For more than two decades, nearly every fact the State of Missouri knows about a child in foster care has passed through one piece of software: the Family and Children Electronic System, known as FACES. It is the system caseworkers open to record a removal, the system that generates the state’s federal maltreatment reports, and — whether the public realizes it or not — the system standing behind almost every number in a Missouri Children’s Division dashboard, annual report, or legislative testimony.
Missouri is now in the middle of replacing it. That makes this a useful moment to lay out, plainly, what FACES was built to do, what people who actually use it say it does, and how differently the system gets described depending on which document you’re reading.
What FACES Was Designed To Do
FACES is Missouri’s SACWIS — a “Statewide Automated Child Welfare Information System,” the category of case-management system every state was pushed to build starting in the 1990s so that federal child welfare data would be traceable and reportable. Missouri’s Title IV-B Child and Family Services Plan describes its intended scope directly: FACES is meant to be used for every child in foster care, every child abuse and neglect report, and every family enrolled in preventive services statewide. According to that same plan, the system is supposed to be able to identify, at any moment, a child’s status, demographic characteristics, placement location, and permanency goal.
The design also assigns FACES a compliance function, not just a recordkeeping one. Caseworkers are required to enter a placement change within 24 hours of it happening. A case cannot legally be opened without demographic information, a permanency goal, and a placement location already logged. Every child who becomes known to the Children’s Division is assigned a Departmental Client Number that follows them through any DSS service for the rest of their involvement with the state. Placement entries are wired directly into the state’s financial and licensing systems, which is what determines whether a placement is valid, licensed, and eligible for Title IV-E federal reimbursement.
In other words: FACES was never just a filing cabinet. It was designed as the mechanism that proves, to federal auditors, that Missouri is doing what it says it’s doing.
What FACES Appears to Be Able to Do Now
Some of that original design still functions as intended. The state’s 2025-2029 Child and Family Services Plan reports FACES correctly tracks basic identifiers — name, age, sex, legal dates — at accuracy rates in the mid-to-high 90s, based on Missouri’s own biennial data-quality review of a small sample of cases. FACES was also recently updated to add an “unable to determine” race category to comply with federal National Youth in Transition Database reporting, and it still functions as the system of record for foster parent licensing renewal, tracking each household’s completed training hours on a dedicated vendor screen.
But the same set of documents that describe those capabilities also describe, in more understated language, where the system falls short of what a modern case-management platform is expected to do:
- It has no meaningful reporting or dashboard capability of its own. Every dashboard the public or legislature sees — the Tableau visualizations for worker/child visits, victimization rates, permanency percentages — is not generated inside FACES. It is generated outside FACES, by the Department of Social Services’ Research and Evaluation Unit, which extracts raw data from the FACES case management system and hands it off to Quality Assurance staff for analysis and visualization. FACES itself does not produce the public-facing numbers; a separate unit builds them from an extract.
- It is unreliable enough that training on it was pulled from new-employee curriculum. According to the Professional Development Evaluation Team’s own late-2023 field report, FACES instruction was removed from the first three weeks of new caseworker training specifically because the system kept going down during live training sessions. It was only reintroduced in 2024, and only after the state purchased new technology that let trainers run it in a controlled virtual environment instead of the live system.
- A major planned upgrade to its core case-planning tool was abandoned mid-build. The 2020-2021 effort to integrate the Social Service Plan directly into FACES was scoped as an eight-phase project. Only one phase was ever completed — not because the plan failed, but because the state redirected funding and staff toward the CCWIS replacement project instead. The state’s own plan document says this left the case-planning tool functioning through “workarounds” rather than as designed.
- It was never built with any external-facing capability. There is no parent login, no family portal, no client-facing verification layer of any kind described anywhere in FACES’s official systemic-factor documentation. Every function described is internal: caseworker entry, supervisor review, DSS Research extraction, dashboard generation for staff.
How the System Gets Described Depends Entirely on Who Is Writing
This is the part worth sitting with, because the same system is described in almost contradictory registers depending on the document’s purpose.
In federal compliance filings, FACES is described in the passive, technically-satisfied language of a system meeting its obligation. Missouri’s Child and Family Services Plan states the Statewide Information System systemic factor — the federal category that FACES exists to satisfy — was found in substantial conformity during CFSR Round 4. Read in isolation, that single line implies the system is functioning as required.
In the state’s own modernization planning documents, the tone shifts. The Children’s Division’s CCWIS project materials describe FACES only in terms of what it lacks relative to newer “Custom-Off-the-Shelf” systems now on the market: more robust reporting, dashboards, “dark data” searches, online portals for foster parents and providers, and mobile capability “essential to the work staff do in the field” — all listed as things the replacement system will add, meaning FACES does not have them now. The same planning documents note the project only began exploring a FACES replacement in 2021, roughly a decade and a half after the system was originally developed, and the current implementation timeline runs through May 2027.
In frontline training feedback, FACES is described almost entirely as an obstacle. Supervisors are quoted asking for more FACES training, not less. Caseworkers describe a system that periodically stops functioning during the exact sessions meant to teach new hires how to use it. None of this appears in the compliance language above; it appears only in an internal Professional Development evaluation report buried inside the broader state plan.
In independent advocacy and oversight documents — including work already built into Missouri’s own HB1414 legislative complaint record — FACES is described as the single point of data extraction feeding every public-facing figure the state publishes, with no independent verification layer between what a caseworker enters and what ultimately appears in a public dashboard or federal report. That framing treats the DSS Research Unit’s extraction process not as a technical detail but as the exact point in the pipeline where data integrity has to be trusted rather than checked.
The Honest Read
Put those four descriptions side by side and a consistent picture emerges, even though no single document states it this way: FACES was designed as an internal compliance and case-tracking tool, it substantially succeeds at that narrow function for basic demographic fields, and it was never designed to do the things a 2026 case-management system is expected to do — produce its own analytics, survive being used in a live training room, support a mid-build feature upgrade, or let a parent see their own case file. The state’s own modernization documents concede all of this implicitly by listing “online portals,” “dashboards,” and “mobile capability” as future features rather than current ones.
The replacement system, still years from full deployment, is a real opportunity to change that. But it is worth being precise about what is actually being replaced: not a broken system, exactly, and not a fully functioning one either — a compliance tool that has been asked, for two decades, to also serve as an analytics platform, a training environment, and a system of public record, without ever having been built to do any of those three things.
Sources: Missouri Department of Social Services Title IV-B 2025-2029 Child and Family Services Plan (Statewide Information System, Systemic Factors, and Professional Development Evaluation Team sections); Missouri DSS Comprehensive Child Welfare Information System (CCWIS) Modernization project materials; Missouri Children’s Division CFSR Round 4 Final Report and Program Improvement Plan.
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