article thumbnail

Child Protective Services in the District of Columbia: An alarming increase in incomplete investigations in FY2024

Child Welfare Monitor

The number of children entering foster care increased for the first time in over ten years. There was a drop in in-home case openings but a similar increase in foster care placements during the year. But the number of children being served in their homes decreased by 50 while the number in foster care increased by 49.

article thumbnail

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

NCCPR Child Welfare Blog

Thats 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.

Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

As foster care removals plummet, where’s the promised help for families?

Child Welfare Monitor

Year after year, states and the federal government continue to release annual data showing a decline in the number of children in foster care, congratulating themselves on keeping families together. percent over the previous year 15.6 percent since 2018. “We

article thumbnail

The fundamental misconception at the heart of the Family First Act

Child Welfare Monitor

Sometime in the early years of the current century, a group of powerful advocates who thought that too many children were being placed in foster care came up with a proposal for change that they called “child welfare finance reform.” … So under Family First, we created new federal funding for those services.

article thumbnail

When it comes to the problems plaguing “child welfare” wrongful removal drives everything else – including caseworker turnover. Case in point: Massachusetts

NCCPR Child Welfare Blog

The story begins and ends with the story of Maria Toscano and her desperate efforts to schedule a visit with her children in foster care. According to the story, Toscano’s husband was also cited for substance abuse, according to DCF records she shared with the Globe. Then the cycle can be broken.

article thumbnail

Officials in two states that routinely destroy Native American families make their position clear: We don’t care, we don’t have to.

NCCPR Child Welfare Blog

The closest thing she has to a concrete solution is no solution at all – making it easier to place Native children in hidden foster care. In South Dakota, Native Americans are 13 percent of the child population and nearly three-quarters of the foster-child population, an issue first exposed in 2010 by NPR.

article thumbnail

How the journalism of child welfare fails

NCCPR Child Welfare Blog

Two online news sites published more than 10,000 words about foster care in West Virginia. Yet the equivalent happens, over and over and over, when the topic is foster care. Parents who lose their children to foster care, on the other hand, are overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately nonwhite.