NCCPR in Honolulu Civil Beat: Hawaii Should Curb ‘Grab And Go’ Mentality In Child Welfare Services

Lawmakers should take the money earmarked for more personnel and use it to ameliorate the worst aspects of poverty.

 Case No. 1: Six-year-old Ariel Sellers is taken from her home by Child Welfare Services. Relatives are ready to take Ariel in, but they say CWS ignores them. Instead Ariel is placed with strangers, Isaac and Lehua Kalua. Ultimately, they adopt her and change her name to Isabella. 

Now the Kaluas are charged with murdering Isabella. She allegedly died trapped in a dog cage with duct tape covering her mouth and nose. CWS still won’t place her siblings with relatives. 

Case No. 2: Bella is in her fifth-grade classroom when suddenly she is told her father has come to her school to pick her up. But the man is not the man she considers her father — rather it’s a man she barely knows — indeed a court order bars any contact. 

But that doesn’t stop CWS. In what a judge would call a “grab and go” CWS flies Bella to the other end of the state and leaves her with the father she barely knows. … 

Read the full column in Honolulu Civil Beat