Mass. family police try an end-run around the State Legislature on child welfare and drug use

But don’t worry, the “cannamoms” will still be safe

The Massachusetts family police agency, the Department of Children and Families, recently solicited comment (presumably only because they had to) on a proposed change to regulations defining child abuse. The change is an attempt to get around a wise decision by the State Legislature.

Indeed, it is entirely consistent with the way DCF helped the Massachusetts “Child Advocate” try to sucker a special commission into recommending all sorts of expansion of mandatory reporting. The commission wasn’t fooled. 

Neither was the legislature. They actually passed a good change which, ever so slightly, narrows the long list of conditions mandatory reporters must report.  But DCF isn’t having that!  They’re trying an end-run by changing regulations. 

It all amounts to a great big DCF-U! to the State Legislature.  Let's see if the lawmakers tolerate it.

Here’s the comment I sent to DCF: 

[Your proposed change] contradicts best practice, contradicts the evidence base concerning substance use and child welfare – and flouts the intent of the Legislature. 

The Legislature recently changed state law so mandated reporters no longer must automatically report any instance of “prenatal substance exposure.” They remain free to report it when, in their professional judgment, they believe such a report is necessary to protect a child. This is a clear recognition that this knee-jerk response of automatically reporting every such instance did nothing to improve child safety. On the contrary, it compromised safety by driving pregnant women away from prenatal care and hospital delivery. 

Rather than respect best evidence-based practice and the intent of lawmakers, you now propose to change regulations defining what constitutes “physical injury” – which of course is something mandated reporters have to report. 

Right now, that definition includes “addiction to drug at birth.” That’s bad enough. But your proposal would change the definition so that physical injury includes “exposure to harmful patterns of substance use.” What does that mean? Presumably whatever you want it to mean. (I’m guessing the groups you have in mind are those against whom DCF always comes down hardest: Poor people, especially poor people of color.  I doubt that it means you’ll be going after the “harmful patterns of substance use” displayed by the celebrated Cannamoms of Massachusetts’ affluent suburbs.) 

Here’s what this would mean for mandated reporters: Under state law mandated reporters don’t have to report “prenatal substance exposure.” But under the new proposed regulation, they would have to report “exposure to harmful patterns of substance use” – which, presumably would include “prenatal substance exposure.” 

In short, DCF seeks to overrule the Massachusetts Legislature. It is a classic example of the arrogance that leads Massachusetts to tear apart families at a rate 60% above the national average, even when rates of family poverty are factored in. And there certainly is no evidence that Massachusetts children are 60% safer than the national average. 

It is in keeping with the decades-long habit of DCF, and before that DSS, and before that DPW of failing to balance the potential harm of parental substance use (or any other alleged parental failing) against the known severe harm of tearing children from everyone they know and love – and the known risk of abuse in foster care itself, where independent studies find far higher rates of abuse than your agency acknowledges in official figures. 

For all of these reasons, and most importantly, for the safety of the children DCF claims it wants to protect, this proposed change should be rescinded.

How the Kansas “child welfare” agency makes hundreds of foster children “disappear.”

Even the Wizard of Oz couldn’t do that. But at last, we’re getting a peek behind the curtain. 

Seventeen years after we first raised the issue, an ugly little practice that leads to hundreds of needless foster care placements in Kansas every year finally is getting some attention – though far from all of the attention it deserves. 

The Kansas Legislature passed, and the governor signed, a bill that may slightly reduce the number of times this practice is invoked – but it still allows the family police agency, the Department of Children and Families, to keep such placements “off the books” – so no one will know how many children really are taken from their homes in Kansas each year. 

The practice is known as placing children in “police protective custody.” It’s a special Kansas twist on the ugly practice of “hidden foster care.” What Kansas allows is so awful that it earns the state a special note in the narrative for the NCCPR Rate-of-Removal Index. 

After decades, it appears that DCF finally has leadership that is concerned about the practice and how it leads to the needless removal of children. They supported the modest reforms.  But they’re still sticking to the disingenuous claim that these placements are not foster care. 

Why are police protective custody placements not foster care? Because, DCF says, they’re police protective custody placements, that’s why! 

And no wonder: 

In a foster care placement, an agent of the government demands that parents surrender their children. The government then decides where that child will go – perhaps to a relative, perhaps to a stranger, perhaps to a group home or institution. The government decides when – or if – the children ever will see their parents again. 

In a police protective custody placement, on the other hand, an agent of the government demands that parents surrender their children. The government then decides where that child will go – perhaps to a relative, perhaps to a stranger, perhaps to a group home or institution. The government decides when – or if – the children ever will see their parents again. 

See the difference?  

Well, actually there is that one difference. When the police take the child (hence the term “police protective custody”) and the child is returned home at or before the first court hearing – which can be as much as six days later – DCF pretends it never happened!  In other words, when Kansas tells the public, and the federal government, how many children were torn from their homes and placed elsewhere by force of law, they don’t count police protective custody placements. 

How many such placements are there? No one knows for sure, but apparently quite a lot – so many that it can take the rate of removal in Kansas from outrageous all the way to obscene. Even worse, it appears that a significant proportion of these placements involve dumping children into the worst, most traumatic form of placement of all – institutionalizing them in parking place “shelters.”   

Officially, in 2022, the most recent year for which data are available, Kansas consigned 3,096 children to the chaos of foster care – that made the rate of removal in Kansas well over double the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in. (DCF gives a lower figure for 2024, but the number nationwide also probably has declined, so it’s unlikely Kansas’ relative position has changed.)

But in March, DCF finally released some figures on police protective custody placements. While not precise, they suggest that anywhere from 979 to 1,076 children were taken into police protective custody and then “thrown back” – much the worse for the experience – before the first hearing, and so would never be counted in official figures.  (A link to DCF’s figures and an explanation of the estimate can be found at the end of this post. If anyone wants to suggest an alternative figure, I’d be glad to take a look.) 

National Average   Kansas1         Kansas2

1=Rate-of-removal based on officially acknowledged entries.
2=Rate-of-removal based on likely real number of entries (including 979 PPC placements)

Using the low-end estimate, that would mean Kansas really took away 4,075 children in 2022. That would make the rate of removal in Kansas more than triple the national average and the fourth highest in the country. 

The practice goes back a long way 

We first discovered the practice in 2007, while working on our report about Kansas child welfare. We discovered it when it was referenced in passing in an op-ed column written by the public official who, then as now, might be Kansas’ foremost proponent of a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare. That would be Ron Paschal, then as now the deputy district attorney in charge of the Juvenile Division in Sedgwick County (metropolitan Wichita). His op-ed hinted that the number was huge, but offered no specifics. 

Just as in 2007, the most extreme use of police protective custody placements is still in the Wichita area. In that region, it appears that more than half of all entries into care were police protective custody cases in which the children were returned to family within six days. 

The excuse for hiding all these placements 

Although DCF has more concern about these placements now than it did in 2007, it still uses the same excuse now as then for failing to report them as entries to the public or to the federal government: It’s not foster care because DCF doesn’t have custody of the children – the police do. In other words: Sure, they’re in exactly the same places and subject to exactly the same control as if DCF had them, but hey, so what? That’s our technicality and we’re sticking to it! 

At best DCF is exploiting a loophole in federal regulations concerning what must be reported as an entry into foster care, at worst they may not be following those regulations. 

Those regulations do not say a child has to be in the custody of a given agency to be counted as in foster care.  Rather, the state family police agency must have “responsibility for placement and care of the child.”  In the case of Kansas police protective custody placements, children may be placed in foster homes group homes or institutions that are licensed and overseen by DCF. That sure sounds like responsibility for placement and care.  But, in fairness to DCF, when we asked the federal Administration for Children and Families about this in 2007, they were just fine with letting Kansas do this and looking the other way. That may be in part because if Kansas doesn’t call a case foster care, the federal government doesn’t have to pick up part of the tab for that case. 

So maybe DCF can get away with it legally – ethically it’s a shameful misrepresentation of the full scope of the extent to which Kansas destroys families.

Six-day placements are almost never necessary 

The new data also tell us something else: In nearly 1,000 cases – and maybe more – a Kansas law enforcement officer decided that something was happening to a child that was so awful it required tearing that child from everyone she or he knows and loves and throwing that child in with strangers – at worst dumping them into an institution. And yet, that child could be returned, typically to the home from which she or he was taken, within six days. 

A sadistic, brutal parent out to beat and torture a child does not suddenly reform in six days.  Neither does a parent who’s been deliberately starving a child. In these sorts of extremely rare cases, the problem is not likely to be remedied in six days.  Where the danger is not severe and immediate, odds are there are things that can be done without taking away the child. Here’s a good example, from next door in Missouri, of a police officer who understands that.  

But Ron Paschal doesn’t understand that. In legislative testimony, he cited horrible situations supposedly requiring police protective custody, and declared in written testimony that when the child then is returned home from this supposedly impossibly horrible situation within six days “THIS IS AN INDICATION THAT [POLICE PROTECTIVE CUSTODY] WAS SUCCESSFUL.” (Capitals in original(!)) 

That’s like saying that kidnapping a child does the child no harm, and even declaring success, if the child is rescued in a few days.  I think most people – especially the children in question – would consider it far better not to be kidnapped in the first place.  And make no mistake, particularly for a young child, the trauma is every bit as great as a kidnapping – no matter how “short” the time in foster care – oops, sorry, I mean “police protective custody.” 

If anything, Paschal suggests Kansas still isn’t tearing apart enough families.  He cites claims that child abuse is underreported, and the fact that his position has popular support – as evidenced by viewer comments on a television station website. 

This is a longstanding belief on Paschal’s part. You can read more about him in NCCPR’s 2007 report on Kansas child welfare. 

One other thing about police protective custody placements. They don’t always end with a return to the birth parents. Sometimes they end with an informal arrangement to place the child in the home of a relative – in other words, the classic version of hidden foster care. So Kansas’ special version of hidden foster care – police protective custody placements – probably increases the number of classically hidden placements. 

______________

How we estimated the number of unreported foster care entries in Kansas. 

In written testimony to the Kansas Legislature, Deputy DCF Secretary Tanya Keys includes several tables on Page 5. One of those tables puts the total number of Police Protective Custody (PPC) placements in 2024 at 2,509.  Another table states that of all the children Kansas officially admits they put in foster care in 2024, 1,433 of them started off as PPC placements. So if 1,433 out of 2,509 PPC placements ultimately became officially recognized foster-care placements, that leaves 1,076 that did not. That would be 1,076 children taken from their families but never officially counted as foster care placements. 

But the number might not be that high. In an email, Keys explained that's because the 1,433 figure is actually an estimate, extrapolating from various data sources. (By the way, however much I disagree with the agency, Keys sure works hard – she answered my emails on a Sunday night.) 

But there’s an alternative, simpler way to estimate: The Kansas Reflector reports that during a legislative hearing 

Keys said, the Kansas Department of Corrections reported 39% of children dropped off at juvenile facilities last fiscal year by law enforcement officers across the state were subsequently released to a family member. 

“Forty percent of those children are returned to a parent or relative. That’s their placement outcome after a juvenile intake an assessment worker is alongside that family,” Keys said. 

That would be 979, and that more conservative figure is the one I’ve used to estimate the real rate of removal in Kansas.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending April 15, 2025

● The family policing system in Philadelphia tears apart families at the second highest rate among America’s largest cities, even when rates of family poverty are factored in. In an extraordinary three-part series, the Philadelphia Inquirer looks at how that city’s system destroys children in the name of saving them – and what can be done about it. Part One deals with widespread abuse in foster care. Part Three compares Philadelphia to the state-run system in neighboring New Jersey, which has improved child safety while dramatically reducing the number of families it tears apart.

But most extraordinary – and perhaps most significant for a national audience - may be part two.  It is the best examination I’ve seen by any news organization into the horrors of “hidden foster care.”  Be sure to read it to the end.

The revelations all were shocking enough to prompt the City Council to plan public hearings.

● Not that we’d ever say we told you so, but NCCPR first wrote about the use of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families funds as a family policing slush fund in 2010. ProPublica did a superb story about it in 2021. So it’s good to see, as The Imprint reports, that the Government Accountability Office is getting into the act.

● Here’s another media myth from news organizations in West Virginia: the claim that the Child Removal Capital of America underspends on child welfare. On the contrary, it spends at a rate above, possibly far above, the national average – but it wastes the money on needless foster care.  I have a blog post about it.

● In an earlier post about West Virginia, I discussed dreadful legislation – sponsored by a lawmaker who’s also a white middle-class foster parent – that would make it easier, yes, easier, to keep foster children apart from their siblings. I hope he reads this commentary in The Imprint by a former foster youth describing what that did to her.

● There may be better news from the legislature in Maine. After years of retreating from reform, lawmakers may be reconsidering. As the Maine Morning Star reports, they’re looking at legislation to make it more difficult to confuse poverty with neglect.

● The Observer, in Sacramento, Calif., begins a multi-part series on the racial bias that pervades family policing. 

● And speaking of racial bias, MindSite News reports that 

Black children are disproportionately diagnosed with a mental health condition known as oppositional defiant disorder, which serves to label them as “bad kids” and perpetuates systemic racism, says a California psychiatrist in a new report released this month.

“I often say ODD greases the school-to-prison pipeline,” Dr. Rupi Legha, a Los Angeles-based child and adolescent psychiatrist, told MindSite News. “It becomes a way to shove kids quicker. They’re going to slip and fall a lot more and it’s going to go a lot faster.” 

Of course, this also has implications for which foster children wind up trapped in “residential treatment” – and what happens to them when they’re there. 

● The New York Times has a story about the horrifying implications of Elon Musk’s attempt to gather all the information the federal government has on us into one giant database. Why is that here? Because if you happen to be an impoverished family in Pittsburgh subjected to a call alleging child neglect – it’s already happening to you.  And in that case, The New York Times ran an article (by a white, middle-class foster parent) praising it to the skies! 

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

● KSDK-TV, St. Louis reports: 

A Lincoln County woman is facing multiple charges after police said she assaulted and abandoned a teenage girl for whom she was supposed to be caring. … 

[The foster mother] collects exotic animals,[Lincoln County Prosecutor Mike] Wood said, and they're investigating allegations that she traded the girl in exchange for a monkey. 

● NBC6 South Florida reports that 

A man has been sentenced to two life sentences in a Miami-Dade human trafficking case involving a child who was in foster care and an adult, prosecutors said. 

And finally,

 ● File this story from The Imprint under “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

West Virginia does NOT underspend on “child welfare” – it MIS-spends

West Virginia probably spends on child welfare at a rate anywhere from 9% to 44% above the national average.

 All posts in this series are available here.

West Virginia Watch is at it again. 

That’s the publication that has published thousands upon thousands of words about the child welfare system in the Child Removal Capital of America – and not one of those words that I can find comes from a parent who lost a child to foster care. 

That’s the publication that repeatedly presents as fact the false claim that West Virginia’s status as Child Removal Capital of America is some inevitable consequence of substance abuse. In fact, as we have pointed out previously, if all substance abuse disappeared in West Virginia tomorrow the state still would be tearing apart families at a rate double the national average. 

And now it offers up a commentary (labeled as one for once, at least) in which a foster parent condemns another foster parent for daring to tell the truth about money: Money, or rather the alleged lack of it, is not the reason the West Virginia foster care system is so awful. 

To read West Virginia Watch and other news outlets constantly bemoaning a supposed lack of funding for child welfare, you’d think West Virginia was spending at or near the lowest rate in the country.  You would hope that before repeating that mantra someone at West Virginia Watch would have checked to see how West Virginia actually compares. 

Apparently, they never have.  So I guess we’ll have to do it for them. 

Comparing rates of child welfare spending 

A precise comparison is impossible – but a rough comparison can be done.  And that comparison shows that West Virginia probably spends on child welfare at a rate at least nine percent above the national average – even when rates of child poverty are factored in. And that probably is a significant underestimate. 

Here’s what we know, and what we don’t: 

Every couple of years ChildTrends attempts the herculean task of trying to figure out how much every state spends on child welfare. This is incredibly difficult because there are a vast number of federal, state, and local funding streams, some of which are reserved for child welfare expenditures, many of which are not. NCCPR then takes these state totals and divides them both by the total number of children in each state and by the number of impoverished children – which we think is the fairer comparison. It’s based on these cost-per-child estimates that we say West Virginia is spending on child welfare at a rate above the national average. 

Some important caveats 

Because the task takes so long – and requires trying to get answers from every state – the data typically run well behind. Unfortunately, now they are five years behind – the most recent are from 2020. So that’s the first crucial caveat; the spending data are old. But there is nothing to indicate that anything happened in West Virginia to prompt child welfare spending to plummet – and certainly not to plummet more than any other state. 

The other caveat explains why the West Virginia spending figure probably is too low: As I said, ChildTrends tries to get the data from every state. A few states couldn’t or wouldn’t supply the data. Guess which state was among them. Yep. So for West Virginia, and a few other states,  ChildTrends had to craft estimates based on federal data sources – and for some very large categories, it could provide no estimate at all.  Categories that, on average, account for 35% of a state’s total child welfare spending are missing for West Virginia. 

So the real spending total for West Virginia in 2020 probably was significantly higher than the ChildTrends estimate. Indeed, West Virginia may spend at a rate more than 44% above the national average. 

Spending so much, getting so little 

So how is it that West Virginia spends so much, but we’re constantly hearing about overload and shortages? It’s because of the great paradox of child welfare: The worse the intervention, the more it costs. Safe, proven alternatives to family foster homes cost less than family foster homes which cost less than group homes which cost less than in-state institutions which cost less than out-of-state institutions.  So of course, when you’re the Child Removal Capital of America you’re going to spend vast amounts of money and children will get nothing – or sometimes worse than nothing – in return. 

So take it from a proud tax-and-spend liberal: West Virginia does not need to spend more on child welfare – but it sure needs to spend smarter.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending April 8, 2025

● I’ve never before seen a foster-care story get a “push notice” from The New York Times. But this one did. That’s what happens when a county agrees to pay four billion dollars to more than 6,800 children sexually abused while in the custody of its foster care and/or juvenile justice systems. As I note in this blog post, in every one of the cases in which the children were thrown into foster care, it was done in the name of “child safety.”  The post also includes a link to a story from KFMB-TV about the latest lawsuits against a parking-place shelter in San Diego. Or you can just see it here: 

● The Harvard Law Bulletin profiles the extraordinary life and work of Dorothy Roberts, professor of law, Africana studies, and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” – and member of the NCCPR Board of Directors. From the story: 

“We need to radically change how we think about child safety and welfare, and that means we need to focus on supporting families,” says Roberts, author of the 2022 book “Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families — and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World.” She adds, “Our society could be structured in a way to provide for those families’ material needs, but instead, it unleashes this terrorizing system on them.” 

● Speaking of extraordinary work, The Imprint podcast talks to Prof. Kelley Fong, author of the landmark book Investigating Families: Motherhood in the Shadow of Child Protective Services. 

● To what should be the surprise of no one, there’s still another study showing that concrete help – in this case not evicting people from their homes – reduces child abuse.

● Last year The Marshall Project and Reveal reported on the enormous harm done to newborns when they’re taken from their mothers because of false positive drug tests.  Now, they have a follow-up story about the medical professionals who are saying Enough! 

From the story: 

A patient at Yale New Haven Health in Connecticut, the largest health system in the state, had said that she’d used marijuana to help her eat and sleep during her pregnancy. The hospital had reported her to child welfare authorities. Now, an investigator wanted Ostfeld-Johns to drug test the newborn. 

[Dr. Sharon] Ostfeld-Johns knew there was no medical reason to test the baby, who was healthy. A drug test would make no difference to the infant’s medical care. Nor did she have concerns that the mother, who had other children at home, was a neglectful parent. The doctor did worry, however, that the drug test could cause other problems for the family. For example, the mother was Black and on Medicaid — race and income bias could influence the investigator’s decision on whether to put the children into foster care. 

“Why did I ever order these tests?” Ostfeld-Johns found herself wondering, about past cases. … 

● For still another example of the harm of botched drug testing, check out this story from WANF-TV in Atlanta. 

And in Minnesota, the Star Tribune reports 

A federal racketeering lawsuit alleges that the leading child abuse pediatrician in Minnesota manipulated medical records that directly led to murder charges against a daycare provider in the death of a toddler in Minneapolis more than seven years ago.

The child welfare establishment just got four billion messages: Your system is not safe

 

 Five years ago, like many other states, California passed a law to reopen the statute of limitations so survivors of child sexual abuse could sue those responsible. What lawmakers had in mind, of course, was institutions such as the Catholic Church, then mired in scandal over abuses by priests and institutional cover-up. 

As a result, to take one example, the Diocese of Los Angeles has had to pay $1.5 billion in settlements with survivors. 

What lawmakers didn’t realize was that, horrific as were the predations of priests, they were nothing compared to the horrors inflicted in foster care – especially group homes and institutions. 

As a result, to take one example: Los Angeles County is likely to agree soon to pay $4 billion – you read that right, four billion dollars – to survivors of abuse inflicted on them when they were in the custody of the Los Angeles County foster care system and/or juvenile justice system.  The money will be divided among 6,800 survivors – and those are just the ones who suffered sexual abuse. 

This $4 billion settlement is the latest illustration of the fact that the entire model of American child welfare was built on a false premise: that child removal equals child safety. Sure, it was said, being torn from everyone a child knows and loves might do emotional harm (in itself a dismissal of profound trauma) but at least they’ll be safe. 

So let's apply the rhetoric we’ve heard from the child welfare establishment decade after decade to these cases.  Some of the 6,800 were placed through the juvenile justice system (which, in itself is more likely if a child was placed in foster care first) but for those among the 6,800 placed through the child welfare system: 

● In every one of those cases, someone decided to tear their family apart in the name of “child safety.”

● In every one of those cases, someone decided they were putting “child safety” ahead of “family preservation.”

● In every one of those cases, someone decided they were acting in the name of “child protection.”

● In every one of those cases, someone decided they were defending “children’s rights.”

● In every one of those cases, someone decided they were putting those “children’s rights” ahead of “parents' rights.”

● In every one of those cases, someone decided to “err on the side of the child.” 

Take a good, long look at how that worked out.  Then take another good, long look the next time you hear that same rhetoric from the take-the-child-and-run crowd. 

Oh, but that crowd will say, those 6,800 cases were just aberrations. The scandals say otherwise.  Just in this decade scandals involving rampant abuse have made headlines in Arizona, Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, Utah, Oklahoma, Washington state, or Arkansas,  Connecticut, New York and Rhode Island – and I’m sure I’ve missed some. 

The data also say otherwise. Yes, the majority of family foster homes are not abusive – it’s not clear if you can say even that about institutions; and, of course, institutionalization is inherently abusive.  Study after study, using conservative methodology, finds abuse in one-quarter to one-third of family foster homes – and the record of group homes and institutions is even worse.  

Foster care apologists also will say these suits deal with abuse from long ago, and really, truly, we’ve all cleaned up our acts since then! But that’s not what the U.S. Senate Finance Committee found just last year. 

Of course, instead of learning the right lessons, some lawmakers are rushing to try to extend protection not to the children but to the agencies responsible for the abuse. In California, private agencies that oversee foster homes and run group homes and institutions sought, and almost got, near immunity from lawsuits. That failed, so now they’re trying for a bailout. New York agencies are doing the same. So are their counterparts in Illinois.

The Los Angeles settlement is far from the end of the story, even in California. 

On the very day the Los Angeles settlement was announced the second of two sets of lawsuits was filed by scores of people who say they survived horrible abuse at the Polinsky Children’s Center in San Diego. 

Said one of the lawyers bringing the suit: “Based on our investigation, the county of San Diego was apparently one of the largest employers of child molesters in the state of California."

That should come as no surprise. Predators go where the prey is. 

San Diego County hasn’t commented on the lawsuits themselves (though the county wants you to know it "remains committed to the safety of all children provided temporary respite at Polinsky Children’s Center.") If the county ever does comment on the lawsuits, I’ll bet officials will say something about how that was all in the past and everything is fixed now. But the allegations cover 1996 to 2023. 

Back in Los Angeles, according to the New York Times 

“On behalf of the county, I apologize wholeheartedly to everyone who was harmed by these reprehensible acts,” the county’s chief executive, Fesia Davenport, said in a statement on Friday. “The historic scope of this settlement makes clear that we are committed to helping the survivors recover and rebuild their lives — and to making and enforcing the systemic changes needed to keep young people safe.”

But in a county that tears apart children at one of the highest rates among America’s largest cities and their surrounding counties, the only systemic changes that will work are: 

● Stop taking away so many children needlessly, so you don’t have to rely on substandard foster homes.

● Shut down the group homes and institutions. 

Having spent decades turning their backs on abuse in systems for which they have ultimate responsibility, one can only hope that for governments in California and across the country, getting hit with a $4 billion two-by-four will be enough to get their attention.

Still another bad “child welfare” bill in West Virginia.

The latest bad bill in West Virginia would make it harder to keep siblings together.

In some cases, this one encourages moving instantly to keep children from their parents (and their siblings) forever, regardless of why they came into care. 

All of the posts in this series are available here.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that in West Virginia, the Child Removal Capital of America, which tears apart families at a rate more than four times the national average, no impoverished child is safe while the State Legislature is in session. 

First came the bill that would send worker caseloads soaring by more than 48%, while drowning workers in cases for which children never should have been traumatized by a needless investigation. 

Then came the bill to build at least one, possibly two more of the worst form of institutions into which to dump children, parking-place “shelters.” 

But another one may be the worst yet.  Think of it as ASFA on steroids. 

Among its many execrable provisions the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act demands that, with certain exceptions, if a child has been in foster care for 15 of the previous 22 months, the state family police agency must seek to terminate that child’s right to live with her or his parents. It doesn’t matter why the child came into care in the first place.  

There are some exceptions.  But there also are so-called “aggravating circumstances” – situations where the agency is allowed to seek TPR immediately. In extremely rare cases that is justified. But states also are invited to pile on whatever other so-called aggravating circumstances they can think of. 

It's all led to the needless destruction of a staggering number of families – overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately nonwhite, of course -- and to the creation of a generation of legal orphans, children who “age out” of foster care with no ties to their birth parents and no other home either.  

That’s why, throughout the child welfare field and beyond, so many are having second thoughts.  But not in West Virginia, of course, where, by a nearly unanimous vote, the state House of Delegates passed a bill that would effectively double down.  This bill, like the other two, is sponsored by two Delegates who also are white, middle-class foster parents. But while I am sure both lawmakers are genuinely concerned about vulnerable children, the bill still oozes white privilege. 

One part of the bill says this: 

When a child has been placed in a foster care arrangement for a period in excess of fifteen consecutive months or fifty percent of the child’s life, and the department determines that the placement is a fit and proper place for the child to reside, the foster care arrangement may not be terminated unless the termination is in the best interest of the child … [Emphasis added].

There are some limited exceptions, including if the children are being reunified with parents and if the children were abused in the foster home. 

But now consider when that fifty percent provision would be triggered: 

● If the child is placed at one year of age.

● If the child is placed at six months.

● If the child is placed at two months.

● If the child is placed at birth. 

Though it doesn’t literally call for instant termination, and has that theoretical exception for reunification, the West Virginia chapter of the National Association of Social Workers (a group that is hardly family-friendly) got the real message.  According to a story in West Virginia Watch (which also is hardly family-friendly): 

Molly Arbogast, executive director of the National Association of Social Workers West Virginia chapter, said the change would allow termination of parental rights far earlier than the federal Adoption and Safe Families Act standard. … 

“The bill’s 50% rule would create a harsher, arbitrary standard [than ASFA] that could result in unnecessary family separations, particularly for very young children, without federal authorization.” 

Separating children from extended families 

The bill also jeopardizes the only area where West Virginia does better than average, placing children with relatives instead of strangers. 

Under this bill, what happens if relatives aren’t found almost instantly – or if the family police agency doesn’t make a serious effort to look?  What if they’re found but aren’t ready instantly because they, too, are poor and need help to fix up their home?  What if they’re simply afraid to have the family police agency in their lives and need reassurance? 

However hard this may be on the egos of privileged stranger-care parents, the evidence is overwhelming that kinship foster care typically is better for children’s well-being, and safer, than stranger-care.  And though the excuse for the bill is that it would promote stability for foster children, kinship care placements typically also are more stable than stranger care placements, because kin are less likely to give up on a child when the going gets rough. 

But the harm this bill would do to children doesn’t end there. 

One of the worst things foster care placement often does to children is to separate them not only from parents but also from siblings. The research on the need to maintain sibling connections is so overwhelming and the benefits are so great that the American Bar Association says: “Sibling relationships are sacred.” 

But this bill puts the interests of white middle-class stranger-care parents first. It sets time limits on when foster or adoptive parents who have taken in one child must be notified that siblings are available, and it says that even when a court determines that moving a child to a home with her or his siblings is in her or his “best interests” they no longer have to do it – they only have to do it if they feel like it; “best interests” be damned!  

Even the West Virginia chapter of Prevent Child Abuse America, a group, which, at the national level has a poor history on supporting families, is opposed: 

“West Virginia should be taking actions to keep brothers and sisters together — not make it easier to separate them,” said Jim McKay, state coordinator for Prevent Child Abuse West Virginia... 

“For many children, those [sibling] relationships are their only remaining connection to family — and a critical source of comfort and stability. Separating them adds to the trauma they’ve already endured,” he said, adding that federal law requires states to take actions to place siblings together. 

To which one of the sponsors said, in effect, so what? “We are pushing the envelope because we’re serious about trying to improve our foster care system in West Virginia,” he declared.  (The previous posts in this series offer several ways to actually do just that.) 

Notwithstanding good intentions, the message these foster parent lawmakers are sending boils down to: Never mind the relatives, never mind the siblings, no one could possibly be better for a foster child than – someone just like me! 

I wonder how many birth parents who lost their children to foster care are members of the West Virginia Legislature.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending April 1, 2025

● Gotta give the Oregon family police agency credit for chutzpah. According to Oregon Public Broadcasting,  Disability Rights Oregon (DRO) charges that after a foster youth forced to live in a hotel committed suicide the Department of Human Services made false statements about key details and covered up its own culpability.  

● But that isn’t even the worst of the chutzpah: The Salem Statesman Journal reports that DHS actually is using the death as a reason to push legislation to make it far easier to resume shipping Oregon foster youth to sometimes hellacious out-of-state institutions, make it easier for institutions to make abusive use of “restraints,” and give lawmakers and the public less information about what they’re doing. DRO calls the bill “a kitchen sink full of known bad practices.” A foster youth asked: “Why would we open more possibilities for maltreatment when it’s already occurring in the system that we have now?” 

The answer is that DHS wants the legislature to believe the only options are parking children in hotels or warehousing them in institutions.  The bill – and that false premise – are discussed here. 

● To the extent that there is any good news out of Oregon, it’s that, as OPB reports, the legislature may extend a pathetically small program to allow some parents convicted of non-violent crimes to stay out of prison so their families can stay together. 

● Speaking of the harm of institutionalization, the Concord Monitor continues its series on that state’s obscene rate of institutionalization with a look at desperate families who voluntarily send their children to faraway institutions because New Hampshire has nothing to offer. At least New Hampshire doesn’t require the parents to surrender custody – but one reason for the lack of options is that beds are filled with foster youth who don’t need to be there in a state that tears apart families at a rate nearly double the national average. 

Referring generally to the shortage of options, one expert told the Monitor, in the newspaper’s words: “The state’s reliance on institutional care is a self-inflicted crisis.” 

● Still speaking of the harm of institutionalization, (where the problem I’m getting to now is worst) one of the greatest harms is the misuse and overuse of psychiatric medication. The Imprint continues its series on the topic – most notably in an installment called “Zombies No More: Former Foster Youth Reflect on Their Medicated Childhoods — and New Ways They Heal.” One striking example, a young woman who remembers: 

stumbling into the kitchen, barely able to walk, on one sunny Los Angeles County morning. Too tired to dish out a bowl of oatmeal from the stove, she brought the whole pot back to a La-Z-Boy recliner. Even then, her limbs leadened, it took several minutes of straining to lift the serving spoon to her mouth. Exhausted, she fell asleep after only a few bites.

● A good bill has made it through one house in Iowa. Iowa Public Radio reports that the bill would require that children in the system get actual lawyers who provide “expressed wishes representation” – that is, they fight for what their child client actually wants, not what they may happen to think is “best.” 

● And a bad bill has so far failed to make it through both houses in Washington State: a bill that would send the family police barging into the confessional.  It would have made clergy mandated reporters, forced to report even what they heard in confession.  As I explain in the Washington State Standard: Of course, it’s not a crime for lawmakers to rush into endorsing bad policy that doesn’t have a prayer of stopping actual child abuse because it sounds good in a press release. But it sure seems like a sin. 

The State Senate passed the bill, but passage in the state House of Representatives is now very unlikely this year. 

● The racism that permeates child welfare doesn’t stop at the northern border. Though Canada’s approach to many social policies is a lot better than ours, that does not apply to family policing. Now scholars at Canada’s most prestigious university, the University of Toronto, have issued a report on the causes of the problem in Ontario, and possible solutions. 

● Back in the United States, The Imprint reports, prosecutors have withdrawn charges of excessive, uh, handshaking, brought as a result of a complaint by a Member of Congress against a foster youth advocate 

● And finally: Our annual reminder on this Blog: If it’s April Fools, it must be Child Abuse Hype and Hysteria Month.