New legislation “sends a clear and powerful message,” says a lawmaker.

“It is time to look at what is not working and fix it,” says another lawmaker.

“It’s got to be all hands on deck,” says an advocate.

If throwing cliches at a problem would solve it, Connecticut would have the best child welfare system in America. Instead, the tired thinking reflected in those tired cliches explains the real problem: A state that once really might have become the best, or at least the least bad, child welfare system in America has been slouching back to mediocrity or worse.

That’s because both lawmakers and the Department of Children and Families refuse to face the problem that is driving all the others. Connecticut no longer is dedicated to safely reducing needless foster care, and DCF no longer has leadership to stand up to pressure to tear apart more families after high-profile tragedies.

When Connecticut emphasized keeping families together, it worked its way out of a decades-old consent decree and became, relatively speaking, a national model. No longer. From 2021 through 2025, nationwide, the number of children torn from everyone they know and love over the course of a year and consigned to the chaos of foster care declined by more than 15%. But in Connecticut, over the same period, entries increased by 33%. And that was before all the recent publicity about deaths of children “known to the system.”

Decade after decade, such cases set off foster-care panics, sharp, sudden increases in the number of children thrown into foster care by workers terrified of having the next tragedy on their caseload. This happens even though it does enormous harm to the children needlessly taken while doing nothing to reduce child abuse deaths.

One DCF Commissioner refused to cave in to the pressure for foster-care panic. In 2011, when DCF faced scrutiny much as it does now after a child’s death, Joette Katz said that in the past such a response “has been exactly the mistake, frankly.  A child dies and the next thing you know, workers are getting thrown under the bus, and 500 children get removed [from their homes] the next day because it’s a reaction to a tragedy. I think that’s the exact wrong way to behave.”

None of her predecessors had the guts to respond that way. Now, one of those predecessors, Susan Hamilton, is back running DCF.

So, confronted with high caseloads and enormous caseworker turnover, Hamilton comes up with a mentoring program and a newsletter highlighting good work. Lawmakers are busy scapegoating homeschoolers and setting up another committee to monitor DCF – in order to send that “clear and powerful message.” Other legislators are bizarrely obsessed with trying to take away one of the few things that might make the job of caseworker more attractive: the ability to do mind-numbing paperwork at home.

In contrast, New Jersey, which CT Mirror points to as a model for curbing such turnover, cut to the heart of the matter: That state takes away children at just over one-third the rate of Connecticut. New Jersey also has one of the lowest rates of child abuse fatalities in America.

And yes, there is plenty of opportunity to reduce entries into care. For starters, how much time are caseworkers forced to waste surveilling parents whose only crime was to be  a survivor of domestic violence? Such surveillance, and worse, removal from the home, actually is even more traumatic for a child when the parent is a domestic violence survivor. That’s why removing children on those grounds is illegal in New York, and surveilling New York mothers in that situation now also is the subject of a lawsuit.

We also know that in Connecticut in 2025, of all the cases in which children were torn from their families, 87% did not involve even an allegation of physical or sexual abuse. And 64% did not involve even an allegation of any form of drug abuse.  Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with “neglect.” We also know from one study after another that, in the typical cases, children left in their own homes typically fare better than even comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care. Yet instead of focusing more resources on ameliorating the worst effects of poverty, such as lack of housing, lawmakers opted for a pay raise for middle-class foster parents, who already receive at least $10,000 per year, tax-free, and often childcare aid as well.

Wrongful removal drives every other child welfare problem – including so overloading workers that they are more likely to overlook children in real danger. So to put this in terms with which Connecticut lawmakers might be most comfortable: To make children safer, the time to refocus on curbing needless foster care is now!

Richard Wexler is Executive Director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform.