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Child welfare systems fail all over the country. But what is happening in Maine may be the saddest story of all.
Over less than a quarter century Maine child welfare went from national scandal to national model to national disgrace. For a few years, Maine was one of the very few places getting child welfare right. But then, thanks to a few demagogic politicians and a case of collective amnesia, Maine threw it all away.
The cycle begain with one horrific tragedy. In 2001, Logan Marr, a five-year-old foster child taken because her mother’s poverty was confused with neglect, was killed by her foster mother, a former child protection caseworker. The Maine system faced harsh national scrutiny, including a PBS Frontline documentary, “The Taking of Logan Marr.”
The documentary made clear that Logan never should have been taken from her mother. And the data made clear Maine was doing it over and over, placing children in foster care at a rate well above the national average.
Everyone from activists to advocates to politicians stepped up. When John Baldacci became governor, he listened. The result was a reformed system rebuilt around safe proven alternatives to taking away children. Entries into foster care dropped, with no compromise of safety. Maine’s success was singled out by the Annie E. Casey Foundation and by Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government which made Maine’s child welfare reform a finalist for one an Innovations in American Government Awards.
But the next governor, Paul LePage exploited child abuse deaths to demand that the state adopt what amounted to a take-the-child-and-run approach. One might expect nothing else from LePage, but Gov. Janet Mills’ administration has been little better.
The result was a cycle of failure: Children known-to-the-system die. There’s a foster-care panic, a sharp sudden spike in removals of children from their homes. Each time we’re told this is necessary to stop child abuse deaths. But the deaths don’t stop and the cycle repeats.
The result: all Maine children become less safe.
Children suffer the enormous inherent emotional trauma of needless removal.
Children are put at high risk of abuse in foster care itself, where independent studies find the rate of abuse is vastly higher than states report in official figures.
And all the false allegations, trivial cases and cases in which family poverty is confused with neglect – like the case of Logan Marr – steal time from finding those few children in real danger.
And so, in 2022 the number of children trapped in foster care reached a record high. So did the number torn from their homes over the course of a year – higher even than before Logan Marr died. Maine took children at a rate more than double the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in. Maine comes down especially hard on Hispanic children. More than one in four will be forced into foster care at some point.
It doesn’t have to stay this way. Maine fixed child welfare once; it can do it again. But only if state leaders defy the fearmongers and embrace what really works to keep children safe. That means more than bland boilerplate about “gee, we should have more prevention.” It means concrete financial help for impoverished families – even small amounts of aid significantly reduce child maltreatment.
But instead, the legislature’s Government Oversight Committee proposes to use scarce funds to give even more money to largely middle-class foster parents. They already get at least $800 per month per child, tax-free. The children’s health insurance is covered. And if a child is taken due to “lack of supervision” because a parent couldn’t work, Maine will subsidize child care for that same child – if the child is in foster care, so the foster parents don’t have to pay for it.
No wonder decades ago, a leader of the reform movement, author and foster parent Mary Callahan, pointed out that almost all the children she cared for could have remained safely in their own homes had their own parents got the money she got as a foster parent.
Families need something else as well: To guarantee they get the help they need to stay together safely, there has to be high-quality family defense counsel for every family, from the moment DHHS shows up at the door. Such programs have been shown to significantly reduce foster care with no compromise of safety.
Anything else is, at best, largely useless and at worst profanes the memory of Logan Marr.
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