AUGUSTA, Maine — Maine’s child welfare system was once held up as a national model, but its recent problems have become the subject of legislative studies, meetings and hand-wringing.
In the meantime, one lawmaker thinks Maine could look across the country to Washington state, which created a standalone child welfare-focused department a few years ago. Still, it has not been immune to problems and also saw caseworkers try last year to oust the department’s secretary, and some Maine legislators are wary of trying to mimic a far-away state.
Consensus on big child welfare ideas remains elusive here. The latest example of the bureaucratic logjam came Thursday and Friday in front of the Legislature’s health and oversight committees, where lawmakers debated bills that would to turn the embattled child welfare office into its own department and add another watchdog atop existing oversight agencies.
The Maine Department of Health and Human Services is resisting those ideas, which have been floated before. Gov. Janet Mills’ administration wants the Legislature to delay consideration of the bill from Sen. Jeff Timberlake, R-Turner, to remove child welfare from its purview and opposes the other measure from Sen. Joe Baldacci, D-Bangor, to create an inspector general.
“You don’t need to reinvent the wheel,” Timberlake said Friday, referring to Washington’s path. “You take somebody else’s plan, modify it to what you think are your needs and move forward.”
After past reform efforts that followed poor compliance with national child welfare standards and highly-publicized child deaths in the early 2000s, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee tasked a commission in 2016 with looking at the welfare system’s structure.
A year later, Inslee signed a law creating a new Department of Children, Youth and Families formed from existing departments for early learning along with social and health services. Inslee, a Democrat, and the commission said it would centralize efforts to protect at-risk kids from harm and abuse.
Some metrics suggest the new department has helped. The number of child maltreatment victims in Washington has fallen from 4,717 in 2016 to 3,486 in 2021, per the Annie E. Casey Foundation. On the other hand, Maine has led the nation in child maltreatment per 1,000 children.
The changes in Washington have not solved all problems. The new department’s secretary, Ross Hunter, told the state’s children and family ombudsman in November his team still faces staffing shortages, high caseloads and a fentanyl crisis that is the “driving factor behind an increase in child fatalities” amid a lack of substance abuse treatment resources.
Just as Todd Landry, Maine’s former child welfare office director, faced pressure from lawmakers and caseworkers before resigning in November, Hunter also faced a no-confidence vote from caseworkers who failed in December to collect enough signatures to advance their months-long effort to urge Inslee to fire him. They held that he was ignoring their concerns regarding unmanageable caseloads and high turnover.
At least 34 children in Maine — the most on record for the state of nearly 1.4 million people — died in 2021 in tracked incidents associated with abuse or neglect or occurring after a history of family involvement with the child welfare system, with 31 deaths in 2022 and at least 16 reported for 2023, per state data subject to updates. Washington, with about 7.8 million residents, reported 39 kids under state supervision dying in 2022 from abuse or neglect.
Maine is searching for a permanent Office of Child and Family Services director after Landry resigned in November. Landry had led since 2019 the office that has faced scrutiny under both Democratic and Republican governors over the high-profile, record-setting numbers of kids dying in state care and caseworkers repeatedly complaining of burnout and low morale.
Not all of Timberlake’s peers are wedded to his ideas. Rep. Anne-Marie Mastraccio, D-Sanford, wondered whether the estimated $4.2 million needed to set up a standalone child welfare department in its first year could better go to improving existing safety and staffing issues.
Rep. Margaret Craven, D-Lewiston, a health committee member, said she thinks the Washington report is “useful” but added she is “not sure if this is the best course for Maine.”
Maine is hardly alone nationally in facing child welfare issues. Washington has also reportedly struggled with foster youth who lack stable placements and instead sleep in hotel rooms or unlicensed facilities, an issue Maine’s oversight committee has also discussed as lawmakers await updated data on kids forced to stay in hospitals and hotels.
In the meantime, Maine has continued with studies and discussions but no changes yet during a shortened legislative session scheduled to end in April. Amid wide-ranging child welfare debates during Friday’s oversight committee meeting, Sen. Jill Duson, D-Portland, aired lingering concerns over not driving actual policy changes forward.
Lawmakers are “spinning wheels,” Duson worried.
