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.

NCCPR in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette: A better approach for state child care

If you really want to fix a child welfare system, the solution is simple: Listen to your gut instinct – and do the opposite. 

Gut instinct says: Another child has died in a case where the file had more “red flags” than a Soviet May Day parade. So, it must be because the Massachusetts Department of Children & Families is fanatically devoted to preserving families and we need to rush to take away even more children. 

The data, and a massive new study, tell a different story and suggest the need for a different solution. … 

Read the full column in the Telegram & Gazette

The Rhode Island approach to Child Welfare: Throw away the money, throw away the kids!

The Rhode Island family police agency wants to spend up to $26 million 
to buy and renovate a residential treatment center that closed after revelations 
of widespread abuse. At the time, a state lawmaker said she could tell things 
were getting better because "I could smell the Pine-Sol

The state family police agency plans to spend up to $26 million to buy and renovate the notorious "House of Pine-Sol" RTC

Here’s what the Rhode Island Department of Children, Youth and Families wants to do with the now-closed hellhole institution known as St Mary’s Home for Children (or as it should be known, for reasons discussed below, the House of Pine-Sol):

 Spend $760,000 to buy what would have been a privately-run residential treatment center. Spend up to another $25 million to renovate the entire place and fix environmental problems.  Use only three of the seven buildings on the eight-acre site. Warehouse 16 girls there. 

(If you’re wondering why 16? It’s because large institutions are so inherently harmful that if more than 16 children are in one at any given time, the federal Medicaid program won’t pick up part of the very expensive tab.) 

And those are just the renovation costs. When it was privately run, DCYF was paying the operators more than $1,000 per day per child!

Apparently, no one in DCYF can think of a better way to spend all that money. This also helps explain why Rhode Island spends on “child welfare” at the highest rate in America, well over triple the national average  -while getting such dismal results. 

Rhode Island lawmakers haven’t shown much concern for the kids (or maybe they just don’t understand what’s best for children and won’t do what it takes to learn). But might they at least rebel at the cost to taxpayers? Nah. We already know that some Rhode Island lawmakers are pretty easy to fool. 

Look what happened after first the state’s Office of Child Advocate and then the Boston Globe exposed the extent to which St. Mary’s was rife with abuse. As we wrote on this blog in February 2024:

After her definitely-not-a-surprise inspection, Rep. Patricia  Serpa says things are soooooo much better now!  How does she know?  She told WPRI-TV: 

“What I saw today was encouraging.  The facility is clean. I could smell the Pine-Sol, I could smell the fresh paint. The kids’ rooms were kids’ rooms — they were messy, but an organized messy.” 

Of course!  Everyone knows children are never abused in rooms that smell of Pine-Sol!  And who would ever want to run from a room that was freshly painted?   (Where was Serpa expecting to see kids stay – in dungeons?)  

[DCYF Director Ashley] Deckert took the tour too. Deckert, more than any other individual, has a vested interest in downplaying any problems at the places where her agency institutionalizes children.  And sure enough, she called the progress “tremendous.” She, too, made a point of saying the place “smells nice.”

But in the end, St. Mary’s couldn’t pass the smell test. After DCYF stopped parking children there, the place had to close.

So what lesson did DCYF learn from this? We’ll buy the place and run it ourselves!

The rationale is the one you’ve heard a million times before – and it’s still BS: Some children have such severe problems they simply can’t stay in a home. They have to be in a residential treatment center – but this will be better because we’ll call it a psychiatric residential treatment center – and now, Rhode Island doesn’t have any of those.

That’s supposedly why so many children are being sent to RTCs out of state.

But the real reason Rhode Island sends all those kids out of state is that Rhode Island tears apart families at a rate more than 80% above the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in.

Of all the Rhode Island children torn from their families and thrown into foster care in 2024, 80% percent did not involve even an allegation of physical or sexual abuse. In 65% of cases, there was not even an allegation of any form of drug abuse.  Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with “neglect.” 

Get the children who don’t need to be in foster care back home, and Rhode Island will have plenty of room in good, safe family foster homes for all the children who really need them. As for those children who supposedly can’t live in a home: They can – if you provide intensive wraparound services to the family or the foster family. That’s an intervention proven to work – as opposed to residential treatment, which, even when the institutions aren’t hellholes, has been proven time and time again to fail. 

Wraparound also is far less expensive than residential treatment. You can buy a whole lot of it for $26 million – which apparently is readily at hand at DCYF. 

As for what might be done with the St. Mary’s campus: 

In 2024, Rhode Island threw more children into foster care because of inadequate housing than because of physical and sexual abuse combined. So how about renovating the place and using all seven buildings for housing for families that might otherwise lose their children to foster care, .  with some other agency – not DCYF – in charge of it.  Or, it might be used for a residential program that really can work: inpatient drug treatment where parents are allowed to stay with their children. 

Just don’t forget to keep a little extra money around for Pine-Sol.

The “logic” behind America’s massive child welfare surveillance state is the equivalent of a house of cards. Thanks to a new study, it just collapsed.

KEY POINTS 

● For decades, we were told we have to take away more children to stop child abuse deaths. If you dare take fewer, it was claimed, then more children will die.  

● A study of 3.4 million records over 13 years finds it’s not true. The study concludes: “Child maltreatment mortality rates did not appear to decrease with higher foster care entry rates or increase with decreasing foster care entry rates.” 

● In other words, huge numbers of children, whom family police agencies rushed to tear from their homes because supposedly it would reduce fatalities, suffered all the harm of needless foster care for nothing. 

● The very fact that this finding will surprise many is a testament to the success of the child welfare establishment in using “health terrorism” to craft a false narrative. 

● The finding is all-the-more alarming in light of another recent study, from Sweden, showing that children placed in foster care are more than four times more likely to die by age 20 than even comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes. The most common cause of death: suicide; suggesting that much of the problem is related to the inherent trauma of removal.

 Consider once again the sheer size of America’s child welfare surveillance state – and all the misery it inflicts in the name of “child protection.” 

More than one-third of all children, and more than half of Black children, will be forced to endure the trauma of a child abuse investigation – and make no mistake, the trauma often is huge – before they are 18. In some cases, the investigation is necessary – but overwhelmingly, the allegations are false and/or confuse poverty with neglect. 

Based on numbers from recent years, it is likely that more than 170,000 children will be torn from everyone they know and love and consigned to the chaos of foster care in 2026. Half a million children are likely to spend some time in foster care this year. As anyone who remembers the cries of children separated at the border knows, no matter who does it and no matter what the reason, this is one of the worst traumas anyone can inflict on a child. 

In a small number of horror story cases, it’s necessary because even this trauma is less than the trauma of remaining in a horror story home. But nationwide in 2024, in 78% of cases, children were thrown into foster care where there was not even an allegation of sexual abuse or any form of physical abuse. In 60% of cases, there was not even an allegation of any form of drug abuse – not just no allegation of running a meth lab or overdosing on fentanyl, no allegation of any use of any drug.  

The creation of this omnipresent surveillance state was not the result of any systematic study to determine what would work. Rather, it is the result of “health terrorism” – that’s not my term, it comes from a group that admits to having practiced it for decades. It’s simple enough: Take the worst horror stories, stories of sadists and brutes who torture, rape and murder children. Then lead us to believe that all or most cases are like that. Then demand that ever more families be surveilled and ever more children be taken. 

If you don’t agree with that approach, they say, then you must not care if children die. Because if we don’t take more children, they imply, that’s exactly what will happen. 

In the more than five decades since this system began, nobody ever actually stopped to check and see if this was true. Nobody asked: If we keep taking more kids, will fewer die? Nobody asked: If we take fewer kids, will that lead to more deaths? 

Until now. And it turns out the answer is no. The “logic” behind America’s massive child welfare surveillance state is the equivalent of a house of cards. It just collapsed. 

A study just published in the authoritative JAMA Network Open examined 3.4 million records of children in foster care from 2010 to 2023 and 24,108 fatalities that states attributed to child abuse or neglect. The result might best be described as a clear pattern – of no pattern. Or as the authors put it: 

“Child maltreatment mortality rates did not appear to decrease with higher foster care entry rates or increase with decreasing foster care entry rates.” 

It’s not just that correlation is not causation – there’s not even a correlation. 

The authors don’t offer any suggestions concerning why there’s no correlation. I will suggest one  possibility: 

Every child abuse death is the worst imaginable tragedy. They also are as rare as they are horrific. Even if you take the officially reported figure for child abuse deaths in a year – 2000- and double it, then compare it to the total child population, that still means that in any given year 99.995% of children will not die of child abuse. The odds of finding an impurity in Ivory Soap are greater than the odds that a child will die of abuse or neglect in the United States this year. 

Here’s how that looks on a pie chart:

 

Can’t see the part with the 0.005%? That’s the point. The line is really there (look very closely at about 3 O’Clock) but child abuse fatalities are needles in a giant haystack. 

So if you react to a horrible child abuse tragedy by making the haystack even bigger; suddenly sweeping a whole lot more children into foster care, the odds are extremely low that you’ll actually happen to sweep up a child who otherwise might die. The odds are excellent that you will expose many more children to the trauma – and worse – of needless foster care. 

And that’s where another recent study comes in. This one, from Sweden, is the latest in a long line of studies, the others almost all from North America, which compare what happens in typical cases – not the horror stories. Over and over, they find that, in these typical cases, children left in their own homes fare better on all sorts of measures even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care. 

The latest study found the children left in their own homes fared better on the most important measure of all: surviving until adulthood.  The foster children were more than four times more likely to die by age 20. The major cause of death: suicide, which would appear to say something about the enormous trauma inherent in removal. 

So consider the implications of these two studies together: 

● Taking away more children will not reduce child abuse deaths.

● But the additional children taken will be a lot more likely to die by age 20 than if they were left in their own homes.

And then there’s that whole other set of studies showing horribly high rates of abuse in foster care itself. Indeed, when child welfare agencies react to tragedies by rushing to take away more children – foster-care panics -- the odds of a child needlessly taken being abused in foster care itself are far greater than the odds that the agency will happen to find a child who otherwise would die. 

This also explains another study finding: The researchers accounted for the claim that the number of child abuse deaths is understated. The authors ran a series of simulations. They simulated under-reporting of fatalities, assuming that as many as 75% of all deaths weren’t reported, and found even that wouldn’t change the result. 

What do we do instead? 

This doesn’t mean we give up. The only acceptable goal for child abuse fatalities is zero; we strive for it even as we know our reach always will exceed our grasp. But bringing us closer to that goal requires rejecting the false narrative of health terrorism that’s only led us farther from it. 

Instead, we start with a laser focus on ameliorating the worst effects of poverty. Study after study finds even small amounts of cash can go a long way.  And not just in curbing “neglect.” Remember the COVID pandemic when the health terrorists predicted a “pandemic of child abuse” because all those overwhelmingly middle-class, disproportionately white professionals didn’t have their eyes on children who are neither? Instead, the family police were forced to step back, community-based, community-run mutual aid organizations stepped up, and the federal government stepped in with no-strings-attached cash. The result, even severe child abuse declined. 

Yes, but what about when the problem isn’t poverty “alone”? Then the solution often still is money – so poor families can buy the help they need with those other problems, the same way middle-class families do, instead of forcing their children to endure the trauma of being confiscated by the state. 

Other solutions involve making the haystack smaller instead of bigger: These include replacing mandatory reporting with permissive reporting, leaving professionals free to exercise their professional judgments instead of flooding the system with false reports, and narrowing definitions of neglect, which often are definitions of poverty. 

All of this needs to be enforced – and that requires high-quality legal representation for families from the moment the family police are at the door. No, it’s not to get “bad parents” off; it’s to provide alternatives to the cookie-cutter “service plans” often churned out by family police agencies. It’s been proven to reduce foster care with no compromise of safety. 

More details concerning these and other solutions can be found in the solutions section at www.nccpr.org 

But here’s step one: The health terrorists misled us for decades. Don’t let them do it again.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, weeks ending January 2, 2026

● This first item made it into our “Year-in-Review” last week, but in case nobody read that far down: 

Just as the year was ending, families in New York won a huge victory when Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a bill that replaces anonymous reporting with confidential reporting. The accused still doesn’t get to know who called the child abuse hotline, but the hotline and local caseworkers need to know – in order to discourage false reports by ex-spouses, angry neighbors, landlords or anyone else abusing the process to carry out a grudge. 

amNY has a particularly good story about the law. The Imprint also has a story about the signing. So does the New York Daily News. And before it passed: ProPublica published a good story on the bill. Also: there was an excellent editorial from the Syracuse Post-Standard, a superb commentary in The Imprint, from Prof. Dale Margolin Cecka, Director of the Family Violence Litigation Clinic at Albany Law School, and another outstanding commentary from the lawyers who regularly represent children in these cases, concerning why this law is needed – and why 48 states and D.C. should follow New York and Texas in enacting such laws. 

● The Reason Foundation is the latest to explore the harm done when families are needlessly torn apart because of housing.  From their analysis: 

To improve child safety outcomes, eviction and homelessness should not be treated as proxies for parental failure. Stable housing is not a secondary concern but a foundational condition for family stability and child well-being. When families secure stable housing, children are more likely to remain safely in their homes, child welfare systems avoid unnecessary interventions, and communities reduce the fiscal and social costs associated with family separation. If the core objective is child safety, policy should prioritize measures that establish stability upstream rather than escalating surveillance or interventions that increase the risk of removal. 

● New Hampshire Public Radio reports that under a new law children in child welfare hearings in that state will get a lawyer charged with advocating for what the child actually wants. That’s not because a child necessarily should get that outcome. But the only way to know what’s best is if all parties have someone making the best possible case for their preferred outcome.  Until now, children in New Hampshire have gotten only a guardian ad litem or, worse, a CASA. They advocate for what they think is best for the child. If the child disagrees s/he is effectively silenced. 

● The Imprint reports on a hearing during which the head of Georgia’s family police agency was questioned about the severe cuts to services to help families stay together. 

Multiple providers testified about the immediate impacts of the restrictions: Children are no longer visiting their parents. Parents are not getting needed assessments required by their court-approved case plan. Working foster parents are losing resources they were promised to help them care for the highest-need children. 

● The Imprint also reports on how, for the usual despicable reasons, the Trump Administration has terminated a series of grants to agencies that help families, including Rise, which gives voice, and provides help, to families caught in the family policing net. From the story: 

“The saddest part is letting staff go during the holiday season with no advance notice,” said Jeanette Vega, executive director of Rise, which received a $1.5 million grant for a peer care initiative. “And we have to turn away families who need our support as we do not have the finances to purchase family basic needs after we promised supporting them before the holidays.” 

● NBC News has two stories on the harm done to families by misdiagnoses of so-called shaken baby syndrome. 

● CT Mirror reports on the progress Connecticut has made in increasing the use of the least harmful form of foster care, kinship foster care. Much of that progress was a result of the work of a former director of the state child welfare agency, Joette Katz. 

● In The Imprint, Mike Leach, former head of South Carolina’s child welfare agency writes about still another little-known way the system hurts the children it was meant to help. Federal law mandates volunteer citizen review boards review individual cases and make recommendations. Here’s how it works in practice: 

[B]ias and misunderstanding manifest in board recommendations. Families, especially those navigating poverty, are often judged harshly for missed visits or slow progress on case plans. A parent working double shifts at Waffle House to keep the lights on might be labeled “uninvolved.” A grandmother caring for multiple grandchildren on a fixed income may be called “unstable.” 

Volunteers who serve on these boards are, in my experience,  often from a higher socioeconomic level than the families whose cases they oversee and, as a result, may lack an understanding of the barriers to case plan compliance those families face. Poverty is not neglect, but when oversight lacks context, the system treats it that way. 

Youth who have attended these reviews have described them to me as cold and humiliating: strangers reading files aloud, offering opinions without real conversation or relational understanding. That is not accountability. It is surveillance without compassion. 

● Also in The Imprint, Sarah Winograd of Together With Families, offers lessons on how to keep families together by giving them what they really need, instead of what makes the helpers feel good: 

People often ask how to build a program that helps families experiencing a crisis. They usually want a model, a toolkit or a checklist. We learned quickly that the work does not function that way. 

Families do not fail programs. Programs fail families when they cannot adapt.

What helps one family stabilize today may be irrelevant six months from now. Effective prevention work is not a fixed model that can be copied and pasted. It is a living approach that must remain responsive to the people it serves. 

Flexibility is not optional. It is foundational. 

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

From County 10, Wyoming: 

Governor Mark Gordon announced today, December 29, his support for rescinding a 2014 National Adoption Excellence Award granted to Steve and Kristine Marler of Casper. Steve Marler was convicted in 2025 of 11 counts of child abuse of minors, five counts of misdemeanor battery, and one count of child endangerment. 

He was also sentenced to a minimum of 128 years on eight felony counts for sexually abusing two girls under his foster or adoptive care and for sexual abuse and battery of foster children. 

● A story from Honolulu Civil Beat includes this chilling reminder: 

In at least five recent cases, children died in homes where they were placed by the state and Family Court and at some point subject to supervision by CWS caseworkers. In two of these, CWS either admits or relatives allege there had been earlier reports of maltreatment.

 And finally …

 ● If you missed it over the holidays, here’s our Year-in-Review for 2025

 ● And NCCPR starts the new year with an updated website. Check it out!