DCS should release data about the children who previously would have received services but no longer do. Let the public evaluate whether those children should be left with no oversight.

Indiana’s Department of Child Services faces a new round of scrutiny following the death of Zara Arnold, a child with extensive DCS history who was killed by her father. Yet, just last year, DCS celebrated drastic reductions in the foster care system and improvements in child safety.

Once known for having among the highest rates of children in foster care in the country, Indiana reduced placements by 50% between 2018 and 2024. DCS attributed its “success” to the 2018 Family First Prevention Services Act, a bipartisan federal law enacted during the first Trump administration.

FFPSA defunded group home and institutional placements and created a funding stream for “prevention services” as an alternative to foster care. Yet, the interventions funded by FFPSA have been slow to roll out, both because of burdensome regulations and because such dramatic shifts in the continuum of services were never supported by data. To date, there is no evidence of improved child safety or impacts on placements.

Indeed, Indiana’s flagship service — the Indiana Family Preservation Services program — is described as having “0 favorable effects” by the federal clearinghouse for evidence-based programs. 

That did not stop DCS from asserting the exact opposite last year. In federal testimony, Deputy Director of Child Welfare Services David Reed confidently pointed to Indiana’s family preservation program as “an intervention that helps keep kids safe and out of foster care.” He further claimed to have reduced racial disparities in foster care entries by two-thirds, relying on a calculation that anyone understanding basic statistics could debunk.

But Indiana did reduce its foster care population by 50% — if not through their prevention program, then how?

It wasn’t because Indiana had fewer concerned residents calling the hotline about suspected child maltreatment. Those numbers have barely budged, aside from a temporary drop during the pandemic, when children were out of the public eye. It also wasn’t because Indiana was providing services to more families when abuse and neglect was reported — the number of families receiving services has been in steep decline since 2017.

In other words, DCS did not provide more support to reduce the use of foster care. It is not intervening differently — just less.

The most likely explanation is that DCS simply raised the threshold for investigating reports of maltreatment and responding to child abuse and neglect, whether through in-home services or foster care.

Perhaps intervening less would be good if Indiana was previously over-investigating and over-intervening. If that’s the case, then DCS should be honest about it instead of claiming that its new prevention supports keeping children safe at home and, thus, drives large-scale foster care reductions.  

DCS should release data about the children who previously would have received services but no longer do. Let the public evaluate whether those children should be left with no oversight.

Like Zara Arnold, we know that other children continue to die of maltreatment. Children like Gwendalyn Cooksey, an 8 year-old girl with cerebral palsy and a history of physical abuse and exposure to parent drug use, who died of fentanyl poisoning in January. Or 5 year-old Kinsleigh Welty, who was starved to death in 2024 by her mother and grandmother only five months after the courts determined it was safe for her to return home from foster care.

New leadership should understand how DCS cut foster care in half without evidence of more, or better, services. The public deserves to know whether the children no longer served by DCS are truly “safe at home.”

Sarah Font is an associate professor of sociology and public policy at Penn State University. Emily Putnam-Hornstein is the John A. Tate Distinguished Professor for Children in Need at UNC Chapel Hill.