Lee Replaces Nichols at Department of Children’s Services

Editor’s Note: This editorial is based on stories we have researched, documented, and published in 2021-2022. We have have made a few corrections but nobody has demanded a retraction because those articles were all based on facts and public records. We have received hundreds of comments from readers who have similar stories. We will continue […] The post Lee Replaces Nichols at Department of Children’s Services appeared first on The Tennessee Tribune.

Lee Replaces Nichols at Department of Children’s Services
Editor’s Note: This editorial is based on stories we have researched, documented, and published in 2021-2022. We have have made a few corrections but nobody has demanded a retraction because those articles were all based on facts and public records. We have received hundreds of comments from readers who have similar stories. We will continue to do our best to bring them to you until DCS is shutdown or completely reorganized. ProPublica and NBC are launching a national investigation into termination of parental rights by child welfare agencies around the country. We have been doing that in Tennessee for a year. Our stories are all in one place on our website: DCS Investigation. You can contact NBC and ProPublica here: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/help-us-investigate-termination-parental-rights-child-welfare-system-n1297498

On July 22, Governor Bill Lee announced that Jennifer Nichols, Commissioner of Children’s Services (DCS), is stepping down. Good riddance. Nichols has been an embarrassment. She led the department down a rabbit hole of ballooning budgets, mismanagement, and bad outcomes for Tennessee’s neediest children.

Every year since 2014, DCS has taken more kids from their families than the previous year. It runs a statewide network of foster homes, half of them contract providers, and DCS has 600 caseworker openings because nobody wants to work there.

The new commissioner, Margie Quin, is currently the Executive Director of End Slavery Tennessee. The group fights sex trafficking of children. Prior to that, she spent 25 years with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.

Nichols spent about as long as a prosecutor in Shelby County with the Special Victims Unit. The Governor has picked people with criminal justice backgrounds to lead Tennessee’s child services agency but neither of them have experience as social workers.

Lee is obsessed with sexual abuse of children; he wants to stop child sex traffickers; he wants a tough cop to lead DCS. What DCS actually does is prosecute parents of potential sex victims before they are trafficked—like the 2002 Speilberg Film, Minority Report.

As numerous studies have shown, foster care is where many kids get sexually abused. A John Hopkins study found the risk four times greater in foster homes than living with birth parents. In a New Jersey study 36.5% % of child sexual abusers were foster parents. More than half of the sex trafficking victims recovered in 2013 during nationwide FBI raids were from group homes or foster homes.

In 2018 alone, the US foster care system received 263,000 children, according to the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS). In Tennessee, DCS took 15,404 minors from their family home in 2018. Most of them ended up in foster care.

If the Governor is really serious about reducing sexual abuse of children he should direct the new commissioner to start reducing the number of kids put in foster care in Tennessee and start increasing the services provided to families with kids.

Many of the families who have their kids taken would be okay if they received social services like child care, health insurance, food supplements, drug counseling, etc. But for years DCS has spent the vast majority of its budget on foster care and just a pittance on family services.

Let’s hope Quin reverses those priorities and stops the department’s habit of wrongfully taking kids. If you consider that DCS is by far the biggest trafficker of children in Tennessee, then Quin could be the right person for the job after all. In her previous job, she worked to stop sex trafficking so maybe she’s got the right background to stop DCS from trafficking so many children.

The post Lee Replaces Nichols at Department of Children’s Services appeared first on The Tennessee Tribune.