NCCPR news and commentary roundup, week ending June 15, 2025

● On the Maine Monitor Radio Hour, reporter Josh Keefe discusses his story about a mother who had to learn the rules of life in a child welfare surveillance state the hard way: Conform precisely to middle-class, white-picket-fence child-rearing norms or lose your child. I have a blog post about the case with a link to the original story. 

● The Iowa Capital Dispatch reports that a mother forced to endure the trauma of a needless investigation and then fight her way off a state blacklist of alleged child abusers, all because of what she says a false positive drug test when she gave birth, is suing the lab. 

In this week's edition of The Horror Stories go in All Directions: 

● KSDK-TV has story about a case in Illinois, in which a foster mother and a foster grandmother have been charged in the murder of one of their foster children, Mackenzi Felmlee. The story begins with this headline: “Foster mom laughed while teen lay dying at bottom of stairs, court evidence reveals.” And there were other videos: 

Another piece of evidence showed Felmlee standing in front of a wall, forced to repeat phrases. One phrase was, "I am a doof, I hate myself," as [the foster mother] recorded and yelled at Felmlee while hitting her with an object. 

Other videos showed Felmlee begging for food and water. 

More videos and pictures showed Felmlee's injuries and bruises from her face to her arm. 

Other disturbing videos and pictures showed Felmlee forced to wear a soiled diaper on her face. … 

Other foster children also said they were abused: 

A child who resided in the home from 2013-2015 also reported [the foster mother] and said they were getting hit and threatened.

They said, "He'd rather die in the cold than live there." 

The family of Felmlee’s birth mother issued a statement. Here are some excerpts:

Mackenzi’s mother fought for her. 

She begged the courts for a second chance. She got sober. She got stable. She did the work. She tried to reunite with her children. But her voice wasn’t heard. The system didn’t want to look back at a woman’s redemption it only saw her past. So instead of being returned to her mother, Mackenzi was placed in a home with multiple prior abuse complaints all ignored by Illinois DCFS. … 

Mackenzi should be alive. 

Her mother should have been given the chance to be her mother again. 

Now, all we have is truth and we will not let it be buried by lies. 

The foster mother and foster grandmother deny the charges. Their defense attorney pointed out that the Illinois “child welfare” agency determined that all of the abuse allegations against them were unfounded. 

● In New Mexico, scene of America’s worst foster-care panic in 2023, and where the Governor has just further ratcheted up that panic, all in the name of child safety, of course, Searchlight New Mexico reports that this happened. 

● And in Pennsylvania, Statecollege.com reports: 

A former Centre County resident was arrested Tuesday on charges that he repeatedly raped a foster child in his care over a period of more than two years in the State College area.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending July 9, 2025

 ● You may think you know all about the horrors inflicted on children and families by some “child abuse pediatricians” – but these extraordinary stories from ProPublica add all sorts of insights, including how, in one state, a foster-care panic helped start the problems. And here’s the inevitable NCCPR Blog post discussing the implications. 

● A remarkable story of bravery from The Imprint: Horribly abused in a notorious New York State institution, she worked up the courage to seek justice – in her 80s. She’s able to try thanks to the extension of the statute of limitations for such crimes. (Those are the same laws that have left private agencies trying to pressure states into either making them virtually immune or giving them taxpayer bailouts. Unfortunately, in California, they got their bailout.) 

● The Reason Foundation is proposing model legislation concerning child welfare and substeance use. Provisions of their proposal include: 

requiring informed consent for drug testing, prohibiting automatic reporting [to child protective services or law enforcement] based on positive tests alone, and ensuring that substance use during pregnancy is not treated as grounds for criminal charges or automatic family separation. 

Here’s why:

This punitive approach to mothers struggling with substance use disorders has backfired spectacularly. States that criminalize maternal substance use see 41% higher rates of Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome—where infants experience drug withdrawal—and worse health outcomes for both mothers and infants. Why? Because fear pushes pregnant people away from care and proper management of their substance use, putting both mother and child at extreme risk. 

States that offer voluntary treatment without the threat of legal punishment, by contrast, see higher engagement in treatment, better recovery outcomes, and healthier births. ...

● Washington Post columnist Leana Wen writes about medical-legal partnerships – when the specialist a child needs most is a lawyer. Some examples: 

In large multiunit apartments, a dozen or more children could be suffering asthma exacerbations from the same environmental trigger. “The answer isn’t to give more medications to one kid,” [Dr. Robert] Kahn said. “It’s to make sure that the property owner is addressing the fundamental issues of roof leakage and mold.” 

He cited other cases: A child with multiple medical conditions was living in a home without a refrigerator or working air conditioner. So a legal advocate filed a complaint with the city that pressured the landlord to fix those problems. 

Though the column cites multiple benefits from these programs it doesn’t mention one of the most important: It helps doctors resist the temptation to confuse the poverty with neglect and call the family police.

● Thanks, CBS12 West Palm Beach, for an unflinching look at child abuse horrors that delves into the real reasons such cases are missed, including NCCPR’s perspective, and offers real solutions.  The story also illustrates how the horror stories go in all directions.  Speaking of which … 

In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories go in All Directions: 

From The Boston Globe: 

A New Hampshire woman who sued her adoptive parents for abuse she suffered as a child was granted $29.6 million in damages by a New Hampshire Superior Court judge on Tuesday, an award her attorney called one of the largest ever in New Hampshire. …

ProPublica’s child abuse pediatrician exposé breaks new ground, revealing failures of medicine, government – and journalism.

Images by chatGPT, (with thanks for the caption to Andrew Brown of the
Texas Public Policy Foundation whose op-ed in The Hill used it as the headline.) 

A brief preface for any journalists who may be reading this: 

OK, all you reporters and editors, admit it: You’ve gotten the calls or the long emails from parents insisting that the child protective services agency that took their children lied.  But they can’t see you when you roll your eyes and think: Yeah, right. After all, the CPS workers are hard-working, underpaid, mostly well-motivated, white-collar professionals – just the sort of people reporters can identify with.  

That person who sent the long email – the one that runs two pages with no paragraph breaks – well, they’re probably child abusers, right? They conjure up images of the worst case you’ve ever covered. So why check out what they have to say? 

When you read about the visit supervisor who called out her own colleagues for lying – and who was pressured to lie herself – you may wish to reconsider. 

The context: child abuse pediatricians 

It’s become a staple of investigative journalism: Every few months, some news organization exposes the horrors inflicted on children and families by some child abuse pediatricians – the doctors who are supposed to find child abuse where it is – but sometimes also find child abuse where it isn’t. 

There was the stunning series by Mike Hixenbaugh of NBC News and more stories by Hixenbaugh and Keri Blakinger, then with the Houston Chronicle. There are the stories from Wisconsin Watch, the Anchorage Daily News and even excellent reporting from The Alligator, the student newspaper at the University of Florida, all dealing with the same child abuse pediatrician who kept getting run out of one job after another. Then there’s this story from Illinois, and this story from Texas, and these stories from Georgia. And of course, there was the reporting from the Sarasota Herald Tribune on the case that was the subject of the documentary Take Care of Maya. 

The most recent stories, from ProPublica, co-published with Minnesota-based APM Reports, add some new elements to consider. 

● They zero in on the extent to which child abuse pediatrics appears to be a closed club, a small group that constantly reinforces each other, tolerates no dissent and demands absolute deference. (Indeed, some child abuse pediatricians have suggested publicly that other doctors should stop doing so much thinking!) 

● The stories show how the harm caused by this culture can extend far beyond the harm done to families directly affected by their blunders. 

● The stories illustrate the extent to which child protective services agencies can be complicit.  

● And the stories illustrate a couple of embarrassing failures by a big local newspaper. 

At the center of all of it is Dr. Nancy Harper, the child abuse pediatrician who leads a team at the University of Minnesota’s Otto Bremer Trust Center for Safe and Healthy Children. The bill of particulars alleged concerning Harper is much like those concerning the child abuse pediatricians in all those other stories: An unwavering belief in the validity of “Shaken Baby Syndrome,” a refusal to consider any other explanation for injuries, running roughshod over anyone, including colleagues who disagree and leaving a trail of despair for children and families needlessly separated. 

As one of the ProPublica stories notes: 

[T]wo federal lawsuits filed recently accuse Harper of ignoring or even concealing alternative explanations for children’s injuries. And, more broadly, medical and legal experts are increasingly questioning a leading child abuse diagnosis, shaken baby syndrome, which is also known as abusive head trauma. 

But this may be the scariest thing of all about Dr. Harper: As the ProPublica story puts it: 

By Harper’s own estimation, she’s never been wrong.

 When the family police are complicit 

The role of the family police agency (a more accurate term than “child welfare” agency) in Hennepin County, Minnesota, itself is aptly illustrated by a case discussed toward the end of one of the stories:  

In this case, a child had multiple bruises and fractures. No one called to report the parents, they saw the bruises, they were alarmed, they brought the child to the hospital. Harper immediately said: child abuse. Not only did authorities take the child on the spot, the county attorney immediately filed for termination of parental rights. 

Here’s what happened next: 

The baby was placed in foster care with a woman who worked as a nurse. … While in the care of the foster parent, the baby developed new bruises and Harper evaluated him again. 

Instead of considering that her diagnosis might be wrong – and remember, Dr. Harper says she’s never wrong. 

A new abuse investigation was opened against the foster parent, and [the child] was moved to a second foster family — in this case, a pediatrician and her husband. Once again, the baby developed new bruises, according to his visitation supervisor. 

So would Harper change her mind now? No way! Instead, she said maybe those bruises weren’t really bruises. 

But prosecutors came up with something even more outlandish: They alleged the parents were finding a way to abuse their son clandestinely during visits – even though all visits were supervised by a professional whose job is – to observe visits. 

And here’s where the whole issue of lying comes in. The visit supervisor 

provided a sworn affidavit saying that she did not witness any abusive behavior from the parents, and that she’d become so stressed in part from the pressure to say she had witnessed abuse that she asked to be taken off the case. She also wrote that CPS workers were lying to and about the couple, claiming that the foster parents spoke Spanish, which they did not, and that [the Spanish-speaking parents] were unreliable about keeping visitation appointments. 

“The parents attended every visit. They never cancelled,” the supervisor wrote. “Even when their tire popped on the way to their first supervised visitations, they got an Uber and were only about five minutes late.”

The collateral damage 

The other key figure in the main ProPublica story is another pediatrician, and one with a distinguished record in his own right. Dr. Bazak Sharon could be difficult with his colleagues, but was notable for his compassion for his patients and their families. He was also the one and only doctor in Minnesota, and one of the few in the nation, who was an expert at treating a rare, traumatic childhood condition known by the acronyms PANS or PANDAS. 

But when Dr. Sharon dared to challenge Harper, and especially when he put his concerns in writing (which can be really embarrassing if there are ever, you know, lawsuits) – he was forced to resign.  That reduced the number of doctors to whom Minnesota parents could turn to treat their children’s PANS/PANDAS to zero. (One nurse practitioner treats it, but she works for a clinic that doesn’t take insurance.)  But the hospital that forced Dr. Sharon out did have a solution. They told parents to try a program in Madison, Wisconsin, four hours away. 

The journalistic failure 

And that brings us to the other key player in all this – one not mentioned in the ProPublica story: The Minnesota Star Tribune. 

When Dr. Sharon was forced to resign, ProPublica notes, parents were so upset that “they went to the local newspaper.” That’s the Star Tribune. On Nov. 6, 2023, they published a good story about the plight of the families. And then they came within inches of another urgent story – and missed it.  The only mention of the child abuse pediatrician issue was this one sentence: 

Sharon said he feels terrible for his PANS/PANDAS patients but that he resigned from University of Minnesota Physicians because of an unrelated dispute over the clinical management of head trauma in infants. 

That should have been a “Wait – what?” moment for the Star Tribune. Child abuse pediatricians have been controversial for some time now and, in particular, it’s well known that there is considerable controversy over “the clinical management of head trauma in infants.” 

So one would hope the Star Tribune would dig into the resignation – which could have led them to the revelations that ProPublica would report nearly 18 months later. 

But I can find no follow-up. I found nothing at all about the controversy until Dr. Harper was sued. Then the Star Tribune wrote about the lawsuit. 

Would at least some of the harm done to children and families since November 2023 have been averted had the Star Tribune then done the reporting ProPublica has done now?  Why didn’t that happen? Did the Star Tribune make a concerted effort to find out more, but simply couldn’t get the story? Did it not occur to them to try? Or is it that the whole notion of false allegations and wrongful removal makes the Star Tribune uncomfortable? 

I sent two emails and a text message to the reporter who wrote the Star Tribune’s 2023 story seeking comment. I have received no reply.

This brings us to the second Star Tribune failure that contributed, albeit indirectly, to this tragedy.  Here’s how the ProPublica story explained it: 

Harper’s arrival in Minnesota coincided with the fallout of a high-profile tragedy: the 2013 death of 4-year-old Eric Dean.

Dean lived with his family in sparsely populated Pope County, in west-central Minnesota. According to an investigation by The Minnesota Star Tribune, teachers and caregivers reported signs that Dean was being abused to child protection workers at least 15 times before his stepmother threw him across a room, causing injuries that would kill him. She is in prison serving a life sentence. 

In response, then-Gov. Mark Dayton signed an executive order in 2014 creating the Governor’s Task Force on the Protection of Children. The next year, along with a slew of other reforms, the state Legislature created a $23.35 million grant to give counties money based partially on the number of open child protection investigations. 

The number of child abuse cases soared. For instance, in Hennepin County, where Minneapolis is located, cases of physical abuse more than doubled from 2015 to 2016, before dropping over the next several years.

The lawsuit suggests an even bigger jump: 

In 2016—after Harper arrived  and her … policies and procedures were put into place – 5,709 children in Hennepin County were reported as alleged victims of physical abuse, an increase of 228% over the previous eight-year average. In one calendar year, physical abuse cases in Hennepin County rose by 223%. 

The lawsuit also has more about the financial incentives that may have been at play, alleging that the Bremer Trust Center itself was “offering substantial financial bonuses for the identification and prosecution of child abuse.” 

But what does any of this have to do with the Star Tribune? 

It wasn’t the death of Eric Dean itself that set all this in motion. It was the Star Tribune’s hype and hysteria-filled coverage of the death of Eric Dean, and the foster-care panic it caused – in a state already tearing apart families at a rate far above the national average -- that set all this into motion. It was the Star Tribune’s blunders that led to the Task Force, which compounded the blunders. More about how the Star Tribune and the Task Force failed can be found in this NCCPR report. And in this column for the child welfare trade journal, The Imprint. 

This kind of failure is bad enough done once, but the Star Tribune not only learned nothing, it tried to do the same thing again in 2023. Fortunately, Minnesota lawmakers seem to abide by the adage “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.” They did not repeat their mistakes – they even passed legislation intended to curb needless removal. 

But the damage done by the first foster-care panic has yet to be undone.  As of 2023, Minnesota still was tearing apart families at a rate double the national average when rates of child poverty are factored in.  And now, thanks to ProPublica, we know about some additional collateral damage. 

The stories told by ProPublica involve families who were able to fight back. We’ll never know if there are others whose children may have been misdiagnosed by the child abuse pediatrician who says she’s always right. 

At a minimum, families accused under these circumstances should be entitled to obtain a second opinion from an expert of their choosing at no cost. 

Also, ProPublica reports: 

Hennepin County has a contract with Harper’s employer, University of Minnesota Physicians, to provide medical consultation, expert witness testimony and case consultation with county attorneys. 

That contract should end. 

Oh, and wouldn’t it be great if the University of Minnesota apologized to Dr. Sharon and offered him his job back?

Forget the ceremonies: In Michigan, every day is Family Destruction Day

At a ceremony to commemorate “Michigan Reunification Day,” Michigan Supreme Court Chief Justice Megan Cavanagh said: 

Through coordination between courts and child welfare professionals, parents who are struggling and need support in order to reunify with their children are given opportunities in family courts to be met with opportunity, not punishment. 

But the data tell a different story ...

Read the full story in the Michigan Advance 

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending July 2, 2025

● A volunteer in the Los Angeles Court-Appointed Special Advocates program said she was “triggered” when the program director used the words “social justice” or “racial justice.”  This particular CASA director used those terms more than most. Instead of deciding the problem was with the volunteer, they … well, it’s CASA, so I’m sure you can guess. The Imprint has a story and I have a blog post about it.  

● When you take away children at a rate 60% above the national average, you have to start begging for beds, and beggars can’t be choosers. So over and over and over, you turn a blind eye to what’s really happening in the places where you put all those children. The Boston Globe exposes some of the terrible consequences.

● Missouri only tears apart families at a rate 50% above the national average – but the new head of their family police agency is aiming higher.  I have a blog post about how Sara Smith of the Missouri Children’s Division is turning up the spigot on the foster-care-to-prison pipeline.

● Of course, no matter how many times journalists expose abuse in group homes and institutions, someone will always bring up Boys Town.  After all, Boys Town is wonderful, isn’t it? So it must be OK to institutionalize children, right?  So I’m glad I stumbled across this stunning 2023 series from the Des Moines Register that I’d missed at the time.

● Yet again, scandal surrounds the work of a “child abuse pediatrician.” This time, ProPublica reports, even another doctor who dared challenge her allegedly faced retaliation. There’s a harrowing recording of a crucial meeting. And in this case, a 2014 foster-care panic, fueled by the Minnesota Star-Tribune, may have played an indirect role.

● Fortunately, more recent reporting by the Star-Tribune that seemed aimed at starting another panic failed, and the state is taking small steps in the right direction, such as the initiative discussed in this story from The Imprint.

● “I remember the case of a 6-year-old boy whose teacher called child protective services because he had missed school one too many times,” writes Mathangi Swaminathan in The 74.

No one asked why. If they had, they would’ve heard about the eviction notice taped to the front door, the backpack still stuffed from the rushed move, the air mattress where he now slept curled beside his baby sister. His parents were working two jobs each, leaving at dawn and returning long after bedtime, doing everything they could to keep food on the table and a roof overhead. 

He wasn’t unsafe. He wasn’t unloved. He was just missing too many days of school: seven, to be exact, the unexcused limit. And that was enough to trigger an investigation. 

● There are several states in which, if you are torn from the arms of your parents as a child, you are almost certainly never going home. I have a blog post about the state with the worst record – Virginia – and a follow-up about some of the others. 

● In the Michigan Advance, I have a column about that state, which, also has a particularly dismal record. 

● In Washington State, whether it’s a state agency that won’t help or a tribal agency that can’t, Native American children wind up forced into foster care at disproportionate rates. KUOW Public Radio reports on the consequences.

Cranking up the foster care to prison pipeline in Missouri

 

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?

Los Angeles CASA does the most CASA thing in the world

There are more than 900 chapters of Court-Appointed Special Advocates. Of that number, one was led by a Black woman with lived experience. Now that number is zero. 

On May 19, UCLA Blueprint published this story about Dr. Charity Chandler-Cole,
director of Los Angeles CASA. On June 18, she was fired.

Here’s how that most sacred cow in child welfare, Court-Appointed Special Advocates (CASA), works: 

Overwhelmingly white middle-class volunteers are given 30 hours of training, maybe 40, much of which can be taken online.* Then they’re sent into the homes of families that are overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately nonwhite. The usually white, middle-class amateurs interview everyone, assess the families, spend what one study found to be an average of 12 minutes every working day investigating the case (less if the child was Black).

Then they can effectively decide if the child will go into foster care. They can effectively decide if the child stays in foster care.  They can effectively decide if the child will ever see his or her parents ever again. (Yes, judges do it officially, but CASA brags about how often judges do as they tell them to do.) 

What could possibly go wrong? 

Well, for starters, abundant research shows that it backfires. Studies find that CASA prolongs foster care, reduces the chances of reunification, increases the chances that children will “age out” with no home at all – and does nothing to improve child safety. (And by the way, though the amateurs also are volunteers, it turns out running all this costs taxpayers a fortune.) 

Second, no matter how well-meaning the volunteers, the program is so steeped in unfixable racial and class bias that runs so deep, two legal scholars called the entire program “an act of white supremacy.” 

But for a while there, it looked like one CASA program was serious about trying to do better, and it was a big one.  In 2021, the Los Angeles County CASA program hired as its director Dr. Charity Chandler-Cole. That was a shock. Charity Chandler-Cole is a Black woman with lived experience; someone who had risen above everything the system tried to do to her. And Los Angeles tears apart families at one of the highest rates among America’s largest cities. 

As The Imprint points out in this excellent story, among those who hailed her appointment was Karen Bass, then a Member of Congress with a strong interest in foster care issues, now mayor of Los Angeles. Said Bass: 

“Charity is the right leader at the perfect time for CASA/LA. She is a visionary who will be a tireless champion for the program and the children and families they serve.” 

But on June 18, the Board of Los Angeles County CASA fired Dr. Chandler-Cole.  That was not a shock.  That was the most CASA thing in the world. 

As The Imprint points out, it’s not like the Board didn’t know what it was getting: 

Her views were clearly stated upon her hiring. 

“If our CASAs don’t understand why these systems were created in the first place and that they weren’t created to really address the needs of our communities, then they can’t really go in understanding how to navigate this system that is not created to help young people from Black and brown communities,” Chandler-Cole said in a 2021 interview with this outlet. 

But, as the story also points out, that was 2021, the height of America’s short-lived racial justice reckoning.  Now, of course, there’s a lot less pressure for racial justice, and CASA can return to its comfort zone. 

In retrospect, a profile of Dr. Chandler-Cole and her work, published just last month, included a hint of what was to come: 

Not everyone was happy when Chandler-Cole got the job and began a series of monthly virtual fireside chats at which she talked about race and racism, immigration, and the particular needs of — and structural discrimination against — LGBTQ-plus kids and parents. Some volunteers and board members told her that her approach was scaring people. Some quit. One said she was triggered every time the new CEO used the words “social justice” or “racial justice.” [Emphasis added.] 

That article was published on May 19. One month later, Charity Chandler-Cole was out.  I guess too many CASAs were getting “triggered.” 

In one sense, the Los Angeles County CASA Board of Directors was absolutely right. Some board members told The Imprint: 

“The CASA Board determined that there was a fundamental misalignment between Dr. Chandler-Cole’s approach and CASA’s mission ..." 

That tells you all you need to know about CASA's real mission. 

*-Plus in-service – some CASAs get soooooo upset when you don’t mention the in-service.