A committee at the Arizona House of Representatives heard from a dozen speakers Wednesday who are concerned about the Department of Child Safety’s protocols for notifying parents and guardians when children go missing from those homes.
They cited a state law signed in June that included mandated reporting requirements DCS must follow when a child runs away or goes missing from a group home.
But several parents testified that the department is still taking too long to make those notifications in many cases, which can make it more difficult to find those missing kids.
Foster parent Anika Robinson says the new law duplicated rules already in place in federal law.
“Everything was already in place; it was simply not being followed,” Robinson said. “And it is heartbreaking for parents to find out 10, 11 days later that their child has gone missing and is deceased.”
Rep. Barbara Parker (R-Mesa) sponsored House Bill 2651 after two runaway foster children were found dead in her legislative district.
“I inherently thought it was so simple, and it was such a simple tool that I thought it would have prevented what we just had happen,” Parker said.
The new law includes requirements that DCS contact parents, family members and national databases within 24 hours of receiving a report that a child is missing. Within 48 hours, local law enforcement must provide information about the missing child to local news media and on social media platforms.
Foster parent Sarah Rodgers said those notification rules make a real difference when a child goes missing, citing her own experience when one of her children ran away.
“As a foster parent, I saw firsthand how every syllable, every direction, everything listed in this law works,” Rodgers said. “Children will be found if this is followed, because mine was.”
But other parents did not have that experience.
Sherika Rhymes’s teenage daughter, Anaiah Walker, was placed in DCS custody in 2017. Rhymes said the department repeatedly failed to notify her in a timely manner when her daughter went missing from her group home.
That included a situation in 2020 when the center where Walker was living took her on a field trip without her mother’s permission. Walker ran away and was later found dead, the victim of a hit-and-run, according to the Arizona Republic.
Rhymes said DCS never notified her that her daughter was missing.
“The statement that the [Arizona Department of Child Safety] failed my family is not amiss. … Anaiah did not come up missing in our care, and Anaiah did not die under our care,” Rhymes said.
According to DCS’ most recent monthly operational report, 115 children under the department’s care ran away in October and 28 other children are classified as missing or abducted.
Katie Ptak, the department’s general counsel, said about 90% of missing and runaway children are found, and the department has a 24/7 hotline to report missing children.
But she said sometimes group homes do not report missing kids through the hotline and instead call a caseworker directly. That can create delays if it happens on a weekend or other day when the caseworker isn’t on call.
Rodgers, Robinson and others called for DCS to create a new unit to focus on tracking missing and runaway foster children to supplement individual caseworkers who typically take those calls to ensure the department is following through with the reporting requirements included in statute.
Ptak said the department already has a special unit called the Office of Child Welfare Investigations that gets involved in those cases when the situation involves allegations that a felony occurred, though she acknowledged some staff within that unit are not assigned to the office full time. She said the department is looking into the use of additional federal funds that could be allocated to OCWI.
But Robinson, the foster parent, said OCWI is only involved in searches for children in certain circumstances and the department is falling short of reporting expectations even with that office already in place.
“I would love for the department to have a specific unit for missing children,” she said.
Ptak also said the department is restricted by confidentiality laws, which limit what information it can share with media or on social media when a child goes missing — a key component of the new state law. Those confidentiality rules would not change even if the department creates a new unit for missing children.
She said that is why DCS partners with law enforcement agencies, which do not have the same confidentiality restrictions, to publicize searches for missing children.
