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.