A Pragmatic Approach to Protecting Washington's Children

Fentanyl is flooding our communities, and the numbers are heartbreaking. In my home district, the 31st, unintentional drug poisoning is the number two reason children ages one to four end up in the hospital. Worse, unexplained poisoning is the number one cause of death for these kids. Children are grabbing pills, putting them in their mouths, and swallowing them.

These are not just statistics. These are our neighbors. These are our children. And we should be crawling out of our skin if this happens to even one child.

The Problem: A System Built to Fail

The drug crisis is terrible, but our state government’s response makes it worse. We are failing the very people we are supposed to protect. The majority party that has been in charge for the last 35 years has built a system that simply does not work. Right now, the Department of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF) acts more like a paperwork factory than a safety net.

The law now forces caseworkers to leave kids in terrifying, lethal homes unless the violence is immediate and visible the exact second they walk through the door. Imagine knowing a child is trapped in a burning house, but the law forbids you from rescuing them until the flames actually touch their skin. That is the nightmare Washington caseworkers live under right now.

“Imagine knowing a child is trapped in a burning house, but the law forbids you from rescuing them until the flames actually touch their skin.”

DCYF treats child safety like a guessing game. They open "risk-only" cases where they admit a child faces extreme danger, but they leave the child in the home anyway. We wait for a tragedy to happen before we act. By then, it is too late.

The Human Cost: Wasted Money and Broken Families

This failure comes with a massive price tag for working families. When we look at the state budget written by the majority party, we see a shocking amount of waste. If you look a couple hundred pages into the budget, you will find $42.9 million set aside to pay for excess lawsuits against DCYF. That is $42.9 million in lawsuits related to dead and dying children.

We are throwing your tax dollars away to cover up bad policies. Every trip to the emergency room costs thousands of dollars. We spend thousands of tax dollars to NOT fix the problem. We spend money on legal battles instead of prevention, and the child is still in danger.

The impact also hits our most vulnerable families. The majority party talks a lot about "community care," but I do not see it. For a family with a severely disabled child in the 31st District, even a normal trip to the dentist is a fairy tale. The support we promise simply does not exist. We force families to spend their time fighting claims adjusters instead of bonding with their kids.

The Solution: A Common-Sense, Maintenance-First Approach

We cannot keep doing things the same way and expect different results. We need a practical plan to stop the waste and start protecting people.

We must stop letting state agencies make up their own rules. An organization that can write its own rules will write them in the blood of our children. We need laws that give our courts the power to look at the whole picture of danger before a child ends up in another fatality report.

We need to stop the bleeding in our budget. We should not budget millions of dollars for lawsuits. That money belongs in our communities. We must take the money we spend on legal defense and put it into fixing our broken safety net.

We need to move past the myth of "community care" and build something real. This means making sure that a trip to the doctor is possible for every child. It means providing real help to parents so they do not have to navigate this dangerous world alone.

The Call to Action: Bringing Adult Leadership Back to Olympia

We do not need more complicated programs. We do not need more empty promises. We need a system that works with competence and common sense.

People are moving out of Washington because they see a government that fails to protect its most vulnerable. But we can fix this. It is time to bring adult, competent leadership back to Olympia. Together, we can protect our families, fix our broken systems, and secure the future of Washington State.