Missouri’s shame: Rampant confusion of poverty with neglect, and skyrocketing numbers of children torn from their homes, is exposed to the nation by The Nation

For want of an air conditioner, a family was lost.

A foster-care panic, set off by the head of the state family police agency, is making everything worse. Her predecessor laments: “Missouri’s leadership is not interested in preventing children from coming into foster care.” 

Second of two parts (Read Part One here) 

Last week, Hearst Connecticut Media exposed the extent to which children are barred from living with the families they love, and sometimes are taken forever, because the families lack adequate housing. We discussed that story in yesterday’s post to this blog. 

At about the same time as the Hearst story was published, The Nation exposed the same problem, on an even larger, even more appalling scale, in Missouri. 

The Nation tells the story of one child denied any contact with his mother for months after being taken because the mother’s rental apartment didn’t have an air conditioner. The mother explained that “To get her son back, a judge told her, she had to have decent housing, a job, and $3,000 in a bank account.” 

In another case, a nine-year-old boy was taken because the family was living in an extended stay hotel.  Excellent local reporting from the Missouri Independent has uncovered similar cases. 

The Nation adds more context, including some stunning comments from the former head of the agency that is taking all these children. 

For decades, Missouri has torn apart families at a rate well above the national average.  That improved a little under former Children’s Division Director Darrell Missey. But as of 2024, Missouri still was taking away children at a rate more than 45% above the national average, even when rates of family poverty are factored in.  And that doesn’t include what appears to be a large number of hidden foster care placements.  But already, there are signs that Missey’s successor, Sara Smith is making things exponentially worse. From the story: 

In Missouri, a substandard apartment is reason enough for judges to agree to removals, said Kathleen Dubois, a retired family court attorney in St. Louis. “Nobody blames the landlord,” she told me. “They just take away the kids.” Kathy Connors, the executive director of the St. Louis homeless shelter Gateway180, sees the same thing: There are an “awful lot” of instances in which mothers living in her shelter have their children taken away if they can’t find permanent housing fast enough. … She has seen many families who come to the shelter working to reunify with their children. But since she began working there in 2016, she has seen only four successful reunifications. “It does seem like it’s a situation where the goalpost keeps getting moved further and further,” she said. 

And what does Smith have to say about this? 

Sara Smith

“In and of itself, we wouldn’t take homelessness as a report,” Smith asserted. “We would be looking at if the child’s basic needs are met, if the family does have some kind of housing.”

But, uh, isn’t shelter a “basic need”? So yeah, they’ll take away children because they’re homeless, or even for lack of an air conditioner. Just look at the agency’s own “risk assessment” form – as The Nation did:

A point gets added to a family’s risk score if “current housing is physically unsafe,” while homelessness adds two points.

Note to journalists: Odds are there’s a similar risk assessment form in your state. 

And here’s where differences in agency culture from state to state show up. As is made clear in Prof. Kelley Fong’s brilliant book, Investigating Families, caseworkers in Connecticut are overloaded, but most of them probably would try to find a family an air conditioner. Even in Missouri, you can sometimes find compassion for families and an understanding of the harm separation does to children – from the Kansas City police. 

But not in Sara Smith’s Children’s Division.  Again from the story in The Nation: 

Even if all a family needs, as in Ortega’s case, is an air conditioner, caseworkers may not have the funds—and might resist calling around to find an organization that does. 

Caseworkers may also feel that this kind of work isn’t in their job description. … Dubois, the retired family court attorney, said that many caseworkers feel they shouldn’t “enable people” by helping them: “‘If [clients] are unable to handle things, we’re not going to do it for them.’” 

Oh, it’s not that the Children’s Division won’t spend money on concrete needs; it just depends on whose needs: 

Sometimes all that families need to remain stably housed and prevent a child’s removal is some extra money. But while the Children’s Division doesn’t use its funds to help these families with housing, the agency does directly fund the housing needs of foster families, as federal law requires. In Missouri, licensed foster-care families receive between $509 and $712 a month for a child, depending on the child’s age, to cover housing and other basic needs, plus an additional $91 a month for children 3 years and younger to cover things like formula and diapers. They receive between $320 and $700 a year for clothing, as well as monthly payments of as much as $2,034 for children with “elevated needs.” 

(Still, they can’t top North Carolina, which is paying some so-called “professional foster parents” $100,000 per couple per year, plus fringe benefits and -  free housing!) 

Paradoxically, it’s better if families don’t have to turn to a family police agency for concrete help; there should be alternative sources. But in Missouri there are no alternative sources anywhere near able to meet the need. The Children’s Division not only isn’t helping, it’s even undermining such efforts. 

This is the culture Darrell Missey, a former judge, was up against when he tried to reduce needless foster care in Missouri. (I was too hard on him at the time for the way he was going about it. For that, Judge Missey, I apologize.) 

Missey is remarkably candid about how much worse things are getting now: 

“I was trying to get people to give folks the opportunity to come up with answers besides separating the family,” Missey said. Still, he often felt forced to remove children because he didn’t have any housing to offer their families. Missey left the position in late 2024. Smith, his replacement, reassigned the person Missey had hired to work on removal prevention to a different role and fired his deputy director, he said. There is a “mentality” that “pervades the state” of removing a child instead of finding a way to fix or find housing, he added: “Missouri’s leadership is not interested in preventing children from coming into foster care.” [Emphasis added.] 

Sara Smith’s actions make that abundantly clear. And the numbers show she is succeeding. The Nation story documents a surge in court petitions after Smith issued a memo warning that, in some cases, even Missouri’s hidden foster care system, which is a problem in itself, wasn’t severe enough. 

And when we compared entries into care for August 2025, the most recent month for which data are available, to August 2024, when Missey still was in charge, we found they’d skyrocketed by nearly 50 percent. From 325 in August 2024, to 462 in August 2025. If that trend holds for an entire year, Missouri’s rate of child removal could approach triple the national average. 

The Nation story also highlights a unique problem in Missouri, the fact that there are two agencies that can tear apart families and keep them apart, and one of them is uniquely unaccountable: It’s the Juvenile Office, the bizarre, and probably unconstitutional fifth wheel in the Missouri system. I’ve written about it several times, but the Nation story highlights something I’ve overlooked. For technical reasons related to how federal funding works, the Juvenile Office doesn’t even have to pretend to follow federal law requiring states to make “reasonable efforts” to keep families together. (By the way, Sara Smith loves the Juvenile Office.) 

A lesson about laws 

The Nation story points out that 

About half of states exempt parents’ financial inability to provide things like shelter for their children from the definition of child maltreatment. At least three states have statutes saying homelessness does not constitute neglect. Missouri does not. While it has exceptions in its maltreatment statutes for corporal punishment and refusing medical care on religious grounds, it has none for poverty or homelessness. 

But back in Connecticut, the Hearst Connecticut Media story about very similar problems, discussed in the previous post to this Blog, notes that 

State law restricts the Department of Children and Families from determining that a child is neglected — and can then be removed from their family and put into foster care — because of poverty. 

But they’re doing it anyway, as they do in every state, whether it has such a law or not. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have such laws. Rather, it means the laws need to be tougher. They need to require states to show what they’ve done to, in the words of one activist group, “take our poverty, not our children,” and require courts to enforce it. 

An example is this good bill proposed in Maine. But it didn’t pass; instead they passed the vague, unenforceable type of law that many other states have. 

A tough law would be a good first step in Missouri – and it would have to apply explicitly to the Juvenile Office as well as the Children’s Division. At least that might curb the rate at which Sara Smith is sending the state careening full-speed backwards.