NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending April 21, 2026

● New Mexico’s Attorney General has issued a report on the state’s “child welfare” system that combines the Donald Trump approach to fearmongering with the RFK Jr. approach to science. The result is a document likely to make New Mexico’s children less safe. That’s why NCCPR has issued an in-depth rebuttal. For the tl;dr version, see our column in Source NM. 

● Speaking of dangerously wrong, over the next five years, Maryland plans to spend $1.2 billion on 637 group home and institution beds. For that kind of money, they could give more than $190,000-per-year-per-child in of help to every Maryland family from whom a child was taken away in 2024. I have a blog post about the state’s misplaced priorities. 

● I don’t know if the Maryland facility exposed in this story from WBFF-TV in Baltimore is among those getting the contracts, but it does give a good idea of what states get for all the money they lavish on “residential treatment.” 

● For decades those fanatical about tearing apart families have been obsessed with paper permanence – a narrow vision in which only formal adoption, usually by strangers, “counts” as permanence. In this version of “permanence,” children are cut off entirely from not only parents but often siblings, friends, extended family, and every other supportive human being in their lives.  Even their birth certificates are changed. Among the many awful consequences: Tens of thousands of young people who age out of foster care each year with no home at all. 

Now, current and former foster youth are leading the chorus of voices who are fighting back, and trying to teach the child welfare establishment that real permanence is relational permanence, in which every human connection that can help a child succeed is nurtured rather than severed. And now, The Washington Post reports, some of those young people have adapted a concept pioneered in Kansas into legislation pending in Washington, DC. From the story: 

The legislation, called the Soul Act — for Support, Opportunity, Unity and Legal Relationships — is part of a burgeoning national movement to transform the foster care system by allowing older teens to create a legally binding network of support. Without having to sever legal ties to birth parents, they could choose their own family by drawing on a variety of guardians, blood relatives and other trusted adults — teachers, pastors, family friends — who agree to care for the young person in specific ways. …

“One of the beautiful things about Soul is it opens up a much broader, more dynamic vision of what a family is,” said Tami Weerasingha-Cote, policy director at Children’s Law Center, which along with the Family & Youth Initiative helped the D.C. teens and young adults craft the legislation.

A Soul family also counters still another of the hideous financial incentives that a family-hating child welfare establishment has built into the system: 

Many foster teens chose to age out to take advantage of state or federal money — such as a tuition assistance or savings program — that they could not access if they were adopted or had a guardian. Under Soul, teens would not have to choose between family or benefits. They could have both.

● Mya Martinez describes herself as “a sexual assault survivor, an aged-out foster youth, a mom, a wife, and a truth teller.” Here’s some of the truth she told in The Imprint last week: 

Let’s just be honest, the foster care system never cared for children’s well-being and mental health. This made-up narrative that the system has to try and make themselves seem great and undeniably precious is fake. I, for one, am sick of it. 

● Courthouse News Service reports that advocates for children and families caught up in the system in New York are asking the state’s highest court to put a stop to a particularly insidious form of hidden foster care – or, as it should be called, sugar-frosted foster care. 

● The New Jersey Monitor reports that New Jersey is the latest state that’s going to be paying a lot of money to survivors of abuse while in the state’s “care” – as it should. 

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

● Keep this story from WDIV-TV Detroit in mind the next time you read about private foster care agencies seeking legislation to make it much harder for victims of abuse on their watch to get justice: 

In a lawsuit filed against Vista Maria, an all-girls facility that Local 4 began investigating over a year ago, six women and girls said the respected Dearborn Heights nonprofit that was meant to protect children instead became a “house of horrors.” 

The lawsuit -- filed April 13, 2026, by former residents and some family members on their behalf -- accuses Vista Maria and its staff of psychological and physical abuse, “sexual abuse, including sexual assault, molestation, and nonconsensual touching and harassment,” along with unsafe conditions and negligence. 

All were placed there as minors, many through the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) and court orders, the suit said. … 

“The allegations laid out by these survivors are not isolated … they reflect a long pattern of abuse and systemic failure involving young women who were placed in an environment that was supposed to protect them.” 

● From the Altoona Mirror: 

An out-of-court settlement has been reached in a case involving six children from an Altoona family who were removed by authorities from their parents almost 18 years ago and placed in foster care. The foster parents, Timothy and Barbara Krause of Houtzdale, eventually adopted the children and the youngsters were never returned to their Altoona roots. … 

Tim and Barbara Krause in 2020 were found guilty of 22 counts that included endangering the welfare of children, simple assault, terroristic threats and reckless endangerment for their treatment of all six children while in the foster home. 

The foster parents, according to the Superior Court in its review of the Krause cases, used racial slurs in referring to the children, forced the children to stand against a wall, knees bent, for long periods of time, deprived them of food for lengthy periods of time, and threatened and beat them.