A state task force created by Gov. Mike Kehoe to recommend changes to Missouri’s child welfare system convened for five hours Monday to begin developing clearer common standards for determining whether a child is safe that can be used by abuse and neglect investigators, the courts, juvenile officers and others across the state.
The Missouri Child Welfare Task Force was created the group Aug. 25 by executive order, less than 24 hours before a bipartisan legislative hearing examining foster care deaths, staff turnover and rising investigation backlogs in the Missouri Children’s Division.
The executive order instructs the task force to propose a statewide definition of child safety, identify gaps and contradictions in existing laws and policies, and establish processes to put the new definitions into practice.
The task force, which includes Children’s Division leaders, lawmakers, judges, law enforcement, private providers, attorneys and advocates, has a Nov. 15 deadline to recommend legislation.
But as members tried Monday to define what makes a child safe or unsafe, two longstanding problems kept intruding on the discussion: a workforce struggling with high turnover and caseloads, and gaps in services designed to keep families safely together.
The task force is using a 2009 child safety guide developed by the American Bar Association for judges and attorneys — as well as tools the division already uses to assess safety and risk, called Structured Decision Making — to guide discussions of potential definitions.
The group agreed to focus on defining three factors that go into determining whether a child is safe: threats to safety, children’s vulnerability and parents’ capacity to remove or minimize threats.
Teri Armistead, director of the department’s Division of Legal Services, said that after assessing those factors, the next step is to determine if services are available that can help a child safely stay in their home.
“The next step is looking at the resources and the services that we have in place in our communities to be able to maintain that child within the home,” Armistead said. “And if not, then it’s removal.”
State Rep. Melissa Schmidt, a Republican from Eldridge and chair of the task force, said clear statewide criteria for assessing safety and making decisions about cases could also ease some of the pressure on frontline workers.
“A lot of the burnout and the burden of the frontline workers is that they are having to make a lot of these decisions on their own, and then they’re grappling with, was that the right decision?” Schmidt said. “…That’s why we’re losing some of them. It’s not the only reason, but those are heavy decisions to make on your own.”
Children’s Division Director Sara Smith said turnover among frontline division workers is 40%. Turnover reached 55% in fiscal year 2022, after then-Gov. Mike Parson cut almost 100 jobs in the division in 2020, citing COVID-19 budget constraints.
Former division workers interviewed by The Independent said high caseloads and increasingly prescriptive requirements to close cases have made it more difficult to help families and contributed to burnout.
Jessica Kruse, a circuit judge for the 38th Judicial Circuit in Christian County, said she worries a recent restructuring of the division’s child abuse and neglect investigations unit could make it harder for workers to meet legally required response times — three hours for emergencies and 24 hours for most other reports.
Since the new structure went into effect Sept. 1, workers have been sent to respond to reports of possible abuse or neglect across much larger swaths of the state, instead of single circuits.
Kruse said she had heard from emergency room nurses in Branson that workers had been sent from as far as St. Louis to respond to certain types of cases.
“It’s all travel time to get to the family,” Kruse said.
Smith said the restructuring is intended to provide frontline workers with support in the field.
“You have to have people that you can call and help navigate the gray,” Smith said.
Emily van Schenkhoff, executive director of the Children’s Trust Fund of Missouri, said “the support for our child welfare workforce is not there right now in the way that it needs to be.”
“There are structural things that we can do in statute, but then there is a whole other separate issue related to our child welfare workforce,” van Schenkhoff said. “You can have all the structure and process in the world, but if you have high turnover rates, high caseloads, you’re going to still have workers that don’t screen in hotlines that they should.”
The task force is also charged with developing training modules for shared use by frontline division workers, juvenile officers, judges and others in the child welfare system.
Rick Gaines, chief juvenile officer for the 21st Judicial Circuit in St. Louis County, said juvenile officers generally no longer investigate reports of potential abuse or neglect. But he remembers when juvenile officers, division workers and law enforcement worked much more closely in the field.
Now, Gaines said, “it’s almost as if we’re on different planets.”
Haylee Musso, deputy legislative liaison for the division and a former frontline worker, said it was an expectation of the juvenile judge in her circuit that the “multi-disciplinary team” on each case — division workers, juvenile officers, guardians ad litem, who represent children’s interests in court, and others — would collaborate.
“I wasn’t just trained by the division,” Musso said. “I was trained by the (multi-disciplinary team).”
Gaines said he hopes the task force “can try to bridge some of the distance, if you will, between Children’s Division and the juvenile office.”
Task force members also discussed whether state law should more explicitly allow courts to order services aimed at keeping children safely in their homes.
Currently, courts in some judicial circuits order some families to work with family-centered services workers from the division to receive services available in their communities. But it’s not a practice used consistently throughout the state.
Musso described court-ordered services as “both the stick and the carrot for parents,” saying, “We’re here. We’re going to help you. But the courts are also involved, so you really need to work with us.”
The expansion of court-ordered family centered services was also recommended in 2024 by the state’s Fentanyl Case Review Subcommittee, which aimed to address an increase in fentanyl-related child fatalities.
Task force members said there is a need for more basic parenting classes and in-home parenting support, as well as classes for parents of children with mental or behavioral health conditions.
Van Schenkhoff pointed to broader gaps in services available in the state as a barrier to preventing children from entering foster care.
“When we see a family that needs additional services, often we don’t have the ability to do that,” van Schenkhoff said. “And so what do we do then? We remove. We cannot get to a place that’s where we want to be as a system unless we have more supports and prevention services available statewide.”
