Missouri’s shame: Rampant confusion of poverty with neglect, and skyrocketing numbers of children torn from their homes, is exposed to the nation by The Nation

For want of an air conditioner, a family was lost.

A foster-care panic, set off by the head of the state family police agency, is making everything worse. Her predecessor laments: “Missouri’s leadership is not interested in preventing children from coming into foster care.” 

Second of two parts (Read Part One here) 

Last week, Hearst Connecticut Media exposed the extent to which children are barred from living with the families they love, and sometimes are taken forever, because the families lack adequate housing. We discussed that story in yesterday’s post to this blog. 

At about the same time as the Hearst story was published, The Nation exposed the same problem, on an even larger, even more appalling scale, in Missouri. 

The Nation tells the story of one child denied any contact with his mother for months after being taken because the mother’s rental apartment didn’t have an air conditioner. The mother explained that “To get her son back, a judge told her, she had to have decent housing, a job, and $3,000 in a bank account.” 

In another case, a nine-year-old boy was taken because the family was living in an extended stay hotel.  Excellent local reporting from the Missouri Independent has uncovered similar cases. 

The Nation adds more context, including some stunning comments from the former head of the agency that is taking all these children. 

For decades, Missouri has torn apart families at a rate well above the national average.  That improved a little under former Children’s Division Director Darrell Missey. But as of 2024, Missouri still was taking away children at a rate more than 45% above the national average, even when rates of family poverty are factored in.  And that doesn’t include what appears to be a large number of hidden foster care placements.  But already, there are signs that Missey’s successor, Sara Smith is making things exponentially worse. From the story: 

In Missouri, a substandard apartment is reason enough for judges to agree to removals, said Kathleen Dubois, a retired family court attorney in St. Louis. “Nobody blames the landlord,” she told me. “They just take away the kids.” Kathy Connors, the executive director of the St. Louis homeless shelter Gateway180, sees the same thing: There are an “awful lot” of instances in which mothers living in her shelter have their children taken away if they can’t find permanent housing fast enough. … She has seen many families who come to the shelter working to reunify with their children. But since she began working there in 2016, she has seen only four successful reunifications. “It does seem like it’s a situation where the goalpost keeps getting moved further and further,” she said. 

And what does Smith have to say about this? 

Sara Smith

“In and of itself, we wouldn’t take homelessness as a report,” Smith asserted. “We would be looking at if the child’s basic needs are met, if the family does have some kind of housing.”

But, uh, isn’t shelter a “basic need”? So yeah, they’ll take away children because they’re homeless, or even for lack of an air conditioner. Just look at the agency’s own “risk assessment” form – as The Nation did:

A point gets added to a family’s risk score if “current housing is physically unsafe,” while homelessness adds two points.

Note to journalists: Odds are there’s a similar risk assessment form in your state. 

And here’s where differences in agency culture from state to state show up. As is made clear in Prof. Kelley Fong’s brilliant book, Investigating Families, caseworkers in Connecticut are overloaded, but most of them probably would try to find a family an air conditioner. Even in Missouri, you can sometimes find compassion for families and an understanding of the harm separation does to children – from the Kansas City police. 

But not in Sara Smith’s Children’s Division.  Again from the story in The Nation: 

Even if all a family needs, as in Ortega’s case, is an air conditioner, caseworkers may not have the funds—and might resist calling around to find an organization that does. 

Caseworkers may also feel that this kind of work isn’t in their job description. … Dubois, the retired family court attorney, said that many caseworkers feel they shouldn’t “enable people” by helping them: “‘If [clients] are unable to handle things, we’re not going to do it for them.’” 

Oh, it’s not that the Children’s Division won’t spend money on concrete needs; it just depends on whose needs: 

Sometimes all that families need to remain stably housed and prevent a child’s removal is some extra money. But while the Children’s Division doesn’t use its funds to help these families with housing, the agency does directly fund the housing needs of foster families, as federal law requires. In Missouri, licensed foster-care families receive between $509 and $712 a month for a child, depending on the child’s age, to cover housing and other basic needs, plus an additional $91 a month for children 3 years and younger to cover things like formula and diapers. They receive between $320 and $700 a year for clothing, as well as monthly payments of as much as $2,034 for children with “elevated needs.” 

(Still, they can’t top North Carolina, which is paying some so-called “professional foster parents” $100,000 per couple per year, plus fringe benefits and -  free housing!) 

Paradoxically, it’s better if families don’t have to turn to a family police agency for concrete help, for reasons that should be obvious: Families are afraid, often rightly so, to seek help from an agency that can take away their children. There should be alternative sources. But in Missouri there are no alternative sources anywhere near able to meet the need. The Children’s Division not only isn’t helping, it’s even undermining such efforts. 

This is the culture Darrell Missey, a former judge, was up against when he tried to reduce needless foster care in Missouri. (I was too hard on him at the time for the way he was going about it. For that, Judge Missey, I apologize.) 

Missey is remarkably candid about how much worse things are getting now: 

“I was trying to get people to give folks the opportunity to come up with answers besides separating the family,” Missey said. Still, he often felt forced to remove children because he didn’t have any housing to offer their families. Missey left the position in late 2024. Smith, his replacement, reassigned the person Missey had hired to work on removal prevention to a different role and fired his deputy director, he said. There is a “mentality” that “pervades the state” of removing a child instead of finding a way to fix or find housing, he added: “Missouri’s leadership is not interested in preventing children from coming into foster care.” [Emphasis added.] 

Sara Smith’s actions make that abundantly clear. And the numbers show she is succeeding. The Nation story documents a surge in court petitions after Smith issued a memo warning that, in some cases, even Missouri’s hidden foster care system, which is a problem in itself, wasn’t severe enough. 

And when we compared entries into care for August 2025, the most recent month for which data are available, to August 2024, when Missey still was in charge, we found they’d skyrocketed by nearly 50 percent. From 325 in August 2024, to 462 in August 2025. If that trend holds for an entire year, Missouri’s rate of child removal could approach triple the national average. 

The Nation story also highlights a unique problem in Missouri, the fact that there are two agencies that can tear apart families and keep them apart, and one of them is uniquely unaccountable: It’s the Juvenile Office, the bizarre, and probably unconstitutional fifth wheel in the Missouri system. I’ve written about it several times, but the Nation story highlights something I’ve overlooked. For technical reasons related to how federal funding works, the Juvenile Office doesn’t even have to pretend to follow federal law requiring states to make “reasonable efforts” to keep families together. (By the way, Sara Smith loves the Juvenile Office.) 

A lesson about laws 

The Nation story points out that 

About half of states exempt parents’ financial inability to provide things like shelter for their children from the definition of child maltreatment. At least three states have statutes saying homelessness does not constitute neglect. Missouri does not. While it has exceptions in its maltreatment statutes for corporal punishment and refusing medical care on religious grounds, it has none for poverty or homelessness. 

But back in Connecticut, the Hearst Connecticut Media story about very similar problems, discussed in the previous post to this Blog, notes that 

State law restricts the Department of Children and Families from determining that a child is neglected — and can then be removed from their family and put into foster care — because of poverty. 

But they’re doing it anyway, as they do in every state, whether it has such a law or not. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have such laws. Rather, it means the laws need to be tougher. They need to require states to show what they’ve done to, in the words of one activist group, “take our poverty, not our children,” and require courts to enforce it. 

An example is this good bill proposed in Maine. But it didn’t pass; instead they passed the vague, unenforceable type of law that many other states have. 

A tough law would be a good first step in Missouri – and it would have to apply explicitly to the Juvenile Office as well as the Children’s Division. At least that might curb the rate at which Sara Smith is sending the state careening full-speed backwards.

Two outstanding stories expose the vast scope of family destruction when family police tear apart families because of housing

In one of the richest states in America, lawmakers leave hundreds of children
trapped in foster care because their parents can't afford adequate housing.

Hearst Connecticut Media exposes the problem in that state, where it’s bad. The Nation exposes it in Missouri – where horrible leadership has set off a foster-care panic, making it even worse

First of two parts (Read Part Two here)

● Virginia Ortega didn’t have an air conditioner in her rental apartment in Missouri. She couldn’t afford one, and the landlord wouldn’t provide one. So the Missouri family police agency (a more accurate term than child welfare agency), known as the Children’s Division, took away her 16-year-old autistic son. For months, she did not even know where he was. 

Now, as The Nation explains in this story 

To get her son back, a judge told her, she had to have decent housing, a job, and $3,000 in a bank account, she told me. But after Cesar was removed, she was fired—someone at work had spread a rumor that she’s a bad mother. Ortega suffers from leukemia, which makes it hard for her to find another job.

● Lauren and her nine-year-old son John were all set to move from Missouri to live with a cousin in a spacious house in Oklahoma. They were just waiting for a transfer of medical records for John, who has kidney disease. 

But that wasn’t good enough for the Children’s Division. They* tore John away from his mother – because they’d been living in an extended-stay motel. 

● In Connecticut, the children of Kelly Toutain and Zachery Lyons were taken for exactly the sort of reason foster care apologists love to cite when they say children aren’t taken because of poverty: They had mental health problems – but nothing that affluent families don’t handle routinely, because they have the money for good doctors and therapists.  

Now the mental health problems are under control. But, as a story from Hearst Connecticut Media explains, to allow their children to be placed with a relative, they had to move out of the apartment they had in the same house. So while mental health problems (and the lack of money to deal with them) may have triggered the removal, homelessness is what kept the family apart. 

Connecticut is bad; Missouri is worse 

The two in-depth stories shed new light on one of the prime examples of the confusion of poverty with neglect: children taken because their families lack adequate housing. (Or sometimes when they just lack housing not good enough to meet the arbitrary standards of the caseworker who showed up at the door that day.) 

In Part Two, available here, we take a close look at what The Nation found in Missouri. But first, Connecticut: 

In 2024, 391 Connecticut children were taken from their families for reasons including homelessness or lack of housing – and that’s just the number the state admits to when reporting entries to the federal government. 

And, the Hearst story reports, 

During the first six months of this year, the families of 452 children currently in foster care were on that [housing] waitlist, according to agency data. Another 635 children with open DCF cases but who remain with their parents who are at risk of homelessness or living in unsafe conditions are also waiting for housing. 

The wait list for housing is so long that some children lose the right to ever live with their families again for their entire childhoods. Under the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act, states are required to seek termination of children’s rights to their parents (a more accurate term than termination of parental rights) if a child has been in foster care for 15 of the last 22 months. (In fact, there’s a lot of leeway, but “ASFA made me do it” is the family policing equivalent of “the dog ate my homework.”) Said one Connecticut family defense attorney: 

“I have so many clients who are FaceTiming me from their campsite, or going into court unhoused,” Custody of their kids is terminated (permanently) before they even get a case manager.” 

But, hey, it’s not housing alone, right? (Except when it is.) It must be mentalhealthdrugabusedomesticviolence, the three excuses for taking away poor people’s children, chanted like a mantra as if a single word.  But that confuses cause and effect. Again, from the story:

Elizabeth Berman, a child-welfare attorney for three decades, said … addressing other issues that contribute to child removal is impossible until parents have stable housing … 

“They can't work toward reunification because they're living in a tent,” she said of one client. “Having to figure out, with no money, what little wooded area am I going to sleep in tonight, or what bridge am I going to be under? It's all consuming. So you can't really focus on mental health treatment or substance abuse treatment or education or anything else because your energy is tied up in fundamental basic survival needs.” 

And, as has been pointed out for decades, mental health issues, domestic violence and substance abuse all can be caused by poverty – and as affluent sufferers from those sorts of ailments, such as Betty Ford – taught us long ago, they often can be cured with money. 

Connecticut once understood this. Again from the story: 

DCF’s supportive housing program has landed national recognition for successfully connecting parents with long-term affordable housing and the services needed to safely reunify with their children. Research shows that those in the program were more likely to get their children back and were less likely to face new substantiated abuse or neglect allegations within five years. Research also found the short-term expense of the program to the agency was cost neutral. 

Even if it weren't cost-neutral, Connecticut sure as hell could afford it. Connecticut spends on child welfare at one of the highest rates in the country, a rate nearly triple the national average when rates of child poverty are factored in.

The program still exists, but it provides nowhere near enough assistance to meet the demand. That may help explain why, while entries into foster care are going down in most states, they're going up in Connecticut.

But at least Connecticut still takes children at a rate slightly below the national average. And at least in Connecticut, the entire system, starting at the very top, doesn’t ooze contempt for impoverished families. For that, we must turn to Missouri. 

We do that on this blog in Part Two. 

*-The Children’s Division will tell you they can’t take away children themselves. For a detailed discussion of why this is disingenuous claptrap, see this post.

Child welfare in Missouri: The family police are fear-bombing a reform effort

Missouri's "child welfare" agency, the Children's Division, offers a lesson in how to sabotage reform

Missouri officials’ work undermining a reform effort makes clear that such efforts will have only limited success unless mandatory reporting is, at a minimum, curbed 

Last week The Journal, a publication of the Kansas Leadership Center looked next door to Missouri as part of a project exploring “health solutions” in that state. 

They published an excellent story zeroing in on the problem of confusing poverty with neglect and a foundation-funded program in several counties, known as Connected Communities Thriving Families, intended to deal with it. 

The idea behind the program is to create alternatives for mandatory reporters, who are required to call the child abuse hotline run by Missouri’s “child welfare” agency, the Children’s Division. Mandatory reporting has been proven to backfire – doing enormous harm to families needlessly investigated and overloading systems, making it less likely they will find the relatively few children in real danger. 

As the story explains: 

Started in 2022, Connected Communities’ underlying premise is that the Children’s Division is creaking under the weight of unrealistic expectations – that its hotline is the default response of teachers, social workers and other professionals required by state law to alert authorities when they suspect abuse or neglect. 

Connected Communities’ overarching goal is to tilt the system toward community-level social service interventions that ameliorate home life issues – often caused by poverty – to keep families intact. 

The aim is to limit calls to the child abuse and neglect hotline to truly life-threatening situations, persuading mandatory reporters to become mandatory supporters. 

The program is run by the Missouri Coalition for Children. CEO Mary Chant says that the communities themselves are designing solutions, as opposed to how family police agencies typically operate: 

“We have a long history of dropping services into communities that is sort of like, ‘Well, we hope whatever you have is appendicitis, because no matter what, you’re getting an appendectomy,’” she said. 

The story cites as an example of potential success … 

a teacher referring struggling parents to a community provider that can give them laundry detergent or get their water turned back on rather than hotlining the family because the children continually come to school dirty and smelly. 

“We do not want anyone to not make a hotline call when they suspect there is abuse or willful neglect,” Chant said. “What we are saying is, ‘If the family is stuck, are there other ways we can support them? How can we remove the issue, not the child? How can we remove the danger, not the child?’” 

The story then nails precisely the biggest barrier to making anything like this work: 

… overcoming a fear among mandatory reporters who can lose their licenses or face misdemeanor charges for failing to report suspected cases of abuse or neglect. 

And the story makes abundantly clear that the Children’s Division not only doesn’t want to allay that fear, it wants to encourage it. Watch how Kayla Ueligger who, when interviewed for this story, was the interim director of the Children’s Division, does it: 

Ueligger … said it puts too much pressure on teachers and staff to make a judgment call about whether an issue rises to the level of a hotline call. 

But, of course, mandatory reporters already make that decision. Ueligger is repeating the mantra that got us into the god-awful mess in which one-third of all American children, and more than half of Black children ultimately will endure the trauma of an investigation by Ueligger’s agency or one of its counterparts across the country. She’s saying don’t make any judgment at all, just phone in your slightest suspicion – act on that “gut feeling” – even though gut feeling often is just another term for bias. 

And then she throws another fear bomb into the mix: 

“I would never want to be the teacher that didn’t call on something because I was unsure, and then something bad happens,” she said. “We’re the safety authorities. … There are other ways for us to address (the situation) rather than telling mandated reporters that maybe they should make the decision when to call.” 

But apparently, Ms. Ueligger would have no problem being the teacher whose mistaken call to the hotline brought hell down upon a family whose only crime was poverty, traumatized the children with interrogations and stripsearches and/or took the children, consigned them to the chaos of foster care and put them at high risk of abuse in foster care itself. 

This is exactly what Ueligger and her counterparts defending the failed status quo don’t want mandatory reporters to think about: There is no easy decision. Yes, sometimes not making the call carries a risk – but so does making the call. If we are ever to stop destroying so many children in the name of “saving” them, mandatory reporters are just going to have to start doing the hard work of thinking before they make the call. 

Ueligger continues: 

The best approach, she said, is to call the hotline and also help address the family’s needs. 

Except that calling the hotline has traditionally been a way to avoid doing anything else to address the family’s needs – something made clear by the comments of a school official that I’ll get to below.  But also, once you call the hotline when it isn’t necessary, you’ve made everything far worse, even if you also try to be helpful. So no, the best approach is to use professional judgment concerning when a call is so urgent that the good the call will do outweighs the harm. 

But here’s the biggest whopper of all: 

Ueligger said the department has an effective triage system to determine whether a situation calls for the removal of the child or some other intervention. 

In fact, the Children’s Division has nothing of the kind. Data from 2023, the most recent for which comparative figures are available, make clear that at every stage of the process, the Children's Division “triage system” stinks: 

● Nationwide, despite extremely low standards for accepting a call, more than half of all calls to child abuse hotlines are screened out. In Missouri, fewer than one-third of calls are screened out. 

● Nationwide, after investigation, even though “substantiation” requires little more than a caseworker’s guess, 56% of reports are found to be false. In Missouri, it’s only 30%.* 

● And of course, Missouri does the ultimate harm – tearing a family apart and throwing children into foster care at a rate 50% above the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in. 

ENTRIES INTO FOSTER CARE 

PER THOUSAND IMPOVERISHED CHILDREN

The only thing Missouri’s “triage system” is effective at is traumatizing children and destroying families. 

To see that system in action, check out this story from the Missouri Independent.  And this one. 

As for what Ueligger herself points to as reform – it’s just replacing foster care with – foster care. She brags about “temporary alternative placement arrangements” – but that’s just hidden foster care. 

Ueligger is no longer running the children’s division. But her permanent replacement, Sara Smith, already has shown indications of being as bad or worse. 

Ueligger isn’t the only one out to undermine reform. 

Meet Robert Webb, who is about to retire as school superintendent in Kirksville, one of the cities where Community Connections is trying to do its work. From the story: 

[Webb] said it’s unrealistic to expect teachers and administrators to be educators and social service navigators for families. 

Webb said he is more than happy to feed kids and provide other such services but working with parents to resolve issues like poverty and homelessness is out of bounds. That’s an adult issue, he said, and “we don’t deal in the adult world.” 

First of all, no one is asking the educators of Kirksville to perform their own investigations or navigate anything. Rather, Community Connections is attempting to coordinate resources, make them easier to find, and get the word out.  So all the educators of Kirksville are being asked to do is call a different phone number – one that connects a family to help instead of policing.

 Even better would be placing a Community Connections employee in the schools to personally help guide mandatory reporters toward alternatives, but clearly, that would be a bridge way too far for Superintendent Webb.  Rarely does one encounter an educator so unwilling to acknowledge that what happens in the home – the “adult issues” -- just might have something to do with how children are doing at school. And you are doing those children no favors if your only response to poverty and homelessness is to turn in their parents to the family police. 

Fortunately, more and more educators are seeing it differently. The American Federation of Teachers, a union with 1.8 million members, says educators should be exempted from mandatory reporting laws. In a comprehensive report based in part on a survey of more than 1,000 educators, the union concludes:  

We must challenge school cultures rooted in regulating families, valuing compliance over compassion, and funneling marginalized students into foster care or prison. Educators are sensitive to both state and local policies. To move away from the ineffective intervention of mandatory reporting, policymakers must decriminalize absenteeism. They can also remove educators from state laws on mandatory reporting, making reporting an option rather than a requirement. [Emphasis added.] 

Citing the phrase coined by JMACforFamilies (the one that’s also in the article from The Journal), the AFT calls for replacing mandatory reporting with mandatory supporting. The AFT has an overview of how to do it here. 

In short, thousands, perhaps more than a million educators are ready and willing to do what Robert Webb will not. 

What all of this illustrates is the limits of any effort to change the approach of mandatory reporters that isn’t backed up by changes in mandatory reporting itself. How many teachers in Kirksville, or anywhere else in Missouri, are going to be brave enough not to call the hotline, and risk job loss or prosecution, when the leadership of the family police agency is demanding that they call in anything and everything – and their boss, the school superintendent, wants them to do the same? 

Ideally, what the AFT recommends for educators would become the norm for all of those who now are mandatory reporters: Mandatory reporting would be replaced by permissive reporting in which professionals are free to do exactly what Kayla Ueligger says they should not do: Exercise their professional judgment. At a minimum, laws should be changed to give mandatory reporters an “off-ramp” – that is, if they take advantage of programs like Community Connections instead of calling a child abuse hotline they are immune from any retaliation. 

Now that would be an effective “triage system.” 

*-Another 64% of reports accepted by the Missouri hotline received a “differential response” assessment. In theory this is less onerous than a full-scale investigation, but practice varies. Missouri was among the first states to adopt this model but also, as we explained in our 2003 report on Missouri child welfare, among the first to screw it up.

NCCPR in the Missouri Independent: Hailey’s story illustrates Missouri’s failure — doing too little to preserve families

The Missouri Children’s Division has accomplished something most of us would have thought impossible: They got all sides in the debate over abortion to agree. 

They agree about Hailey, the young mother profiled in an outstanding story in The Independent. They agree that the behavior of the Children’s Division in surveilling, harassing, traumatizing and sometimes tearing apart Hailey’s loving family was, in the words of State Sen. Mary Elizabeth Coleman, “really horrifying.” 

Over and over Hailey’s great-aunt, Jodi Spradley, overcame one obstacle after another to craft a fragile safety net first for Hailey and then for her infant as well.  Over and over the Children’s Division tore that safety net apart. The issue was never abuse, it was poverty – often housing. 

As Kelley Fong, professor and author of the landmark study Investigating Families said: 

“[I]t’s really striking that rather than provide her with what she needs to provide a stable home for mom and baby, the response is just to separate everyone. That is extremely traumatic for the new mom, for the baby, for everyone involved.” 

Yes, it’s horrifying. But here’s something more horrifying: A change in leadership at the Children’s Division means it’s likely to get worse. … 

Read the full column in the Missouri Independent