Minnesota and the nation should stop measuring child protection primarily by reports received, investigations completed, children removed, and cases closed. We must measure whether children become safer, healthier, better educated, stably housed, connected to family and community, and able to thrive as adults. We must also measure whether our interventions interrupt or unintentionally repeat multigenerational trauma. Public systems should be accountable not only for what they do, but for whether children’s lives improve.
CPS should not be judged only by how many reports it receives, screens in, investigates, or closes. Lawmakers need a life-course accountability system that shows whether children become safer, healthier, more stable, better educated, and less likely to enter homelessness or the justice system—and whether their own children face the same system decades later.
Minnesota already has pieces of this capacity. The University of Minnesota’s Minn-LInK links child-welfare, education, corrections, and court data for research, while Minnesota’s Integrated Data System uses summary data to inform policy without providing public access to identifiable child records.
KARA is advocating for a stronger, privacy-protected public accountability framework, not public access to private case files.
The central question
Every policy, service, and court decision should ultimately be measured against this question:
Did this child become safer and better able to thrive and did the intervention reduce the likelihood that trauma, family instability, system involvement, and harm would continue into the next generation?
Current child-welfare systems are strongest at tracking events: reports, investigations, placements, removals, reunifications, adoptions, and case closures. They are much weaker at consistently tracking life outcomes across school, health care, behavioral health, housing, employment, courts, corrections, and adulthood.
Longitudinal data are essential because a one-time snapshot cannot show whether an intervention improved a child’s life over time. The Annie E. Casey Foundation’s guidance on longitudinal child-welfare data explains that tracking people at multiple points in time helps agencies identify which approaches improve safety and well-being.
KARA life-course framework
KARA can recommend that Minnesota and the federal government measure the following outcomes for children reported to CPS, children investigated, children who receive services, children removed from home, and children who exit foster care.
The 12 highest-priority measures
If KARA asks legislators to begin with a manageable list, these are the most important measures to require statewide and county by county:
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Repeat maltreatment: How many children are reported again within six months, one year, three years, and five years?
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Repeat CPS involvement: How many families return to CPS after a case is closed, and what services were offered or unavailable before they returned?
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Child deaths and near fatalities: How many children die or experience life-threatening harm after prior CPS reports, screening decisions, services, placements, or reunification?
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Service access and wait time: How long do children and parents wait for therapy, substance-use treatment, housing support, domestic-violence services, developmental evaluation, and family-based care?
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Placement stability: How many foster-care placements does each child experience, how often are siblings separated, and how often are children placed with relatives?
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Reunification durability: How many children return to foster care after reunification within one, three, and five years?
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Educational stability: How many children change schools, experience enrollment delays, become chronically absent, face exclusionary discipline, or graduate on time after CPS involvement?
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Behavioral-health outcomes: Are children receiving trauma-informed therapy and evidence-based treatment, or primarily medication, crisis response, and removal from school or home?
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Youth-justice outcomes: Do diversion, restorative justice, mentoring, treatment, and probation reduce new offenses, improve school participation, and strengthen family stability?
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Adult independence: Do young adults with CPS or foster-care histories have stable housing, employment, health coverage, education, and community connection at ages 21, 25, 30, and beyond?
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Cost per successful outcome: What does Minnesota spend to achieve durable safety, stable housing, graduation, permanency, mental-health improvement, and reduced justice involvement?
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Intergenerational recurrence: What percentage of adults who experienced CPS intervention as children later become involved with CPS as parents, and which supports successfully interrupt that pattern?
Who should collect it
No one agency can answer these questions. The right model is a secure, governed data partnership in which each institution retains its appropriate records but contributes limited, authorized data to evaluate outcomes.
Federal guidance already encourages stronger data exchange. The joint ACF and CMS toolkit on Medicaid and child-welfare data sharing describes bi-directional exchanges that can help child-serving agencies coordinate care while operating within federal privacy rules.
Privacy and public accountability
KARA should make clear that the goal is not to create a public surveillance system or expose children’s confidential records.
A responsible system should have three layers:
Minnesota’s existing Integrated Data System states that it uses summary data and does not allow access to information that identifies individual children or youth. That is the correct public-accountability principle. Minnesota Integrated Data System
Any framework should include:
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Data minimization: collect only what is necessary.
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De-identification before public release.
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Small-cell suppression so rural counties or rare circumstances cannot identify a child.
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Strong access controls, encryption, audit logs, and penalties for misuse.
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Clear data-retention and destruction rules.
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Independent privacy, Tribal, youth, parent, disability, and community oversight.
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Youth and family participation in deciding what outcomes matter.
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Public reporting that identifies system gaps without blaming children, parents, racial groups, or neighborhoods.
The Casey Foundation’s data-sharing implementation guidance stresses that cross-system data work requires secure protocols, limited access, and formal agreements that define legal authority, purpose, and data protections.
What legislators should do
KARA can ask Minnesota legislators and federal policymakers to pursue five practical reforms:
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Create a Child and Family Life-Course Outcomes Act requiring annual, de-identified statewide and county reporting on safety, health, education, placement, housing, justice, adult-independence, and intergenerational outcomes.
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Fund a secure longitudinal child-and-family data system that links child welfare with education, health, behavioral health, courts, housing, workforce, and justice data for approved policy evaluation.
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Require outcome reporting for every publicly funded program serving CPS-involved children and families, including the number served, cost, completion, safety outcomes, school outcomes, placement outcomes, and recurrence measures.
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Create a public Child Protection Results Dashboard with county-level comparisons, trend lines, demographic equity measures, definitions, methodology, and plain-language explanations.
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Establish an independent Child Protection Data and Outcomes Council that includes former foster youth, parents with lived experience, Tribal representatives, child advocates, educators, health professionals, data-privacy experts, legislators, and researchers
Not all data is equal. Child Protection data that is reported is often sporadic (not consistent over time) and mostly a tally of how many children and families in the system but not the metrics of child outcomes reported and trackable over time. This kind of reporting tells only part of the story and not much about the important outcomes at-risk children and youth passing through CPS carry with them into adulthood.
Where the information is kept and how it be accessed by the public / media and policy makers is a huge invisible issue. Historically, Child Protection records have been deleted after a few years. Today in MN it’s ten years. It is not uncommon for troubled families to enter and reenter CPS over decades. This makes longitudinal comparisons impossible and impedes long term understanding of conditions facing CPS and the children we are trying to keep safe.
Counties refusing to make data available
in 2014 four MN counties screened out 90% of child abuse reports & Star Tribune reporter Brandon Stahl spoke of the stonewalling of information from Pope County in his search for information on the tortured death of Eric Dean.
In 2022, four MN Counties did not respond to the Safe Passage Investigative report on Child Maltreatment Deaths of children in CPS. No counties provided any information that was not already public.
Why agencies don’t record or share important information.
Conflicting and confusing privacy and security laws from Local, County, State, and Federal jurisdictions make it easy to get into trouble and a good excuse to not share even sharable information.
America’s reaction to bad news is more likely to trigger blame and punishment of an overwhelmed agency (and its workers) than constructive attempts to fix it. Administrators know this. Turnover in Child Protection is high and Directors rarely opt to address the issues head on that led to the dead child reported in the newspaper (read the investigative report in the paragraph above).
More obscure but as or more harming to children is our cultural avoidance of child rape most violence against children. When we do talk about it, we obfuscate and euphemize calling it maltreatment when it’s actually repeated beating or violent rape of a very young child. Over half of the children killed by their caregivers in the Safe Passage reports were under 3 years old.
The politics of at-risk children have reached a high point: parental and religious rights groups and conservative politicians demanding diminishment and deregulation of child services and even elimination of government interference in family matters. America remains the only nation in the world not to have ratified the United Nation’s Rights of the Child Treaty of the 1980’s. This means that children have no standing in court, or the ability to leave a marriage made at a very young age. They are stuck hoping that the overwhelmed systems (described in the paragraph below) can come to their rescue.
Legislators can only make laws that make children safe if they know the reality these children are living.
This math exercise makes an important point about the depth and scope of the issues facing at-risk children and how tax dollars could be redirected to better solve problems (improving our Return on Investment) and saving taxpayers money.
- Official Federal Data understates the problems of child abuse by a factor of 2: In federal fiscal year 2024, U.S. child-protection agencies received an estimated 4.365 million referrals alleging child abuse or neglect, involving approximately 7.693 million children. About 2.06 million referrals were screened in for investigation or an alternative response, and 532,228 children were determined to be victims of maltreatment. These numbers are based on the questionable premise that there are two children per case in CPS. While this may seem like a small distinction, it is not. While the average number of children per family in the U.S. is 1.9. this is not the average number of children per family in CPS cases. In this CASA GAL’s experience, the average number of children per family in Hennepin County MN Child Protection Cases varied between 4.and 8 from 1996 to 2008). These are metrics that should be easily tracked and reported (but are not) that would add clarity to the number families caught up in the system over decades. This and the number of years records are kept, is what changes the calculus of how many children in our nation are facing trauma annually. On the low end, almost sixteen million children a year are experiencing traumas that have caused these reports to be made. On the higher end, it is not unrealistic to think that another sixteen million children go unseen and unreported each year because child abuse is invisible.
- Keep in mind that a child witnessing egregious harm to a sibling or parent experiences the same level of trauma as if it happened to you.
- Generational child abuse has grown and continues to grow exponentially as have our budget allocations for child abuse and all things related to it. Think schools, health care, social services, and crime.
- Arguably, 80% of fostered youth aging out of the system lead dysfunctional lives – 2000 Minnesota youth each year age out of Foster Care year costing our communities between $300,000 and $900,000 over their lifetime. This figure does not include the high cost of juvenile crimes or cost to our schools, public health or public safety. 23,000 American youth age out of foster care each year.
- In a the words of a former MN Supreme Court Chief Justice, 90% of youth in the Juvenile Justice System have passed through Child Protective Services. For decades, 66% of youth in JJ have had a diagnosable mental illness and over half of them have multiple and severe diagnosis.
- 80% of adults in the Criminal Justice system have passed through Juvenile Justice. 9 year prison recidivism rates nationally are have remained at 80% for decades. The cost per youth at Rikers Island in NY is $553,000 per youth this year. The cost per youth in 40 states (including MN) Juvenile Justice is almost over $150,000/year.
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“The Aggregate Cost of Crime in the United States,” which calculated a range of $4.71 trillion to $5.76 trillion annually when transfers from victims to offenders are included. Excluding those transfers, the study estimated a range of $2.86 trillion to $3.92 trillion annually. Read the study summary at the University of Chicago Law School’s Chicago Unbound repository
https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/jle/vol64/iss4/7/
Back to tracking and reporting:
Federal law therefore requires data collection and confidentiality, but it does not say that every CPS file must be kept for 10 years, 25 years, 75 years, or permanently. This means that longitudinal studies of data is uncommon. More common is data kept sporadically and deleted whether over five or ten years.
Minnesota’s retention rule
Minnesota does have a specific retention requirement. Records involving reports that result in a maltreatment determination or a finding that child-protection services are needed generally must be maintained for at least 10 years after the final entry in the case record. Minnesota Rule 9560.0230 and the federal Child Welfare Information Gateway summary of Minnesota retention rules 1164
Federal law requires states receiving CAPTA funds to collect child-abuse and neglect data and protect the confidentiality of child-protection records, but it does not establish a single nationwide retention period for county CPS files. In Minnesota, certain maltreatment and child-protection-service records generally must be retained for at least 10 years after the final case entry. Think about the nature of research and the ability to know that children involved in crime and courts declined or rose dramatically over a 15 or 20 year period because of the projects, programs and policies that could be tracked over those years and the value this would have for law and policy makers.
Restorative justice practices, once rare, are now widespread. Counties are hiring outside providers to conduct group dialogues, or talking circles, in which youth are encouraged to confront the impact of their crimes on victims and the community.
But the effectiveness of these programs, largely operated by nonprofit agencies, is poorly understood. Many counties do not monitor what happens to children after they have been diverted away from the formal court system. A Star Tribune survey of 44 counties, including all in the metro area, found that nearly half do not follow up to determine whether youth complete these community-based programs. And less than a third track recidivism rates, meaning most of the counties do not know if youth commit new crimes once they complete the programs.
“At every stage of our youth justice system, people are making grave decisions about young people’s lives without taking outcomes into account,”*** said Danielle Lipow, senior associate at the Annie E. Casey Foundation,(NOTE;
“At every stage of our Child Protection System, people are making grave decisions about young people’s lives without taking outcomes into account,”*** said Mike Tikkanen and Damon Kocina from KARA (Kids At Risk Action).
- More than 23,000 children will age out of the US foster care system every year.
- After reaching the age of 18, 20% of the children who were in foster care will become instantly homeless.
- Only 1 out of every 2 foster kids who age out of the system will have some form of gainful employment by the age of 24.
- There is less than a 3% chance for children who have aged out of foster care to earn a college degree at any point in their life.
- 7 out of 10 girls who age out of the foster care system will become pregnant before the age of 21.
- The percentage of children who age out of the foster care system and still suffer from the direct effects of PTSD: 25%.
- Tens of thousands of children in the foster care system were taken away from their parents after extreme abuse.
- 8% of the total child population of the United States is represented by reports of abuse that are given to authorities in the United States annually.
- In 2015, more than 20,000 young people — whom states failed to reunite with their families or place in permanent homes.
KARA reports on the issues of child abuse and child protection
This article submitted by CASA volunteer Mike Tikkanen
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