Written by Will Estrada

Almost 2,000 children died in the United States from abuse and neglect in 2023, according to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services Administration for Children and Families.

Illinois and Maryland – with 83 child fatalities in 2023 each – were both number five in the nation for child fatalities.

What are we doing wrong that in the United States in the twenty-first century we cannot stem such a horrific statistic, which belies the immense suffering of the most vulnerable among us?

It is a good question, and a question that could save the life of a child.

But the greatest tragedy is, in Illinois at least, nothing is being done. And Illinois’ Department of Children and Family Services – DCFS – has failed to protect our children.

A damning investigative report from Chicago-Sun Times last week showed that “[t]he state agency responsible for keeping Illinois’ most vulnerable children safe has failed to produce legally required public reports after examining what went wrong in hundreds of cases of child deaths and thousands of serious injuries[.]” This covers a staggering number of “[m]ore than 1,200 deaths and more than 3,000 other cases of serious injury … since July 2018[.]”

This is not DCFS’ only failure. In a horrific sex abuse investigation into Martha’s Integrated Care Center on Chicago’s South Side, recent reporting has shown that “the state agency whose job it was to place and protect these abandoned children instead dropped them off at a program it repeatedly failed to monitor.”

Another recent news story showed that a DCFS attorney was fired after employment fraud on the government dime. Another news story shows that DCFS is out of compliance with a 30 year old consent decree which was issued in order to protect vulnerable children in foster care. Another investigative report concluded that DCFS is “a state agency in crisis.”

A state audit of DCFS, released on September 7, 2023, found page after page of “noncompliance,” “weakness,” “significant deficiency,” and “material noncompliance,” with state law and state policy.

And a horrifying report in January of 2023 found that 171 Illinois children died in the past few years from abuse and neglect – who were known to DCFS.

Our legislators are AWOL when they should be holding DCFS accountable for its horrific failures. Illinois State Representative Terra Costa Howard, who serves as vice chairperson of the House Adoption & Child Welfare Committee, has failed to call for any hearings or legislative oversight of DCFS in recent years. She recently released a press statement “thanking” the beleaguered DCFS Director, Mark Smith, when he announced his resignation in the wake of the cascading reports about the failures of the agency he had been charged to lead.

Indeed, Vice Chairperson Costa Howard is apparently so unconcerned about these horrific failures by DCFS that she decided to introduce legislation – H.B. 2827 – to make Illinois’ public education system supervise homeschool families. Her decision to place the protection of homeschool children as an additional responsibility for the public education system is curious, and is a tacit acknowledgement that DCFS is not up to the job.

Instead of doing what it takes to strengthen and reform DCFS to protect Illinois children from death and bring Illinois out of the top five states in the nation with child deaths due to abuse and neglect, Vice Chairperson Costa Howard wants every homeschool family in the state to file a “Homeschool Declaration Form” with their local public school upon pain of criminal penalties if they don’t. It is unclear how this paper form will protect homeschool children from abuse and neglect. It is also unclear how new regulations on homeschoolers will protect the vast majority of children in Illinois, particularly when peer reviewed studies show that homeschool children are not at higher risk of abuse and neglect than their public and private school peers, and when federal data indicate that the vast majority of children who die from abuse and neglect are below the age of compulsory attendance (ACF, Exhibit 4-B).

The supporters of H.B. 2827 testified in a committee hearing on March 19 that according to their research, 7 Illinois homeschool children died from abuse and neglect since CRHE began tracking such numbers. This is a heart-breaking statistic, if true (CRHE’s data is suspect; for example, they list Elizabeth Smart, a public school student who was kidnapped in 2002 from her family’s Utah home by a monster, as a victim of homeschool abuse). CRHE also did not indicate in the hearing how far back these 7 deaths go – they could go back decades. But even if CRHE’s number is accurate, it does not take a data scientist to quickly realize that these 7 deaths – while tragic – show that, statistically speaking, homeschool children in Illinois are far safer from abuse and neglect fatalities than any other cohort of Illinois children.

Every harm to a child is a tragedy. The New Testament records Jesus’ hatred of any harm to a child in Matthew 18:2-6 when Jesus said “. . . whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me. If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.” Those who harm a child are evil.

Illinois, let’s get focused on reforming and strengthening DCFS to protect children. Illinois legislators, stand up and take action to reform DCFS to protect children. And Vice Chairperson Terra Costa Howard, if you are unwilling or unable fix DCFS to protect Illinois children, it’s time for you to retire from politics.

 

Will Estrada
HSLDA Senior Counsel

Will is senior counsel and contact attorney for HSLDA members in the states of CA, WY, IL, AL, GA, SC, MD, PA, and NH. He works to make homeschooling possible for thousands of member families and hundreds of thousands of homeschool students by advocating in state legislatures for homeschool freedom, working to ensure that homeschool graduates are treated equally, and that the laws protecting the rights of homeschool families are followed by government officials. Will is a homeschool graduate from Pennsylvania. He and his wife, Rachel (a homeschool graduate from Virginia), have two sons, Dominic and Merrick, and live in Northern Virginia.