NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending February 17, 2026

Before the look back, a brief look ahead: 

● There’s a big event on Feb. 26: Check out this webinar, sponsored by the National Association of Counsel for Children, on The Legacy of Control: The Racist Roots of the Family Policing System. 

And now the news: 

● Remember how horrified we were when we saw pictures of Liam, the five-year-old boy detained by ICE? In Psychology Today, psychiatrist Rupinder Legha wants us to remember something else: 

[F]amily separation is systemic and … its harm extends far beyond immigration enforcement. 

Child welfare, foster care, and juvenile justice follow the same logic—separating families in the name of safety. In practice, though, they often end up causing predictable harm through separation, surveillance, and displacement that land hardest on Black and Brown communities. There have been countless instances of Black, Latine, and Indigenous children being removed from their families under the guise of protection—when the real issue is poverty, not neglect.​ 

Dr. Legha urges the research and provider communities to change course: 

Research conducted in child welfare and juvenile detention tends to normalize family separation because it often develops and evaluates therapeutic interventions within the very institutions perpetuating toxic stress. One study found that Black parents receiving parent training while under child welfare surveillance were depressed. The authors suggested adding depression treatment—instead of recognizing the likely role that the surveillance itself was likely playing. 

This research is rooted in circular logic: The more detention harms children’s mental health, the more we study how to treat them there, when instead we ought to be questioning the harm of the system itself. …

Providers might believe they are helping people in need. But I believe that instead they're legitimizing the idea that healing is possible while detained, which contradicts what we know about trauma and safety. Such providers might, for example, prescribe sleep aids for insomnia caused by sleeping in an unfamiliar or unsafe facility and antidepressants for sadness rooted in separation from family. Medicalizing predictable responses to confinement makes it challenging for them to question the confinement itself.

● Consider, for example, the ongoing detention of another little boy, not by ICE but by the Oregon family police agency. And while, normally, one might at least be able to draw the distinction that the family police are well-motivated, in this case, that’s not so clear. 

Last year, Oregon lawmakers refused to pass a bill sought by the family police and the governor that would make it easier to exile kids to out-of-state institutions and harder to prevent abuse in group homes and institutions. It was one of the few times Oregon’s way-too-influential Senator Soundbite, who has done so much to make a bad system worse, actually did the right thing – she opposed the bill. This case, reported by Oregon Public Broadcasting, sounds like it may have been motivated by revenge, at a 9-year-old boy’s expense. 

● Last week’s round-up included a link to this stunning investigative report from The Marshall Project on how the family police harass new mothers who test positive for drug use – even when the test is wrong or the drug is medically prescribed. Well, some new mothers, that is. In a blog post, we compare what The Marshall Project found to what happens when the mothers are white and affluent. 

● New York’s greedy private foster care agencies are back seeking a bailout to pay their insurance premiums. The premiums are high because so many children have been abused on their watch. This blog post explains why, if the latest scheme becomes law, no matter how abominably agencies allow the children in their care to be treated, and how much that jacks up their insurance premiums, they need never change, secure in the knowledge that taxpayers will pick up the tab. 

● Georgia has a law that guarantees parents accused of abuse by a medical professional the right to a second opinion. But, of course, a doctor can’t provide a second opinion without the medical records. Families say some of the places that diagnosed alleged abuse are stonewalling when it comes to providing the medical records. So now, WXIA-TV reports, one lawmaker is introducing a bill to fine providers who fail to promptly provide those records. 

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

● From the Redding Record Searchlight 

A young woman who said she was sexually abused by two men for years while living in a Shasta County foster home has sued her former foster parents, as well as a second man who she said repeatedly raped her. … 

The victim's aunt and her psychotherapist made reports to county officials in 2014, the lawsuit naming the Sheriff's Office said. No action was taken to investigate their claims, the suit alleged. 

At one point, the teen tried to tell a Shasta County official making a routine visit to the foster home in 2008 about the ongoing sexual abuse, said the lawsuit naming [the county child welfare agency]. The unidentified official who came to the home called her "a liar," the lawsuit said, and told her if any abuse was happening, she had been "asking for it."

Child welfare in New York: Beware of a backdoor bailout for private foster care agencies

If the latest scheme becomes law, no matter how abominably agencies allow the children in their care to be treated, and how much that jacks up their insurance premiums, they need never change, secure in the knowledge that taxpayers will pick up the tab. 

When state legislators started easing statutes of limitations to allow child abuse survivors to sue, the lawmakers probably had in mind institutions like churches, the Boy Scouts, etc. But it should have come as no surprise that a great many lawsuits have targeted private foster care agencies, because so very many children were abused on their watch (in the name of “child protection,” “child safety,” and “erring on the side of the child,” of course). 

Particularly vulnerable: agencies running the worst form of “care” – group homes and institutions. As a result, their insurance premiums have skyrocketed. Some agencies even had to close. 

Here’s the most important thing to understand: Private agencies that run group homes and institutions having to shut down is not a crisis or a calamity. On the contrary, it’s great news! As I posted two years ago: 

The group homes and institutions are harmful even when they´re not rife with physical and sexual abuse.  The whole model is a proven failure, and there are far better alternatives.  But these giant, greedy, well-connected agencies are scarfing up all the money for such alternatives. (And when I say greedy: Have you seen Ron Richter´s salary for running one of them?) 

[Update: he’s left, but continues to ally with those wedded to a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare.] 

But the agencies are doing what they do best: predicting that horrible calamities will befall children unless they get some kind of bailout and/or near immunity from accountability to all those children horrifically abused on their watch. 

Two years ago, California agencies predicted foster children would suddenly be homeless if they had to close. I explain here why that is nonsense. Sice them, at least 19 California agencies reportedly have closed, and yet the counties that run child welfare in California apparently are coping just fine. It helps, of course, that California has been safely and steadily reducing the number of children torn from their families in the first place. 

Nevertheless, California fell for the fearmongering, at least in part. So far, New York has not. 

But according to Insurance Business, an insurance industry trade publication, those greedy agencies are trying again. This time, they’ve gotten at least two lawmakers to introduce a bill to provide a so-called $20-million “bridge fund.” Worse, the bill would require the state agency that sets rates for these places to make absolutely positively sure the rates are set so high they cover the entire cost of insurance. 

This is a backdoor bailout. Under this provision, no matter how abominably agencies allow the children in their care to be treated, and how much that jacks up their insurance premiums, they need never change, secure in the knowledge that taxpayers will pick up the tab. 

And if anyone needs another reminder of why that’s a bad idea, check out this lawsuit settlement in California – in a case where, one would have thought, the private agency would have been especially vigilant.

Image from Easy Peasy AI

Since the child welfare establishment keeps telling us there’s no racism in their field, there must be some other explanation for this:

 

This is what happens when Black mothers use marijuana gummies (From The Marshall Project):

 Ayanna Harris-Rashid was sitting up in bed, her newborn son latched to her breast, one hand scrolling on her phone, when the police called. She was wanted on a felony charge of child neglect. 

Harris-Rashid had just had her third child in March 2021. To ease pain and frequent nausea, she had used legal CBD gummies and a topical hemp-based ointment throughout her pregnancy. But at the hospital, she and the baby tested positive for marijuana, prompting providers to file a report with the South Carolina Department of Social Services, which forwarded the information to police, records show. Now an officer was demanding that Harris-Rashid turn herself in. 

Harris-Rashid said goodbye to her children and husband. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered to her newborn son. A friend drove her to the sheriff’s office, where she was handcuffed, strip-searched and placed for the night in a cold and crowded cell. By the time she left the jail the following morning, her milk supply had decreased and she found she could no longer breastfeed. The charge was eventually dropped. 

“They shook me bare. They made me feel very indecent and inhumane,” she said, adding, “This is a person, a woman, a mother, an actual individual. What justifies this?” 

This is what happens when white mothers use marijuana gummies (From Boston Magazine): 

Cannabis gummies have become as ubiquitous as Lululemon leggings and UppaBaby strollers, particularly among millennial mothers in their thirties and early forties. Moms are popping edibles as they’re folding laundry in the evening, before heading to back-to-school night, and during Friday-afternoon playdates. They’re setting up elaborate home bars decked out with cannabis-infused drinks and bowls of colorful gummies and hosting Cannabis & Crafts nights. … 

The first time [Kate] tried a gummy, “it was just wonderful,” she says. The self-dubbed “100 percent type A” mother found herself less wound-up and more relaxed with her two children. And she appreciates that she’s not drinking in front of her kids. At a Fourth of July gathering, Kate split a gummy with her close friend as the children ran around the yard. ... It’s been a good fix for me.”

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending February 10, 2026

● The Marshall Project has a stunning expose of the extent to which mothers are harassed at birth – and children torn away during the days they need their mothers most, their first, -- after what often are false positive drug tests or positive tests for substances that are no problem for white, middle-class mothers, such as marijuana gummies. It happens far more often that previously thought.  Some examples from the story: 

In Oklahoma, armed sheriff’s deputies took two children from their parents after the mother tested positive for meth, a false result triggered by an acid reflux medication the hospital had given her during labor, according to court records and her lawyer. In South Carolina, police interrogated a mother after she tested positive for the fentanyl from her epidural, as well as marijuana, according to police records. 

And after a Virginia couple insisted on having an attorney present for a child welfare interview, a police officer threatened them with arrest if they didn’t surrender their newborn. “When we step in, that’s when we start charging people,” the officer told the parents, according to an audio recording of the meeting. “You got about three seconds.” The mother had tested positive for methadone, the medication prescribed to treat her opioid addiction. The parents were forced to leave their newborn in the hospital and police escorted them out, records show.

● As you read this story from USA Today, about a grandmother’s heroic fight for her grandchildren, I hope you will take special note of the role of the so-called guardian ad litem – and what it says about allowing those supposedly looking out for a child’s “best interests” to inflict their own biases. 

●  Oklahoma Watch reports that Oklahoma is the latest state taking first steps toward boosting one of the most effective ways to keep children safe: providing high-quality family defense. Perhaps most notable is the vivid description of what “representation” is like where this program does not exist (and that’s what it’s like in most of the country). 

● The Imprint takes a close look at the decision by the federal Administration for Children and Families to allow the medication used for Medication-assisted treatment of substance use disorder to be funded under the Family First Act. The story also discusses the bias against this treatment among many in the family police community and the harm that’s done to children. But the story has a reminder: What the Trump Administration gives with one hand, it may take away with another. The primary source of federal reimbursement for these medications is Medicaid – and Trump’s budget is expected to cut millions off from Medicaid. 

● Here we go again: Still another study on the benefits of concrete help to families. This one, in JAMA Pediatrics, shows that the availability of universal pre-kindergarten significantly reduces the number of children forced to endure an investigation concerning alleged “neglect.” The results were particularly strong for nonwhite children. 

● In Utah, legislative auditors issued another one of those ScathingReports on a state family police agency. I have a column in the Utah News Dispatch about why this ScathingReport is different: It recognizes that the tragic errors go in all directions. Speaking of which … 

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

● From The Imprint

 A mother whose baby died in a Los Angeles County foster home has been awarded $9 million to settle a lawsuit against the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) and one of its social workers. 

According to court records, Erick Lee died in 2022 from severe dehydration in a foster parent’s home where two other children had previously died. Earlier that year, another foster child placed in the home passed away of unknown circumstances, but no autopsy took place. The foster parent’s biological son also died in 2018, as a result of untreated diabetes. 

● From the San Antonio Express News 

A New Braunfels woman was sentenced for 40 years in prison for keeping children in cages and denying them food to the point of malnutrition, Comal County officials say. 

Susan Rae Helton, 53, was convicted of four counts of injuring a child and causing serious bodily injury in an abuse case that involved two of her adopted children, according to the Comal County District Attorney’s Office. 

● And sometimes, as the Associated Press reports, the horror stories go in all directions for the same children: 

A Southern California county and a foster care agency have agreed to a $13.5 million settlement with six children who were placed in an abusive home after being rescued from squalid and abusive conditions in their parents’ home. 

Riverside County will pay $2.25 million to six of the Turpin children, most of whom are now adults, and ChildNet, a care agency, will pay $11.25 million, according to a copy of the settlement.

NCCPR in the Utah News Dispatch: Fixing DCFS requires understanding that the tragic errors go in all directions

By now, so many oversight agencies in so many states have issued reports about those states’ child welfare systems, and those reports so often are accurately described as “scathing,” that it may as well be one word. 

But the ScathingReport issued by the Utah Office of the Legislative Auditor General concerning the state Division of Child and Family Services includes a commendable difference: It recognizes that in “child welfare,” the terrible mistakes go in all directions. Understanding that is essential if DCFS is ever going to be fixed. ...

Read the full column in the Utah News Dispatch

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending February 3, 2026

● All over the country, new mothers are reported to the family police when a drug test allegedly reveals not drug abuse but medication-assisted treatment for drug abuse. In other words, they’re taking prescribed medications, such as buprenorphine, methadone, and naltrexone, that reduce the craving for opioids and symptoms of withdrawal. But censorious family police workers and judges (secure in the knowledge that no one will be barging into their homes to check their liquor cabinets or watching them smoke pot during their children’s playdates), investigate them, condemn them, and often tear their children from them. 

Now the federal government is putting its weight behind a change in course. Writing in The Imprint, the new head of the federal Administration for Children and Families, Alex Adams, announced that these medications are now approved for federal reimbursement under the Family First Act. 

Also in that commentary: an encouraging framing of his priorities: 

ACF is aligning its policies to increase the ratio of foster homes to foster children. This gives states two focuses: increasing the numerator of foster homes or, more importantly, safely reducing the denominator of children in the foster care system. 

● Fresh from giving a giant rate increase to a group home provider (and big campaign contributor) with a questionable track record, Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs is lavishing an even bigger pay raise on foster parents – and effectively making poor people pay for it. I have a blog post about it. 

● amNY and Courthouse News Service report on a decision by a federal appellate court that revives a lawsuit brought by New York foster youth. They were arbitrarily denied the right to live with their own extended families in kinship foster care. 

● The Seattle Times has a story about another approach to high-quality legal representation, helping families before problems reach the point where the family police intervene. 

We have updates on two cases in which states passed “reasonable childhood independence” laws, but caseworkers ignored those laws and traumatized families. 

● ABC News reports on a case in Georgia. 

● Reason has an update on a case in Utah. 

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

● When Honolulu Civil Beat was able to pry loose the records concerning a child who allegedly was, in effect, adopted to death, the records revealed the extent of the willful blindness of a family police agency desperate to get its adoption numbers up.

Arizona governor robs poor families to give middle-class foster parents a giant pay raise

 

It’s almost as if Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs stole a page from Donald Trump’s playbook. She’s moving to attract greedy potential foster parents to join the majority who are not in it for the money. And the way she is doing it is the equivalent of telling poor families: We’re going to build a wall between you and your children – and we’re going to make you pay for it! 

Fresh from giving a giant rate increase to a group home operator (and generous campaign donor) with a questionable record, Hobbs is lavishing an even bigger rate increase – 50% -- on state foster parents, who already do quite well. 

As of 2022, depending on a child’s age and needs, foster parents got anywhere from $637 to $1,465 per month. That’s per child, not per family. Hobbs says that, with the rate increase, foster parent reimbursement will average between $1,000 and $1,700 per month. 

All of that is tax-free. Foster children’s health insurance is covered, and in some cases, working foster parents can even get childcare aid; the kind of aid that, had it gone to birth parents, might have prevented children being taken for “lack of supervision.” 

I don’t think most foster parents are in it for the money. But wouldn’t we all like to keep it that way? Do we really want someone who says, “I won’t do it for less than $1,000 a month, tax-free, plus health insurance for the kids and maybe a childcare subsidy” to be a foster parent? 

Now, let’s consider who’s footing the bill: 

When Congress replaced “welfare as we knew it” with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the money was supposed to help impoverished families become self-sufficient. But the rules are so vague that some states have turned TANF into a child welfare slush fund. 

In that regard, Arizona is a national leader, diverting more than 60% of TANF funds away from impoverished families.  As ProPublica explained: 

Welfare in Arizona largely goes not to helping poor parents financially but rather to the state’s Department of Child Safety — an agency that investigates many of these same parents, and that sometimes takes their kids away for reasons arising from the poverty that they were seeking help with in the first place. 

How much more good could that TANF money do if it were actually used to help poor people? There’s a clue in why Arizona children are taken away – it’s almost never because of the horror stories that make headlines. 

Of all the Arizona children torn from their families and thrown into foster care in 2024, 87%  did not involve even an allegation of physical or sexual abuse. In fact, almost as many children were taken because of “inadequate housing” as because of physical and sexual abuse combined. 

Hobbs claims the state has to lure in more foster parents with big bucks in order to have places for children now needlessly confined to group homes and institutions. 

Arizona is, indeed, a horrific outlier in this regard. It throws 41% of foster children into group homes and institutions; the national average is 16%. (That kind of makes you wonder why she also gave that big increase to some of those same group homes and institutions.) 

But the solution to overuse of group homes can be found in another ugly Arizona statistic: The state still tears apart families at a rate 25% above the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in. Stop taking so many children needlessly, often when family poverty is confused with neglect, and there will be plenty of room in the foster homes Arizona already has. 

Hobbs adds insult to family injury by implying that she is providing some special benefit to extended family members who provide kinship foster care. But the giant pay raise applies only to licensed foster parents. Federal law already requires that all licensed foster parents – whether kin or strangers – be paid the same amount. 

The biggest problem in foster care rates is the lack of support for relatives who provide safe, loving homes, but may not be able to meet licensing requirements that can be geared more to middle-class creature comforts instead of only health and safety necessities. Hobbs' giant pay raise doesn’t apply to them. 

And when it comes to discretionary spending, Hobbs took away $6.5 million in support for kinship foster care – and diverted it to group homes and institutions. 

Brick by financial brick, Gov. Hobbs builds an ever-higher wall between children and the families who love them – and makes those families pay for it.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending January 27, 2026

● Parents of disabled children often need to fight tooth and nail to get schools to provide the services their children need, and are entitled to under law. A lawsuit in New York City documents a common way schools fight back: Filing false child abuse reports alleging “educational Neglect.” The Daily News has a story, and I have a blog post about the lawsuit – and how the practice is not limited to New York. 

● In still another case of alleged harassment, this time by the New York City family police agency itself, the New York Post reports, in a follow-up to a story first reported earlier this month, that the agency even harassed a family after their removal of a child from the home allegedly led to her death. 

From the story: 

The city’s Administration for Children’s Services “stole” a vibrant but mentally ill teenager from her family months before she leapt to her death from the Brooklyn Bridge in despair, her mom told The Post. 

Jade Smith was just 13 — but had already spent years battling hallucinations and suicidal thoughts — when ACS took custody of her for 4 1/2 months and began bouncing her between foster homes, her family said in a lawsuit. 

She committed suicide in January 2023. 

“They made everything so much worse,” mom Terri Nimmo claimed in her first public remarks. “She should be here and she isn’t — and it is ACS’ fault. Their behavior resulted in my daughter dying.”… 

● In 2023, a new law in Washington State took effect that said, in effect, you can’t tear children from their families based on broad, vague definitions of neglect or some caseworker’s gut feeling. That led to a torrent of media stories scapegoating the law for an increase in child abuse deaths that actually began well before it took effect. KUOW Public Radio took a different approach: The public radio station actually spoke to people on all sides of the issue, allowed all sides to be heard – and then checked the data, including details such as this: 

[T]he numbers don’t support that taking more kids out of struggling homes would reduce the number of deaths. The year the most children on CPS’s radar died in Washington was 2012, long before the Keeping Families Together Act. At that time, case workers took nearly twice the number of kids from their families as they do today. 

Although that’s been well-known for years, I am aware of no other Washington State news organization that has bothered to point that out.

● The Kentucky Lantern reports on legislation that “would allow judges to consider an alternative sentence for parents charged with low-level, nonviolent crimes to keep families together.”  Said Amber Duke, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky: “Kentucky kids should not serve their parents’ sentences.” 

● Speaking of child welfare and drug use, this ProPublica story illustrates still another reason not to rely on drug testing when deciding whether to tear apart a family:  

A ProPublica investigation found that Averhealth’s lab practices have not only been faulted by its own accreditor but also targeted in lawsuits, and prompted Michigan’s child welfare agency to order its employees not to use Averhealth’s tests as evidence in court and to withdraw any petitions based solely on the lab’s results. 

The state has since stopped using Averhealth. But what about all the children victimized by needless removal due to faulty drug tests before Michigan issued this order?

● In Missouri, some legislators are bemoaning the horrendous workloads of caseworkers for their family police agency, the Children’s Division (as they should). They’re also saying that, therefore, the Children’s Division should hire a whole lot more workers (which they shouldn’t). I have a blog post about it. 

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

● Here’s what happened, according to a lawsuit that was the topic of a story in the Dayton Daily News:

 A mother did something the county family police agency found inexcusable when her children were home on overnight visits from foster care. When they appeared to be very sick, she – horrors! -- took them to the ER to be checked by a doctor.  The family police agency was so furious about this that they not only cut off visits for a time (thereby punishing the children for the “transgression” of the mother), they also threatened to terminate the children’s rights to ever live with her. 

So she gave in. Instead, over and over, she would notify caseworkers and plead with them to act. According to the lawsuit, they didn’t. Now, after another untreated illness, her son is dead.

Missouri “child welfare” agency gets it right! (For all the wrong reasons)

Missouri Children's Division Director Sara Smith

The Missouri Independent has a story about legislators bemoaning the horrendous workloads of caseworkers for their family police agency, the Children’s Division, (as they should) and saying that, therefore, the Children’s Division should hire a whole lot more workers (which they shouldn’t). The Children's Division has declined to seek funding to hire more workers. They're right, but for all the wrong reasons.

Yes, the situation is horrendous, and this part of the story reveals the biggest horror of all: 

Division policy requires that parents have at least one visit per month with their child in the division’s care, unless a court prohibits meetings. An evaluation team established after the passage of a 2020 state law on foster care set a goal of each county complying with this policy 60% of the time. Between April and June 2025, no more than 6% of counties met this goal, according to an October 2025 report. 

The division also struggled to meet policies of one meeting per month between caseworkers and each of a child’s parents. Between July and September 2025, no more than 38% of counties met a goal of adhering to this policy 50% of the time, according to a January report. 

In other words, the head of the Children’s Division, Sara Smith, is only too happy to see children filed away and forgotten in foster care, and then rushing to terminate parental rights, by cutting the children off from their parents and the parents off from any help. 

But a caseworker hiring binge won’t fix that. It would be especially awful right now in Missouri, where Smith has made her fanaticism about tearing apart families abundantly clear. Instead of reducing caseloads, just hiring more workers will simply further expand the net of intervention into families. All you’ll get is the same lousy system, only bigger. 

If you’re a state like Missouri, that tears apart families at a rate at least 45% above the national average, a state whose confusion of poverty with neglect and other glaring failures were just exposed to the entire country in a national magazine, the solution is not to increase the supply of caseworkers, but to reduce the demand for them. 

That does require hiring – but not at the Children’s Division. It requires funding programs like this one – which the Children’s Division wants to sabotage – to go statewide. It requires high-quality family defense counsel to craft alternatives to the cookie-cutter “service plans” doled out by the Children’s Division, and it requires a laser focus on ameliorating the worst effects of poverty. 

Some lawmakers have proposed legislating a cap on the number of cases a worker can carry. In arguing that such a caseload cap won’t work without all those new hires, Rep. Keri Ingle, herself a former caseworker, said a cap

“doesn’t [allow us to say], ‘We’re not going to put any more kids in foster care,’ or ‘We’re not going to do any more investigations.’ It just doesn’t work like that.” 

No it doesn’t work like that, and it shouldn’t work like that. But what you can do is embrace safe, proven alternatives that reduce the need for all those investigations and all that foster care in the first place.

“Educational neglect”: When education bureaucrats and the family police team up to traumatize a family

Just reading about what Michelle Fraser had to do to get her son Jacob the special education services he needed and to which he was entitled under state and federal law is exhausting. To actually do what she did is a true testament to strength, resilience, and most of all a mother’s love for a son who is autistic, has epilepsy and is unable to speak. 

It happened year after year after year after year after year after year after year after year after year – every year from at least 2015 through 2023. The New York City public school system would deny Jabob the special education he needed and propose an alternative. Each year, Michelle Fraser would check out the school system’s proposed alternatives. One year, she even checked herself out of a hospital after major surgery to visit a school which, it turned out, didn’t have what Jacob needed – and didn’t have an opening for Jacob anyway. 

Each year, Fraser would appeal to an independent hearing officer. Each year, she would win her case. Jacob would get the education he needed to thrive.  Until the next school year, when it would start all over again. 

Apparently, this proved tiring for the school system, too.  But they had a secret weapon: The Administration for Children’s Services, New York City’s family police agency. They allegedly filed a blatantly false report. The allegation against the mother who fought so hard to get her child an education: educational neglect. 

But Fraser wouldn’t back down. Even in the face of the investigation, which traumatized the entire family, Fraser kept fighting. And now, she’s the plaintiff in a lawsuit brought by the Family Justice Law Center and two private law firms, Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP, and Peter Romer-Friedman Law PLLC. 

Though Fraser is the named plaintiff, the lawsuit isn’t just about her case, because Fraser’s family is not the only one put through this hell. The lawsuit alleges that staff from the city’s Department of Education 

are reporting parents of students with disabilities in retaliation for their advocacy—to intimidate or coerce “difficult” parents into dropping their concerns about special education services or requests for placement in a different school. 

Even a former ACS attorney has said: 

 “If schools don’t get the parents to agree to what’s being recommended—not all the time, but sometimes—they will call ACS to pressure them.” 

And indeed, according to the lawsuit, in Fraser’s case, 

Defendants reported Plaintiff to the [New York State child abuse hotline], falsely and maliciously alleging that her son had not been attending school for years. Later, the reporter told an ACS caseworker that she had actually called the [hotline] because the “stalemate” with Plaintiff had “been going on too long” and her supervisor “wanted ACS involved.” 

This kind of behavior has been well documented for years in news accounts from, among others, The 74 and The Hechinger Report.  And not just in New York. The Hechinger Report stories document cases in Illinois as well as New York. Searchlight New Mexico documented the problem in that state. And the Boston Globe documented how such charges were used to harass families during the COVID pandemic - but not all families. 

Many states don’t even include “educational neglect” in the jurisdiction of their family police agencies. And, indeed, as far back as 2009, the respected Vera Institute of Justice said it should be drastically curbed, if not abolished, in New York as well. 

What is different now is that, thanks to the Family Justice Law Center and its partners, families can fight the entire regime of retaliation. 

What the lawsuit tells us about ACS 

Though ACS itself is not a defendant in the case, the lawsuit also reveals a lot about that agency’s failure, on several fronts. 

● First, ACS has refused to seek the state legislation that could have allowed it to refuse to be a party to DOE’s retaliation scheme. In New York, the state runs the child abuse hotline, but localities do the investigating. That creates a huge incentive for the state hotline to funnel b.s. reports on to the localities – making it someone else’s problem. 

One partial solution would be to allow localities to do their own screening, something that already happens for most cases in Pennsylvania, which has a similar system. 

But ACS has refused to ask the state for permission to do the same. Perhaps it just prefers to be able to pass the buck and say “the state made us do it” in cases like that of the Fraser family. 

● Second, ACS is fond of touting its version of “differential response” known as CARES. These cases supposedly get a kinder, gentler approach.  It’s not an investigation, they say, it’s just an “assessment.” 

When there’s a full-scale investigation, caseworkers ask children about the most intimate details of their lives, let everyone the family deals with know they’re under investigation for child abuse and search every room in their homes.

Let’s go back to the lawsuit Complaint to compare that to the Fraser case – which was assigned to the CARES track. 

Plaintiff received a call from her daughter, who was upset and said there was a strange man walking around outside their home. 

Plaintiff then discovered she had a voicemail from an ACS caseworker, Nikunj Patel. He was investigating a report that her son had not been attending school. 

Plaintiff immediately returned home with her son. Mr. Patel was still outside the house. Mr. Patel demanded to see every room in the house, including private outdoor areas where Plaintiff’s son liked to spend time as well as the bedrooms of both of Plaintiff’s children. He also said he needed to see the children’s medical records. 

The caseworker’s visit was very upsetting for Plaintiff’s son and caused him to cry in distress and retreat outside while the caseworker was in the home. 

Although this baseless ACS report concerned only Plaintiff’s son, the caseworker also interrogated her daughter, a competitive student athlete, with invasive questions about her family home, whether she felt undue parental pressure to engage in sports, and whether her mother ever yelled at her. 

After the visit, Plaintiff called the head of her daughter’s school, officials at the YMCA that hosts her son’s school program, and her children’s doctors to alert them that ACS may be contacting them, after the caseworker told her that he would be calling people who regularly interacted with the children. She felt embarrassed to have to tell people that she was being investigated for child neglect, and she experienced constant anxiety while the investigation remained pending. 

After a comprehensive investigation that included the home search and conversations with the children’s schools, doctors, and father, ACS found that no child abuse or neglect had taken place and raised no concerns about the children’s welfare. ACS closed the investigation. [Emphasis added.] 

Fraser’s daughter told the Daily News how it had all affected her: 

“I walked into school I think days later,” said Mia. “All I could think to myself was, I don’t want this to become a public thing. I don’t want my friends to know. I don’t want my teachers to know.” 

Years later, Mia, now 16, is more open about the experience — but she still thinks about the trauma that it caused. 

“I did mention it in one of my college essays,” she added. “One of my drafts was about the incident, and how all I could think about in the entirety of the situation was, what’s going to happen to my brother?” 

But hey, at least it was just an assessment and not an investigation, right? 

Still, the “assessment” did lead to one useful bit of information. Again, from the lawsuit complaint: 

During an initial call, the ACS caseworker asked the psychologist the reason for not reporting Plaintiff’s son’s absence from school until June 2023, if he had not been in school since 2016.

The caseworker documented the psychologist’s response: that Plaintiff “has taken legal action against DOE, she has constantly requested Re-evaluations, and Impartial hearing” and that Plaintiff has a legal background and “is very by the book, and strict in her speaking.” 

Another failure for the “training” panacea 

No matter how much harm family police do to families, no matter how egregious their behavior, they will insist everything can be fixed with “more training.” They’ve been saying that for decades, and during that time, the child welfare surveillance state has grown to its current massive proportions. 

Yet both ACS and DOE insist that the harm done to the Fraser family and so many others can be fixed with more training. Let’s return to the lawsuit complaint to see how that’s working out: 

Defendant DOE has acknowledged that educators have been overreporting to the [child abuse hotline]. Since the report against Plaintiff, DOE has begun work with ACS to develop a training module indicating that reports to ACS in retaliation for advocacy are unlawful and encouraging staff to check their biases and connect families with services. … 

OK, let’s just stop there. DOE says its employees need special training to know it’s against the law (not to mention morally wrong) to call in a child abuse report as an act of retaliation? Really? 

The training material also informs DOE employees that “Just because you disagree with a parent’s decisions or actions does not mean a child is being abused or maltreated.” And the new material reminds employees that there is an actual DOE regulation prohibiting retaliation. 

However, as the Complaint points out 

There is no evidence to indicate that the updated guidance and trainings have resulted in a decrease in retaliatory reports from educators against parents who advocate for services. Indeed, upon information and belief, some DOE employees have continued to retaliate against parents who advocate for their children with disabilities even after DOE began training staff in fall 2023 that “a call to the SCR is an option of last resort.” 

No, training isn’t going to do the job. But a hefty damage award in this lawsuit might.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending January 20, 2026

● We begin with the news we broke on this blog yesterday afternoon: The federal government’s annual Child Maltreatment report is out. It shows a significant decline in child abuse fatalities, even as foster care entries fell. 

● And on the same topic, from Rutgers University: More about the blockbuster study finding that taking away more children does nothing to reduce the number of child abuse fatalities. 

● In New York City, you can always count on Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post to demand that the city’s family police agency get ever more power to tear apart ever more families. Last week, the Post reported on the horrific tragedy that followed when the agency performed exactly as the Post’s editors and opinion columnists demand. They won’t learn anything from it, but the rest of us might. 

● Last year, Minnesota passed landmark legislation that, when it takes effect, will make all of the state’s children safer.  The Imprint reports on a committee’s recommendations concerning what needs to happen next: 

The 22-member advisory panel that released its report this month included community members, state and county leaders and nonprofit directors. In 111 pages, they detailed what the Department of Children, Youth and Families, the state Legislature and counties need to do to fully enact the Minnesota African American Family Preservation and Child Welfare Disproportionality Act. 

● Next time you hear that family police agencies never intrude on families because of poverty “alone” consider what happens in Washoe County, Nev. For homeless families in that county, the act of accepting help – and nothing else – can lead to an automatic referral to the family police. I have a blog post about it. 

● You often hear that in the family policing system families are guilty until proven innocent. But for Toia Potts, even being proven innocent wasn’t enough. Two of her children had their right to live with her terminated. She tells her story in Inquest magazine.

● Georgia recently passed a Reasonable Childhood Independence law. But, as Lenore Skenazy writes in Reason, that wasn’t enough to stop an Unreasonably Paranoid Caseworker from traumatizing a family. Now their child is afraid to go out of the house alone, not because of any supposed danger from strangers, but because of fear of another traumatic investigation by the family police. The family must operate under a so-called safety plan. In contrast, there is no indication anything like that has happened in this other Georgia case, where the alleged offense is vastly more serious. 

● Five years ago, Arizona signed a consent decree promising to reduce the proportion of children placed in the worst form of “care” – group homes and institutions. But now, KNXV-TV reports, a mediator has found that the proportion actually has gone up. But then, given Gov. Katie Hobbs’ willingness to lavish state funds on such places, that shouldn’t come as any surprise. 

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

● From The Imprint: 

After a 25-year fight for accountability, a former foster youth has been awarded $5.5 million to settle his case against the county that placed him with his adoptive father — a man who was once the chief pediatrician for foster kids in Silicon Valley. 

Dozens of children in foster care and multiple boys who lived in Dr. Patrick Clyne’s home when he was a licensed foster parent have accused him of sexual abuse, and he has been the subject of criminal investigations dating back to 2001. To date, he denies wrongdoing and has not been charged with any crime related to the allegations. …

Latest federal data show significant decline in child abuse fatalities, even as foster care entries fell

The latest federal compilation of data from the states concerning child abuse and neglect shows that known child abuse fatalities declined significantly in 2024 compared to the previous year. It’s also the second decline in a row, following a smaller decline from 2022 to 2023. Overall, known fatalities during the two-year period declined by 12%. 

That’s probably the most significant finding in the latest Child Maltreatment report released Friday by the federal Administration for Children and Families (and yes, 2024 is the latest). 

During that same period – 2022 through 2024 – entries into foster care nationwide declined by about six percent. 

Did the decline in foster care entries cause the decline in child abuse deaths? Almost certainly not. Correlation is not causation. But that’s also true when foster care entries go down and child abuse deaths go up – yet foster care apologists love to exploit those data points over and over – carefully picking and choosing among them. 

Foster care apologists also will rush to point out that, they claim, child abuse deaths are underreported. They may be right. There also are reasons to believe they can be overreported. 

Consider a hypothetical example: Early one Sunday morning, while his parents are asleep, a three-year-old wakes up, manages to unlatch the back door of the family home and wanders away.  He falls into a body of water and drowns. Accident or neglect? The history of American family policing suggests that if the body of water is the pool behind a McMansion it will be labeled an accident. If it’s a pond behind a trailer park it will be labeled neglect.

But whichever may be the case, there is no evidence that agencies were, say, 12% more likely to overlook fatalities in 2024 than in 2022. 

All this is all the more reason it’s a good thing a massive new study has settled the issue once and for all. The study looked at 3.4 million case records and more than 20,000 child abuse deaths over a period of 13 years. The result: No evidence whatsoever that increasing foster care reduces child abuse deaths. And no evidence that reducing foster care increases child abuse deaths. 

For a full discussion of why that might be, and a discussion of what actually can reduce child abuse deaths, see this earlier post to the blog and NCCPR’s Issue Paper on child abuse fatalities. 

And in contrast, let us never forget the new study from Sweden finding that, when compared to comparably maltreated children left in their own homes, children placed in foster care were more than four times more likely to die by age 20. 

Other notable data from the Child Maltreatment report: 

● For the first time since at least 2015, the number of calls to child abuse hotlines declined – ever so slightly. Perhaps the public is starting to understand that both underreporting the very rare cases of genuine, serious abuse and overreporting everything else harms children. Perhaps people are being a little more careful – and more willing to become, in Joyce McMillan’s phrase, mandatory supporters instead of mandatory reporters. 

● The rate at which caseworkers checked boxes on forms saying they believed it was at least slightly more likely than not that the allegation is true (that’s all a “substantiated” report of child abuse or neglect really means) declined for the sixth year in a row.

A Nevada County forces families to gamble with their children’s lives

 The county offers families a cruel choice – and effectively admits they DO police families for poverty “alone.” 

Over and over, family policing apologists tell us they don’t police families because of poverty “alone.” It’s always some other issue. There are two problems with that: 

● First, the other issues often are caused by poverty and/or can be alleviated with money – instead of putting the family under traumatic surveillance or tearing the family apart entirely. 

● Second, every few months, somewhere in America, someone in the family police effectively admits that yes – they do intervene because of poverty alone. 

In Washoe County, Nevada (metropolitan Reno), in some cases, it’s agency policy. 

In that county, here’s the choice homeless families face when the county-run shelter is full: Accept an offer of a place at a hotel, and face an automatic investigation by the county family police agency. Reject the offer, stay homeless, or find something on their own, and stay free of having the family police in their lives. 

Here’s how the Nevada Current reported it: 

Washoe County operates a 38-private room facility for families with children called Our Place Shelter. 

If the shelter runs out of space and families have no other housing options, the county can offer to pay for a hotel room. Accepting the assistance to stay in a hotel comes with an automatic referral to child welfare, said Sabrina Sweet, a human services coordinator with Washoe County. [Emphasis added.] 

The county had no data on how many times the referral led to foster care. The county also had no data on how many families refused the help because of their fear of a family police investigation. 

And while they have the resources to send an investigator, they somehow don’t have the resources to provide help to the families in the hotels. From the story: 

“We don’t have the bandwidth to go out into the motels,”[Tara Sterrett, a human services supervisor] said. “Once we put them in a motel, we don’t really have the ability to go in and say, ‘Okay, now what is it that’s keeping you from being able to provide for your kids?’” 

The county also admits it knows what’s generally keeping homeless families from being able to provide for their kids – and it’s not primarily drug abuse, mental illness or domestic violence – the big three excuses foster-care apologists cling to when it’s pointed out that they take away children because their families are poor. As the story explains: 

The high cost of rents and the lack of affordable places to live are driving people into homelessness in Washoe just like the rest of the state – as well as the country. 

“One of the biggest barriers is affordable housing, especially for families,” Sterrett said. 

The larger the family, the more challenging it becomes for them to find adequate housing.  

“It’s really hard to find an apartment that’s going to be large enough that they’re going to be able to afford and sustain,” Sterrett said. [Emphasis added.] 

So now let’s consider how the county might deal with that. The average monthly rent in Reno is $1,462.  So: What if the county paid a rent subsidy of a bit less than that, say only $858 per month, per child, to every homeless family?  That would go a long way toward reducing homelessness. 

Why $858?  Because that’s the minimum amount Washoe County will pay foster parents (tax-free, by the way) for every child – and it can go much higher, if they take a child from, say, a family that accepted the offer of housing in a hotel only to have that child taken away. 

All this may help explain why Nevada tears apart families at a rate 46% above the national average, even when rates of family poverty are factored in.  

Sure, they’re fond of gambling in Reno. But the stakes should never be whether a family is destroyed.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending January 13, 2026

 

 ● Of course, the biggest news of the past week is the publication of a blockbuster study on the relationship between the number of children family police agencies take away and child abuse deaths: The key finding: There is no relationship. Taking more children does not reduce child abuse deaths. Taking fewer children does not increase child abuse deaths. That means the “logic” behind America’s massive child welfare surveillance state collapses like a house of cards. I have a blog post with a link to the study and a discussion of things that really can reduce child abuse deaths. 

● There’s still another problem with the fanatical push by some take-the-child-and-run extremists to confiscate any child supposedly born with drugs in their system. In addition to the enormous, needless trauma this inflicts on children during the most important days of their lives, their first, in addition to driving women away from giving birth in hospitals and seeking prenatal care, in addition to the huge problem of false positive tests, ProPublica now reveals another: What constitutes a positive test result? There’s no uniform scientific standard. States are free to set any standard they want, or just let the testing lab decide. The result: 

The amount of opiates that upended [one new mother’s] life … was so minuscule that if she were an Air Force pilot, she could have had 200 times more in her system and still have been cleared to fly. 

● Massachusetts throws children into foster care at a rate 44% above the national average and institutionalizes children at a rate 80% above the national average. In this commentary for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, NCCPR rebuts those who want to make things even worse. 

● The Center Square has an update on that case in Georgia in which a man was arrested for allegedly driving very, very drunk with his young children in the car, but the children were not taken away – and the police may not even have called in a report to the state child welfare agency. But they did call the head of the agency – to come pick up the kids, since her husband was the alleged drunk driver. Here’s how their story begins: 

In at least one way, Georgia’s child welfare agency has treated its chief administrator just like any other parent involved in a possible child endangerment investigation. 

By not disclosing anything about the case publicly at all. 

Nevertheless, The Center Square turned up some new information, and I’ve updated NCCPR’s blog post on the case to include it.

● Rhode Island’s family police agency plans to spend up to $26 million to buy and renovate the notorious "House of Pine-Sol" RTC and warehouse 16 girls there. I have a blog post about it. 

● The Indiana Capital Chronicle reports that Indiana is the latest state where a “reasonable childhood independence” bill has cleared a legislative committee. 

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

● From Honolulu Civil Beat:

As Civil Beat was reporting last year on a foster dad who sexually preyed on and beat the boys in his care, the state intervened to prevent the release of court documents that detailed how it could have happened. … Now those documents are public. And they offer a rare glimpse into the workings of the child welfare system, and how a predator could go unchecked for more than two decades. 

● From the Spokane Spokesman-Review: 

A Spokane girl was hit, neglected and sexually assaulted by her foster family for seven years as state workers documented the abuse but failed to remove her from the home, a new lawsuit against the state alleges.