NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending September 30, 2026

● First and foremost this week: A new development involving one of the most crucial issues in child welfare: the perverse financial incentives that encourage foster care and discourage better, safer alternatives.  

I’m proud to be part of United Family Advocates, a group that brings together Left and Right where we have common ground on these issues. This is real bipartisanship, not a group dominated by one ideology with token representation from the other. And it’s not limited to centrists who lean slightly one way or the other. 

UFA has released a comprehensive plan to change the horrible financial incentives that have dominated child welfare for decades; incentives in which foster care is funded through a huge federal entitlement, and alternatives get extremely limited flat funding. UFA’s plan does not increase funding; it realigns funding so every dollar does the most good. You can read UFA’s press release, with a link to the full plan, here.  

● Speaking of bad financial incentives in child welfare: 10 years ago, when it was introduced, I explained why the Family First Act would fail & how child welfare establishment would exploit the failure to push for more foster care. As my latest column for The Imprint illustrates, if Kalshi had been around back then, I’d have made a fortune. 

● Everything bad about foster care is worse for children who are disabled. NPR has a harrowing story about the treatment of disabled foster children. None of the examples involve children who were abused before they were placed. One involves an Arizona family that “relinquished” the child because they couldn’t get enough help to care for him at home. He died in a group home. In another, in California, the parents were accused of drug use, but the child already was living with her grandmother and great parents. She was taken anyway, and died in foster care.

As you read about all the horrible failings of the group home in that first case, don’t overlook this: One month after the child died, the company running the group home “won accreditation from the state and an accreditation agency to operate for another three years.”

● In Washington State, the family was living in squalor, in a park in a tent; the mother was being trafficked. She kept refusing help. The knee-jerk response would be: take the child and run. But as NBC News explains, a police officer saw a better way: Get the trafficker out of the way. From the story: 

The breakthrough came on New Year’s Eve, when the man who had been trafficking the boy’s mother was hospitalized. The mother and son were there with him when a social worker contacted police. An officer who knew The More We Love called [executive director Kristine] Moreland, and around 1 a.m., mother and son arrived at the organization’s crisis center. 

Check out what happened next. 

There are three interesting court cases in Georgia: 

● If the circumstances that prompt a state to want to tear apart a family are not an emergency, that means there’s time to have a court hearing first. But Georgia family police want the right to run to a judge whenever they feel like it and get an order without letting the family defend itself. The Georgia Recorder reports that, in a case in which that action compounded a family tragedy, the State Supreme Court appears skeptical. 

● In another case, The Imprint reports that a federal court has set some limits on Georgia making parents pay ransom to get their kids back from foster care. (Well, no, they don’t call it ransom, but that’s what it is.) The federal court ruled that Georgia can’t do this when the children already are out of foster care because they’ve been adopted or aged out – in other words, in cases including those where the parents have been totally cut out of the child’s life, will never get the child back but still must pay ransom. Unfortunately, the decision goes no further, but the litigation is continuing. 

● And then there’s the case of the man whose children have not spent so much as a minute in foster care – even though their father is charged with driving drunk while the children were in the car, rear-ending another vehicle and then fleeing the scene. Earlier this month, The Imprint reports, he pleaded not guilty. Of course, unlike the parents in the previous two cases, this father not only is a high-powered Georgia political operative; he’s also married to the head of the state child welfare agency. 

● In Maine, a man overseeing a mother’s drug test allegedly forces her to strip and stares at her. Then, it allegedly gets worse. The family police agency, on the other hand, is only too glad to look the other way. I have a blog post about it, with links to two news stories. 

● I also have a blog post about the real “oomph” deficit in Santa Clara County, California. So far, no one will stand up to the bullies driving the nation’s worst foster-care panic and endangering children’s lives. 

● Writing in STAT, Sandy Santa of Children’s Rights and Kristen Weber of the National Center for Youth Law explain why the consequences of cuts in the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program “go beyond hunger.” 

Research suggests that when families lose access to food assistance, they may face a greater risk of investigation by child protective services — and, ultimately, being separated. 

That is because poverty and neglect are too often conflated in America’s child welfare systems. When parents cannot afford enough food, stable housing, child care, or other necessities, the conditions created by poverty can bring them to the attention of child protective services. Cutting material support can therefore create a perverse and devastating cycle: The government takes away resources families need to care for their children, and then the child welfare system may intervene because families don’t have the resources to provide for their children. 

● In Tennessee, WSMV-TV reports, families whose children have suffered the trauma of needless removal are beginning to organize. 

● While in Kansas, it sure sounded like the unfortunate influence of one individual kept coming up at a recent legislative hearing, but no one would say the name. We say it in this blog post. 

● It’s great to see Clara Bates and Anne Spoerre win a prestigious state journalism award for their outstanding child welfare reporting at the Missouri Independent. If you want to see why, follow the links in this paragraph from the Independent’s story: 

Bates and Spoerre’s reporting examined persistent problems in Missouri’s child welfare system, including children remaining in foster care longer than federal standards, uneven legal representation that can leave families and children stuck in the system and the experience of a teenager who spent nearly her entire life in foster care and later fought the state to keep her own baby. 

This week’s reminder that the horror stories go in all directions 

● The headline on this story from WLOX-TV in Mississippi sums it up well: “’Held like prisoners’: State spends millions keeping kids in hotels, fails to keep some safe.”