Category: Uncategorized

Every child welfare agency in the country now says it values “lived experience.” It’s in strategic plans, grant applications, conference panels. Say it enough times and it starts to sound like a value the system already has, rather than a resource it mostly still doesn’t know what to do with. That gap is the problem.…

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…

Missouri’s child welfare system runs on FACES — the Family and Children Electronic System. Every removal, every visit, every safety assessment, every permanency decision eventually has to live somewhere, and that somewhere is FACES. When the state, the legislature, or a federal reviewer wants to know how the system performed, they open the database and…

Public data does not create transparency simply because it is public. For a public accountability system to work, the information it provides must allow legislators, families, researchers, journalists, and members of the public to answer basic questions about how the system is functioning—and to independently reproduce the answers being reported. Missouri’s child welfare dashboard represents…

Systems that serve children and families carry enormous responsibility. The decisions made inside those systems can determine whether a family receives support or enters crisis, whether a child remains safely at home or is removed, whether parents understand what is happening to them, and whether the policies designed to protect families actually work as intended.…