Congratulations Phoenix: When it comes to tearing apart families in big cities, you’re still #1!

 

Bipartisanship in action! In Arizona both parties have failed the state's children

(This post is adapted from NCCPR’s press release to Arizona media.) 

NCCPR has updated its Big CityRate-of-Removal Index, comparing the propensity of America’s ten largest cities and their surrounding counties, to tear apart families. Once again, the champion for big-city family destruction, metropolitan Phoenix, Arizona. 

Children are at greater risk of being torn from everyone they know and love and consigned to the chaos of foster care in Phoenix than in any other of America’s largest cities. It’s a long, ugly tradition. 

Year after year, the Department of Child Safety, Arizona’s family police agency (a more accurate term than ‘child welfare’ agency), cuts a swath of destruction through poor families in Phoenix at a vastly higher rate than any other such agency does in any other of America’s ten largest cities and their surrounding counties. 

And while it’s all done in the name of ‘child safety,’ of course, the DCS take-the-child-and-run mentality makes all children less safe. The mentality was revealed to the nation in 2020 when workers in a DCS office thought it would be a laugh riot to wear matching t-shirts emblazoned with the words ‘Professional Kidnapper.’ The workers were fired, but the data show the mentality remains. 

NCCPR’s Big City Rate-of-Removal Index compares the number of children thrown into foster care to the impoverished child population in America’s ten largest cities and their surrounding counties. Maricopa County (metropolitan Phoenix) is an extreme outlier. Children are taken from their parents in Maricopa County at a rate: 

● 50% percent higher than the second-worst region – Santa Clara County.

● More than 60% higher than the third worst, Los Angeles County.

● Nearly two-and-a-half times the national average for big cities.

● More than triple the rate of New York City.

● Nearly six times the rate of Chicago. 

There is no evidence that Phoenix is a cesspool of depravity with vastly more child abuse than any other big city in America. Rather, this is evidence of a take-the-child-and-run mentality, rooted in racial and class bias, that has plagued child welfare in Arizona for decades. 

The problem is compounded by Arizona’s overreliance on the worst, and most dangerous, form of care – group homes and institutions. Arizona institutionalizes 41% of children entering foster care, a rate more than two-and-a-half times the national average. 

You may be sure that DCS will respond to the facts about its abysmal performance with the Big Lie of American child welfare: the false claim that child removal equals child safety. 

But the Big Lie ignores:

● The mass of research showing that, in typical cases, not the horror stories, children left in their own homes typically fare better even than comparably-maltreated children thrown into foster care. That research includes a stunning recent study showing that, under these circumstances, by age 20, the foster children were more than four times more likely to die.

● The mass of research showing high rates of abuse in foster homes and even higher rates of abuse in group homes and institutions – all those news accounts about the horrors of Arizona group homes and institutions are not aberrations.

● The mass of research showing that poverty is routinely confused with neglect. The research is confirmed by data from Arizona, where, in 87% of cases in which children were thrown into foster care, there was not even an accusation of sexual abuse or any form of physical abuse. In fact, Arizona took away more children because of inadequate housing than for physical and sexual abuse combined. In 62% there was not even an accusation of any form of drug or alcohol abuse – not just no accusation of meth or fentanyl, no accusation of any drug or alcohol abuse of any kind.

All this does enormous harm to the children needlessly taken – and also to those who might be spared foster care but still face the enormous trauma of a child abuse investigation – which involves a traumatic interrogation and, sometimes, a stripsearch. Almost always, this trauma is inflicted as a result of a false report or a poverty case. Nationwide, more than half of all Black children will be forced to endure this trauma at some point in their childhoods. But Arizona is different. In Arizona, it’s two-thirds.

But these aren’t the only children harmed. All the time, money and effort wasted harming children in these cases is, in effect, stolen from finding the relatively few children in real danger. That’s almost always the real reason such children are overlooked, leading to the horror stories that, rightly, make headlines. That’s how the Arizona approach makes all children less safe.

Actions by Gov. Katie Hobbs have compounded the problems. These actions include:

● Giving a giant rate increase to a politically-connected group home operator.

● Giving a giant pay raise to foster parents – and, in effect, making poor people pay for it.

● Taking away support for the least harmful form of foster care, kinship foster care, in which children are placed with extended family.

But the governor’s political opponents have no cause to gloat. In a rare example of bipartisanship, governors and legislators from both parties have been failing Arizona’s vulnerable children for decades, something we documented in a report we released on Arizona child welfare in 2007.

It doesn’t have to be that way. In other states, lawmakers and state leaders have worked across party lines to curb needless removal and make all children safer. In Texas, for example, with strong bipartisan support, lawmakers raised the threshold for coercive intervention into families. In New York and New Jersey, governments bolstered high-quality legal defense for families – not to get “bad parents” off but to craft alternatives to the cookie-cutter ‘service plans’ churned out by agencies like DCS. For more solutions, see NCCPR’s Due Process Agenda and for more examples of strong legislation see the NCCPR Good Bill Bank. Together, these bills and other solutions create a true blueprint for child safety.

They represent ways Arizona could turn its system around and make all children safer. All it needs is the will to finally renounce the take-the-child-and-run mentality that has made all of the state’s children less safe.

Arizona governor robs poor families to give middle-class foster parents a giant pay raise

 

It’s almost as if Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs stole a page from Donald Trump’s playbook. She’s moving to attract greedy potential foster parents to join the majority who are not in it for the money. And the way she is doing it is the equivalent of telling poor families: We’re going to build a wall between you and your children – and we’re going to make you pay for it! 

Fresh from giving a giant rate increase to a group home operator (and generous campaign donor) with a questionable record, Hobbs is lavishing an even bigger rate increase – 50% -- on state foster parents, who already do quite well. 

As of 2022, depending on a child’s age and needs, foster parents got anywhere from $637 to $1,465 per month. That’s per child, not per family. Hobbs says that, with the rate increase, foster parent reimbursement will average between $1,000 and $1,700 per month. 

All of that is tax-free. Foster children’s health insurance is covered, and in some cases, working foster parents can even get childcare aid; the kind of aid that, had it gone to birth parents, might have prevented children being taken for “lack of supervision.” 

I don’t think most foster parents are in it for the money. But wouldn’t we all like to keep it that way? Do we really want someone who says, “I won’t do it for less than $1,000 a month, tax-free, plus health insurance for the kids and maybe a childcare subsidy” to be a foster parent? 

Now, let’s consider who’s footing the bill: 

When Congress replaced “welfare as we knew it” with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the money was supposed to help impoverished families become self-sufficient. But the rules are so vague that some states have turned TANF into a child welfare slush fund. 

In that regard, Arizona is a national leader, diverting more than 60% of TANF funds away from impoverished families.  As ProPublica explained: 

Welfare in Arizona largely goes not to helping poor parents financially but rather to the state’s Department of Child Safety — an agency that investigates many of these same parents, and that sometimes takes their kids away for reasons arising from the poverty that they were seeking help with in the first place. 

How much more good could that TANF money do if it were actually used to help poor people? There’s a clue in why Arizona children are taken away – it’s almost never because of the horror stories that make headlines. 

Of all the Arizona children torn from their families and thrown into foster care in 2024, 87%  did not involve even an allegation of physical or sexual abuse. In fact, almost as many children were taken because of “inadequate housing” as because of physical and sexual abuse combined. 

Hobbs claims the state has to lure in more foster parents with big bucks in order to have places for children now needlessly confined to group homes and institutions. 

Arizona is, indeed, a horrific outlier in this regard. It throws 41% of foster children into group homes and institutions; the national average is 16%. (That kind of makes you wonder why she also gave that big increase to some of those same group homes and institutions.) 

But the solution to overuse of group homes can be found in another ugly Arizona statistic: The state still tears apart families at a rate 25% above the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in. Stop taking so many children needlessly, often when family poverty is confused with neglect, and there will be plenty of room in the foster homes Arizona already has. 

Hobbs adds insult to family injury by implying that she is providing some special benefit to extended family members who provide kinship foster care. But the giant pay raise applies only to licensed foster parents. Federal law already requires that all licensed foster parents – whether kin or strangers – be paid the same amount. 

The biggest problem in foster care rates is the lack of support for relatives who provide safe, loving homes, but may not be able to meet licensing requirements that can be geared more to middle-class creature comforts instead of only health and safety necessities. Hobbs' giant pay raise doesn’t apply to them. 

And when it comes to discretionary spending, Hobbs took away $6.5 million in support for kinship foster care – and diverted it to group homes and institutions. 

Brick by financial brick, Gov. Hobbs builds an ever-higher wall between children and the families who love them – and makes those families pay for it.

Arizona’s great big rate increase for a group home provider: State officials deny it was pay-for-play; but their own explanation is nearly as bad.

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs

Shortly after taking office as Governor of Arizona, Katie Hobbs announced what could have been a breakthrough: She named a real reformer, Matthew Stewart, to run the state family police agency, the Department of Child Safety. For the first time in decades, the agency would have a leader who understood that the root of Arizona’s child welfare problems was the fact that it tears apart families at a rate well above the national average. That’s compounded by Arizona’s obsession with institutionalizing the children it takes. 

  National Average       Arizona
                  Source: U.S. Deparrtment of Health and Human Services AFCARS Dashboard               

Indeed, the culture of child removal runs so deep that workers in one office thought they would get away with wearing t-shirts that said: “Professional Kidnapper.” 

Right after the governor named Stewart, I wrote a column for the Arizona Republic praising her decision. “Stewart will need ongoing support from the governor,” I wrote. “It looks like he’s going to get it.” 

Boy, did I ever get that wrong! Just weeks after he was nominated, while on the job but still awaiting a confirmation vote from the State Senate, Hobbs withdrew the nomination and replaced him with David Lujan. 

It’s never been clear why. But one possible explanation has emerged, thanks to some great investigative reporting by the Republic. 

The story recounts this chain of events: 

● Sunshine Residential, an Arizona for-profit operator of group homes, run by Simon Kottoor, donates $300,000 to Hobbs’ campaign and another $100,000 to her inaugural – the latter in response to a personal request from Hobbs herself.

● Sunshine Residential asks for a 30% rate increase. They threaten to refuse children from DCS, claiming they got a better offer from the federal government to house migrant children. Three other providers also seek increases.

● Matthew Stewart says no.

● Stuart is replaced by David Lujan.

● Lujan says yes – to Sunshine Residential.

From the story: 

“We are weak, no leadership, perfect time to get what they want,” Alex Ong, then the head of contracts and procurement at DCS, wrote about the requests from group homes. He wrote to then-Deputy Director Robert Navarro in late January 2023 that it wasn’t the time to approve higher rates. 

“I agree...But when simon gives money to the gov...it can make magic happen,” Navarro responded. 

Later, the Republic reports 

Ong would make an eyebrow-raising comment in May 2023. 

"We gotta pay to play now," he wrote. 

DCS spokesman Darren DaRonco said that comment was not related to group homes but made during a conversation about contracts for supervised visitation in DCS cases. 

Lujan says contributions had nothing to do with the rate increase.  But his own explanation isn’t much better. He says DCS needed the beds that Kottoor was threatening to take away. 

Lujan said Sunshine Residential is one of Arizona’s better group home providers.  As the story explains:

Their work was well-regarded by DCS officials, though the company has also faced scrutiny and is named in an ongoing lawsuit over the death of a 9-year-old boy. The boy, Jakob Blodgett, was allowed to refuse diabetes medication before his death. Earlier this year, pregnant 16-year-old Zariah Finley Dodd was murdered shortly after leaving her placement at a group home run by Sunshine Residential. 

And, using the sleazy argument agencies always use to institutionalize children, Lujan said Sunshine Residential's beds were needed to keep siblings together.

In fact, DCS doesn’t need those beds – from Sunshine Residential or anyone else. Rather, DCS still takes away children at a rate well above the national average, even when rates of family poverty are factored in. Children are more likely, by far, to be torn from their parents in Phoenix than any other of America’s ten largest cities and their surrounding counties when rates of child poverty are factored in. 

And no, that’s not because Arizona is a cesspool of depravity with vastly more child abuse.  

Of all the children torn from their families and thrown into foster care in Arizona in 2024, 89% did not involve even an allegation of physical or sexual abuse. In 59% of cases, there was not involve even an allegation of any form of drug abuse.  Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with “neglect.” 

But even more damning than the high rate of needless removal is where the children end up. DCS is obsessed with stashing away the children it takes in so-called “congregate care” – group homes and institutions.  Nationwide, on average, 15% of children taken in 2024 were placed in such settings. In Arizona, it was 41%! 

Stop doing that, and there will be plenty of room in family foster homes for the children who really need them - including sibling groups.

Perhaps Matthew Stewart understood that was the real problem. And perhaps that’s why his tenure was so brief. 

UPDATE:Arizona group home industry tries to take advantage of ouster of the first Black director of the state’s “child welfare” agency.

Hobbs doesn’t go as far as they want, but, for an agency in desperate need of radical change, she chooses someone who promises NOT to do “anything radical.”

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs (Photo by Gage Skidmore)

The recap:

 In a previous post to this blog, I wrote about a huge cave-in by Arizona’s Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs.  She apparently surrenderedto pressure from an extremist Republican legislator, State Sen. Jake Hoffman, and fired Matthew Stewart.  Stewart was, very briefly, the first Black director of the state family police agency, the Department of Child Safety.  Hobbs fired him less than two months after appointing him. 

Stewart had not been confirmed, and Hoffman chairs the committee that would have held the confirmation hearing. 

I wrote about how this was not only a political failure but also a media failure. Arizona media cut-and-pasted Hoffman’s false allegations against Stewart, with no context for either what was alleged or who was alleging it.  The allegations came from a legislator so extreme he was banned from some social media spaces for running a “troll factory.”  Oh, and he’s an election denier – he refuses to even acknowledge that Hobbs is really the governor!  I only know this because ProPublica published a story with the context Arizona media left out.

 Here's what’s new, part one:

 While still failing to provide this context, the Arizona Republic did advance the story a little on Thursday.  They published a story raising questions about whether Stewart was the victim of a campaign by the state’s group home industry.

 The Republic reports that three days after Hobbs fired Stewart, she received a letter from “numerous group home operators” urging her to reinstate Mike Faust, who ran DCS under former Republican Gov. Doug Ducey. Hoffman promptly echoed that call, citing the group home industry letter.

 It’s no wonder they’re so fond of Faust.  Congregate care – group homes and institutions -- is, by far, the worst option for children.  Among all forms of foster care group homes and institutions have the worst record for abusing children in their“care.”  As the Republic story points out: “Under [Faust’s] watch, there were safety issues at several group homes, including last fall, when a foster youth was fatally shot.”  I wrote about another example of Arizona group home failure just last month.

 But even when residents are not physically or sexually abused, group home and institutional care is so inherently harmful that pressure has been growing across the country to get rid of them.  But Arizona lags way behind. The state institutionalizes children at a rate 50% above the national average.  So clearly, the Arizona group home industry had a lot to lose when Hobbs named Stewart, a reformer dedicated to doing more to keep families together, to run DCS.

 The letter from the group home industry came three days after Stewart was fired, so we don’t know if they were urging Hoffman to attack Stewart all along, or if they just saw their opportunity and they took it.

 Responding to Hoffman’s call to bring back Faust, a spokesman for Gov. Hobbs declared that "We won't be taking direction from Hoffman.”  That would be a lot more convincing if they had never thrown Matthew Stewart under the bus in the first place.

Here's what’s new, part two:

While Hobbs did not go as far as the group home industry wanted, she has now made a choice to head the agency that almost guarantees no real change.  Indeed, her choice to run DCS has already promised as much.

Hobbs chose David Lujan, the current head of a group that did an enormous amount to create the current crisis in Arizona child welfare – the so-called “Children’s Action Alliance.”   Even though Arizona tears apart families at a rate 75% above the national average and has one of the nation’s worst records for racial bias, Lujan told the Arizona Republic he plans to assure lawmakers that “I'm not looking to do anything radical at this agency.”

That’s not surprising.

To understand just how much harm the Children’s Action Alliance has done, we need to go back a long way, to another failure by an Arizona governor.  As I explained in what turned out to be a way-too-optimistic op-ed column for the Arizona Republic:  It was January 2003.  High-profile child abuse deaths in cases “known-to-the-system” were front-page news and the new governor, Janet Napolitano, had fallen for the Big Lie of American child welfare: that child removal equals child safety. So within days of taking office, she was greeted with wild applause when she told a child welfare conference, “Err on the side of protecting the child, and we’ll sort it out later.”

Speaker after speaker echoed her call.  They set off a foster-care panic, a sharp sudden increase in children torn from their homes.  But Arizona still hasn’t sorted it out.  The panic has never stopped.

I bring this up now because the 2003 conference in question was organized by the Children’s Action Alliance.  Like many such groups, they do good work on issues like education, health care, etc.  But when it comes to “child welfare,” they have long been the leading voice for a take-the-child-and-run approach.

In Arizona, year after year, CAA threw gasoline on the fires of foster-care panic.  Do a search for “Children’s Action Alliance” in our 2007 report on Arizona child welfare, and you’ll find one inflammatory quote after another.

CAA has never apologized, never taken responsibility for the chaos it helped to unleash and the families it helped to destroy.  Instead, it is one more group engaging in reputation laundering.  So their current child welfare agenda uses what has become the standard buzz phrase that once had real meaning but now has been co-opted to the point that it tells you when a group doesn’t really want to change anything: “child and family well-being system.”  That means: go through the performance art of pretending to consult communities, add on a few more “preventive services” – but call for nothing that would actually curb the power of the family police.

And sure enough, CAA’s child welfare agenda has not one specific proposal to curb entries into care, and nothing that would curb the vast power of DCS.  Mostly their agenda involves “fixing” foster care.  So when Lujan promises not to do anything radical, we can all take him at his word.

So can we expect change when David Lujan starts running DCS?  Sure.  Caseworkers will have to keep their “professional kidnapper” T-shirts hidden.

A postscript

Arizona media continue to disappoint: The three stories I read about Lujan's appointment all repeat the allegations against Stewart, none includes his response and the other context provided by ProPublica.

Children abandoned in the OTHER Arizona desert

A news desert makes it easy for an extremist lawmaker to pressure a governor into firing the first Black director of the state “child welfare” agency – less than two months after appointing him. 

MARCH 3: See also the update here.

Shortly after taking office, the new Governor of Arizona, Democrat Katie Hobbs, named a reformer to run the state “child welfare” agency.  Matthew Stewart would be the first Black leader of the Department of Child Safety (DCS).  Arizona is a state which has one of the worst records f in America for racial bias in child welfare, a state where some caseworkers thought it was funny to wear t-shirts emblazoned with the words “Professional kidnapper.” 

Hobbs, a social worker herself, knew exactly what she was getting when she chose Stewart.  But she fired Stewart after less than two months.  She fired him before he could even get a confirmation hearing – because of a smear campaign led by Republican State Sen. Jake Hoffman, who chairs the committee that would have held the hearing.  Hoffman doesn’t even accept the legitimacy of Hobbs’ election.  He’s been banned from some social media spaces for running a “troll farm.”  

But this is more than a failure of one governor – it’s an example of how a state can become a “news desert” even when, technically, the news organizations haven’t shut down. 

None of the facts about what really happened to Stewart was uncovered by an Arizona news organization.  On the contrary, they simply cut-and-pasted Hoffman’s claims.  They did this even though they knew or should have known all about the troll farming (something the Arizona Republic reported in 2020) and the election denying.  The Republic quoted exhaustively from Hoffman’s press release gloating about his triumph. (I can’t link to it due to their paywall.)  A breathless “breaking news” story from KPNX-TV could have been scripted by Hoffman. 

At a minimum, local news organizations could have reminded readers of Hoffman’s own track record.  For example, Hoffman implied that, during his brief tenure, Stewart fired employees because they were gay.  It might have helped readers weigh the credibility of the claim had they been told that Hoffman 

is leading a group of conservatives who plan to sue Hobbs for issuing an executive order guaranteeing equal employment opportunities for LGBTQ people working at state agencies. He also wrote a bill that would have banned books from schools that depict “acts” of “homosexuality.” 

That’s a quote from a news organization, but not one based in Arizona.  It’s from ProPublica, which told the full story that Arizona media missed.  

Yes, ProPublica had an advantage.  Reporter Eli Hager had met Matthew Stewart well before he was appointed, while doing an outstanding series of stories on the failings of family policing across the country.  In the only Arizona news account I’ve found that mentions even asking Stewart for comment, the one in the Republic, he declined.  But Hager didn’t just talk to Stewart.  He found plenty of employees within DCS who vouched for him and debunked the allegations.  Nothing published so far indicates that any Arizona news organization even tried. 

That is not a function of malice or bias – it’s a function of the evisceration of local news. Between 2008 and 2020, the number of Newspaper newsroom employees plummeted by 57% - and there’s no end to the decline in sight.  A few years ago both the Arizona Republic and the Arizona Daily Star received grants to do in-depth reporting on child welfare.  Both did some very good work.  But the grants have run out, and so has any serious reporting. 

But how much would it have taken to at least put Hoffman’s smears into context?  A paragraph or two, from earlier news stories, such as the one from the Republic, would have helped.  And you still can reprint the ProPublica story at no charge.

If lawmakers are going to run troll factories, the least local media can do is not help them spread the trolling.  Because a news desert is a dangerous place to leave children.

NCCPR in the Arizona Republic: Arizona still yanks too many kids from their parents. Can a new director fix this?

A mistake 20 years ago still reverberates today at Arizona's Department of Child Services. Gov. Katie Hobbs seems eager not to repeat it.

Even before taking office, Arizona’s new Democratic governor made clear she’s not about to repeat one of the biggest blunders of the last Democratic governor. 

That’s great news for the state’s vulnerable children. Indeed, to understand why Arizona’s child welfare system is a national disgrace, it’s essential to revisit the crucial mistake made by Janet Napolitano within days of taking office 20 years ago. ...

Read the full column here.