Lessons from Hawaii’s “Lord of the Flies” foster home

It went on for decades. Rampant sexual abuse in the Hawaii foster home of John Teixeira. Caseworkers failed to check on the children. Not only did the state family police agency ignore complaints, they praised Teixeira to the skies – because, after all, there’s always a “shortage” of foster homes, and Teixeira would take children no one else would.  And it wasn’t just the family police agency. Teixeira also was subject to one of those treacly “model foster parent” stories that so many reporters seem to love. 

The horrors finally were exposed thanks to a civil lawsuit by one brave former foster youth, and dogged reporting from Honolulu Civil Beat. 

How bad was it? From one of the stories: 

“Life for a young boy in the Teixeira foster home was a struggle for survival akin to ‘Lord of the Flies,’” the judge in JR’s lawsuit wrote in 2024, referring to the classic novel about castaway children creating a savage society. “The older boys were abusive and Defendant Teixeira, an abuser himself, failed to protect younger boys from them.” 

One of those who tried to warn the family police agency 

… said she tried to tell the social worker that she didn’t think the boys were being treated right in Teixeira’s home. 

She testified that she vividly recalls the social worker’s response. 

“When you’re looking for a foster home for teenage boys, you take what you can get.” 

But that, of course, is because systems tear apart so many families needlessly in the first place. 

And reporter John Hill doesn’t let the family police agency get away with the usual excuse: Oh, that was long ago, we do much better now.  Hill writes: 

The story is a microcosm of what was happening to foster children across Hawaiʻi in the 1990s and 2000s — and, evidence suggests, to this day. [Emphasis added.] 

You can read all about what happened to children placed with Teixeira in the series itself; I won’t recap it here, just be sure you’re ready for it. 

Instead, I want to focus on something mentioned at the very beginning of the series. How JR wound up in foster care in the first place: 

The 8-year-old boy who would later be known as John Roe 121 arrived at his new foster home in Waimānalo in the midst of a crisis. 

JR and his siblings had been taken from their biological parents three years earlier after his mother accidentally hit his brother on the head with a hammer in the midst of being attacked by the children’s drug-addled father. 

OK, let’s stop there. What might have happened had Hawaii authorities removed the drug-addled father instead of the children? No, just doing that and closing the door wouldn’t have been enough. But what if they’d then helped JR’s mother cope with all that had been done to her – both the psychological help agencies love to dispense and the concrete help she almost certainly needed?  What if they’d at least tried that first? 

And before you say: Wait, you wanted the state to try keeping the children in a home like that? Read the stories to see what happened to JR when they didn’t. 

But that was only the first mistake. When children genuinely can’t stay with their own parents, the best choice almost always is another relative. But Hawaii authorities quickly gave up on that: 

[The children] stayed for a short time with an aunt. When state child welfare workers showed up, the aunt told 5-year-old JR and two younger siblings to hide in a closet. But they made too much noise. 

The social workers opened the closet door and took them away. 

Then came another placement that was not as bad as a total stranger. But, as one might expect, given what he’d been through, JR’s behavior was getting difficult. The state could have provided wraparound services to save that placement. But instead… 

JR’s next stop was with a neighbor of his mother. Separated from his siblings, he spent three years with her. Now she was telling the state she could no longer handle him. 

So JR was moved from home to home to home – eventually winding up in the “Lord of the Flies” home.  

And then the state family policing agency blew it again: 

… when a relative expressed interest in adopting JR, state officials declined. Teixeira, they said, was JR’s “best advocate,” according to the later expert witness report. 

So, JR had a home. Teixeira had solved a problem for the state, as he had many times before — where to put foster boys no one else wanted. 

Another story is even more tragic. It’s the story of Rahiem Morris. 

Rahiem’s dad had a drug problem. He separated from the boy’s mother. Then the mother, Sharon Fernandez-Thomas, was arrested for contacting her husband’s new girlfriend, violating a court order. 

She pleaded no contest and was sentenced to community service. And CWS took Rahiem, who was 4, severing her parental rights. 

Then Rahiem’s mother remarried, moved to the mainland and lost track of him. 

There is nothing to indicate Rahiem’s mother abused or neglected him; so there’s no indication there was anything wrong that couldn’t have been fixed without taking Rahiem at all, let alone terminating his right to live with his mother for his entire childhood. 

After Raheim aged out, mother and son found either other again. Children who age out often go back to the parents the state tried to keep from them forever.  But by then, too much damage had been done to Raheim in foster care, particularly at the “Lord of the Flies” home. 

There is only one piece of encouraging news here: It looks like in 2023 and 2024, Hawaii finally got serious about taking away fewer children (though, as always, we don’t know how much of the decline is real and how much is just a shift to hidden foster care.) If it’s real, then, in 2024, for the first time in more than 20 years, the rate at which Hawaii took away children was no worse than the national average – though that average is itself too high. 

That means for the first time, if the family police agency builds on this progress, maybe Hawaii foster children won’t have to “take what [they] can get.”

NCCPR in the Kansas Reflector: Yes, there’s a way to make child abuse horrors less common in Kansas — but it’s not what you think

 A child dies a gruesome death. The child was “known to the system.” In fact, the case file had more “red flags” than a Soviet May Day parade. That leaves everyone asking: “How could it have happened?” 

The answer is counterintuitive. 

Tragedies like the death of Zoey Felix, who was killed after slipping through the cracks, happen in every state. But they are more likely to happen in Kansas. That’s because Kansas has embraced an approach to child welfare that can be boiled down to: Take the child and run. Kansas tears apart so many families needlessly that workers have less time to find those very few children — like Zoey — who really do need to be taken. … 

Read the full column in the Kansas Reflector

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending October 7, 2025

● A North Carolina agency wants us to believe that the best way to help impoverished parents whose children have been taken because of alleged abuse or neglect is to hand the children over to stranger couples and pay those stranger couples $100,000 a year - plus fringe benefits, free housing and more! The state family police agency loves it – in part, they say, because paying that much is a great way to stop foster parents from undermining reunification!  In this NCCPR Blog post, we offer some alternative suggestions.   

● Spotlight PA reports on the enormous harm done to children and families by a system that makes it incredibly easy to blacklist parents as child abusers, and incredibly difficult to get off the blacklist.  There is a lawsuit pending to try to change this, and also legislation. 

● The Indiana Capital Chronicle tells us the litany of pathetic excuses offered up by the head of Indiana’s family police agency for the 30% increase in the number of children torn from their families in 2024 compared to the previous year. The story also includes NCCPR’s perspective. 

● NCCPR joined with two outstanding advocates from Maine to discuss that state’s system in a presentation to the 2025 Kempe Center International Conference. Here’s the text of two of the presentations. 

●You know your family policing agency is out of control when even a local CASA demands changes that would put more emphasis on reunification. KWTV reports that’s what happened at a hearing in Oklahoma. 

● From NCCPR’s commentary in the Rhode Island Current: 

If the fact that Rhode Island’s child welfare system wastes lives isn’t enough to prompt real change, consider the staggering waste of money. New data show Rhode Island spending on child welfare is proportionately the highest rate in the nation — well over triple the national average. 

The amount is equal to $11,244 for every impoverished child in the state. Rhode Island’s children would be far better off if the state could simply give every impoverished family $11,244 per child.

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

● Honolulu Civil Beat reports on a Hawaii Supreme Court decision that will force the state family police agency to release records in a horrific case in which a foster child was allegedly, in effect, adopted-to-death.  But what is most interesting is the incredible lengths the agency went to in an effort to conceal those records: 

DHS explained that since the girl had not been officially declared dead, her case was not subject to disclosure under the federal law. 

After a judge declared her dead, DHS said it still wouldn’t release the information because the judge had not specified that she died of abuse. 

● From KFOR-TV, Oklahoma City: 

A metro father is suing after his one-year-old was kidnapped by a former Oklahoma Human Services worker. 

Earlier this year, Xander Faison was a DHS hotline worker and used fake papers to remove a child and take her to her own apartment.

“Child welfare” in North Carolina: Take away poor people’s children. Pay strangers $100,000 to raise them.

Anybody out there know any Hollywood agents? ‘Cause I have a great idea for a film script: 

Scene 1: 

Two couples are sitting around a battered table in a broken-down trailer in, let’s say, North Carolina. They’re despairing over how to fix up their homes and put food on the table for their children.  Then one of the fathers spots an ad: 

“Will you look at this?” he says. “There’s a place that pays couples $100,000 to raise kids!”  

“Yeah, right,” says the other father. 

“No, look!  It’s $100,000 a year, plus fringe benefits, and they let you live in a really nice house, rent-free!” 

“No way! No one’s going to pay us $100,000 to raise our kids.” 

“No, no. Not our kids – it has to be someone else’s kids, who’ve been taken by CPS – you know, like when they can’t provide enough food, clothing or shelter, so CPS says it’s neglect.” 

And so is born a plan: The couples sign up and get the training to join this program. Then they convince the people running the program that, since they already know each other, they should be given adjoining homes.  Then they call CPS and turn each other in. Then they become “professional foster parents” for each other’s children! 

This idea catches on, more and more people sign up, and soon an entire small town is lifted out of poverty with six-figure incomes and free housing!  

The real-life version

I know what you’re thinking: No Hollywood producer will ever believe that there is a place that would  take away poor people’s children, often because of housing, and then pay two total strangers a combined total of up to $100,000 (plus free housing) to care for them.  

So just be ready to show them this exposé of just such a plan for children taken from their parents in North Carolina. It’s run by Crossnore Communities for Children with the enthusiastic support of the state family police agency. Did I say expose? My mistake. It’s 2,000 gushy, worshipful words in Business North Carolina about Crossnore, the program in question and the man behind it, CEO Brett Loftis. 

As is almost always the case, Loftis and those who work on the project, including the $100,000 foster parent couples, have the best of intentions.  As is also almost always the case, there is no reason to take any comfort from that. 

Loftis is running Bridging Families, in which couples are hired and trained to be “professional foster parents.” They do no other job and, in exchange, get up to $48,000 each plus a $3,000 signing bonus,* the fringe benefits and the rent-free accommodation. There's also "an insured agency vehicle for transporting the children, a budget for food, household supplies, and clothing for the children and an allotted stipend for family vacations."

Though the worshipful story in Business North Carolina portrays it as an amazing innovation, it sounds more like a group home with highly-paid “house parents.”  The program is paid for by a combination of federal Title IV-E and Medicaid funds, state funds, and private donations – North Carolina philanthropies seem to love it. 

So to review: 

● In North Carolina, the state Supreme Court has ruled that children can have their right to live with their parents taken from them forever for no other reason than a parent’s failure to help cover the cost of the children’s foster care. (They call it "child support," but when you take someone’s child and make the parents pay money to get the child back, the proper term for the payment is “ransom.”)  Some of that ransom might even wind up contributing to that $100,000 the professional foster parents are getting. 

● In North Carolina, one-third of the children placed in foster care are taken for reasons related to housing – that’s double the number taken because of physical and sexual abuse combined. So there may be roughly a one-in-three chance that a child living with strangers who are paid a combined $100,000 a year and are living rent-free was taken because her or his own parents couldn’t afford the rent on a decent place to live. 

The family police agency loves it 

Does any of this bother the family police agency in North Carolina? Not a bit. On the contrary, Lisa Cauley, division director of the North Carolina Department of Social Services, which oversees (badly) more than 100 county family police agencies (like the ones responsible for this case, and this one and this one), is thrilled with the program. The reasons why are unintentionally revealing. 

From the story: 

Bridging Families “allows us to keep siblings together, especially larger groups … Volunteer parents seldom accept more than two children at a time, and usually accept just one. The best option is to place (kids) together. They’ve lost their home, their parents. They don’t need to lose (siblings), too. And then the children get to visit with their parents, and the parents learn skills through demonstrated change. The professional aspect means there’s a consistency to it as well, which is rare in this world.” 

Parents in Bridging Families also come with no desire to adopt the children for whom they care. That’s a contrast to many volunteer foster parents who view the program as a test run for adoption. That can create problems when a court orders the children to be reunified with their birth parents. 

What Cauley really is saying amounts to: Here in North Carolina, we have a whole lot of selfish foster parents who view the system as the ultimate middle-class entitlement: Step right up and take a poor person’s child for their very own! They’ll undermine anything that would help lead to reunification, including regular visits! (And the term "volunteer" is inaccurate. Even regular everyday foster parents in North Carolina get at least $702 per month per child, tax-free.)

Cauley seems to be saying that rather than get rid of these selfish foster parents, and rely only on the many good foster parents who are in it for the right reasons, we’ll let the selfish ones keep on undermining families, and defying federal law, which requires “reasonable efforts” to reunite families. But we’ll find some foster parents we can persuade to not behave this way by giving them a six-figure income, fringe benefits and free rent. 

(By the way, when great foster parents really do fight to reunite families in North Carolina - without being paid $100,000 -- the system sometimes fights them every step of the way - as in this case).

What is striking here is that Cauley is admitting something damning about a practice known as “concurrent planning” – which encourages this sort of rotten behavior by telling agencies, and foster parents, to plan for reunification and adoption simultaneously. 

For decades, critics have been saying that concurrent planning has a built-in conflict-of-interest. That conflict may help explain the steady decline in the rates at which families are reunified. Cauley’s tolerance of this behavior may help explain why North Carolina has the second-worst rate of reunification in the country. 

That brings us to another claim made in the story about Bridging Families: The story says they have an 80% reunification rate vs. 40% for the state as a whole. (The figure the state gives the federal government is even worse - 29% in 2024.) 

For starters, that may not be accurate. Crossnore repeatedly tries to sell us on the idea that the best way to help birth parents is to pay a couple of strangers $100,000 to raise their children. But Crossnore itself doesn't actually say 80% of the children in its program are reunified. Rather, Crossnore claims that 82% of children "have been discharged to permanece with parents, relatives or pre-adoptive foster families." [Emphasis added.] Both the article and Crossnore itself compare the combined total for all these categories to the state total for reunification alone. And a case Crossnore itself chooses to highlight on its website ends with adoption, not reunification.

In any event, it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. The statewide figure includes children in group homes and institutions, those least likely to be reunified.  We also don’t know how the families in the Bridging Families program are chosen - except that Crossnore gets to choose who to accept and who to reject.  

Crossnore says: "The parents are highly motivated to progress through their court-appointed reunification plan and desire to partner with the Bridging Families team to accomplish that." A detailed addendum to the form agencies must fill out to request any Crossnore service uses the degrading, demeaning term "bio mother" and "bio father" to describe the birth parents.

But most important, if, in fact, the reunification rate for conventional foster care is lower, well, what do you expect when you tolerate foster parents who undermine reunification at every turn? 

The usual excuse about siblings 

And finally, there’s that claim about siblings: Cauley claims they just can’t find enough strangers to take in sibling groups – unless couples are paid $100,000, plus free housing, plus fringe benefits. If the claim about siblings sounds familiar, it’s because that is at the top of the excuse list for everyone defending institutionalizing children as well. 

But a key reason North Carolina has trouble placing siblings together is that North Carolina, far more than most states, hates the one group most likely to take in sibling groups: extended families providing kinship foster care. North Carolina uses kinship foster care at a rate nearly 20% below the national average. 

Ah, but I forgot that intangible benefit, you know, how, as Cauley puts it: 

“The parents learn skills through demonstrated change.” 

As one well-intentioned “professional foster parent” explained: 

“Mom is watching how we do things, picking up cues on that. We’re giving advice and we are really just involved with the whole family. 

Because you know what those people are like, right? They can’t possibly know how to be parents unless their saviors model it for them – notwithstanding the wealth of studies, like this one, indicating that families caught up in the family policing system do better with less “modeling” and more money. 

What else might all that money buy? 

What could $150,000 a year buy in North Carolina? 

50% child care subsidies for 28 families. 

50% rent subsidies for 16 families. 

1 pair of “professional foster parents.”

 Now let’s do a little “modeling” of our own and consider how else the money might be spent. 

First let’s add up the money: There’s $100,000 in salary plus fringe benefits, which typically equal 30% of salary, so that would be another $30,000.  Average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in North Carolina is $1,551 per month; the average monthly mortgage payment is $2,125. So we’ll be conservative and say that the free housing adds another $20,000 or so – making the total roughly $150,000 per year to subsidize this one foster home (not including training, administrative costs, etc.). 

What else might that buy? 

●As just noted, the average rent is $1,551 per month.  So $150,000 would buy 50% rent subsidies for an entire year for 16 families. 

● The average cost of childcare in North Carolina is roughly $892 per month per child.  So $150,000 would buy a year’s worth of vouchers covering half the cost of child care for 28 families. 

Now, consider that Crossnore’s CEO wants to set up 100 of these so-called Bridge Family homes. 

So imagine what would happen if, instead, that money were used to prevent poverty from being confused with neglect for anywhere from 1,600 to 2,800 North Carolina families every year. 

Now that would be a real Hollywood ending.

*-Yes, that's a mere $99,000; but Crossnore says "The recommended salary for each Bridge Parent is between $45,000 and $50,000 per year, plus benefits."

NCCPR at the Kempe Center conference: Child welfare in Maine: A case study in reform, regression and renewal

Today, two outstanding advocates from Maine, foster and adoptive parent Mary Callahan and family defense attorney Julian Richter of Family Advocacy of Maine, joined me to give a presentation with the above title at the Kempe Center International Virtual Conference: A Call to Action to Change Child Welfare. Here is the text of Ms. Callahan's presentation and mine.

Presentation of Richard Wexler, part one

             I first became the full-time executive director of NCCPR in 1999, and one of the first states that caught my attention was Maine.  At the time, Maine was tearing apart families at one of the highest rates in the nation. That was made even worse by a deeply ingrained bias against extended families. At a time when no one was doing enough to use kinship foster care, Maine was doing nothing. The state family police agency, a more accurate term than child welfare agency, was proud of it. And while Maine underused the least harmful form of foster care, kinship foster care, it overused the worst, group homes and institutions. 

            But something else made Maine stand out: The sheer meanness of the agency under the leadership of its then-Commissioner, Kevin Concannon. For what was then the Maine Department of Human Services, winning wasn’t enough – they had to grind you into the dirt. 

            That’s what happened in the first Maine case that got my attention. A Maine clinic’s treatment for a little girl with cystic fibrosis wasn’t working, so her mother and grandmother wanted no more than to get a second opinion – from Boston Children’s Hospital. The Maine clinic retaliated by calling DHS, insisting all the problems were the mother’s fault.  DHS took the case all the way to termination of parental rights – and even before that, as the child lay all alone in a hospital bed, they denied that child the chance to be comforted by her mother and grandmother. They were denied even the right to visit. 

            But because this family had dared to go public, TPR was not enough. The agency – which, as they always do, says they can’t comment on anything because of confidentiality – asked a local newspaper to print the entire termination decision, and they agreed.  The family didn’t even get a warning. They just woke up one morning and saw it all taking up a full page of the Kennebec Journal. 

            That was after Concannon already had gotten the judge’s permission to speak out about this case, and news accounts had told his side and reported the decision. 

            But in some ways, Concannon’s efforts to justify himself backfired. The decision was a psychobabble-drenched mess so bad that the Maine Supreme Court almost overturned it.  They didn’t – but a 4-3 decision in a Maine termination case is almost revolutionary.  And it left a little doubt in the minds of some Maine journalists – which made them more willing to listen when another tragedy rocked the state at about the same time. 

            On January 31, 2001, a five-year-old girl named Logan Marr died, killed by her foster mother, a former caseworker for Maine DHS.

 In this case, too, Maine DHS added an extra measure of mean. Concannon would not even tell Logan Marr’s mother he was sorry for what happened to her little girl – until after she went public with his refusal (at which point he wrote a very nice letter).  

At first, the response to this tragedy was what it usually is when a child dies in foster care: a focus on caseworker visits, background checks and licensing standards. But whether a system will reform in the wake of a foster-care tragedy depends on whether journalists get beyond that and move on to the real problems. In Maine, that meant confronting the culture of child removal embedded in DHS. 

NCCPR began raising these larger questions. Within weeks of Logan’s death, we were in  Maine to meet with journalists and issue a report on the system - and the state’s newspapers began pursuing these questions, in part, I believe, because of what they’d seen in that earlier case. 

Story after story, editorial after editorial, zeroed in on the high numbers of children trapped in foster care. Two legislative committees held hearings, and NCCPR’s testimony received prominent coverage.  

An independent office of child welfare ombudsman was created. That would later become a huge obstacle. But initially, unlike most such offices, which often do more harm than good, this one took seriously the mandate to look at errors in all directions. 

At about the same time, two other things happened. 

First, producers working for the PBS series Frontline contacted NCCPR.  They said they were interested in doing a documentary about child welfare and were looking for ideas.  “You can always go to Florida,” I said, “something’s always happening there. But if you want to look at something that’s not on anyone’s radar, take a look at the case of Logan Marr in Maine.”  I mentioned that, among other things, there was video of Logan complaining about being abused in her foster home, just weeks before she died.  

We provided extensive briefing material to the Frontline producers, and we were in touch several times over the following year and a half.  The result was the documentary The Taking of Logan Marr, which I urge everyone to see. 

But something much more important happened as well. I met one fed-up foster parent – Mary Callahan.  And now, you’re going to meet her, too.

Presentation of Mary Callahan

I was a single mother of two teenagers when I started taking in foster kids. My parents had eight kids of their own and always had foster kids in the house, so it was a natural thing for me. I also followed their lead when it came to the hard, fast rule: I don't deal with birth family. 

Over a ten-year period, I had ten kids who stayed for a significant length of time, the youngest being nine years old. 

When I got my first placement, a 12-year-old named April,  I believed what I was told about her parents. They sounded pretty bad. It took me a long time to realize much of what I was told was grossly exaggerated, an anonymous tip or a bold-faced lie. But I recognized immediately that she was abused in foster care. She came to me malnourished and reading four years below grade level. The foster mother before me, who had her for six years, said to me right in front of her: "She's a whore, just like her mother." 

And that wasn't her worst foster home. She was molested in the first one by a 14-year-old boy. 

When I finally saw the whole picture, that the abuse in her birth family was like a 1 on a 1 to 10 scale, and the abuse once in the system was more like an 8 or a 9, I started going to people in power to show them how she had fallen through the cracks, and somehow we had to make it right. 

I was threatened by the head of the private foster care agency and dismissed by the head of the Health and Human Services committee.  He said, tellingly: "There is nothing new here. I've got 100 stories just like it." I was also warned that if DHS found out what I was doing, they'd file an abuse complaint against me on the drive home. 

I decided to keep my mouth shut. But I started to question everything I was told about my other foster kids’ families.  April was not the only one who had fallen through the cracks. Maybe it wasn't really a crack.  Maybe it was just the system. I started writing each of their stories just to get it all off my chest. 

Then Logan Marr died at the hands of her foster mother. As the details came out in the news, it was shocking how similar her story was to April's. The public was outraged, and there were a lot of people demanding answers, so the HHS committee held a public hearing.  

That was the day everything changed for me. The place was overflowing.  The stories each person got to tell in their three minutes were heartbreaking.  So heartbreaking they almost seemed unbelievable.  Like no one could be that cruel, right?  When it was my turn, I addressed that. I said, "If you're thinking these stories you've heard before me are exaggerations, they are not. I'm a foster parent and I can tell you that's how the system works." I got a standing ovation from the birth families. 

Obviously, I had decided to come out of hiding. But I also decided I would be so public that any retaliation would be public too. So I talked to reporters. I met Richard Wexler, by phone I believe, and let everyone use my name and the fact that I had been warned there would be retaliation. DHS started telling people I was crazy, but that made them look bad, as I was still fostering kids. 

I also met so many people that day who felt the same way I did, and they weren't just birth families. There were psychologists and lawyers and other foster parents. There was a local TV reporter.  A state representative named Eddie Dugay was already planning a march across the state that would end with a presentation to the Governor.  

With that as our starting point, we formed a group we called Maine Alliance for DHS Accountability and Reform or MADAR. 

Somewhere around one hundred of us made the trek from Ellsworth to Augusta over a four day period in a snowstorm. That got us on the news every night. The speech to the Governor was carried in the Lewiston Sun Journal.  

We started meeting once a month at the Statehouse, thanks to Representative Dugay, and planning more events. The goal was just to be very, very noisy and keep the subject being talked about.  

We picketed DHS. We held an event called the Unfair Fair. Example: We had a display of a foster home full of pets (mine) and a grandmother trying to get her grandkids out of the system and placed with her, being told she couldn't because her pets were a health hazard. A nightmare and a health hazard, to be precise, and I had more pets than she did. How fair is that? 

We showed the film The Taking of Logan Marr, a brilliant documentary that was shown on PBS, in a church in Portland.  

We made sure we got news coverage. We wrote Op Eds and letters to the editor responding to any news item on our issue. Reporters started calling us for a response from MADAR when something came up. 

I  quickly turned my notes on my kids into a book and self-published it. That led me to give library talks and to do book signings. The head of DHS sent an email to their staff to attend my talks and "set me straight." It backfired when DHS workers at my talks started to cry and talk about families they had split up that now they regretted. One said she quit after her supervisor made her take a new baby when the family issue was a teenager out of control, and the mother had been the one to call for help. 

Something else changed during this time. Maine got a new Governor, John Baldacci, who named a new commissioner of DHS, Jack Nicholas. Nicholas brought in a new head of the division of DHS in charge of child welfare, Jim Beougher.

After one of our events, the nightly news said I had a meeting the next day with Nicholas. They even said what time it was, so I hustled up to Augusta even though it was news to me. The first thing he said to me was: "I didn't know we had a meeting until I saw it on the news last night." I still wonder who orchestrated that. But we had a good talk. He said we were on the same side, even if it didn't look that way from the outside.  

As I was leaving, I literally bumped into Governor John Baldacci in the hall. He said, "Keep doing what you're doing. DHS is like a steamship at sea. You have to push and push and push to turn it around, and if you let up for a minute it will drift back." 

Soon after, he announced the formation of a committee to reform the Child Protection System.   

That's when we entered a new phase in our mission. I thought this was where the real work began. But I eventually learned the real work was what led up to the formation of this committee. The committee was where I learned how government works behind the scenes and the games people play for their own personal gain. 

There were actually several branches of the committee, and each one had someone on it from MADAR. I was on one and, sadly, the only one to last to the end. The others were members of birth families in our group, and they were made to feel very unimportant and small in their meetings. They refused to go back after a few sessions.  

It was an eye-opener for me, too. First of all, it went on for years! We met weekly, and the meetings were hours long. We would beat a subject to death, and then someone would say, "You know who should have been here? So and So. We should invite her to the next meeting." And we would cover the exact same ground in the next meeting with the new person.  

We wasted so much time. I overheard a conversation at the coffee pot during one of our breaks and realized it was all very planned and calculated. Everyone else on these committees was either from a foster care agency or from DHS, and saw no need for change so their goal was to stop it.  

One member was the head of the foster care agency I worked for, and I heard him talk out of both sides of his mouth. At the reform  meetings, he talked about the need to support birth families, and at the foster parent meetings, he promised to "get our placements back up." He said this reform stuff would pass, and we could all get back to business. And it was a business.  

Bad news for him and others on the committee: I kept writing Op Eds for the paper about how things were going on the committee. Looking back on it, I was brutal. 

After taking over as chairperson for our branch, which I did by raising my hand very fast and not giving anyone else the chance, I asked to go around the room and have everyone say why they were on the committee and whether they had a financial stake in the outcome. Most people refused to answer the second half of the question. I wrote in the paper that "I'm passionate about children" is code for "I could lose money in this deal." 

When it was finally coming to an end, we were to write up our proposals for change to present to Governor Baldacci and Commissioner Nicholas. It turned out not a single one of the ideas we researched and discussed at such great length was voted in. They were all voted down for reasons like "It needs more study." We had absolutely nothing to show for our time. Except the rest of the committee had forgotten one thing. 

When we were given our instructions at the beginning of the process, we were told we could write up a proposal even if it was voted down, as long as it said on the top of the proposal what the vote was. So I typed up a half a dozen papers, and each one had on the top of it: Voted down 29 to 1.

When these were presented at a lunch meeting to the Governor and the Commissioner, the others on the committee were surprised and furious. One stood up and wagged her finger at me, saying I had ruined the whole process and wasted all of their time. I knew it was coming so it didn't bother me. 

But they were right about the wasted time. Because while we were meeting and meeting and meeting, a new director of the Child Protection arm of DHS was hired and his mission was the same as mine. Jim Bouegher was already putting in place much of what was in the proposals that were voted down.  

In retrospect, the important things we did took place before the interminable committees. It was changing public opinion that allowed for the huge improvements made. I noticed the change in the checkout line at the grocery store.  

When Logan Marr's death was front-page news, everyone was blaming her mother. Just like I used to think all birth parents were awful people who didn't deserve sympathy, let alone their kids, everyone in the grocery store line said Logan wouldn't have been in foster care if it wasn't for her awful mother. 

But that slowly changed. Facts came out that shocked everyone. One of our members produced a newspaper with the true facts about Logan's removal, and we brought stacks of it to convenience stores around the state. Logan, like April and Michael and Jennifer and so many of my kids, was removed for very trivial reasons. 

Logan's mother was a loving mother. April's parents were good people, but imperfect. Michael's mother was young and called DHS for help. As these stories got out there and talked about in grocery store lines, the public got ready for change. Even clamored for it.  

And change happened.

Presentation of Richard Wexler, part two 

So, what kind of change happened? 

First, Kevin Concannon began feeling the heat.  Once NCCPR and local advocates “kicked down the door,” he had to let other reformers walk through.  So, having once scorned the success of states that took away fewer children because they were “southern states.” (Of course, if you’re in Maine, pretty much every place else is a southern state.) Concannon turned for help to the Child Welfare Policy and Practice Group, an organization founded by Paul Vincent, who, sadly, died earlier this year. He is the reformer who did so much to transform child welfare in Alabama.  

DHS also brought in the Annie E. Casey Foundation.  But, as Mary made clear and a Casey publication about the Maine reforms makes clear, albeit in a genteel sort of way, things didn’t really start to change until Concannon and his old guard were out of the way. 

As Casey put it: 

Without the right players in the right places at the right time, large scale change in any organization is often doomed. By 2004, a new group of leaders moved into key positions in Maine, people who would be absolutely essential to putting the state on an entirely new child welfare path.

 All that committee work Mary mentioned, and much frustration, followed. But the change was remarkable and, by child welfare standards, remarkably swift. 

By 2005, four years after Logan died: 

● The number of children taken from their homes had dropped by 30 percent, and the number of children in foster care on any given day had been cut in half. 

● Maine nearly tripled the proportion of children placed with relatives; by 2011, Maine exceeded the national average – and that is still true. 

● Most remarkable: The proportion of Maine foster children who were institutionalized was cut by at least 73 percent. 

That first independent child welfare ombudsman found that the reduction in substitute care came with no compromise of safety. He strongly supported the reforms. 

It all prompted Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government to make the transformation of child welfare in Maine a finalist for its prestigious Innovations in American Government awards. 

But much of that is gone now.

Not everything. As I said, Maine still uses kinship foster care at a rate above the national average, and uses group homes and institutions at a rate below the national average –

But if you were to plot a line graph using entry into care data from Maine since 1999, it would look, perversely, like an ugly, crooked smile.  By 2018, Maine was taking away even more children than before Logan Marr died – and the number stayed at that level for every year since, through 2023, except 2021 – and that may have been because of COVID. 

Just-released data for 2024 show some improvement – but Maine still took away children at the 12th highest rate in America – more than double the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in. 

How was so much lost? 

With hindsight, one crucial failing set the stage for the retreat from reform that would follow: Maine’s good leaders didn’t plan for the prospect of bad leaders in the future. They didn’t build an infrastructure of due process for families, so families could have a fighting chance. Instead, everything rose and fell based on the policy choices of political leaders and their appointees. 

So what might one expect to happen when Maine elected Paul LePage, a governor who would often be described as Trump-before-Trump because of a penchant for lying, racism, vulgarity and miscellaneous cruelty? Someone who would seek to roll back reform at every opportunity, of course. It started almost as soon as he took office. Then he had the chance to kick into high gear after the deaths of two children in rapid succession in 2018. 

Bad as it is when that kind of behavior comes from Trump-before-Trump, I would argue the moral failing may be even greater when it comes from people who know better or should know better. 

And that’s what we have now. 

The current governor, Janet Mills, has been justly praised for standing up to Trump. The first person she named to run what is now the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, and who was there until last year, Jeanne Lambrew, had a great reputation when she was in the Obama Administration. 

But, it seems, she knew nothing about child welfare.  How else to explain her choice to run the child welfare division. Todd Landry came from Nebraska, one of the few states even more fanatical about child removal than Maine - and worst in the entire nation when Landry was in charge. Like Concannon, Landry has a mean streak. While in Nebraska, he made a sick joke at the expense of desperate parents surrendering their children because it was the only way they could get those children help. 

Fortunately, he’s gone. There is nothing mean about his replacement, an agency veteran, Bobbi Johnson. I think she knows what should be done. But she has yet to show the courage necessary to push back against those fanatically pushing to maintain or even expand Maine’s current take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare. 

Before I get to who those people are, let me address two other factors that made it easy to tear down reforms that were so hard to build up.  Both involve the loss of institutional memory. 

● The Maine Legislature has term limits. The lawmakers who heard Mary Callahan and all those others testify, the lawmakers who watched The Taking of Logan Marr when it first aired on PBS, are long gone.  

● Similarly, as everywhere else, Maine media have consolidated. The reporters who became a little skeptical after that first case I cited, and a lot more skeptical after Logan Marr died, also are long gone.

That made it easy for Maine to revert to what should be called a pre-Logan Marr mentality.

 There is a silver lining there: Out of the rubble of Maine media consolidation arose an excellent online news site, the Maine Monitor. Their reporter on these issues has shown the same willingness to dig and the same willingness to question conventional wisdom as some of his counterparts did nearly a quarter century ago. A second online news organization, the Maine Morning Star, is smaller but also open to all perspectives. 

But will that be enough to push back against two powerful players devoted to the take-the-child-and-run approach? 

I mentioned that when Maine first created an office of child welfare ombudsman, it worked well. The first ombudsman saw that the reforms were making lives better for hundreds, perhaps thousands of children, with no compromise of safety. He knew that the errors go in all directions. 

But his successor, Christine Alberi, has been more typical of the people who generally land these jobs.  She has explicitly said that in her entire 12 years as ombudsman, she has never – never – seen a single case of wrongful removal of a child. 

            But then, she’s never looked. Her office responds only to complaints, and even then, she picks and chooses which complaints. She has explicitly rejected the idea of supplementing this by getting a team of objective reviewers to examine a random sample of cases in order to judge overall system performance. 

            And here’s the problem with all child welfare ombudsman offices: In systems more secret than the CIA, these offices have a near monopoly on information – giving them enormous power to spin the story of child welfare as they choose. And, because they have this near monopoly, making them great sources, reporters don’t want to get on their bad side. 

            So over and over, legislators have jerked their knees and given the current ombudsman ever more power. Another such bill is pending. We have proposed better alternatives. 

             The backstory for the second person pushing the take-the-child-and-run narrative is odder – and his media appeal inexplicable to me. Bill Diamond used to be Maine’s Secretary of State and he used to be a State Senator. Nothing unusual there; many states have a “Senator Soundbite” who rushes to get attention by demanding the destruction of more families in the wake of high-profile tragedies. (If anyone here is from Oregon or Washington State, you know the type.) 

            But Bill Diamond became a godsource for Maine media in spite of another couple of jobs he held: Director of Government Relations and Superintendent of Schools for the now shut – thank God – Elan School.  

            What was the Elan School? Modeled on Synanon, it was possibly the most notorious troubled teen industry institution in America. There is a survivors group.  There is a book about it. 

And there is a two-hour documentary that is very, very difficult to watch.  If I had time, I’d have shown the trailer during the Kempe Conference presentation.  I had to settle for this screenshot. But you can see it here:  

            Diamond – the superintendent of schools – said he never so much as set foot in the place, and thought all the problems ended before he ever got there. Some of the survivors disagree. 

            In the short time since I originally wrote those last few paragraphs, Bill Diamond died, of cancer, at the age of 81. Diamond’s obituary mentions that he died “with his family by his side.” That family has my sincere sympathy. 

Some would argue that I should have softened what I wrote about Diamond or deleted it. But  when I read that line in the obituary, I was struck by something: 

All over Maine, there are people who will never have the comfort of having family by their side in their final hours. They won’t have family around the tree with them at Christmas, or at the table with them at Thanksgiving. 

            They won’t have that comfort because the state of Maine tore them apart, often needlessly. And while I’m sure that was never his intent, Bill Diamond’s work, and the failure of Maine media to scrutinize his work, contributed to that tragedy. 

            So that’s what Maine’s most vulnerable children and families are up against.

In his presentation, Julian Richter explained how some of their advocates are fighting back.