Why Washington Parents Are Demanding Accountability from DCYF

The Nightmare Our Caseworkers Face

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.

The majority party has built a system that forces caseworkers to leave kids in terrifying, lethal environments unless the violence is immediate and visible the exact second they walk through the door. Our families are hurting, and the system meant to protect them is failing. As a leader, I believe we owe it to our children to ask the hard questions and demand real answers.

A Budget Built on Broken Promises

The majority that has been in charge for the last 35 years wants you to think they are protecting families. But if you look a couple hundred pages into the state budget, you find the truth. They budgeted $42.9 million in excess lawsuits to come out of the Department of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF) coffers.

That is $42.9 million in lawsuits related to dead and dying children.

Every time the state fails, working families pay the price. We spend millions of your tax dollars to pay for state mistakes instead of fixing the root problem. We throw money away on lawsuits, and the children are still in danger. This is not how a responsible government operates. We are failing backwards in Washington State.

The Human Cost in Our Living Rooms

This failure is not a distant problem. It hits right here at home. In the 31st District, unintentional drug poisoning is the number two leading cause of hospitalization for children ages one to four. Worse, unexplained poisoning is the number one leading cause of death. Children are grabbing pills they find, putting them in their mouths, and swallowing them.

DCYF treats child safety like a guessing game. Caseworkers open "risk-only" cases when they admit a child faces extreme danger, but state rules force them to leave the child in the home anyway.

“DCYF treats child safety like a guessing game. Caseworkers open 'risk-only' cases when they admit a child faces extreme danger, but state rules force them to leave the child in the home anyway.”

In one heartbreaking case, a baby was born positive for cocaine and methadone. Staff explicitly stated they lacked the evidence of imminent physical harm to remove the child. They closed the case. That child died.

Common-Sense Accountability

The majority party lets state agencies write their own rules with zero oversight. But an organization that can write its own rules will write them in the blood of our children. We cannot accept this.

We must bring basic competence back to our government. We need common-sense accountability. I support giving courts the latitude to evaluate the total danger a child faces before they end up in another fatality report. We must fix our data blindness problem and see if our safety plans actually work before we blindly trust a broken system. We need rules that work for the caseworker trying to save a life, not rules that protect a state bureaucracy.

Bringing Adult Leadership Back to Olympia

Politicians in Olympia argue over whether 50 children died in state care last year or 90 children died. It does not matter if it is 50 or 90. We should be crawling out of our skin if it is one.

We cannot settle for a state government that waits for a tragedy before it acts. We cannot accept a budget defined by lawsuits and loss. It is time to bring adult, competent leadership back to Washington State. We can fix this system. We can protect our most vulnerable neighbors. But it starts with demanding real accountability today.