Indiana, a state which, year after year, tears apart families at rates well above the national average, things got even worse – much worse. The number of children taken skyrocketed by 30%. Indiana now tears apart families at the sixth-highest rate in the country, even when rates of family poverty are factored in. That’s a rate nearly triple the national average.
Just a few days ago, we posted to this blog about an example of how Indiana confuses poverty with neglect. At the end of that post, we included some context on other dismal data from that state. I’ve added that context at the end of this post as well.
● There was an even worse rate of increase in the District of Columbia – 46%. But the raw numbers are relatively low, so it doesn’t take as much of a change to get a huge percentage difference. Nevertheless, this should alarm the D.C. Council, which needs to ask what’s going wrong at the city’s family police agency.
● But there was also some good news: The biggest year-to-year decrease in entries into foster care was in Idaho, down 18.3% between 2023 and 2024. That’s particularly good news since, at the time, the Idaho child welfare agency was run by Alex Adams, who has been nominated to run the federal Administration for Children and Families.
● Entries into foster care in Missouri declined by nearly 11%.
That left Missouri tearing apart
families at a rate 35% above the national average. For Missouri, that was
real progress. But it’s not likely to last.
The improvement came when the state family police agency was led by Darrell
Missey, who understood the enormous harm of needless foster care. But he retired,
and his replacement has made clear she
wants to reverse all of Missey’s progress.
The reasons family police agencies (a more accurate term than “child welfare” agencies) give for taking the children haven’t changed much. Once again, 87% of children were not taken because of even an accusation of physical or sexual abuse. And though the take-the-child-and-run crowd wants us to believe every parent who loses a child to foster care is a hopeless drug addict, 62% were not taken because of parental drug or alcohol abuse – not just no proof of such abuse, not even an accusation of any drug use of any kind.
In contrast, the number of children taken in cases in which the family police agency admits the problem was housing equals the number involving physical abuse.
Racial disparities haven’t changed much either:
● Black children made up 22% of those placed in foster care, compared with 14% of the total child population.
● Native American children made up 3% of foster children – triple their representation in the general child population.
For the first time, the report separately lists data for eight
Indian tribes. Some tribes run their own
systems. The numbers are small, fewer than 600 entries total, and it’s not
clear if these data are complete. Nor is it clear whether or not these entries
also are included in the entry figures for their respective states.
Here’s
how bad Indiana was even before 2024:
● Nationwide, 37% of children will be forced to endure the trauma of a child
abuse investigation before they turn 18. In Indiana, it’s 58%. Nationwide, 53% of Black children will
have to endure this trauma. In Indiana, it’s 79% - the highest rate in
America.
● In any given year,
among all children, Indiana takes them from their homes at a rate 66% above the
national average, even when rates of
family poverty are factored in.
● When going up against
this family police juggernaut, families often are almost literally defense-less
– because their lawyers often have so little time and so many clients. Many
Indiana counties want to keep it that way. One in five actually turns down federal funds to improve representation for parents and also
for children. One county court administrator explained that county’s refusal
this way: “[T]he system we have works well.”
None of this is because Indiana is a cesspool of
depravity with vastly more child abuse than the national average. In
fact, in Indiana in 2024, 87% of the time, when children were thrown into foster care, their
parents were not even accused of physical or sexual abuse.
Forty-one percent of the time, there wasn’t even an allegation of drug abuse.
