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?
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