In late 2023, deputies in Monroe County found two young children living in a tent behind a house. It was November. The tent was covered with a tarp, heated by a small space heater and sat on the cold ground. The children’s mother was battling serious health problems. Their grandfather, who lived with them, tried to keep them fed with occasional help from the mother’s ex-boyfriend. The kids weren’t in school.
Over the next 18 months, the sheriff’s office would encounter the family twice more, once in the same tent and later living in a car. On that last encounter, one child couldn’t remember her last shower, and she sometimes relieved herself in her clothes because she had nowhere else to go.
Each time, deputies called Children’s Protective Services. And each time, they were told there was little the agency could do. There was food. There was heat. The situation, in the agency’s view, did not meet the definition of abuse or neglect. And if the children weren’t being abused or neglected by their parents, there was little the agency was going to do.
This is the hard truth about our “child welfare” system – it is not designed to address the welfare of children or help families meet their concrete needs. At its core, CPS is an investigative agency. It investigates families, looking for parental wrongdoing. If it doesn’t find any, it often closes its case. It is not a child welfare agency because “child welfare” means more than the absence of abuse. It means addressing the actual needs of struggling families…