Maine State Capitol
Also:
● Part of the decline isn’t even real – the news story reporting the decline left 143 children out.
● When it comes to the least harmful form of foster care, kinship foster care, Maine’s record is getting worse.
One of the many reasons Maine has one of the saddest recent child welfare histories is a lack of institutional memory. Logan Marr was torn from her mother because their family poverty was confused with neglect. She died in foster care at the hands of a foster parent who had been a child welfare caseworker. After that, there was real reform. For a while, Maine was a national leader.
But that was decades ago. The lawmakers who pushed for change are gone thanks to term limits. The journalists who covered the story and chronicled the progress are largely gone thanks to drastic cutbacks in newsrooms.
So it was easy for a demagogic governor, Paul LePage, to set about undermining reform. His successor, the current governor, Janet Mills, failed to undo the damage. With no one around who remembered what the take-the-child-and-run mentality had done to Logan Marr and so many children needlessly taken before her, it was easy for that mentality to take hold again in the wake of high-profile deaths of children “known to the system.”
And perhaps that’s also why, in a story about progress in finally reducing the number of children in foster care, the Portland Press Herald didn’t look back far enough.
Some, but not all, of the progress is real, and the Maine Office of Child and Family Services deserves credit for that. But in context, the story says more about how far Maine has fallen than about how much it has progressed. And that’s before we reach how some youth were left out of the data.
The story reports that
“The number of children in Maine in state custody has dipped below 2,000 for the first time since 2019, continuing a downward trend officials credit in part to more focus on preventing abuse and neglect.”
The story reports that, according to OCFS, the number of children trapped in Maine foster care on any given day is down to 1,801. That’s compared to a high of 2,579 in July of 2024.
For starters, as is discussed below, the real number isn’t 1,801. It’s 1,944 –under 2000, but barely.
Even at 1,944, that probably represents real progress. But Maine has become such an extreme outlier that, compared to most of the rest of the country, its record still stinks.
In 2024, the most recent year for which comparative data are available, when the number of children in foster care on any given day is compared to the number of impoverished children in each state, Maine held proportionately more children in foster care than all but four other states – the rate of placement was well over two-and-a-half times the national average. The current figure used in the Press-Herald story, 1,801, still leaves Maine tearing apart families at the 12th highest rate in America – a rate more than double the national average. The real figure, 1,944, would leave Maine’s rate of removal 11th highest in America.
Sources: Impoverished child population: Census Bureau
Children in foster care: Maine DHHS
In other words, no matter how you count it, Maine’s rate of holding children in foster has indeed declined – from obscene to merely outrageous.
And here’s where I wish the story had looked farther back. On Sept. 30, 2011, the first year LePage took office, but before he started undermining reform, there were only 1,296 children in foster care. That still was above the national average at the time, but only by 9%.
What didn’t get into the story
Now, let’s get into the weeds to see the missing context:
● Older foster youth aren’t included in the 1,801 figure. In response to emailed questions from NCCPR, Lindsay Hammes, press secretary for the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees OCFS, mentioned that the 1,801 figure did not include foster youth age 18 or over. Hammes said that with those youth included, the total would be 1,944. She said they gave both figures to the Press Herald. In response to NCCPR’s queries, Hammes says DHHS has asked the Press Herald for a correction. Hammes also said that, in a Press-Herald graphic comparing the number of foster children over time, the figures for prior years do include older foster youth. That makes the decline look bigger than it really is. (The federal government requires that older foster youth be included in the figures states provide to its national database, and Maine does that.)
● Hidden foster care. We also don’t know how much of the current decline is a mirage – simply a function of hidden foster care. These are essentially blackmail placements. They may not use these exact words but, in effect, the caseworker is telling the family: “Sure, you can try to fight us and go to court, but you’ll almost certainly lose, and if you fight us, we’ll place the kids with strangers and we might have to split them up. But if you just sign this ‘voluntary’ agreement (or sometimes, in some states, there’s no paper at all), we’ll place all of them together with grandma or another relative.”
By signing the paper, the family signs away what few rights it may have – and also, these “informal” placements typically are not reported in the official figures a state sends to the federal government. That makes the state’s numbers for tearing apart families look artificially lower than they really are.
In Maine, this takes several forms. When the hidden foster care is the result of a so-called “voluntary” or “informal” placements, Hammes says OCFS doesn’t track them. In fact, not all such placements are foster care – but if OCFS is in any way involved, they should be counted.
Where the placements are a result of what OCFS calls “a short-term alternative care plan” Hammes says the number has decreased since 2019 – but she didn’t give the current number. Without such data, we can’t be sure how much of the decline in foster care numbers is real. This would not necessarily affect Maine’s standing compared to other states, however, since no state is completely candid about this.
● What about entries? All of the above is a measure of the “snapshot number,” the number of children in foster care on any given day. This is a very important measure, but it can rise or fall for reasons unrelated to a state’s propensity for taking away children in the first place. The story doesn’t examine the number of children taken away over the course of a year – the key measure of a state’s propensity to tear apart families. It’s not just the story that doesn’t mention it. The OCFS Child Welfare Data Dashboard also measures the snapshot number, but not the entry number.
But, because states have to report entries to the federal government, we know that in FFY 2024, Maine tore 967 children from their parents and consigned them to foster care – a rate more than double the national average. In response to our query, Hammes said that in FFY 2025, the number was 731. To the extent that the decline is real and not a function of hidden foster care, that’s a genuine improvement. But it still would leave Maine tearing apart families at a rate over 50% above the national average. And back in 2011, the state took 552 children, well below the national average at that time.
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| Sources: Impoverished child population: Census Bureau Entreis into foster care: Maine DHHS |
● Regressing on kinship foster care. When it comes to the kind of kinship foster care that actually can be measured, Maine appears to be moving backwards. In 2024, OCFS told the federal government that 44% percent of foster children were in kinship foster care. They just told the Press Herald that it is now down to 36.6%. While it is reasonable that, if foster care numbers are declining, the raw number of children placed with relatives would decline, there is no good reason for the big decline in the percentage of children placed with relatives.
There’s no excuse for Maine being such an outlier
More disturbing than the omission of 143 foster youth is the fact that the story buys into the excuses OCFS and others have used for years to account for Maine’s extreme outlier status. According to the story:
Maine’s child welfare system has struggled for years to meet rising caseloads. Long court backlogs, a struggling mental health system and limited access to facilities that treat substance use disorder created more demand for services, pushing many kids into a system without the resources to manage them.
But mental health issues and substance abuse are problems everywhere. Other states have coped with them without rushing to tear apart families and forcing them into foster care at one of the highest rates in America.
Nor is the problem nearly as prevalent as the fearmongers, nationally and in Maine, want us to believe. In 2024, in 57% of cases where children were thrown into foster care, there was not even an allegation of any form of substance abuse. Not just no allegation of a fentanyl overdose or a meth lab – no allegation of any drug abuse of any kind. As for the long court backlogs – that’s a function of flooding the system with children who never needed to be taken away.
No, the reversal of reform and the foster-care panic that swept through Maine were not a function of actual need – it was pure politics.
It reflects the demagoguery of Paul LePage and the failure of Janet Mills to counter it, goaded every step of the way in recent years by Maine Child Welfare Ombudsman Christine Alberi. She exploits horror stories about families the way Donald Trump exploits horror stories about immigrants while showing the same respect for science as RFK Jr. This can be seen in her rejection of random sampling in favor of extrapolating from horror stories and how her fearmongering about drug abuse compares to what science tells us. But lawmakers appear hellbent on giving her more power, with no accountability.
And the way OCFS has chosen to make progress makes that progress especially vulnerable. Their approach boils down to a form of noblesse oblige: We’ll give families a little money when we feel like it, we’ll provide more “training” in the way we want things done. There is no recognition that children have a right to live in their own families – because for the overwhelming majority of children, the overwhelming majority of the time, it is not only better for their well-being, it is safer than foster care.
So OCFS opposed a stronger, more meaningful version of poverty-is-not-neglect legislation than the much more limited version that actually passed. OCFS opposed a bill that simply would require it to prove to a judge that leaving a child in her or his own home would be more harmful than tearing the family apart. And OCFS has failed to push hard for high-quality legal representation for families, one of the most effective “preventive services” of all; not because it gets bad families off, but because that kind of representation can craft alternatives to the cookie-cutter “service plans” so often dished out by OCFS.
But because they’ve chosen a noblesse oblige approach, it can all be washed away as soon as there’s another high-profile fatality and efforts to keep families together are scapegoated. There is nothing in Maine’s recent history or its current leadership to suggest that, when the next tragedy happens, they won’t just let what little progress has been made be obliterated.
