Not just the big states...tiny Montana is thoroughly abused by CPS issues too.
Montana is enormous...4th largest state in the union behind only Alaska, Texas and California in land area. But, in population it is tiny. Only Wyoming has fewer people. So, it is very sparsely populated with a goodly portion of this gorgeous state's people living in the state's few large towns...Billings, Helena, Great Falls, Missoula, Bozeman...
So, when we read that "Child Protective" "Services" (CPS) was sicced on families nearly 16,000 times in one year in a state that has only 218,000 children to begin with, statewide, that really catches your attention.
What possibly could be going on in a rural, ranching, hard-working, self-reliant, rugged-individualist state like Montana that would require CPS involvement in 1/13th of all children's lives each year?? Apparently, plenty. And, like so many other places the real problems do not seem to be with the people's parenting skills so much as with the agency that takes their money to "protect" them.
Check out this link:
Admittedly, this article is a bit of a snapshot in time, showing things as they existed in "Big Sky country" in 2015, but there are so many little hidden nuggets of interest in this one article (if you read between the lines) that it is definitely worth our perusal.
(Image courtesy of montananews.tv)
Start with this:
"in 2014, CPS assessed 15,724 reports of alleged child abuse or neglect, with 7,812 of those reports requiring an investigation, the audit found. CPS has 29 field offices within five geographic areas statewide. The audit found that 78 percent of the time in 250 investigations it reviewed that the department did not document notification to families of the outcome of the investigation."
We've already alluded to how high the number of CPS reports are in a state this small, but the fact that well over half of those cases resulted in a full-blown CPS investigation (that's fairly typical, compared to national statistics) where families have no recource to documentation of the outcomes 4/5 of the time is LUDICROUS and way above national averages. Why? In a rural state largely devoid of the types of inner city issues, does CPS feel that it is okay not to document things--even though required by law to do so? I will only mention, for now, that Montana's demographics--largely white, poor, under-educated... make it prime territory for very desirable "adoptables," and that this is the real money maker for CPS.
"Overall, our work concluded that this lack of documentation was not isolated in nature, but rather represented a systemic concern within CPS whereby department staff does not consistently document how the department assesses and investigates reports of alleged abuse or neglect."
How convenient. For a state to allow this problem to be "systemic," something has to be behind that. This is not the sort of thing that every CPS field office is going to discover organically and innately all on its own. In my opinion for this to be systemic across a huge swathe of territory where people are fairly isolated in their locales it takes some type of wink & nod "suggestion"/coordination from some central authority.
Here is another brief excerpt:
"Corbally and DPHHS director Richard Opper left the room as the public began to comment on the audit. Many said they had dealt with CPS and were critical of how they were treated. Former state representative Cleve Loney of Great Falls said he has been contacted by nearly 4,000 people about problems they have had with the department."
(Corbally...Image courtesy of mtpr.org.)
Sarah Corbally is the administrator of the Montana Child and Family Services division (MCFS...their alternate acronym for CPS), and Opper is her boss at the Montana Department of Health & Human Services. For them to get up and leave the room just as the people were about to give them an earful is, in my opinion, the height of hubris, and signals their willingness to continue to be unaccountable in every way, shape and form. That one State Rep (of 100 total, representing app. 8000 Montana residents) got calls from HALF of the people in his district is stunning and shows just how serious the overall problems with this agency have to be.
That a conservative, rural state like Montana has such a systemic problem with CPS INTENTIONALLY NOT KEEPING RECORDS of their interactions with desperate parents that they raid and harass tells me that there is no place where CPS, nationally, is likely being properly managed, and/or where they are following the law.
Changing the laws is often suggested as a "fix" to what has become an enormous CPS boondoggle and nightmare. But, if they are known to flout the law in almost every jurisdiction, without ever being held accountable for doing so, the tweaking of the laws is probably not going to make much of a difference.
It may very well be past time for more drastic solutions.
Thanks FP! Love all you do for the most innocent among us!
-God Bless.