Holy Toledo! Is a county learning the RIGHT lessons from a child abuse tragedy?

 

The Lucas County, Ohio, courthouse. (Photo by Joel Rossol)

In Lucas County, Ohio (metropolitan Toledo), a 13-year-old girl, Kei’Mani Latigue, apparentlty living with her grandmother, was kidnapped and murdered, allegedly by her father. There had been at least three reports to the county child welfare agency, but they never found cause to remove her from her home. In the furor that followed, the county created the usual OBRC (Obligatory Blue-Ribbon Commission). That group, the Lucas County Child Protection Task Force, just issued its report. 

So far this is a story you’ve heard over and over. And I was expecting nothing good from a county I’ve criticized for caving to the group home and institutions lobby. Looks like I was wrong. 

Because there’s something different this time: The recommendations from the Task Force are  -- good! They could have embraced the usual cheap-shot, easy recommendations that make the task force and the politicians feel good even as they would make the system worse (for classic examples, see Santa Clara County, California and the State of New Mexico). Instead, the task force opted for doing the hard work and finding real solutions that can make all of the county’s children safer. They've created a blueprint for child safety.

As the Task Force report explains, the members

recognized the complexity of the child protection system and the many partners that influence  child safety and family wellbeing. … Progress will not be defined by any single action, but by the County’s ability to align efforts, adapt over time, and remain focused on outcomes that matter most—family stability, child safety, and community trust.

The first bit of good news is what is not in the report. No cheap shots suggesting that the county was doing too much to keep families together. No scapegoating caseworkers. No drivel about swinging pendulums. No recommendations to make it harder to keep children in their own homes and harder to return them home – as they are pushing in North Carolina and Indiana. The Task Force understood that this is the approach that backfires, exposing many more children to the trauma and the danger of needless foster care and overloading systems, making it harder for workers to find children in real danger. 

Now consider what they did recommend. It’s nothing dramatic, but it’s constructive: 

● Expand community-based visitation, engagement and prevention spaces.

● Map services for child maltreatment prevention and improve family navigation and resource access.

● Implement coordinated prevention networks and post-reunification support.

● Deliver equity-centered workforce training and front-door practice reform.

● Embed lived experience leadership across governance, practice and accountability.

● Launch comprehensive equity-focused kinship and foster care recruitment.

● Increase coordination to reduce placement disruptions and promote stability of foster youth.

● Reestablish a Lucas County ombudsman with public reporting authority..

The full descriptions for each make clear that, while they’re certainly not revolutionary, and the last one could backfire, the recommendations are better than these bland literal “top-lines” suggest. 

Equally remarkable is what top officials are saying. 

Here’s Randy Muth, executive director of Lucas County Children Services: 

“Poverty does not equal child neglect. Poverty does not equal criminality,” Mr. Muth said. “Families can be supported before they’re reported.” 

And from Doris Tolliver, the Task Force facilitator: 

Child services frequently receives reports of families who struggle with parental distress and financial strain, diverting them from helping children who are actively harmed, Ms. Tolliver said. Streamlining support from community-based organizations would allow the agency to focus on families with the greatest needs, alleviating strain on the system. 

What the numbers tell us: 

Although it takes a lot more courage to utter these words than to vomit up the usual (see, again, certain public officials in Santa Clara County, California, and the State of New Mexico), words still are easier than action. What do we know from the numbers? 

I can find no data on entries into foster care in Lucas County, and only limited data on the number of children in foster care on any given day. The picture is mixed. 

The death of Kei’Mani Latigue was discovered in March 2025. But there does not seem to have been a foster-care panic – at least not immediately.  According to data compiled by the Public Children’s Services Association of Ohio, the number of children in foster care on the most recent date I can find,  July 1, 2025, was down slightly from the previous year. But the rate of placement in Lucas County is 36.8 children in foster care per thousand impoverished children, below the Ohio average of 41.6, but above the national average of 30.6. 

And of course, there will be ridicule. The take-the-child-and-run extremists will be out in force. They talk about child safety but advocate an approach that sacrifices safety, suggesting an agenda that’s really about racial and class bias; a desperate desire to see impoverished nonwhite children torn from their homes and placed with white middle-class families. 

To do that, they’ll misrepresent the recommendations, claiming that the Task Force somehow thought they could persuade the killer of Kei’Mani Latigue not to kill. But that’s not what the Task Force is saying at all. Rather, these recommendations will get some of the cases that are nothing like the case of Kei’Mani Latigue out of the system, so workers will have more time to carefully assess every call – including the calls that come in about the next Kei’Mani Latigue. 

It won’t be easy to stand up to that. But at least, it appears, in Lucas County, Ohio, they’re giving it a try.

NCCPR in the Toledo Blade: County Children Services won’t do its own heavy lifting

 The increased costs facing Lucas County Children Services are not the fault of a federal law or state stinginess. They’re the fault of the county’s own lack of guts and imagination. ...

Read the full column in the Toledo Blade (subscription required)

Points of no return

Here are some of the other states with child welfare systems so rotten that the vast majority of foster children are never allowed to go home.

The previous post to this Blog highlighted Virginia’s dismal distinction: worst in America for allowing foster children ever to return to their own homes. In Virginia, if you’ve been taken away from your parents, odds are nearly three in four you will never be able to return to them – unless you find them again when you’re an adult. 

Virginia’s rate of reunifying families is 27%. The national average is 44% - which itself is dismal. Virginia children are more likely to be torn from their parents forever and handed over, usually to total strangers, to keep through adoption than they are to go back to their own homes.  And Virginia’s contempt for families runs so deep that child welfare agencies will let nearly one in five foster children “age out” with no home at all, rather than exert any real effort to reunify families. 

But while Virginia wins for worst record in the nation, there were plenty of other contenders. Here are some of them: 

● Virginia may not be #1 for long. North Carolina is nearly as bad – only 30% of foster children get to return home.  And right now, North Carolina lawmakers are patting themselves on the back for supposedly passing a major “reform” bill.  While some provisions may be marginally helpful, what may be the most significant will make it even harder to reunify families. 

● Like Virginia, Michigan is triply dismal.  Only 35% of foster children are reunified, while 41% are adopted. And Michigan is another state where the proportion of children who age out with no home at all is nearly double the national average. 

● Much the same can be said for Ohio – except that the adoption percentage is lower. 

● Connecticut did good work in past years in reducing entries into foster care. But lately, there’s been backsliding. In 2023, Connecticut was one of the few states where the number of children taken from their parents over the course of a year increased over the previous year, and it was the second-highest increase in the nation. A huge proportion of the children Connecticut took – more than two-thirds -- probably are never going home. Connecticut is another state where the proportion of children exiting to adoption, usually by strangers, is higher than the percentage reunified. 

● There is a similar pattern, though not as bad, in Alabama, another state that saw great progress in past years, but now is backsliding. 

● Texas has made ongoing commendable progress curbing entries.  But here, too, nearly two-thirds of those taken will never go home. And in Texas, nearly as many are adopted as reunified. 

Guardianship is no excuse 

Some of these states, such as Connecticut, may claim their rates of reunification are low because they supposedly place a lot of children in guardianship arrangements with relatives.  Yes, that’s better than adoption by strangers, but: 

● It is not the same thing as being allowed to go home to your own parents.

● The fact that many of these states use formal adoption – which usually means strangers – at a rate nearly as high or higher than reunification suggests they’re not doing enough with guardianships either.

Yes, you CAN reduce foster care – even in Ohio

Two counties embrace family preservation, one by “[taking] to heart” NCCPR recommendations.

In 2006, NCCPR released a report on child welfare in Ohio, with a particular focus on Butler County, just north of Cincinnati.  Ohio is one of the states in which individual counties run child welfare agencies.

Last week, a story in the Dayton Daily News about deaths of children previously known to those agencies all the way back to 2009 included this:

After the 2006 death of Marcus Fiesel, a Middletown boy who was bound and left in a closet by his foster parents, Butler County was the subject of a scathing report by [NCCPR], which said the system is too quick to yank children out of troubled homes and place them in foster care, where they may not get the same level of supervision. 

Butler County took many of the report’s recommendations to heart and has seen success in the years since, according to Butler County Job and Family Services Director Bill Morrison. 

The county has achieved a 20 percent reduction in removals and did not have a child death from abuse or neglect post-reunification in the years examined by this newspaper.

Butler was not alone.  Montgomery County, which includes Dayton, reduced needless foster care by embracing “differential response” an approach found to be safe by 25 of the 26 studies to examine it.  Montgomery County had the same excellent results as Butler concerning fatalities.

 Learning from an earlier “drug plague”

What makes these results all the more notable is that they come from Ohio which is, we are told in one news story after another, the “epicenter” of the latest “drug plague” – the opioid epidemic.

So how did foster care go down in these counties when it is going up elsewhere in Ohio? 

Perhaps these counties learned from an earlier drug plague, “crack cocaine.”

University of Florida researchers studied two groups of children born with cocaine in their systems; one group was placed in foster care, another left with birth mothers able to care for them.  After six months, the babies were tested using all the usual measures of infant development: rolling over, sitting up, reaching out.  Typically, the children left with their birth mothers did better.  For the foster children, the separation from their mothers was more toxic than the cocaine.

Similarly, consider what The New York Times found when it looked at the best way to treat infants born with opioids in their systems. According to the Times

a growing body of evidence suggests that what these babies need is what has been taken away: a mother.  Separating newborns in withdrawal can slow the infants’ recovery, studies show, and undermine an already fragile parenting relationship. When mothers are close at hand, infants in withdrawal require less medication and fewer costly days in intensive care.

“Mom is a powerful treatment,” said Dr. Matthew Grossman, a pediatric hospitalist at Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital who has studied the care of opioid-dependent babies.

  

It is extremely difficult to take a swing at so-called “bad mothers” without the blow landing on their children. That doesn’t mean we can simply leave children with hopelessly addicted parents.  But it does mean that in most cases, drug treatment for the mother is a better option than foster care for the child. 

Butler and Montgomery Counties also seem to have done something else: They took a long, hard look at all the cases that did not involve drug abuse to see if those children really needed to be torn from everyone they know and love.

A caution about how results are measured

The results concerning fatalities do have to be looked at with caution.  Indeed, I have long argued that you can’t judge child safety simply by looking at fatality numbers. That is for a reason for which we all should be grateful.

Though each is among the worst imaginable tragedies, let us be grateful that the number of such tragedies is low enough to rise or fall due to random chance.  A child returned to his home in Montgomery County could die tomorrow. If that happens, you may be sure those wedded to a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare will rush to scapegoat differential response.

So it’s not changes in the number of fatalities that prove you can’t have child safety without family preservation.  It’s a much larger “evidence base”:

●The reason we know differential response is safe is not because no child returned to his own home has died in Montgomery County since 2009. It’s because of all those studies.

●The reason we know Intensive Family Preservation Services is safe and effective is because of all the studies that prove it.

●The reason we know that rebuilding systems to emphasize safe, proven approaches to keeping families together works is because independent court-appointed monitors have found that it works, as, for example, in Alabama. (A member of NCCPR’s volunteer board of directors brought the lawsuit that led to the Alabama reforms.)

●The reason we know lower rates of removal can improve child safety is because of places such as New York City. In New York, key safety indicators  - the rate at which children “known to the system” were reabused and the rate of foster-care recidivism (children returned from foster care who had to be placed again) - improved when the city reduced needless removals of children.

That’s why other Ohio counties should be learning from Butler and Montgomery. And that’s why take-the-child-and-run does not have to be child welfare’s knee-jerk response to every new problem, or even to every new drug plague.

Curbing needless foster care: Does the Obama Administration even have a clue?

INDIFFERENCE AND/OR HOSTILITY THREATEN CHILD WELFARE WAIVERS

Ok, I get that with two wars, the worst environmental disaster in our history, health care, the economy, etc. President Obama may not be paying a lot of attention to child welfare. But is it too much to ask that his administration not make things even worse?

For starters, the Administration took the terrible financial incentives that encourage foster care and discourage better alternatives and did, indeed, make them worse. I don't think they did it on purpose. Rather, my guess is they were intent on increasing state reimbursement for Medicaid and weren't paying attention to the fact that this also automatically increases reimbursement for foster care. (The House and Senate have split on whether to continue this increase, so here's a modest proposal for a compromise: Extend the increase for Medicaid, but not foster care.)

Now, according to The Columbus Dispatch, the Administration may refuse to extend a waiver that gives 18 counties in Ohio the same flexibility that has allowed Florida to vastly improve its system. (That success, already cited by The New York Times, also was a key focus of an Associated Press story Friday.)

The "ProtectOhio" waiver has been around for 12 years. It's due to expire at the end of July, and there's no word from the federal Department of Health and Human Services concerning whether they will grant another extension.

PROMISING EARLY RESULTS…

An early evaluation found that, on average, the counties did not perform as well as Florida. But that changed. And even early on there were improvements; and, in two counties, the improvements were particularly significant.

What made the difference in those counties? In a word: Leadership.

As we discuss in our report on Ohio child welfare, according to the evaluation:

The two most successful counties…share a pattern of strong leadership and careful planning of systemic reforms. Both demonstrated an early and ongoing commitment to expanding resources for child welfare activities other than foster care board and maintenance, well beyond the flexible funds generated by Waiver participation. They also sharply reduced placement utilization, instead serving children in-home or through referral to community agencies.

The evaluation found that, in Lorain County, the child welfare agency had been engaged in a comprehensive planning process, geared toward safely reducing entries into foster care, even before the waiver. So the county knew how to make the best use of flexible funds to enhance services to families. In addition to reducing needless removals of children, when a child really needed to be taken from his or her parents, the county also significantly increased placements with relatives instead of strangers.

"Overall," according to the evaluation, "the flexibility of the Title IV-E waiver seems to have reinforced the reform agenda of Lorain County Children Services."

…AND NOW, EVEN MORE SUCCESS

The other counties learned from those early experiences. According to a new report from Casey Family Programs, now:

Demonstration counties in ProtectOhio have consistently shown briefer lengths of stay in children's first placements, greater success in completing permanency plans for children in long-term foster care, higher rates of adoption, and a higher proportion of children exiting foster care to extended family caregivers without a decline in child safety measures. For the two-year period ending September 30, 2009, the ProtectOhio demonstration group generated internal savings of 329,441 placement days.

In other words, children spent a total of 329,441 fewer days in foster care than they would have had there been no waiver – with no compromise of safety. And that includes the children who had zero days in foster care because, thanks to the waiver, the services were available to keep them out of foster care in the first place.

It also probably helped that Ohio's largest county, Franklin, eased out the mediocre longtime leader of its child welfare agency. His replacement has done a better job taking advantage of the waiver. That's the whole point of reforming child welfare financing: It can't make up for mediocre leadership. But it allows good leaders to swim with the tide instead of against it.

Speaking of mediocre leadership: HHS apparently hasn't been paying attention. No surprise there. The federal leadership team on child welfare is incomplete and what there is of it is undistinguished.

HHS: THE MEDIOCRITY STARTS AT THE TOP

The problem goes all the way to the top. When the secretary of HHS, Kathleen Sibelius, was governor of Kansas, a state with one of the highest rates of removal in the nation, she turned a blind eye as her state fudged the figures it sent to HHS. She also didn't lift a finger when the head of her human services agency was caught in a bald-faced lie. (We don't know which of two flatly contradictory statements was the lie, we just know he lied. Details are in our report on Kansas child welfare.)

The one time I heard the HHS Assistant Secretary in charge of the Administration for Children and Families, Carmen Nazario, speak on the funding issue, her comments amounted to: I can't wait to give the Child Welfare League of America exactly what it wants! Since CWLA is the giant trade association for agencies, including many that live off a steady supply of foster children, that's always bad news for kids. For details, see our report on child welfare financing.

And now, whether through indifference or hostility, HHS is threatening one of the few areas where federal child welfare policy actually has helped children – waivers from federal funding rules that provide a huge, perverse incentive to place children in foster care and keep them there.

So, if the people who occasionally pay attention to child welfare in the Obama Administration (if any) really are too distracted to do comprehensive reform of child welfare – like making the Florida waiver the way child welfare is financed nationwide, or at least making such a waiver available to any state that wants one – could they at least let the states and counties that were smart enough to get these waivers in past years keep them?

It's simple. Just sign the relevant forms. Then you can go back to the wars, the oil spill, the economy and all the rest.