This story was initially printed by the Louisiana Illuminator.

Confronted with the failure of the Division of Kids and Household Providers, lawmakers and directors in Louisiana have responded the way in which they do in most states:

They slapped a baby’s title onto a regulation to point out how a lot they care.

They created the compulsory particular committee to make suggestions, which it has not but achieved.

They rearranged the deck chairs on the kid welfare Titanic, and now suggest to rearrange them some extra.

None of this labored. It by no means does. However at the least now one Louisiana lawmaker, Sen. Thomas Pressly, is asking the correct query

“Somebody must be doing it higher,” Pressly requested DCFS Secretary Rebecca Harris final week,  desirous to know who.

No place does youngster welfare nicely, however there are a couple of locations that do higher than the remainder. At one level, one in every of them was in Louisiana. 

All have one factor in widespread: They’re laser-focused on lowering the variety of kids who ever should be torn from their households and consigned to the chaos of foster care within the first place.

That concern, and that answer, have been lacking from the controversy in Louisiana. As an alternative, DCFS has careened the opposite manner.  Between 2020 and 2023, a time when most states have been lowering the variety of kids taken from their houses, Louisiana was responding to horror tales about youngster abuse deaths with a foster care panic: The variety of kids torn from their houses over the course of a 12 months skyrocketed greater than 50%. The quantity declined a bit of by 2025, however entries have been nonetheless 35% above the place they have been in 2020.

The speculation, in fact, was that taking away all these further kids would cease youngster abuse deaths. In 2024, I wrote about why that wouldn’t work. A foster-care panic will increase caseloads, giving staff nonetheless much less time to look at every case. The horror tales are needles in a haystack. You’ll by no means discover the needles in the event you maintain making the haystack larger.  

New analysis confirms that foster-care panics don’t work. A examine printed in December by the authoritative JAMA Community Open examined 3.4 million data of youngsters in foster care from 2010 to 2023, when states attributed 24,108 fatalities to youngster abuse or neglect. The examine discovered that taking away extra kids did nothing to cut back youngster abuse deaths.

One other latest examine is the newest in a protracted lines displaying that, in typical circumstances, kids left in their very own houses usually do higher even than comparably-maltreated kids positioned in foster care. The newest examine, from Sweden, even discovered that the foster kids have been greater than 4 instances extra more likely to die by age 20.

The commonest explanation for dying was suicide, which supplies some clue in regards to the huge inherent trauma of kid elimination. All that is earlier than we even attain the research displaying excessive charges of abuse in foster care itself.

Most circumstances are nothing just like the horror tales. Of all the youngsters taken from their households in Louisiana in 2024, 93% didn’t contain even an allegation of sexual abuse or any type of bodily abuse. Much more widespread are circumstances wherein household poverty is confused with “neglect.”

So, to reply Sen. Pressly, right here’s who has achieved it higher:

• Former Orleans Parish Choose Ernestine Grey received nationwide acclaim for drastically lowering pointless foster care, with no compromise of security, just by implementing the regulation. She wouldn’t permit kids to be eliminated due to poverty. However since she retired on the finish of 2020, there’s been backsliding. Reform can’t rely on a single visionary.
• Due to a landmark lawsuit consent decree (a member of my group’s board was co-counsel for the plaintiffs), Alabama grew to become an unlikely nationwide chief by specializing in ameliorating the worst features of poverty. It really works as a result of we all know even a bit of money for a struggling household could make an enormous distinction. There was backsliding when the court docket monitoring ended, however the classes stay.
• That’s why New York Metropolis and New Jersey realized to not rely solely on a time-limited consent decree or a single visionary chief. They supply high-quality protection counsel to households caught up within the system — to not get “unhealthy dad and mom” off however to offer alternate options to the cookie-cutter “service plans” churned out by companies like DCFS. It’s been confirmed to cut back foster care with no compromise of security.

The identical horror tales that happen in Louisiana occur in these locations as nicely, and these locations nonetheless take kids needlessly. They aren’t good techniques; they’re much less unhealthy techniques. 

The place that places all this innovation collectively and sticks with it might develop into the primary genuinely good system in youngster welfare. Louisiana could be a superb place to begin.

Richard Wexler is govt director of the Nationwide Coalition for Little one Safety Reform, which seeks complete change within the youngster protecting system. Be taught extra at www.nccpr.or

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