Missouri “child welfare” agency gets it right! (For all the wrong reasons)

Missouri Children's Division Director Sara Smith

The Missouri Independent has a story about legislators bemoaning the horrendous workloads of caseworkers for their family police agency, the Children’s Division, (as they should) and saying that, therefore, the Children’s Division should hire a whole lot more workers (which they shouldn’t). The Children's Division has declined to seek funding to hire more workers. They're right, but for all the wrong reasons.

Yes, the situation is horrendous, and this part of the story reveals the biggest horror of all: 

Division policy requires that parents have at least one visit per month with their child in the division’s care, unless a court prohibits meetings. An evaluation team established after the passage of a 2020 state law on foster care set a goal of each county complying with this policy 60% of the time. Between April and June 2025, no more than 6% of counties met this goal, according to an October 2025 report. 

The division also struggled to meet policies of one meeting per month between caseworkers and each of a child’s parents. Between July and September 2025, no more than 38% of counties met a goal of adhering to this policy 50% of the time, according to a January report. 

In other words, the head of the Children’s Division, Sara Smith, is only too happy to see children filed away and forgotten in foster care, and then rushing to terminate parental rights, by cutting the children off from their parents and the parents off from any help. 

But a caseworker hiring binge won’t fix that. It would be especially awful right now in Missouri, where Smith has made her fanaticism about tearing apart families abundantly clear. Instead of reducing caseloads, just hiring more workers will simply further expand the net of intervention into families. All you’ll get is the same lousy system, only bigger. 

If you’re a state like Missouri, that tears apart families at a rate at least 45% above the national average, a state whose confusion of poverty with neglect and other glaring failures were just exposed to the entire country in a national magazine, the solution is not to increase the supply of caseworkers, but to reduce the demand for them. 

That does require hiring – but not at the Children’s Division. It requires funding programs like this one – which the Children’s Division wants to sabotage – to go statewide. It requires high-quality family defense counsel to craft alternatives to the cookie-cutter “service plans” doled out by the Children’s Division, and it requires a laser focus on ameliorating the worst effects of poverty. 

Some lawmakers have proposed legislating a cap on the number of cases a worker can carry. In arguing that such a caseload cap won’t work without all those new hires, Rep. Keri Ingle, herself a former caseworker, said a cap

“doesn’t [allow us to say], ‘We’re not going to put any more kids in foster care,’ or ‘We’re not going to do any more investigations.’ It just doesn’t work like that.” 

No it doesn’t work like that, and it shouldn’t work like that. But what you can do is embrace safe, proven alternatives that reduce the need for all those investigations and all that foster care in the first place.

NCCPR statement on the ICWA decision: A joyful surprise: The Supreme Court refuses to give family police the green light to revert to policies that fit the UN definition of genocide.

Now, let’s get serious about enforcement

The United Nations defines genocide as “a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part.”  In the decades, indeed in the centuries before passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act, U.S. “child welfare” policy toward Native Americans fit that definition.  

It’s not as if anyone tried to hide it.  From the superintendent of a notorious 19^th Century “boarding school” – more like a prison – who said the purpose was to “kill the Indian in him and save the man” to the Child Welfare League of America’s Indian Adoption Project which had as its explicit aim  “to stimulate adoption of American Indian children by Caucasian families on a nationwide basis,” they said the quiet part out loud.  (CWLA’s subsequent apology rings hollow, since they continue to support racist laws like the Adoption and Safe Families Act and the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act.)

 The Indian Child Welfare Act is a recognition that it’s not too much to ask of America’s “child welfare” agencies that they not commit acts that fit the definition of genocide in international law.  We are thrilled that the United States Supreme Court agrees.  

ICWA is often described as the “gold standard” for “child welfare” law and policy.  As such its biggest flaw is not in the law itself but the failure to enforce it – indeed, ProPublica reminded us of that failure in a story published just today (June 15)..  The story focuses on the atrocious record of South Dakota, the same state exposed by NPR more than a decade ago. 

Other nations are doing better.

 In Australia, there is a National Sorry Day, to apologize to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people for what Australia calls “the stolen generations.”  In Canada, governments are paying reparations to First Nations for what was done to them.  While other nations slowly move forward, we must build on today’s Supreme Court decision to force America’s family police agencies (a more accurate term than “child welfare” agencies) to do the same.  And we must provide tribal nations with the resources they need to enforce their families’ rights under ICWA.