Every year, the state issues a report tabulating cases where children died, or nearly died, while on the radar of Washington’s child welfare system. It’s usually a dry document, despite the pain and tragedy it tracks, full of charts and recommendations presented in straightforward, deliberately undramatic terms.
Not this year. For the first time, Patrick Dowd, the Ombuds for Families and Children, has included information about critical cases during the first two quarters of 2025 — on top of his overall summary for 2024.
Why? Because between January and March alone, there were 47 child deaths and near-deaths among kids known to the Department of Children, Youth and Families — more than during any quarter of 2024. That was no onetime blip. The pattern has continued, such that by the end of last month, there had been 92 of these critical cases — more incidents recording children in mortal danger than throughout all of last year.
“What concerns me,” said Dowd, “are the number that qualify for critical-incident reviews” investigating serious abuse and neglect. If this rate of child misery continues through 2025, he added, “We’ll have to look at what needs to change.”
Dowd is a sober, thoughtful man, not given to hyperbole, and he has been doing this work for more than a decade. So to see him waving his hands, warning of danger, makes one sit up and take note.
Quite a bit has already changed at DCYF over the past two years, since the state’s new Keeping Families Together Act was put into practice. Seeking to stem the number of children taken from their families and placed in foster care — a severe trauma unto itself — legislators passed the law, aiming to raise the bar for removing kids. While children remained at home, the thinking went, caseworkers would steer parents toward voluntary drug- and mental health-treatment programs.
That was the plan. But clearly, it is not meeting the mark.
Nearly 40% of child fatalities in 2024 happened after parents had participated in a voluntary Family Assessment Response, or Family Services, and the state, satisfied, closed their cases. Forty-two percent of families in which a child died last year had open cases with the department at the time.
To reverse this dismal trend, Dowd suggests expanding drug treatment for pregnant women and new mothers and, in cases involving older kids, allowing them to remain with their parents but under intensive, court-ordered supervision — in-home foster care, he calls it.
Standing up such a program would be neither quick nor easy. But it’s worth serious consideration by Tana Senn, the newly appointed secretary at DCYF, who has an opportunity — and an obligation — to make improvements.
Whatever her decision, Senn must confront these numbers and find a way to make the department’s policies match reality.
