NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending October 14, 2025

This week’s round-up begins with exposés of foster care horrors from one end of the country to the other: 

● I have a blog post about lessons from a Honolulu Civil Beat series published two weeks ago on what was aptly called the “Lord of the Flies” foster home. At one point, when a caseworker in Hawaii was warned about problems in the home, she replied: “When you’re looking for a foster home for teenage boys, you take what you can get.” 

● Last week, the Boston Globe exposed the horrors of Massachusetts group homes. It described how hundreds of young people run from them, often because they think they’ll be safer in the streets. One runaway recalls being told by a caseworker: “We have nowhere else for you to go, Alexia. You have to go. Get in the car.” 

As long as Massachusetts tears apart families at a rate 44% above the national average, runaways are going to keep hearing that from caseworkers. 

● And in Colorado here’s a story from KCNC Denver about a “residential treatment center” where children are “desperate to escape.” The fact that Colorado officials, and some journalists, are in love with institutionalizing children doesn’t help. 

● While in Baltimore, a family was desperate to get help for their teenager’s mental health problems. Instead of providing Wraparound services to the teen could remain safely at home, the state threw her into foster care and wound up placing her in a hotel. WMAR-TV reports on what happened next.  As Prof. Shanta Trivedi of the University of Baltimore pointed out in this earlier WMAR story: 

… the money spent on hotel stays and one-on-one services, would be better spent helping to reunite family including providing wraparound services. 

“Most of the cases that we see are neglect, not abuse, and a lot of those cases are based on poverty,” she said. “We take their children and then pay foster parents to take care of the children when we could take that same money and pay the parents to help them find stable housing and reduce the trauma on everyone and not for nothing, reduce the burden on the court system, on all these attorneys and case workers that are part of the system” 

● There’s better news from Michigan, where the state’s Court of Appeals ruled that, no, you can’t tear children from their families forever just because a caseworker thinks the family’s housing is too small. (And yes, the Michigan family police agency really tries to do things like that.) 

● And back in Colorado, there’s also some better news. The Denver Post reports that, after the state got rid of some of its hypertechnical foster home licensing requirements, there’s been a significant increase in kinship foster care placements with relatives. 

● For The Imprint, Alexis Kramer writes about having to fight multiple stereotypes when she faces a family police agency: 

For me, being a Black autistic mother raising Black autistic children has created a unique set of challenges when dealing with CPS. Each identity carries stereotypes, and when those stereotypes combine, they often lead to increased surveillance, harsher judgments, and less support. This is the reality that many neurodivergent families of color live through, though it is rarely acknowledged.