A reporter investigates the huge racial disparities marking Montana’s foster care system

Montana has long struggled with a large foster care caseload, often standing out from other states for its high rate of separating children from parents.

But one statistic that isn't often investigated by local leaders is how much more often Native American children are removed from their families compared to white children — a trend that many experts note has shaped Montana's child welfare landscape for years, but that few groups are trying to address statewide.

Through the 2023 Data Fellowship with the Center for Health Journalism, I sought to compile and understand the available data about Montana's racially skewed foster care system. Based on what the data showed, I also began looking for local and community-led examples of how to prevent Native American family separations and reunite parents and children after involvement in the child welfare system.

Part of the drive behind this project was my interest in confronting the apparent fatigue and apathy about the issue among top-level policymakers. Native American children make up less than 10% of the state's child population but more than a third of the foster care caseload. But despite that dramatic overrepresentation, lawmakers, administrators within the administration of Gov. Greg Gianforte, and tribal leaders lack a coordinated strategy to address it. Because of various jurisdictions among the tribal, state and federal government, many people in positions of authority appeared noncommittal when I asked what Montana stakeholders were collectively doing to address that racial imbalance.

“They're aware of it,” said Lesa Evers, a member of the Little Shell Tribe and former tribal relations manager with the state Department of Public Health and Human Services, referring to state officials. "Why is it not alarming? And if it's alarming, why are we not addressing it?"

Like many reporters at the outset of a major reporting project, I wanted to gain a deeper understanding of what the data showed about foster care before launching into a search for solutions or notable community trends. Many aspects of foster care data are shielded from public disclosure to protect the privacy rights of families and children, making negotiations with state and tribal-level authorities for public records very difficult.

Based on the recommendations of senior fellows at the Center for Health Journalism, I requested data from the federal Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS) to analyze the racial trends in Montana's foster care. We entered into user-agreements for a decade of the most recent annual reports, through which I slowly began sifting and analyzing, by applying lessons and tools from the fellowship’s beginner-level data track.

After several weeks, and repeated consultations with state, tribal and federal officials, I found that Native American children in Montana had been involved in foster care at roughly five times the rate of their white counterparts, according to the available federal data. That breaks down to a 10-year average of 9 per 1,000 white children involved in foster care, compared to an average of 44 per 1,000 Native children over the same period.

That conclusion, and the consistent year-to-year overrepresentation that our data analysis showed, shocked me. But as I was working to analyze the racial trends in the data, I had the sense that I could be missing some critical information about how exactly the federal AFCARS data was compiled.

Prior to joining the 2023 Data Fellowship cohort, I might have overlooked this line of questioning. But because of how much the senior fellows and experts in the program stressed the importance of “interviewing” the data that reporters work with, I began asking local and national experts more questions about where the numbers came from.

Most importantly, I wanted to understand if tribal nations that share borders with the state of Montana are required to report information about their independently managed foster care caseloads to the federal government, as state government agencies must do. There was a chance, I realized, that the exceptionally wide racial gap we knew about in Montana was actually an undercount, if that data did not include reports from tribes or federal agencies that contract with some tribal nations.

Ultimately, that nagging feeling turned out to be correct. The federal data that we worked with did not include comprehensive information from the sovereign nations in Montana, or the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which contracts with some tribal governments to manage parts of their foster care systems. In other words, the disproportionality rate we found was not representative of all the children in foster care systems in Montana.

Despite gaps in data collection, and jurisdictional boundaries that complicate child welfare agencies taking statewide action, local groups are investing in programs that help keep Native families together.

Our reporting focused on two of those efforts. In the northeast corner of the state, stakeholders and health care providers on the Fort Peck Reservation met last fall to advance a maternal health program at a local hospital that serves many members of the Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes. The strategy, known as the Meadowlark Initiative, works to match pregnant patients with behavioral health providers to coordinate services for anxiety, depression and substance use disorders. With those added resources, the community hopes to increase access to prenatal services, improve healthy births, and decrease family separations based on parental addiction or mental health issues.

“The way we look at prevention is understanding. We need to understand the people we're serving,” said Kenneth Smoker, director of the Fort Peck Tribes' Health Promotion Disease Prevention program, during the 2023 meeting.

Since that article in our series came out, Northeast Montana Health Services has posted a job listing for the Meadowlark care coordinator position.

Another article in the series involved me spending time with the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) Family Recovery Court in Yellowstone County, home to Montana's largest metropolitan area and a few hours west of the Crow and Northern Cheyenne tribal nations. The court, the first dedicated ICWA court in Montana, works with a cohort of parents to stabilize their lives after their children were removed and placed in foster care by the state. The parents stay involved in the court’s programming long after their children are returned to them, sometimes for years, celebrating new jobs and working through challenges with parenthood, sobriety and mental wellbeing.

Two of the mothers who graduated from the court during or after my reporting stressed how much they felt like their lives had changed because of the resources and support they gained. The court's pledge was not to give up on participants, and to encourage them not to give up on themselves. Both women were living with their children again and working hard to be strong parents every day — something they acknowledged many people with children in foster care never get a chance to do.

It's hard to know whether these three articles in our series will lead to any policy change or coordinated investments to keep Native families together across Montana and reduce the statewide racial disproportionality in foster care. But the data and research we published may help keep the topic near the forefront of conversations about the future of child welfare in Montana, even if change is gradual.

Several months after we published our series, my ears perked up as I was covering an event on the Rocky Boy Reservation in north-central Montana, where state Gov. Greg Gianforte was meeting with tribal leaders to discuss health issues and strategies.

In three and a half years of covering the governor, and throughout the course of interviewing members of his state health department for this series, I had not heard members of the administration bring up the racial disproportionality in foster care as an issue that needs to be addressed. But that day in July, Gianforte raised the topic explicitly and suggested future collaboration.

“I want to ask for your help. Of the remaining kids in foster care, 40% are Native,” Gianforte told the room.

In proposing possible solutions, the governor’s tone was delicate. He was suggestive, rather than directive, and cast his comments as an invitation to partnership, not a decided agenda. One idea he raised was the possibility of initiatives to recruit Native foster families — an effort to keep children connected to community and culture when they go into foster care.

“It’s my belief that there might be some form of that that might have a positive impact on Native communities,” Gianforte said. “I don't know that. It would have to be a Native approach for Native kids with Native families, not a white approach.”

The governor’s comments could turn out to be mostly indicate shifting rhetoric, and not concrete steps to pursue change. Many other possible reforms and investments could be under consideration by individual tribal governments, or nonprofits focused on health and community development in Native communities.

I hope that time, and continued reporting, will help me find answers to those and other questions about this vast and complex issue. Through policy analysis, data tracking and on-the-ground coverage, I’m ready to stay a part of the conversation.