The number of Maine children in state custody to protect them from suspected abuse or neglect has risen to its highest level in two decades, adding to the strain on caseworkers tasked with keeping children safe and on caregivers who take in the at-risk children.

There were 2,573 children in state custody as of June 1, an increase of more than 468 over six years, according to data kept by the Department of Health and Human Services.

Additionally, the state has struggled to find permanent placement for these children within 12 months, which is the goal. Over the same six-year period, the rate of finding permanency has decreased from 30% to 22%, which puts Maine further behind the national standard of 40.5%.

But although those trends are noteworthy, Maine Office of Child and Family Services Director Bobbi Johnson said she believes the state’s child protective system is rebounding after some tumultuous years.

Much of the increase in the number of children in custody, as well as the lower rate of finding permanency, can be attributed to a backlog of cases moving through the court system.

“Children are entering the system, but they aren’t exiting,” Johnson said.

She also said the state has struggled to build its roster of foster families. After five years of steady growth in the number of licensed foster families, the number dipped last year, and again this year to 1,583 – the lowest total since 2019. There are an additional 439 kinship homes that are in the process of getting licensed, according to DHHS.

One major challenge has been that many children have significant behavioral health needs that most foster families cannot provide, putting pressure on the caregivers who are qualified to take on children with special needs.

“We continue to onboard new resource parents and lose others,” she said, while stressing that any decisions about whether to seek removal of children from their homes are not dictated by the adequacy of placements.

Maine’s Office of Child and Family Services has endured more sustained scrutiny than any state agency over the last six years as policymakers continue to search for answers following a series of child-abuse deaths.

Robin Upton-Sukeforth, who for the last six years has been a field representative for the Maine Service Employees Association, said things have improved, but caseworkers still shoulder the weight of a child welfare system beset by broader societal challenges.

“MSEA continues to be very concerned about the rising number of children in state custody,” she said. “While the state has made progress, significant work still remains.”

The increased number of children in state custody isn’t a surprise. Maine has had the highest rate of child maltreatment and child abuse cases in the country, according to a 2023 study, although that report acknowledged the limitations of comparing states.

The opioid crisis and a lack of preventive resources for at-risk families have been the biggest contributing factors to the rising custody numbers, but the increased scrutiny after breakdowns in the protective system likely has played a role, too.

The fact that more children are being removed from abusive or neglectful environments could be seen as a sign that the system is working more effectively.

But that comes with costs, too. Removing children from homes has long-term implications.

Melissa Hackett, a policy associate with the nonprofit Maine Children’s Alliance and coordinator of the Maine Child Welfare Action Network, said the state has focused its efforts and investments on child protection – and rightly so.

Less attention has been paid to societal factors that can contribute to abuse and neglect.

“We need to respond to crises, but that can’t be the only thing we do,” she said. “The other part of the conversation is: What are we providing to families and caregivers at the community level?”

CHILD DEATHS BRING SCRUTINY, CHANGES

Maine’s child protection system has long been an area of concern for policymakers, but the current challenges can be traced back to late 2017 and early 2018.

The deaths of 4-year-old Kendall Chick in Wiscasset and 10-year-old Marissa Kennedy in Stockton Springs prompted lawmakers and then-Gov. Paul LePage to institute reforms aimed at improving child safety.

Chick had been removed from her mother’s care and placed with her paternal grandfather and his partner, Shawna Gatto. But caseworkers failed to monitor the girl’s care, and she later died from abuse by Gatto, who is now serving 50 years in prison.

In Kennedy’s case, child protection officials had been to her home six times in the four months before her death to investigate claims of abuse. Two days before she died, a caseworker said she noticed bruises but believed the girl’s parents when they said they were self-inflicted.

Those two cases highlighted conflicting challenges for the Office of Child and Family Services: They didn’t have enough staff to deal with the volume of neglect and abuse reports, but they also struggled with inconsistent expectations on when children should be removed.

Following those two deaths, the state saw a dramatic rise in the number of children who were removed, from 1,724 in June 2018 to 2,105 in June 2019.

Hackett, who started doing work in child welfare in 2018, said the uptick was predictable because of the heightened concern about missing warnings signs.

“Any time there is increased scrutiny, there is an understandable reaction of fear,” she said. “Mandated reporters and child protection caseworkers, they are human, so they experience the same fear and reaction. No one wants to be working with a family where a child dies, and they wonder if they missed something.”

The office was provided with more resources beginning in 2018 – new caseworker positions and an increase in pay for those already in place.

Just as the agency was starting to implement more reforms, including better training, another spate of child deaths in 2021 – four in the span of a month – led to further internal and external investigations, some of which lasted into this year.

The child welfare ombudsman’s office, which is independent from DHHS, has routinely criticized the agency for not doing enough.

Last November, testimony and reports shared with the Government Oversight Committee – which was involved in three separate reviews of the Office of Child and Family Services going back to 2018 – revealed caseworkers still had few opportunities to catch their breath in a physically and emotionally demanding job. They also said agency policies led to “unsound safety decisions.”

Later that month, the agency’s director, Todd Landry, resigned amid questions about his leadership.

Johnson, who is a longtime DHHS employee and former child protective caseworker, was appointed to take over, first on an interim basis and then permanently.

She said one of her biggest goals has been to shift the culture within the agency, but also to be mindful that sustained scrutiny, while justified, has had a negative effect, too. Families no longer trust in the system and that makes it harder for the state to work with community partners, which is critical.

“I have to remind my staff and myself, sometimes there are bad outcomes, but the majority of work we do is supportive,” Johnson said. “After 29 years, I still have a lot of hope and optimism.”

Some lawmakers and others, however, have argued that the only way to fix the systemic problems is wholesale structural reform, which hasn’t happened.

During the last legislative session, lawmakers discussed a proposal to break off the Office of Child and Family Services from DHHS and make it a standalone department. It was an idea that had been tried before without success.

“Sometimes you have to tear down the old barn before you build a new one,” the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Jeff Timberlake, R-Turner, told colleagues in a floor speech this spring.

Although the bill had broad bipartisan support in the Senate, the House never took up a vote and the measure died.

Rep. Michele Meyer, D-Eliot, who chairs the legislature’s Health and Human Services Committee and who made the motion in the House to table the bill, said creating a new department at this stage “would actually harm the systems we’ve been working to improve.”

Lawmakers did approve additional funding to add more trainers and legal aides to support child welfare caseworkers and to initiate a reclassification of pay for child welfare caseworkers and supervisors.

Johnson said her office is having more success retaining staff. In January, there were 82 positions vacant. This month, that was reduced to 43.

COURT BACKLOG ADDS TO CASELOAD

The court backlog has been part of a broader problem within the state’s legal system.

This spring, the Maine Commission on Public Defense Services reported that the list of parents in custody cases who were waiting to be assigned an attorney had grown by 400%.

Maine law says a hearing must be held within 14 days after removing a child from a home, during which time parents can respond to accusations. But that hasn’t been happening in many cases.

And more and more cases are coming in.

“I think the department is under significant political pressure to remove kids to be on the safe side,” Jim Billings, the commission’s executive, said at the time. “That tends to create more cases and can make (them) more contentious if you’re removing kids from the outset on a marginal case.”

Hackett, with the Maine Children’s Alliance, said the backlog serves as a reminder that child protection cases are often complex legal processes.

“It’s not as simple as child safety, because we all want kids to be safe,” she said. “What becomes more complicated is when you look at kids who have had outcomes in the foster care system that are often not good, and also the trauma to families when children are removed. These are complicated things for the public to hold, but we need to hold it together.”

There are cases where children are removed without good reason.

In 2019, two children were taken from a mother who failed to “consistently meet the children’s medical needs.” Her parental rights were later terminated.

This winter, more than four years after the children were first removed, the state’s highest court ruled that the mother’s rights were unfairly terminated because she was not provided adequate medical care she was entitled to under MaineCare to meet the children’s needs.

Removing a child from parents, and then taking the additional step of terminating parental rights, requires an agonizing balancing act.

Research has shown that keeping families together, even troubled ones, is beneficial to the children, according to the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, a Virginia-based advocacy group.

But every time a child dies at the hands of a parent or family member, that belief is challenged.

Upton-Sukeforth, the union representative, said if caseworkers are removing more children from homes, they are simply carrying out policy and doing their jobs.

“But the question is: Why are there so many kids that need to be removed?” she said. “If we put resources where they are needed, why are we not seeing the reduction in harm?”

A compounding factor is that the more the state removes children from their homes, the more other families are afraid to get help from the state.

“In almost every conversation with a family, they do talk about the pervasive fear of child protective services,” Hackett said. “And that fear prevents families from reaching out when they do need services.”

Johnson said she has seen that exact dilemma play out, and it’s a reminder that the state needs to do better at directing people to resources. That was one of the reasons behind a recent initiative, Be There for ME, which does just that.

“It’s definitely coming more to the forefront,” Johnson said. “I think across the state there is an understanding that (child protective services) should be the last resort of intervention for families. The more we can support them and normalize them asking for help, the less that is needed.”

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