NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending Nov 4, 2025

● Research overwhelmingly shows that, almost always, the least harmful form of foster care, by far, is kinship foster care – placement with extended family. Consider that as you read this story from USA Today about how the State of Texas threw every possible barrier in the way of a heroic grandmother who stepped up to take care of her grandchildren. 

● In Kansas, which tears apart families at one of the highest rates in the nation, the leader of a private foster care agency describes conditions in her own agency as “pandemonium.” She tells a legislative committee about a six-year-old sleeping in their office for 48 nights before being institutionalized. Then she says the agency needs a taxpayer bailout because insurance premiums are going up. To the surprise of no one who regularly reads this blog, I have a blog post about this. 

● File this next one under “those who cannot remember the past…” I always worry when I ask reporters if they’ve ever heard of cases like the McMartin Preschool, and they say no. That’s understandable; that case happened more than 40 years ago. But it seems that a lot of people, from caseworkers to therapists to journalists, forgot. How else to explain the horrific injustice exposed in a very recent case in Washington, D.C. by former Washington Post reporter Radley Balko on his Substack, The Watch. It could have been called McMartin Redux. And in this recent case, some of the biggest failures were those of the D.C. family police agency. 

Given that none of the individuals or organizations most responsible for whipping up the hysteria over cases like McMartin all those years ago ever has been held accountable – indeed, some are still treated as reliable sources by journalists today, perhaps it was inevitable. 

As for the media, the then-media critic for the Los Angeles Times, David Shaw, won a Pulitzer Prize for a series critiquing their failure in the McMartin case. Balko hasn’t gotten one of those for this story (and media were not the primary focus) – but he did get a “laurel” from Columbia Journalism Review. 

● Libertarian journalist John Stossel offersa refreshing take on these issues. Refreshing on two counts: First, he hears out all sides, then he offers a candid conclusion: 

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

From The News-Review in Oregon:

A boy who said he was sexually abused by another child while both lived in a Douglas County foster home is suing the state, claiming the parents of the home knew about the alleged abuse yet allowed it to occur. … 

J.A., who was born in 2014, lived in the foster home between 2019 and the first half of 2020. During that time, J.A. was sexually assaulted by a female foster child who also lived in the home. The girl reportedly made the boy touch her private area, insert objects into her, and drink her urine, the lawsuit said. 

The foster parents in the home reportedly learned of the abuse, but “simply moved Jane to another bedroom,” according to the lawsuit. Further, the foster parents reportedly continued to allow the girl back into the boy’s bed at night. …

In Kansas, an agency that institutionalized a six-year-old is looking for a bailout

Stock photo from Pixabay

Add Kansas to the list of states where private foster care agencies are looking for a bailout to cover high insurance costs. So far, California has caved, New York has resisted, and it looks like Illinois is going to study the matter. 

Insurance premiums are skyrocketing because of laws making it easier for victims of horrific abuse in foster care and institutions to sue. Those lawsuits are what insurance companies needed to notice something a lot of us have been saying for decades: Though foster care is portrayed as a safe haven for children, it’s rarely a haven – and often it’s not safe. 

So now agencies are running to government seeking either near-immunity from lawsuits, taxpayer bailouts or both. 

The real solution is to curb needless removal of children. That way, group homes and institutions no longer will be needed, and for the few children who really need to be taken from their parents, safe, loving family foster homes will be available. 

In few places is this more apparent than Kansas. When you count only the removals of children to which the state Department of Children and Families admits to taking, Kansas tears apart families at a rate more than double the national average. Add in Kansas’ own special form of hidden foster care, so-called police protective custody placements, and it’s probably closer to triple. 

                                        Nat. Avg.                 KS official      Estimate: KS+ "police                                                                                                                      protective custody"

Enter Brenda Watkins, president of EmberHope Connections, the latest subcontractor handling foster care for the Wichita region, telling the Kansas Legislature her agency needs a bailout – even as she admits to “pandemonium” in her own agency. 

As a story in the Kansas Reflector explains: 

She described “pandemonium,” staff and child injuries and security troubles. One security company fired EmberHope, and off-duty Wichita Police Department officers now help in place of private security guards. 

The issue arose in connection with the Wichita region’s dismal record for stashing children in makeshift night-to-night placements, such as offices. It happens across Kansas hundreds of times. And in 2024, the Wichita region, with roughly 27% of the state’s population, had 83% of such incidents.

Which brings us to the matter of institutionalizing six-year-olds. From the story: 

One 6-year-old boy spent 48 nights in an EmberHope office and 40 nights in a hospital in a three-month span. … 

The boy, who was eventually diagnosed with a neurological condition, has been living in a residential psychiatric treatment facility and is expected to soon be discharged into a therapeutic foster home, Watkins said. 

So was this child actually abused? Neglected? Abandoned? How exactly did a neurological condition call for any form of foster care, much less what this six-year-old is being forced to endure. 

Perhaps most disturbing is how Watkins spins this as some kind of success.  Now, at last, she says, 

“He has been wrapped around with community services and supports to meet his needs,” Watkins said. 

Yes, private agencies can pervert any term to suit their interests. No, warehousing a six-year-old in an agency office, a hospital, and a residential treatment center and then providing a supportive home is the antithesis of Wraparound. For the benefit of anyone who may be confused, here’s a brief video refresher course in what Wraparound really means: 

There are more details here. 

Of course, Watkins blamed a shortage of placements. But neither she nor anyone else explains why the so-called “shortage” apparently is even worse in Wichita than the rest of the state. 

One place to look might be back at those police protective custody placements.  When it comes to officially acknowledged foster care placements, the Wichita region does not appear to be out of line with the rest of the state in its rate-of-removal – it’s horrible everywhere. 

But when it comes to those off-the-books placements, Wichita is far worse. We don’t know why, but I can suggest one place to look. 

In Kansas child welfare, caseworkers come and go, private contractors come and go, commissioners come and go, even agency names come and go (DCF used to be SRS - the Department of Social and Rehabilitative Services). But for decades, there has been one constant: Ron Paschal, the deputy district attorney in charge of the Juvenile Division in Sedgwick County (metropolitan Wichita). 

Based on what I am sure is a sincere belief he is protecting children, there is no stronger advocate for a take-the-child-and-run approach to “child welfare” – and no stronger defender of police protective custody placements – than Paschal. Seventeen years ago, his office was accused of bullying caseworkers into including things in sworn affidavits that the workers didn't actually believe. Paschal’s staff also was accused of cussing at, screaming at, yelling at and threatening the caseworkers. 

The accusations came from none other than the head of SRS at the time – Don Jordan. Paschal strongly denied the accusations and, ultimately, so did Jordan. When Jordan found out his comments had been taped and would be made public, he called Paschal and apologized. He didn’t mean it, he said; he was merely “pandering” to the family advocates with whom he was meeting. (Details on all this are in the report on Kansas child welfare that we released at the time.) 

But there is no doubt that Paschal has spent decades pushing a take-the-child-and-run agenda and opposing any attempt to curb it. 

So he, too, really should watch the video above. 

And then he and Watkins should read that new study from Sweden -- the one finding that, by age 20, foster children were more than four times more likely to have died than those alleged to have been comparably-maltreated but left in their homes. So no, the horrifying finding is not because the foster youth were in worse shape to begin with. 

The major cause for all those foster child deaths: Suicide. 

So after reading the study, I hope that Paschal will reconsider his approach. And I hope Watkins, whose agency is not responsible for the initial act of removing children, will speak out about those who are responsible and are taking too many needlessly. 

I also hope Watkins will move heaven and earth to wrap real help around that six-year-old for a long, long time. Because it sure sounds like he’s going to need it.

#CASAsoWhite: Our annual Halloween reminder to CASA: No, it’s not a good idea to raise money by holding a talent show with a blackface act. (And yes, one CASA chapter actually did that.)

 We suggest that the National office for the Court-Appointed Special Advocates program use this item from The Daily Show as a training video

In 2018, responding to former Today Show anchor Megyn Kelly’s appalling attempt to justify blackface, (for which she has apologized) her colleague Craig Melvin noted that, as a CNN story put it, “this controversy is an opportunity to inform people — but [Melvin] said most people already knew how offensive blackface is.”

Most people, but apparently not one chapter of that most sacred cow in child welfare Court-Appointed Special Advocates.  Oh, they’ve learned in the years since they included a blackface act in a fundraiser, especially since they apparently eventually apologized – but that is just one example of the racial bias that plagues CASA.  And that, of course, raises fundamental questions about the role of CASA in deciding the fate of children who are overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately children of color.  Even more questions are raised by the latest study of CASA's effectiveness. And there's much more about CASA in NCCPR's presentation at the 2021 Kempe Center conference. and in this 2024 story from The Imprint.

So every Halloween, I plan to reprint this post from 2017:  

This Halloween, The Daily Show offers a useful history lesson. The topic: why it’s a really bad idea for white people to dress up in blackface:

But the lesson isn’t just useful for Halloween. It’s also something that anyone involved with that most sacred cow of child welfare – Court-Appointed Special Advocates -- needs to know.

CASA is a program in which minimally trained volunteers, overwhelmingly white and middle-class, are assigned to families who are overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately nonwhite. Then they tell judges if the children should be taken from those families, sometimes forever.   That, of course, raises problems of inherent bias.  But some CASA chapters have made their biases depressingly obvious.

Consider what happened nine years ago in Arkansas City, Kansas. To raise funds for the local CASA chapter, they held a talent competition. The winning act featured the mayor of Arkansas City – dressed in blackface.  The head of the local CASA chapter couldn’t understand why that was a problem.   "It wasn't black black," she said. "It was all really just tan." That’s only the beginning. All the awful details are here.

It would be one thing if this were just an isolated example of racial bias. But it’s not.

● There was the CASA chapter in Marin County, California, which fell apart when the state CASA association merely asked that they strive for more diversity among the volunteers.

● There was the appalling racist rant by someone who says he volunteered in a scandal-plagued Washington State CASA program for 20 years.

● There’s the fact that the most comprehensive study ever done of CASA, a study commissioned by the National CASA Association itself, found that CASA volunteers spend significantly less time on a case if the child to whom they are assigned is Black.

● And then there’s the question of whether the very structure of CASA makes it, in the words of a law review article, “an exercise of white supremacy.”

Showing the Daily Show video won’t solve all these problems; not even close. But it might help prevent the worst excesses of racial bias in CASA programs.

Originally published, Oct. 30, 2017

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending Oct. 28, 2025

Before the week in review, a note about a new resource from NCCPR: The Good Bill Bank has links to excellent legislation from around the country aimed at curbing the vast power of the family police. Take a look and see what might work in your state. 

● Last week, I highlighted a study, the author of which described its key finding as “staggering.” This study, from Sweden, found that, by age 20, children who had endured foster care were more than four times more likely to die than children left in their own homes. And no, the children placed in foster care did not suffer worse maltreatment or have worse problems beforehand. The cause wasn’t what happened before foster care. The cause was foster care. 

The major cause of death: suicide. A tragic illustration can be found in Baltimore. In the Baltimore Sun, Prof. Shanta Trivedi of the University of Baltimore wrote about the real roots of these tragedies and what can be done about them. 

● Every once in a while, family policing systems give us a peek into the depths of their cruelty. A story in The Imprint gave us such a peek last week. It’s about the Georgia family police agency’s response to a lawsuit demanding that it stop making parents pay ransom to get their kids back. (Oh, they call it “child support,” but when you take away someone’s child against their will and then make the parents pay money to get the child back, obviously, the proper term is “ransom.”) 

The Georgia family police agency response included this: 

 “All parents have a duty to support their children,” a duty that is not “performed only at the voluntary pleasure or whimsical desire of the parent.” 

The story also notes that, even as the lawsuit is pending, the mother “continues to receive letters threatening jail time if she doesn’t pay off her accumulating debt.” 

● Given how the Georgia family police agency behaves, it’s no wonder nonprofit organizations have to cobble together a patchwork of support and work with those caseworkers who really do want to do the right thing, whenever they want to keep children out of family police clutches. From The Imprint, here’s one example. And another. And another. 

That last one includes a reminder of why an omnipresent child welfare surveillance state backfires: 

Months later, she said she had refused our help at first because she feared that accepting assistance from anyone connected to CPS might jeopardize reunification. She added that what she needed — but was afraid to ask for — was recovery support and connection to a healthy community, plus help with a car repair to keep work and court appointments. 

● Child abuse pediatricians allegedly are at it again – this time in Indiana. And once again, a news organization, this time WRTV Indianapolis, goes beyond that immediate issue to explore larger failings in the family policing system. 

● Welcome to Sacramento County, California, where the family police will take an infant away from his mother in the midst of breastfeeding – and later, threaten to cancel visits if the mother didn’t stop crying. Afro LA has a story about a program intended to stop situations from escalating to that point – and about the enormous difficulties getting it funded under the so-called Family First Act. 

There’s better news from New York on two fronts: 

● In June, the online publication Documented told the story of two Asian families that the New York City Administration for Children’s Services and its contracted agencies tried to destroy. For one, it was too late, but the other family – and all vulnerable children – won a huge victory in the form of a landmark decision from New York State’s highest court, the Court of Appeals. The court reversed the termination of a child’s rights to his father (a more accurate way to look at it than termination of parental rights).  As the Center for Family Representation, which represented the father, said: 

As the Court noted, "[e]conomic challenges, like those experienced by father, are often the most difficult to overcome because lack of financial resources may be at the root of other barriers to reunification." As a result, the Court held that agencies have a responsibility to assist parents with economic challenges when they present a barrier to reunification. 

● The NYC Family Policy Project reports on two policy changes since 2020 that are helping children and families: The city’s public hospitals no longer test pregnant and postpartum women for drugs without their consent, and, when it’s necessary, hospitals and other institutions are doing more to connect mothers directly to help instead of turning them in. 

The result, says the report:

 -- ACS cases involving newborns fell almost 50% between 2017-2024. 

-- Newborn foster care entries also fell by 37% between 2019-2023. 

-- For infants, ACS involvement fell less dramatically but substantially, with reports dropping by approximately 20% from 2019-2023 and foster care entries declining by 23%. 

There is no evidence that newborns and infants are less safe because of reduced ACS involvement. Child maltreatment fatalities of children under 6 months and under 1 are rare in NYC and have remained stable since 2017. 

● But the lesson hasn’t been learned everywhere. WXIA-TV Atlanta reports on how, back in Georgia, non-consensual drug testing and calling the family police at the drop of a hat combine to cause misery for children and families. 

● The Imprint reports on youth and family advocates who brought the case against the American family policing system to the United Nations. 

● One often reads stories about a “shortage” of caseworkers. In fact, the problem almost always is not too few caseworkers, it’s too many children needlessly investigated and placed in foster care. That’s especially true in Alaska, which, for decades, has torn apart families at one of the highest rate in America. 

So KTOO-TV took a different look at issues involving caseworkers: The disconnect between their background – overwhelmingly white – and the background of the children and families – overwhelmingly Alaska native, and the fact that the state family police agency doesn’t seem to give a damn. 

The story quotes an email from an agency flak in which she writes that the agency 

“does not view this as a ‘concern’ in the sense of a problem to be fixed, but it does guide our efforts to provide culturally responsive care.” 

Yeah. That sure seems to be going well.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending October 21, 2025

● Serial, the famous podcast shop that’s now part of The New York Times, is the latest to examine the enormous harm to children done by some child abuse pediatricians. But if you think you already know the story, at least check out Part 3 – because it looks at a bigger issue: The terrible harm done to children when agencies think tearing apart a family is ok because it’s “erring on the side of the child” or “better safe than sorry.” 

● Yes, but those who cling to “better safe than sorry” claim that at least if we throw them in foster care they won’t die. The next time you hear it, you might want to show the speaker a study from Sweden that shows where children really are more likely to die – more than four times more likely, in fact. I have a blog post with the answer, along with a link to the study. 

● KNXV-TV reports that in Arizona, a state that still tears apart families at a rate well above the national average, “Since 2016, state records show DCS has paid out more than $30 million to settle lawsuits involving children.” The most common allegation: wrongful removal. 

● In Maine, private contractors are hired by the state family police agency to arrange visits after children are taken from their parents. The first visit is supposed to be arranged within seven days. That’s actually far too long, especially for the youngest children. But the Maine Monitor reports that one of the contractors met the deadline less than half the time.  That almost certainly would have been the story’s lead – except that another contractor, the largest, met the deadline only ten percent of the time.  The state renewed that vendor's contract anyway. 

As one guardian ad litem put it: 

“Babies being removed and then not being allowed to see the parent that they’ve just begun bonding with, that’s horrific. But a child of any age needs to see their parent again.” 

And then there was the case in which a judge said the failure to arrange visits between a mother and her child was “simply not acceptable.” But she terminated the child’s right to ever live with the mother ever again anyway. 

Because this is Maine. And in Maine, which takes away children at one of the highest rates in the nation, whether you’re a contractor or the family police agency, you can do pretty much whatever you damn well please to any family you want to do it to, and there’s no penalty. 

● WANF-TV in Atlanta reports “A Cherokee County mother has been cleared by child welfare officials after false positive drug test results nearly separated her from her children.” 

● In Oklahoma, KWTV reports, a lawmaker who wants to raise the standard of evidence before children can be torn from their families got support from some surprising places – in fact, even from a CASA.  From the story:

 At last week’s interim study, attorney Phillip Owens, who is a foster parent himself, said many parents face unfair court battles. "Most of the deprived cases that I handle don’t involve any kind of a criminal charge," Owens said. “Way too many judges in this state take DHS at their word." 

Tulsa-based private investigator Eric Cullen echoed that statement. "There’s just no compromise. It’s black and white," Cullen said. "It’s really harsh; it’s a little draconian, frankly.” 

Jennifer Ballew is a court-appointed special advocate who is assigned to child welfare cases by judges. She said policy changes are necessary. "The policies of DHS do not lead in the direction of reunification," Ballew said. 

Two columns in The Imprint shed new light on chronic family police system failures: 

● From Shellie Taggart and Wendy Mota of Futures Without Violence: A reminder of how the system makes things infinitely worse for survivors of domestic violence and their children. They write: 

CPS continues to rely on a vast surveillance network of mandated reporters to bring survivors of domestic violence into the system, where their protective strategies are often misinterpreted as neglect. Their lives are constrained by unnecessary services, and too often their children are removed for ‘failure to protect.’ This practice continues despite the obvious harms caused by the system and extensive evidence that a loving parent-child bond is a critical protective factor for healing from trauma. 

●Ericka Hickey writes about how she was separated from her siblings in foster care – but she notes an extra level of cruelty. She writes: 

The most painful part of my story isn’t that I was separated from my sisters. It’s that I was only brought around when it served someone else’s goals, when it made their job easier, or fulfilled a requirement — not because our bond mattered and should have been honored and protected. 

● NCCPR’s commentary, behind a paywall in the Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch, begins this way: 

Faced with horrifying child abuse deaths, often in cases that were well known to child protective services agencies, there are two ways to respond: Determine what went wrong case-by-case and do the hard work necessary to fix the problems so they never happen again. Or just scapegoat efforts to keep families together and embrace what amounts to a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare. …

 The first approach leads to safer children; the second makes for great politics. Unfortunately, Virginia’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, Janet Kelly, chose the second.

Death at an early age: A Swedish study finds it’s FOUR TIMES more likely for those who’ve been in foster care

Our entire massive child welfare surveillance state – a system so omnipresent that it will investigate the families of one-third of all American children and more than half of Black children – was never built on science. It didn’t grow based on research showing that this approach will make children safer. 

It was fed, and grew to its current monstrous proportions, almost exclusively on horror stories. 

Over and over, child abuse fatalities among children “known to the system,” horrors as rare as they are tragic, were exploited to call for ever more investigations and the removal of ever more children to foster care.  It never worked; but that never mattered. 

As we have begun to catch on, as some states have passed laws curbing the reach of the child welfare surveillance state, the invocation of horror stories has become even more desperate. Think of that one person to whom your local media turn time and time again. Maybe it’s your “Senator (or Representative) Soundbite” – the state legislators who worm their way into every story. Maybe it’s the state child welfare ombudsman or “child advocate.” Maybe it’s the head of a trade association for group homes or residential treatment centers. Sometimes, sadly, it’s the journalists themselves. 

The message is always the same - some version of: If you don’t investigate even more families and take away even more children, more children will die! 

The only acceptable goal for child abuse fatalities is zero. But there is no evidence that exploiting such fatalities to create the current system, no evidence that investigating ever more families, and no evidence that taking away more children, has ever done a damn thing to curb child deaths – even as it caused enormous collateral damage. And now there is evidence that the system itself may cause more children to die. 

The evidence comes in the form of a stunning study from Sweden. The study determined the fate of children involved in 21,000 cases, comparing those placed in foster care to comparably- maltreated children left in their own homes. (Note the part about comparably-maltreated. No, the foster youth did not suffer from worse abuse or neglect than those left at home.) Here's a link to the full study.

The result: By age 20, those who had endured time in foster care were more likely to die. Not just a little more likely to die – more than four times more likely to die. 

Of course, percentages don’t mean a lot if the raw numbers are low. But the raw numbers are not low.  Among children left in their own homes 1.8% died by age 20. Among those who were forced into foster care, 8.6% died by age 20, a figure the study author calls “staggering.” 

She writes: 

This effect is mainly driven by suicides that occur while the removed children are still placed in out-of-home care. There is a sharp and persistent increased risk of suicide already within nine months after the court’s decision. The empirical evidence suggests that unfavorable care conditions and harmful exposure to peers serve as important explanations. 

Among other things, this is still more evidence that the “residential treatment center” model, in which children said to have serious mental health problems are thrown together right when they are most vulnerable to peer pressure, is, well, insane. And there certainly is nothing to suggest that “care conditions” in the United States are more favorable than in Sweden – not when you consider all the exposes of residential treatment and all those studies showing high rates of abuse in American foster care. 

This is, of course, on top of all the other studies, one after another after another, finding all sorts of terrible outcomes for foster youth when, in typical cases, children placed in foster care are compared to comparably maltreated children left in their own homes.  

No, this doesn’t mean no child ever should be placed in foster care. But it means family policing systems need to be a whole lot more careful about whom they police. They need to be a whole lot more certain that there is danger in the home so great that it outweighs the risk of abuse in foster care, and the risk that the children will kill themselves in foster care. 

All the Senator (and Representative) Soundbites across the country, all the “Child Advocates” and all the others who exploit child abuse deaths to panic us into throwing more and more children into foster care need to stop and consider: To the extent that they succeed, is it their own rhetoric that, however unintentionally, is really putting children at risk?

NCCPR in the Richmond Times-Dispatch: A take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare makes kids less safe

Faced with horrifying child abuse deaths, often in cases that were well known to child protective services agencies, there are two ways to respond: Determine what went wrong case-by-case and do the hard work necessary to fix the problems so they never happen again. Or just scapegoat efforts to keep families together and embrace what amounts to a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare. …

Read the full column (behind a paywall) in the Richmond Times-Dispatch