The collective weight of the horror stories that result when foster care systems fail is enough to make anyone want to give up. But if we stand together, we can bring about massive change. We’ve been writing all week about the stories of Oklahoma children who lost their lives when state child welfare officials failed […]
Child welfare officials chose to ignore a basic, easy-to-enforce rule, and then failed to learn from their deadly mistake. Child welfare systems establish rules to protect the well-being of the kids in their care. Plain and simple. And those rules are as worthless as the paper they’re printed on if child welfare workers aren’t compelled […]
A 20-month-old boy in foster care, run down by a pick-up truck, paid the ultimate price because Oklahoma child welfare officials didn’t ask the obvious questions about a dangerous foster home. The pick-up truck that peeled away from a boozy lakeside gathering left behind more than just a cloud of dust. On the ground lay […]
With little planning and no sense of gravity or urgency, Oklahoma returns a helpless boy to an environment of brutal violence — and he pays for the state’s negligence with his life. D.S. first came to the attention of Oklahoma child welfare officials when he was three years old, not long after his mother moved […]
When foster youth in Oklahoma suffer abuse in state custody, the chances are appallingly high that an investigation will be ineffective and inconsequential. When a 10-year-old boy said he was sexually assaulted by his 13-year-old roommate in their room at an Oklahoma short-term residential treatment center, the staff didn’t rally to protect him or call […]
Tulsa’s News On 6 ran a story last night on the tragic cases of several children in the custody of Oklahoma’s extremely dangerous child welfare system — children who had been the subject of at least one confirmed report of abuse or neglect in foster homes that the state should have been monitoring carefully, and […]
One Oklahoma toddler was shuttled between eight different foster care placements in less than a year — and her experience isn’t unusual, according to a recent expert report.
In 2005, an Oklahoma boy entered state foster care at the age of five. In the years that followed, his life became a nightmarish blur as the state stashed him in a succession of damaging foster care placements: Four different foster homes. One emergency foster home. One residential treatment center. An inappropriate shelter — on […]
Maggie May Trammel was just 10 days old last November when her mother, Lyndsey Fiddler, a 26-year-old Oklahoma woman with a history of substance abuse problems, loaded her into a washing machine with a pile of clothes, started the machine, and subsequently passed out. Maggie May was in the washing machine for as long as […]
A recent op-ed published in The Washington Post suggested cuts in support to foster families to reduce “waste” in the DC child welfare system. According to its writer, “middle class” foster parents are “overpaid” to care for the children they take in, while others — like the relatives of vulnerable children — are suffering in […]
