Child welfare in New York: Beware of a backdoor bailout for private foster care agencies

If the latest scheme becomes law, no matter how abominably agencies allow the children in their care to be treated, and how much that jacks up their insurance premiums, they need never change, secure in the knowledge that taxpayers will pick up the tab. 

When state legislators started easing statutes of limitations to allow child abuse survivors to sue, the lawmakers probably had in mind institutions like churches, the Boy Scouts, etc. But it should have come as no surprise that a great many lawsuits have targeted private foster care agencies, because so very many children were abused on their watch (in the name of “child protection,” “child safety,” and “erring on the side of the child,” of course). 

Particularly vulnerable: agencies running the worst form of “care” – group homes and institutions. As a result, their insurance premiums have skyrocketed. Some agencies even had to close. 

Here’s the most important thing to understand: Private agencies that run group homes and institutions having to shut down is not a crisis or a calamity. On the contrary, it’s great news! As I posted two years ago: 

The group homes and institutions are harmful even when they´re not rife with physical and sexual abuse.  The whole model is a proven failure, and there are far better alternatives.  But these giant, greedy, well-connected agencies are scarfing up all the money for such alternatives. (And when I say greedy: Have you seen Ron Richter´s salary for running one of them?) 

[Update: he’s left, but continues to ally with those wedded to a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare.] 

But the agencies are doing what they do best: predicting that horrible calamities will befall children unless they get some kind of bailout and/or near immunity from accountability to all those children horrifically abused on their watch. 

Two years ago, California agencies predicted foster children would suddenly be homeless if they had to close. I explain here why that is nonsense. Sice them, at least 19 California agencies reportedly have closed, and yet the counties that run child welfare in California apparently are coping just fine. It helps, of course, that California has been safely and steadily reducing the number of children torn from their families in the first place. 

Nevertheless, California fell for the fearmongering, at least in part. So far, New York has not. 

But according to Insurance Business, an insurance industry trade publication, those greedy agencies are trying again. This time, they’ve gotten at least two lawmakers to introduce a bill to provide a so-called $20-million “bridge fund.” Worse, the bill would require the state agency that sets rates for these places to make absolutely positively sure the rates are set so high they cover the entire cost of insurance. 

This is a backdoor bailout. Under this provision, no matter how abominably agencies allow the children in their care to be treated, and how much that jacks up their insurance premiums, they need never change, secure in the knowledge that taxpayers will pick up the tab. 

And if anyone needs another reminder of why that’s a bad idea, check out this lawsuit settlement in California – in a case where, one would have thought, the private agency would have been especially vigilant.

Image from Easy Peasy AI

Since the child welfare establishment keeps telling us there’s no racism in their field, there must be some other explanation for this:

 

This is what happens when Black mothers use marijuana gummies (From The Marshall Project):

 Ayanna Harris-Rashid was sitting up in bed, her newborn son latched to her breast, one hand scrolling on her phone, when the police called. She was wanted on a felony charge of child neglect. 

Harris-Rashid had just had her third child in March 2021. To ease pain and frequent nausea, she had used legal CBD gummies and a topical hemp-based ointment throughout her pregnancy. But at the hospital, she and the baby tested positive for marijuana, prompting providers to file a report with the South Carolina Department of Social Services, which forwarded the information to police, records show. Now an officer was demanding that Harris-Rashid turn herself in. 

Harris-Rashid said goodbye to her children and husband. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered to her newborn son. A friend drove her to the sheriff’s office, where she was handcuffed, strip-searched and placed for the night in a cold and crowded cell. By the time she left the jail the following morning, her milk supply had decreased and she found she could no longer breastfeed. The charge was eventually dropped. 

“They shook me bare. They made me feel very indecent and inhumane,” she said, adding, “This is a person, a woman, a mother, an actual individual. What justifies this?” 

This is what happens when white mothers use marijuana gummies (From Boston Magazine): 

Cannabis gummies have become as ubiquitous as Lululemon leggings and UppaBaby strollers, particularly among millennial mothers in their thirties and early forties. Moms are popping edibles as they’re folding laundry in the evening, before heading to back-to-school night, and during Friday-afternoon playdates. They’re setting up elaborate home bars decked out with cannabis-infused drinks and bowls of colorful gummies and hosting Cannabis & Crafts nights. … 

The first time [Kate] tried a gummy, “it was just wonderful,” she says. The self-dubbed “100 percent type A” mother found herself less wound-up and more relaxed with her two children. And she appreciates that she’s not drinking in front of her kids. At a Fourth of July gathering, Kate split a gummy with her close friend as the children ran around the yard. ... It’s been a good fix for me.”

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending February 10, 2026

● The Marshall Project has a stunning expose of the extent to which mothers are harassed at birth – and children torn away during the days they need their mothers most, their first, -- after what often are false positive drug tests or positive tests for substances that are no problem for white, middle-class mothers, such as marijuana gummies. It happens far more often that previously thought.  Some examples from the story: 

In Oklahoma, armed sheriff’s deputies took two children from their parents after the mother tested positive for meth, a false result triggered by an acid reflux medication the hospital had given her during labor, according to court records and her lawyer. In South Carolina, police interrogated a mother after she tested positive for the fentanyl from her epidural, as well as marijuana, according to police records. 

And after a Virginia couple insisted on having an attorney present for a child welfare interview, a police officer threatened them with arrest if they didn’t surrender their newborn. “When we step in, that’s when we start charging people,” the officer told the parents, according to an audio recording of the meeting. “You got about three seconds.” The mother had tested positive for methadone, the medication prescribed to treat her opioid addiction. The parents were forced to leave their newborn in the hospital and police escorted them out, records show.

● As you read this story from USA Today, about a grandmother’s heroic fight for her grandchildren, I hope you will take special note of the role of the so-called guardian ad litem – and what it says about allowing those supposedly looking out for a child’s “best interests” to inflict their own biases. 

●  Oklahoma Watch reports that Oklahoma is the latest state taking first steps toward boosting one of the most effective ways to keep children safe: providing high-quality family defense. Perhaps most notable is the vivid description of what “representation” is like where this program does not exist (and that’s what it’s like in most of the country). 

● The Imprint takes a close look at the decision by the federal Administration for Children and Families to allow the medication used for Medication-assisted treatment of substance use disorder to be funded under the Family First Act. The story also discusses the bias against this treatment among many in the family police community and the harm that’s done to children. But the story has a reminder: What the Trump Administration gives with one hand, it may take away with another. The primary source of federal reimbursement for these medications is Medicaid – and Trump’s budget is expected to cut millions off from Medicaid. 

● Here we go again: Still another study on the benefits of concrete help to families. This one, in JAMA Pediatrics, shows that the availability of universal pre-kindergarten significantly reduces the number of children forced to endure an investigation concerning alleged “neglect.” The results were particularly strong for nonwhite children. 

● In Utah, legislative auditors issued another one of those ScathingReports on a state family police agency. I have a column in the Utah News Dispatch about why this ScathingReport is different: It recognizes that the tragic errors go in all directions. Speaking of which … 

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

● From The Imprint

 A mother whose baby died in a Los Angeles County foster home has been awarded $9 million to settle a lawsuit against the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) and one of its social workers. 

According to court records, Erick Lee died in 2022 from severe dehydration in a foster parent’s home where two other children had previously died. Earlier that year, another foster child placed in the home passed away of unknown circumstances, but no autopsy took place. The foster parent’s biological son also died in 2018, as a result of untreated diabetes. 

● From the San Antonio Express News 

A New Braunfels woman was sentenced for 40 years in prison for keeping children in cages and denying them food to the point of malnutrition, Comal County officials say. 

Susan Rae Helton, 53, was convicted of four counts of injuring a child and causing serious bodily injury in an abuse case that involved two of her adopted children, according to the Comal County District Attorney’s Office. 

● And sometimes, as the Associated Press reports, the horror stories go in all directions for the same children: 

A Southern California county and a foster care agency have agreed to a $13.5 million settlement with six children who were placed in an abusive home after being rescued from squalid and abusive conditions in their parents’ home. 

Riverside County will pay $2.25 million to six of the Turpin children, most of whom are now adults, and ChildNet, a care agency, will pay $11.25 million, according to a copy of the settlement.

NCCPR in the Utah News Dispatch: Fixing DCFS requires understanding that the tragic errors go in all directions

By now, so many oversight agencies in so many states have issued reports about those states’ child welfare systems, and those reports so often are accurately described as “scathing,” that it may as well be one word. 

But the ScathingReport issued by the Utah Office of the Legislative Auditor General concerning the state Division of Child and Family Services includes a commendable difference: It recognizes that in “child welfare,” the terrible mistakes go in all directions. Understanding that is essential if DCFS is ever going to be fixed. ...

Read the full column in the Utah News Dispatch

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending February 3, 2026

● All over the country, new mothers are reported to the family police when a drug test allegedly reveals not drug abuse but medication-assisted treatment for drug abuse. In other words, they’re taking prescribed medications, such as buprenorphine, methadone, and naltrexone, that reduce the craving for opioids and symptoms of withdrawal. But censorious family police workers and judges (secure in the knowledge that no one will be barging into their homes to check their liquor cabinets or watching them smoke pot during their children’s playdates), investigate them, condemn them, and often tear their children from them. 

Now the federal government is putting its weight behind a change in course. Writing in The Imprint, the new head of the federal Administration for Children and Families, Alex Adams, announced that these medications are now approved for federal reimbursement under the Family First Act. 

Also in that commentary: an encouraging framing of his priorities: 

ACF is aligning its policies to increase the ratio of foster homes to foster children. This gives states two focuses: increasing the numerator of foster homes or, more importantly, safely reducing the denominator of children in the foster care system. 

● Fresh from giving a giant rate increase to a group home provider (and big campaign contributor) with a questionable track record, Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs is lavishing an even bigger pay raise on foster parents – and effectively making poor people pay for it. I have a blog post about it. 

● amNY and Courthouse News Service report on a decision by a federal appellate court that revives a lawsuit brought by New York foster youth. They were arbitrarily denied the right to live with their own extended families in kinship foster care. 

● The Seattle Times has a story about another approach to high-quality legal representation, helping families before problems reach the point where the family police intervene. 

We have updates on two cases in which states passed “reasonable childhood independence” laws, but caseworkers ignored those laws and traumatized families. 

● ABC News reports on a case in Georgia. 

● Reason has an update on a case in Utah. 

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

● When Honolulu Civil Beat was able to pry loose the records concerning a child who allegedly was, in effect, adopted to death, the records revealed the extent of the willful blindness of a family police agency desperate to get its adoption numbers up.

Arizona governor robs poor families to give middle-class foster parents a giant pay raise

 

It’s almost as if Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs stole a page from Donald Trump’s playbook. She’s moving to attract greedy potential foster parents to join the majority who are not in it for the money. And the way she is doing it is the equivalent of telling poor families: We’re going to build a wall between you and your children – and we’re going to make you pay for it! 

Fresh from giving a giant rate increase to a group home operator (and generous campaign donor) with a questionable record, Hobbs is lavishing an even bigger rate increase – 50% -- on state foster parents, who already do quite well. 

As of 2022, depending on a child’s age and needs, foster parents got anywhere from $637 to $1,465 per month. That’s per child, not per family. Hobbs says that, with the rate increase, foster parent reimbursement will average between $1,000 and $1,700 per month. 

All of that is tax-free. Foster children’s health insurance is covered, and in some cases, working foster parents can even get childcare aid; the kind of aid that, had it gone to birth parents, might have prevented children being taken for “lack of supervision.” 

I don’t think most foster parents are in it for the money. But wouldn’t we all like to keep it that way? Do we really want someone who says, “I won’t do it for less than $1,000 a month, tax-free, plus health insurance for the kids and maybe a childcare subsidy” to be a foster parent? 

Now, let’s consider who’s footing the bill: 

When Congress replaced “welfare as we knew it” with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the money was supposed to help impoverished families become self-sufficient. But the rules are so vague that some states have turned TANF into a child welfare slush fund. 

In that regard, Arizona is a national leader, diverting more than 60% of TANF funds away from impoverished families.  As ProPublica explained: 

Welfare in Arizona largely goes not to helping poor parents financially but rather to the state’s Department of Child Safety — an agency that investigates many of these same parents, and that sometimes takes their kids away for reasons arising from the poverty that they were seeking help with in the first place. 

How much more good could that TANF money do if it were actually used to help poor people? There’s a clue in why Arizona children are taken away – it’s almost never because of the horror stories that make headlines. 

Of all the Arizona children torn from their families and thrown into foster care in 2024, 87%  did not involve even an allegation of physical or sexual abuse. In fact, almost as many children were taken because of “inadequate housing” as because of physical and sexual abuse combined. 

Hobbs claims the state has to lure in more foster parents with big bucks in order to have places for children now needlessly confined to group homes and institutions. 

Arizona is, indeed, a horrific outlier in this regard. It throws 41% of foster children into group homes and institutions; the national average is 16%. (That kind of makes you wonder why she also gave that big increase to some of those same group homes and institutions.) 

But the solution to overuse of group homes can be found in another ugly Arizona statistic: The state still tears apart families at a rate 25% above the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in. Stop taking so many children needlessly, often when family poverty is confused with neglect, and there will be plenty of room in the foster homes Arizona already has. 

Hobbs adds insult to family injury by implying that she is providing some special benefit to extended family members who provide kinship foster care. But the giant pay raise applies only to licensed foster parents. Federal law already requires that all licensed foster parents – whether kin or strangers – be paid the same amount. 

The biggest problem in foster care rates is the lack of support for relatives who provide safe, loving homes, but may not be able to meet licensing requirements that can be geared more to middle-class creature comforts instead of only health and safety necessities. Hobbs' giant pay raise doesn’t apply to them. 

And when it comes to discretionary spending, Hobbs took away $6.5 million in support for kinship foster care – and diverted it to group homes and institutions. 

Brick by financial brick, Gov. Hobbs builds an ever-higher wall between children and the families who love them – and makes those families pay for it.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending January 27, 2026

● Parents of disabled children often need to fight tooth and nail to get schools to provide the services their children need, and are entitled to under law. A lawsuit in New York City documents a common way schools fight back: Filing false child abuse reports alleging “educational Neglect.” The Daily News has a story, and I have a blog post about the lawsuit – and how the practice is not limited to New York. 

● In still another case of alleged harassment, this time by the New York City family police agency itself, the New York Post reports, in a follow-up to a story first reported earlier this month, that the agency even harassed a family after their removal of a child from the home allegedly led to her death. 

From the story: 

The city’s Administration for Children’s Services “stole” a vibrant but mentally ill teenager from her family months before she leapt to her death from the Brooklyn Bridge in despair, her mom told The Post. 

Jade Smith was just 13 — but had already spent years battling hallucinations and suicidal thoughts — when ACS took custody of her for 4 1/2 months and began bouncing her between foster homes, her family said in a lawsuit. 

She committed suicide in January 2023. 

“They made everything so much worse,” mom Terri Nimmo claimed in her first public remarks. “She should be here and she isn’t — and it is ACS’ fault. Their behavior resulted in my daughter dying.”… 

● In 2023, a new law in Washington State took effect that said, in effect, you can’t tear children from their families based on broad, vague definitions of neglect or some caseworker’s gut feeling. That led to a torrent of media stories scapegoating the law for an increase in child abuse deaths that actually began well before it took effect. KUOW Public Radio took a different approach: The public radio station actually spoke to people on all sides of the issue, allowed all sides to be heard – and then checked the data, including details such as this: 

[T]he numbers don’t support that taking more kids out of struggling homes would reduce the number of deaths. The year the most children on CPS’s radar died in Washington was 2012, long before the Keeping Families Together Act. At that time, case workers took nearly twice the number of kids from their families as they do today. 

Although that’s been well-known for years, I am aware of no other Washington State news organization that has bothered to point that out.

● The Kentucky Lantern reports on legislation that “would allow judges to consider an alternative sentence for parents charged with low-level, nonviolent crimes to keep families together.”  Said Amber Duke, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky: “Kentucky kids should not serve their parents’ sentences.” 

● Speaking of child welfare and drug use, this ProPublica story illustrates still another reason not to rely on drug testing when deciding whether to tear apart a family:  

A ProPublica investigation found that Averhealth’s lab practices have not only been faulted by its own accreditor but also targeted in lawsuits, and prompted Michigan’s child welfare agency to order its employees not to use Averhealth’s tests as evidence in court and to withdraw any petitions based solely on the lab’s results. 

The state has since stopped using Averhealth. But what about all the children victimized by needless removal due to faulty drug tests before Michigan issued this order?

● In Missouri, some legislators are bemoaning the horrendous workloads of caseworkers for their family police agency, the Children’s Division (as they should). They’re also saying that, therefore, the Children’s Division should hire a whole lot more workers (which they shouldn’t). I have a blog post about it. 

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

● Here’s what happened, according to a lawsuit that was the topic of a story in the Dayton Daily News:

 A mother did something the county family police agency found inexcusable when her children were home on overnight visits from foster care. When they appeared to be very sick, she – horrors! -- took them to the ER to be checked by a doctor.  The family police agency was so furious about this that they not only cut off visits for a time (thereby punishing the children for the “transgression” of the mother), they also threatened to terminate the children’s rights to ever live with her. 

So she gave in. Instead, over and over, she would notify caseworkers and plead with them to act. According to the lawsuit, they didn’t. Now, after another untreated illness, her son is dead.