On Tuesday, the Arizona State Senate announced its intention to draw greater attention to the more than 1,000 children who have gone missing in Arizona.
Arizona State Senator David Farnsworth, Chair of the previously named Senate Committee on Transportation and Technology, announced the added focus on missing children.
The newly named Committee on Transportation, Technology and Missing Children will hold ten hearings throughout the legislative session related to the added topic.
These hearings will provide the committee, comprised of Republican and Democrat legislators, according to Farnsworth, “with important information and testimony that will help craft legislation to fight this issue and protect Arizona’s children.”
Farnsworth claims that the Arizona Department of Public Safety’s website shows that “there are over 1,100 missing children in Arizona as of today.”
“This is both disturbing and unacceptable,” said Farnsworth in a press release. “Protecting vulnerable children who are being kidnapped, murdered, or forced into the sex trafficking world needs to be a priority, especially when it’s due to state negligence. We must create more oversight, accountability, and work together to find ways to ensure the safety and wellbeing of our children. I’m looking forward to having necessary and meaningful conversations about what can be done and using the information to enact change.”
The first Senate Committee on Transportation, Technology and Missing Children hearing will be on January 9th.
In December 2023, the House Ad Hoc Committee on Missing Children in Foster Group Homes held a hearing to review and discuss the Department of Child Safety’s (DCS) policies, procedures and training relating to the location and reporting of missing children, including appropriate collaboration with other state agencies and law enforcement.
In July, the auditor general reported systemic failures by DCS caseworkers that harmed children’s cases.
As previously reported by the Arizona Daily Independent:
There are 109 local foster care review boards throughout the state as of February, according to information provided by the Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC); these boards conducted 13,280 case reviews for 21,782 children in out-of-home care last year. (Multiple children may be reviewed in a single case review, i.e. siblings).
DCS gives AOC the information needed for local boards to review children’s cases and provide recommendations to the juvenile court. Caseworkers are required to be present at board reviews to provide additional information and answer questions.
Local boards determine whether proper efforts were made in an Indian Child Welfare Act case to prevent child removal from home; a child’s continuation in out-of-home placement is necessary; a child’s placement is safe, appropriate, and the least restrictive; a written case plan exists establishing an appropriate permanency goal and outlining tasks for each case participant (child and parents); each case participant is following outlined case plan tasks; progress is being made toward establishing permanency for a child; the established target date for the completion of the child’s permanency goal is realistic; a child’s educational requirements and/or developmental needs are met; and the existence of significant service gaps or system problems in a child’s case.
The auditor general report indicated that DCS was thoroughly failing to properly review children’s cases.
In a random sampling of thirteen cases reviewed across several different counties on June 28, 2022, and July 6, 2022, the report found none of the thirteen cases had complete versions of all three required case documents to conduct a proper review. 7 of 39 documents were incomplete; 24 of 39 documents were missing.
Those thirteen cases were a sampling of the 124 case reviews that took place those two audited days. Of the 124 case reviews, local boards received 94 percent of court reports but only 45 percent of case plans and 72 percent of TDM meeting summaries.
Of the 124 case reviews, caseworkers failed to show up in thirty-eight cases, or 30 percent. If that ratio to the greater total of cases for that year, that would mean caseworkers failed to show for 4,000 cases. Of those 124 sampled, two had no status update on physically endangered children: one child was hospitalized for abuse, the other afflicted with poor mental health and self-harm.
Again, if that ratio applied to the greater total of DCS cases from 2022, that would mean 214 children went without a status update.
The auditor general also found that DCS hasn’t held caseworkers accountable for noncompliance with case review attendance.
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