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.

Cranking up the foster care to prison pipeline in Missouri

 

In an interview, the new head of Missouri’s Children’s Division spewed out a gish-gallop of misinformation to try to justify her take-the-child-and-run approach.  We set the record straight.

In an interview with the Missouri Independent, the new head of the Missouri Children’s Division, one of the two agencies (notwithstanding its denials – see below) that take away children and hold them in foster care, said “she wants to bring the Children’s Division back to basics, which she defines as ensuring safety for children.”  

In just those few words, Sara Smith is already out to mislead us; it’s the start of a gish-gallop of misinformation.  So let’s parse the interview, starting with that claim. 

The claim implies that under Smith’s predecessor, Darrell Missey, the Children’s Division became part of a Vast Family Preservation Conspiracy, fanatically devoted to reducing foster care – indeed, she’s come close to saying it outright. 

Well, if that was Missey’s nefarious plan, he wasn’t able to execute it. Yes, foster care numbers declined, but they declined from obscene to merely outrageous. As of 2023, the most recent year for which data are available, Missouri tore apart families at a rate nearly 50% above the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in.  

ENTRIES INTO FOSTER CARE 

PER THOUSAND IMPOVERISHED CHILDREN

And those are only the cases we know about. Missouri loves hidden foster care; placements in which families are, in effect, blackmailed into surrendering their children “voluntarily.” These “Temporary Alternative Placement Arrangements” have no court involvement – and they are not recorded as entries into foster care.  What little data are available suggest that if such placements were included, the total number of children the Children’s Division admits to taking would be at least 20% higher. 

But Smith says she wants even more of them. 

So Missouri is an extreme outlier not in keeping families together but in tearing them apart. The consequences can be seen in cases like this one, and this one, and this one, or this one. But Smith has made clear she wants to make Missouri a worse outlier still.  

This, even though study after study shows that in typical cases, children left in their own homes typically fare better in later life even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care. This in spite of the fact that, though Smith equates child safety with child removal, the rate of abuse in foster care itself is sky-high. 

Where do those children end up? Some will succeed in spite of everything the system does to them. But as the Kansas City Star pointed out, young people in foster care are more likely to end up in prison than in college. Darrell Missey couldn’t do much about it, but at least he understood it. Now Sara Smith is out to turn up the foster-care-to-prison pipeline to full blast. 

● It can be seen in one of her first acts upon taking the job. She handed out stickers that effectively equate child removal with child safety. Of course, she doesn’t use those words. But, the message to the frontlines is clear: I’m handing out stickers that say “centered on safety” because your old boss wasn’t. So if you want to please the new boss, take away more children! 

● It can be seen in her slick, subtle efforts to fearbomb a foundation-funded initiative to curb the confusion of poverty with neglect.  

● And it can be seen again in the facile, disingenuous way Smith ducked the question when asked flar-out if Missouri takes away too many children.  Here’s what she said: 

I think we’re lucky in Missouri to have what I would call kind of a bifurcated system. It’s something that a lot of other states don’t have. Children’s Division cannot remove a child. We would recommend removal to the juvenile office. So the juvenile office that’s receiving that referral, they’re making sure that it’s legally sufficient and that we should be recommending removal. 

And we have those [referrals] denied from Children’s Division where, Children’s Division might think that there’s a safety threat, the child can’t remain in the home. And the juvenile office might look at it and help us understand why that’s not a legally sufficient avenue. 

They’ve been really great partners to us in that space, but having that other look to make sure that you know whatever the concerns are, do meet legal standards, I think helps make me feel better, especially with our turnover rate, that the kids that are in care are actually there for a reason that is legally supported. 

Here are the facts: 

● First, of course, she never actually answers the question. She never explains why, apparently, she sees Missouri as such a cesspool of depravity that even tearing apart families at a rate 50% above the national average isn’t enough.  (Good news, Missouri: You’re not.) 

But the disingenuousness meter goes off the scale when she suggests that Missouri’s notorious fifth wheel, the Juvenile Office, is a check on wrongful removal. 

● For starters, she does not claim that the Juvenile Office actually rejects removals because they are unnecessary – only if they can’t meet the extremely low standards for getting a judge to rubber-stamp what the Children’s Division wants.  Notice how Smith never says how often the Juvenile Office actually does that.  Smith then says she’s confident all that family destruction is “legally supported” – which is not the same thing as: good for the children. 

● Second, Smith never explains that, contrary to her claim, every state has some version of this. Every state either has its own in-house lawyers or relies on a state attorney general’s office or equivalent to check if a case is legally adequate and then decide whether to file it. 

● What makes the Juvenile Office different – and quite possibly unconstitutional – is that it is run by the courts itself.  As Prof. Josh Gupta-Kagan has written: 

By granting juvenile officers, who are subject to judges’ supervision, exclusive power to file child abuse and neglect and juvenile delinquency cases, Missouri law concentrates power into the hands of one branch of government.  Missouri law thus empowers individual judges to set child welfare and juvenile justice policy by managerial decree. Subordinate judicial branch officials face pressure to file and litigate cases to please their boss, the judge, who hired them, supervises them, and has power to fire them. 

● Just as the juvenile office can reject a Children’s Division recommendation to remove, it can proceed to court to take away a child even when the Children’s Division doesn’t think that’s necessary. That probably happens more often than the scenario Smith describes, and it’s probably one of the reasons for Missouri’s high rate of removal. In fact, the juvenile office doesn’t even have to wait for the Children’s Division because … 

● The Juvenile Office acts as, in effect, a second family police agency – and that is unique to Missouri. Anyone who calls the Children’s Division and doesn’t get them to investigate and/or seek to take away a child can simply call the Juvenile Office and try their luck there.  Or they can just call the Juvenile Office first. So the number of times this second front door leads to taking a child who, in other states, would have stayed home, likely far outstrips the number of cases in which they deny a Children’s Division request because it’s legally insufficient. 

Indeed, the Juvenile Office’s reputation long has been that of one more thumb tilting the scales of justice against families – as in this case, for example.  So it’s no wonder Sara Smith loves the Juvenile Office. 

● The claim that only a Juvenile Officer can take away children isn’t true either. You might need to call a juvenile officer if you actually plan to let the family have minimal due process by going to court. But remember those blackmail placements (Temporary Alternative Placement Arrangements)? For those, there’s no court, no Juvenile Office and no pesky due process for families. The Children’s Division can coerce the parent into surrendering the child and then, for Orwellian good measure, call it voluntary. No wonder Sara Smith loves this as well. 

● And finally, if the Juvenile Office is such a great check on needless removal, why do so many other states, none of which has a juvenile office, take proportionately fewer children? 

Hostility to families in every answer 

It’s not just when the topic is rates of removal that Smith’s profound hostility to families seeps through – though always, you have to look closely: 

Take a look at this exchange from the interview: 

[Q:]Do you see training as potentially helping remedy some of the federal issues outlined in the Performance Improvement Plan, such as family engagement? 

[A]: If you’re not meeting with families, how are you moving the needle towards permanence here, or identifying safety threats? I don’t think we can hang our hat there and not do any other work around things, but I do think solid training is going to set us up for a lot better success. 

Family engagement typically means working with the family so they can reunite with their children – because, in the overwhelming majority of cases, that’s what’s best for those children. But in Sara Smith’s world, “family engagement” seems to be just a means of surveillance –“identifying safety threats” – to build a case for termination of parental rights, which sounds like what she means by “moving the needle toward permanence.” 

Teeing up the veto of silence 

One of the reasons it's so hard for families to get attention to their stories is a tactic agencies use that should be called the veto of silence: A family complains that their children were needlessly taken by an agency like the Children’s Division. They tell their story to a reporter. The reporter calls the child welfare agency and is immediately referred to their flack who says: “Oh, well, there’s really so much more to the story and we wish we could tell you, truly we do, but we just can’t; confidentiality, you know.” 

Sadly, that’s often been enough to scare reporters off. But not always – those stories cited earlier by excellent Missouri journalists are examples of overriding the veto of silence.  But Smith makes clear she’ll be trying to invoke that veto whenever she can. Here’s how she tees it up: 

I think there’s a lot to Children’s Division. Being in it for so long, it’s complicated, and it’s a space that — we respect families’ privacy, and we can only share certain things, and there’s a lot that we can’t share about the work that happens. And that’s really hard sometimes, because you want to be able to share all the complicating factors that are happening and the ins and outs of different pieces. But we can only talk about how the process should work in a best case scenario. 

And I don’t think we should necessarily talk about case specifics, because that is a family’s right to privacy. A child’s right to his or her information being kept close to the vest for Children’s Division, but then having the opportunity to be transparent with our stakeholders about what’s happening, what the pain points are and using those systemic things and trends to be able to work with them to create some change. 

What that gobbledygook really means is: We love confidentiality laws, because they let us hide what we do to families and persuade you not to write about it!  Of course, some information is legitimately confidential, but when a family comes forward to tell its story, at least two states, New York and Arizona allow their equivalent of the Children’s Division to respond. The reason other states don’t is simple: Their child welfare agencies don’t want that right; it takes away their ability to invoke the veto of silence. 

And, of course, thanks to some outstanding reporting decades ago by the Springfield News-Leader,  most portions of court hearings themselves are open in Missouri. But the sky hasn’t fallen, because, just as in the case of adult victims of sexual assault, reporters are good about protecting the privacy of children – as opposed to the interests of agencies. 

This is why NCCPR favors a rebuttable presumption that all court hearings and almost all documents in these cases be open.  Lawyers for children and lawyers for parents could go to court to rebut the presumption and keep closed any records the disclosure of which might harm a child.  The Children’s Division and the Juvenile Office should not even be able to ask for secrecy  - because they have no interest in secrecy except to cover their failings and try to impose the veto of silence. 

One thing Smith got right 

Smith repeatedly invoked her long, long tenure at the Children’s Division as some kind of asset. I’m not sure why anyone would say being a lifer in an agency that has done such a lousy job for so long is a job qualification, but be that as it may, she did say one thing that’s right on the mark: 

I think I’ve had nine [directors] since I started Children’s Division. And I’ve heard this from Children’s Division team members: ‘We’re just going to wait it out. There’ll be somebody else coming in with a different philosophical view.’ 

That would certainly help explain why Darrell Missey had so little success.  As for long-timers waiting it out until someone comes along “with a different philosophical point of view” – I wonder who Smith had in mind?

Update: Missouri’s take-the-child-and-run approach leads to tragedy

This agency's failure to follow federal law contributed to an unspeakable tragedy

Last fall, I took issue with how KCUR public radio in Kansas City handled a story about the failings of the state’s family policing system (a more accurate term than “child welfare” system).  In many ways, it was a good story, but it still missed the point.  I concluded it this way:

 This was certainly a better story than many, perhaps most day-to-day reporting on “child welfare.”  But the fact that even an excellent reporter producing an in-depth public radio story can use a case in which the only thing separating a family is housing, another case in which visits with children are being used as a “reward” for a parent, have a caseworker admit that children are in foster care needlessly, all in a state that tears apart families at a rate 50% above the national average – and still think the primary problem is a “shortage” of caseworkers, suggests that the journalism of child welfare has a long way to go. 

Two weeks later, the Missouri Independent showed a better understanding of the issue.   And I wrote a commentary about how the head of the state’s “child welfare” agency, Darrell Missey,  effectively admitted violating federal law requiring family police to make “reasonable efforts” to keep families together. 

Naturally, Missey has paid no price for this.  The same cannot be said for the mother who lacked housing, Shayla Curts.  In December, she was shot to death. 

As KCUR reports in this follow-up story, Shayla’s family is asking: 

Did problems with the Jackson County, Missouri, foster care system force Shayla into an unnecessarily risky living situation? 

“She would still be alive if they’d have put her, like they promised, in housing,” [Shayla’s mother] Dezirae said. “They were looking for housing, shelter or transitional housing, just somewhere she could take the kids.” 

Again it’s a good story. But again it misses the point.  It attributes the problem largely to a shortage of caseworkers, instead of the fact that Missouri is now tearing apart families at an even more obscene rate than before.  In the months since the original story, most of America got better – but Missouri got even worse.  Now, the rate of removal in Missouri is more than 80% above the national average.  The fact that Missouri tears apart families at the 10th highest rate in America is never mentioned in the story.  Neither is the issue of Missey’s failure to follow federal law.

The good news: A public radio station in Kansas City talked to the right people for a "child welfare" story. The bad news: They still missed the point

A billboard from JMac For Families

 

 The story shows deep compassion for the trauma caused by removing children – the trauma it causes for those doing the removing, that is. 

Often, when I single out for criticism particular stories about “child welfare” – or as it should be called family policing, it’s because the reporter never bothered to even speak to parents who have had their children taken, or to lawyers for such parents.  

So perhaps I should just be grateful that a reporter for KCUR public radio didn’t make that mistake. She conscientiously reached out to both and included their perspectives.  Perhaps I should settle for being pleased this story is better than so many others.  

But I’m not going to do that.  Because in spite of its strengths, this story still missed the point in so many ways.  It is the work of a reporter who previously did a very good story on these issues.  But this time, it seems, she found it easier to identify with the police force than with those who are policed.  Perhaps because, unlike poor people of color who understand what really happens, most journalists still have trouble thinking of child protective services caseworkers as police. 

But that’s what they are.  Sometimes caseworkers are good cops.  Sometimes they are nice cops.  Sometimes they are cops who do their best to help families.  But they are always cops. 

The story concerns the harm being done to children and families because of what is said to be an acute shortage of caseworkers and constant turnover as caseworkers quit due to burnout.  The premise is that because of the “shortage,” children can’t see their parents while in foster care, and families don’t get the guidance they need to jump through all the hoops they must surmount to prove themselves worthy of getting their children back. 

Let’s start with the most basic failure: the false premise underlying the entire story.  Missouri does not have too few caseworkers.  Missouri has too many foster children.  Missouri tears apart families at a rate more than 50% above the national average, even when rates of family poverty are factored in.  If Missouri did no more than become no worse than average about tearing apart families, there would be enough caseworkers.  Those workers would have low enough caseloads that they would be less prone to burnout and quit. 

But nowhere in the story is there any mention of Missouri’s high rate of removal.  And while there is a brief suggestion, way at the bottom, that some removals of children aren’t necessary, nowhere is a connection made between this and the so-called shortage of caseworkers. 

Getting down to cases 

The story begins this way: 

Shayla Curts, 22, had been living at Newhouse KC, a domestic violence shelter in Kansas City, Missouri, for several months after the birth of her second child. She said it gave her a safe place to breast feed her infant and care for her 4-year-old while trying to get back on her feet. 

But she was asked to leave Newhouse after what she claims were false allegations of misconduct. Because Curts didn't have a stable housing alternative, on June 15, 2022, investigators from the Jackson County Children’s Division of the Missouri Department of Social Services and two policemen came to take her children into protective custody. 

Anybody see the problem here yet?  If not, consider how the reporter circles back to Ms. Curts at the end: 

She has a new caseworker who has been responding and appears committed to helping Curts get her kids back as soon as possible. And she’s started a job at McDonald's. 

“It should be 60 days, four checks or so and I’ll have at least enough to get accepted into an apartment,’" she said. “I need housing before I can get my kids back. My plan is to have a place, and move in, within 60 days.” 

OK, now do we see the problem?  At no point is anyone -- caseworker, supervisor or administrator – asked one simple question: “Why in God’s name are you tearing apart families just because they don’t have 60-days worth of McDonald’s-level pay to move into an apartment?”  

It’s not like the state can’t afford to step in and provide this money.  Even with the federal government  picking up a large share of the tab for foster care, Missouri still will pay more for foster care than it would cost to help Ms. Curts get an apartment.  There is at least one Kansas City Missouri police officer KCUR could have spoken to who understands this perfectly. 

Using visits as a “reward” 

In another case, KCUR tells us, a father 

continues to adhere to the requirements of his court order: going to therapy, getting psychological evaluations, taking anger management and parenting classes. He has been rewarded by progressively more time with his four-year-old son and three-year-old daughter. 

But the court’s not holding up its end of the deal, he said. There have been three-month periods when he's gone without seeing his children. 

By focusing on the caseworker “shortage” impeding visits, the story misses the larger point: It is an act of state-sanctioned child abuse to use visits with children as a reward or punishment for parents – if for no other reason than the fact that the victims of that punishment are the children.  Visits are the most important way, sometimes the only way, to ease the enormous emotional trauma that removal inflicts on children.  Depriving children of visits in order to use visits as carrots or sticks against parents is barbaric.  But this barbarity goes unremarked upon. 

“Secondary trauma” as primary problem 

The story shows far more concern about the emotional toll on – yes, the caseworkers. It cites a regional director for the state family policing agency, known in Missouri as the Children’s Division, who says caseworkers 

often suffer what’s known as secondary trauma, the experience of absorbing the grief, anxiety and anger that comes with routinely seeing the impact on families when parents and children are separated. 

Hmmm. How might we fix this? The story suggests counseling and pay raises for the workers.  I don’t object to either.  But there might just be a better way: How about sparing caseworkers the secondary trauma they experience when they remove kids by having them not inflict the primary trauma of separation on all those kids in the first place? 

I would ask readers to stop and consider for a moment how they might react to a story about law enforcement that suggested the biggest problem with stop-and-frisk policing is the secondary trauma inflicted on the cops who do the stopping and the frisking – and that the solution to the failings of law enforcement is to pay the police more and give them counseling. 

In fairness, the KCUR story doesn’t ignore needless removal entirely.  It quotes one former caseworker who said 

the hardest part of her job were the bureaucratic obstacles she faced in trying to reunite families after relatively minor infractions.  "There was often nothing there, no reason for a kid to be in foster care," she said. “I remember one of the these cases took an entire year. It was like the court pushed for them to remain separated." 

Courts have exceptional power to do that in Missouri, since they actually run what amounts to a second, parallel (and probably unconstitutional) family policing agency known as the “juvenile office” – which often can be even worse than the Children’s Division. 

This was certainly a better story than many, perhaps most day-to-day reporting on “child welfare.”

But the fact that even an excellent reporter producing an in-depth public radio story can use a case in which the only thing separating a family is housing, another case in which visits with children are being used as a “reward” for a parent, have a caseworker admit that children are in foster care needlessly, all in a state that tears apart families at a rate 50% above the national average – and still think the primary problem is a “shortage” of caseworkers, suggests that the journalism of child welfare has a long way to go.