Every few weeks or so, I flip on the TV or read a news account of how our Legislature here in Maine has responded to the death or alleged mistreatment of children in the state’s foster system, or kids who weren’t in the system but should have been.

I’m a foster parent myself, so I tend to pay attention to this stuff.

Technically, the Department of Health and Human Services and its Office of Child and Family Welfare are expected to answer for all the children being mistreated in Maine, though only those boys and girls with foster parents, or those in group homes, or those cribbing temporarily in motel rooms, are actual wards of the state. According to DHHS, there are 2,527 kids in state custody right now.

In 2023, there were some 455 DHHS employees spread across five programs: intake, investigation, permanency, adoption and licensing. Do the math. Then, before you flip the channel or browse the next news story, consider how many more children/cases are under some kind of DHHS investigation or review, at any one time. Please take a moment to let the scale of that mandate sink in. Then imagine all the unreported child neglect that invariably takes place across the state.

Invariably, these episodic news stories are reported from featureless hearing rooms somewhere in the Capital complex, in Augusta, where one or more duly elected state representatives or senators can be heard castigating some unlucky DHHS representative: “This is unacceptable,” they tut-tut into a microphone; or maybe, “It’s time we stop accepting that as an answer.”

I’m no apologist for the workings of any bureaucracy, but I find such performative outrage stunning in its hypocrisy — in its misunderstanding of Maine’s child welfare system, and the larger cultural forces that involve the state in the first place.

Let me put this as simply as I can: It is not the government’s job to prevent the ill care today being administered by parents and guardians from Fort Kent to Kittery. It’s the job of DHHS staff to respond to that ill care — when it’s reported to them — as best they possibly can. And that’s the thing about making the best of inherently bad situations — even when the state handles them perfectly, none of the outcomes are so great.

It’s understandable that Mainers who have no contact with the foster system may not appreciate this reality with any sort of nuance. There are plenty of thankless jobs we essentially create government agencies to handle, in our stead. But any elected official who serves in state government, and especially those who sit on the Government Oversight Committee, should know better. They should be well familiar with the range and scale of parental depravity that routinely results in state involvement.

My wife and I only deal with the individual cases that arrive at our door (we participate in the “respite” exercise, meaning short-term foster parenting while the state searches for longer-term placement solutions). Our state legislators should have a fuller picture of what a devastating toll rampant substance use, subsequent addiction, grinding poverty and intergenerational neglect have taken on young parents in this state. In every state.

Instead, they drop these issues in the lap of DHHS: “We can’t just keep saying ‘Here’s the new initiative, just wait, things are going to turn around,'” one state senator held forth, at a December 2023 hearing.

Legislators should know better. They should know there is no “solving” any of these larger issues — not in the halls of DHHS. They should know (better than anyone) that government in general and DHHS in particular are by nature reactive. They can only respond once neglect and abuse have been reported to the state.

If committee members are not familiar with these realities, they are delinquent, and perhaps they should serve on a different sort of committee, where their grandstanding affects nothing more than their ability to post provocatively on Instagram.

The much publicized death of 6-week-old Jaden Harding in 2021 — at the hands of her now-convicted father, who had never before been identified in a previous DHHS investigation (though the baby’s mother had) — is the titular source of this most recent round of very public “oversight.” The mother was indeed on the DHHS radar, but none of her children were ever removed from the home prior to Jaden’s death. It is reasonable to ask, Why not?

“The state cited a lack of evidence and that [the mom] appeared to be engaging with support services, although police reported that her mental health worsened in 2020 after the death of a family member,” the Sun Journal/Portland Press Herald account reads, from Nov. 15, 2023. “(DHHS) said the police report was investigated by a standby caseworker and supervisor, who determined the children were safe because relatives from out-of-state were there to help care for the kids. (The mom) was taking her medications as directed, they determined. The case was transferred back to the regular caseworker and supervisor without a plan to follow-up or provide support services once the relatives left.”

The general public may not know, but anyone serving on the General Oversight Committee should well understand how difficult it is to remove anyone from parental custody. They should know how most kids don’t want to leave and actively hide the truth from investigative caseworkers, to cover for their parents’ behavior — no matter how frightfully they’ve been treated. They should know what profoundly difficult judgment calls these are.

They should also know that caseworkers, on whom we rely to make those calls — to investigate, or not; to follow- up on potential interventions over the course of years, or not — routinely carry ridiculous caseloads.

That’s the case work my wife and I see first-hand — the amazing commitment shown by those in the DHHS permanency program on behalf of those 2,500 kids in various levels of state care. Each caseworker deals with multiple “client” kiddos, of course. See the math above. They’re on call for these understandably bewildered, invariably traumatized children 24/7, meaning they are driving them to counseling, to the dentist, to supervised visitation with moms and dads whose parental rights have not been terminated. The system also obliges the state to work in support of those parents — are they taking their medications and otherwise working to rectify their situations?

The tragedy of Jaden Harding illustrates just how much we are expecting of caseworkers and their supervisors, of the system in general. According to the Office of Child and Family Welfare’s 2023 Workload Report, for example, the district encompassing Androscoggin, Oxford and Franklin counties should have 93 caseworkers, yet 32 of those positions remain unfilled. Is it any wonder?

While you may have heard of Jaden Harding, you may not be familiar with L.D. 2097, a bill that would authorize and fund the hire of case aides — to lighten the load of caseworkers around the state by delivering documents, driving children to appointments, supervising children in the office or hotels rooms overnight. When making the best of imperfect situations (in this case, an imperfect hiring situation), L.D. 2097 makes sense to me. It deserves your support. Kudos to its sponsors in the Maine Legislature.

I wish things were different. I wish young parents were better prepared to be parents. I wish there were more foster parents, so children taken into custody need not endure overnights in hotel rooms. I wish every child taken into state custody didn’t also represent an active, heart-breaking court case — because even the most unfit parents cannot countenance the idea of losing their children, even temporarily.

But we don’t live in a John Irving novel, where young princes and princesses of Maine can be plucked without fuss from troubled homes and transported en masse to remote, idyllic boarding facilities where they’ll be cared for and educated by kindly grandfather types, assisted by teams of well meaning nuns.

We don’t live in that world. We probably never did.

Hal Phillips of Auburn has been a working journalist since 1986, and managing director of Mandarin Media, Inc. since 1997. His first book, Generation Zero: Founding Fathers, Hidden Histories & The Making of Soccer in America, was published in 2022. Rowman & Littlefield will publish his next effort in 2026. He can be reached at [email protected].