child deaths

In 2019, newly elected Maine Gov Janet Mills brought in Todd Landry to lead the state’s Office of Child and Family Services (OCFS). Landry entered the fray not long after the state had experienced two child deaths: one of whom was the subject of 25 reports in her last 16 months of life, the other who had been placed by OCFS with a relative while her mother sought treatment for addiction. 

A legislative committee in Maine will sue the state's human services department for access to records related to four child deaths in 2021.

In my last column, I discussed the new approaches to identify and target high-risk families for special attention in child welfare. Los Angeles and Allegheny County, Penn., as well as New Zealand are working on risk assessment algorithms.

Lisa Mayrose knew Florida’s Department of Children & Families needed to overhaul how it investigated phone calls reporting beaten and neglected children. “We had a rash of child deaths,” Mayrose, the regional managing director of the department in Tampa, said in an interview with The Imprint.

Los Angeles County struggles to strike the right balance between human judgment and increasingly sophisticated predictive tools when determining the risk that a child will be abused.   On weekdays, calls to Los Angeles County’s child abuse hotline reach their peak between 2 p.m.

By Beth Cortez-Neavel Texas is taking serious steps toward using predictive data analytics, or “big data,” to prevent child deaths due to abuse and neglect. Not only are state officials finally catching on that child maltreatment is a public health issue, there are three new state-led efforts to curtail child deaths and maltreatment by using data to pinpoint specific warning signs at different community levels.

While brutal child deaths caused by physical abuse may grab newspaper headlines, a new study shows that the majority of injury fatalities of children five or younger in California stemmed from neglect.

President Signs Children’s Commission Into Law On Monday, January 14, President Obama signed the Protect Our Kids Act (HR 6655) into law. The Protect Our Kids Act (PL 112-275) establishes a commission to examine child deaths in the United States.