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

● Two years after one sensation-seeking member of the Board of Supervisors and one Pulitzer-sniffing journalist for the San Jose Mercury News in Santa Clara County set off the worst foster-care panic anywhere in America in decades, the other members of the Board are starting to wonder if they did the right thing. They brought in a panel of state and national experts for a study session. As The Imprint reports, they made clear the answer is no. The Mercury News also eventually published a story. I have a blog post about that one. 

● The Tampa Bay Times follows up on its outstanding expose of the enormous harm of hidden foster care. Among other results, a Florida member of Congress will now cosponsor a bill that would require states to at least keep track of – and disclose – how many children they place in hidden foster care. 

● Also in Florida: I don’t know if the underlying decision to remove the child in the case I write about here was right, though there is strong cause to doubt it. I do know that everything else the Florida Department of Children and Families did was wrong – and probably far more common than the agency will ever admit. See especially the bodycam video revealing the appalling behavior of caseworkers. 

● As the time approaches for Minnesota to implement a law requiring county family police agencies to do more to keep families together, it seems the state and the counties have spent more time whining about the law than preparing for it. The Imprint reports that “an advisory council has issued a report saying the state lacks the ability to assess” whether the law is working. 

“Whether the law fulfills that promise will not be determined by its enactment,’’ its authors wrote. “It will be determined by whether Minnesota builds the standards, services, authority, accountability, and enduring infrastructure necessary to make its protections real in families’ lives.” 

● The Davis Vanguard offers an excellent overview of the confusion of poverty with neglect. From the story:

Consider a family facing eviction because it cannot pay several thousand dollars in back rent. 

One possible government response is to allow the family to lose its housing, investigate the parents because their children no longer have stable shelter, remove the children, pay foster parents or residential providers, assign caseworkers, appoint attorneys and require parents to complete a series of services before reunification. 

Another possibility is to prevent the eviction. 

● And in Georgia, the Albany Herald compares two counties with starkly different rates of taking away children – and starkly different rates of poverty. 

● Also in Georgia: The persecution of a mother who, exhausted and living in a shelter for battered women, accidentally left one of her children in a hot car where he died, continues. Her surviving children suffer most. Former Washington Post reporter and editor Gene Weingarten, who has been following the case on his Substack, has an update.

● And still in Georgia: The state family police agency has an $81 million deficit. Wait ‘till you see where some of the money went, as reported by The Center Square.

● In The Imprint, Ruth White, executive director of the National Center for Housing and Child Welfare, and a member of the NCCPR Board of Directors, writes about the “vexing admixture of learned helplessness, paternalism and institutional parochialism among the professional class” that prevents youth aging out of foster care from getting the housing benefits to which they are entitled and which are readily available under a federal program. (It’s an excellent program regardless of who insisted on slapping her name on it.) 

● Virginia has a “reasonable childhood independence” law. But when have mere laws stopped the family police? Lenore Skenazy writes in Reason about what happened to one mother in Virginia who gave her child reasonable childhood independence. See also this story about the case from The Washington Post. 

● Some better news from Virginia: In that state, the law was unclear about whether, if pregnant women were taking prescribed medication to treat opioid use disorder, mandated reporters still had to turn them in to the family police. In the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Robert Melvin of the R Street Institute praises lawmakers for passing legislation clarifying that the answer is no. 

For pregnant women receiving medication for opioid use disorder (MOUD), like methadone or buprenorphine, clear health guidance is critical. They need to be able to talk frankly with their doctors about their situation without triggering a mandatory-reporting call to CPS. That fear is the biggest impediment, which is why Virginia’s approach is so important. 

In this week’s reminder that the horror stories go in all directions: 

● If the allegations in the lawsuit that is the topic of this story from WEHT-TV are true, Indiana’s hair trigger for tearing apart families may have cost a three-year-old boy his life. 

In March, 2022, Leon Morrero was born with medical issues so complex that his mother, Nicole, had to complete three months of medical training before her son could be released from the hospital. More than three years later, his mother brought him to the hospital for more treatment. 

As the story explains: 

Nicole reportedly spent time with Leon daily, while balancing the needs of her other children. 

On September 21, a release says Nicole went to the hospital to visit Leon, leaving her other child in the care of her 14-year-year-old daughter to babysit. Nicole then went to dinner with a friend and fell asleep at the friend’s house. 

The next day, Nicole was reportedly arrested at the hospital and charged with child neglect for allowing the child to babysit her younger sibling. 

The Vanderburgh County Department of Child’s Services removed all of Nicole’s children from her care due to the allegations. Her contact with Leon was also limited by DCS while he stayed in the hospital. 

But, the lawsuit alleges, the foster parents got only a few hours of training. It wasn’t enough. Within days the boy needed emergency medical care. But he was returned to the same foster parents. Four months later, he died. 

● From the Missouri Independent: 

A children’s Christian residential facility whose director has spent three years urging Missouri lawmakers to allow unlicensed religious organizations to care for foster children in state custody is being sued in federal court by former residents who allege they were subjected to forced labor and sexual abuse. 

Three lawsuits filed against Show-Me Christian Youth Home allege that the former residents were forced to perform heavy manual labor under threat of food deprivation, isolation or more work. The lawsuits also allege the three plaintiffs, who each spent time in the same Show-Me household between 2007 and 2012, were touched sexually, beaten while naked, surveilled in the shower by their “house father” and punished when they reported the abuse. … 

Show-Me Christian Youth Home, which is based in La Monte, denies the allegations. In Aug. 24 court filings, the organization also argued it cannot be held liable because any alleged harm was caused by employees acting “outside the course and scope of their employment.” It contends the lawsuits violate the First Amendment by asking the court “to rule on or excessively entangle itself in religious doctrine, policy and administration.” 

● You know all those exposés about group homes and “residential treatment” centers? As The Guardian reports, the problem isn’t just limited to the United States.