By Michael Phillips – Originally pushed on October 16, 2025, on MDBayNews and Fatherand.Co.
This investigation is part of MDBayNews’ coverage of child-welfare oversight in Maryland. All claims are sourced to primary documents or peer-reviewed research and independently verified where possible. No public funds, government contracts, or advocacy-group sponsorships influenced this reporting.
As of October 15, 2025 — New developments have deepened Maryland’s foster-care scandal. DHS has formally suspended Fenwick Behavioral Services—the contractor supervising Kanaiyah Ward at the time of her death—pending an internal review. A legislative workgroup tasked with recommending reforms missed its October 10 deadline, drawing bipartisan criticism. Meanwhile, “Kanaiyah’s Law” is gaining co-sponsors across party lines, with hearings expected later this fall even as the state continues to house children in hotels. Republican delegates have accused the Moore administration of “governing by press release,” while Democrats have defended incremental progress toward reform.
Introduction: The Bureaucracy of Compassion
Maryland has erected an empire of empathy that malfunctions precisely where it matters most. Administrators invoke equity, compassionate governance, and safety as North Star ideals, yet the children in state custody—its foster youth—remain among the most neglected in public life. The distance between Maryland’s moral vocabulary and its moral performance has become a chasm.
A September 2025 audit by the Office of Legislative Audits (OLA) made the chasm legible. The report catalogued unsafe placements—some with registered sex offenders—financial mismanagement measured in the tens of millions, and process failures so routine that the system’s anesthesia is now its defining feature. And then came the death of 16-year-old Kanaiyah Ward, a Black teen who overdosed on diphenhydramine in a Baltimore hotel room while under one-on-one state-contracted “care.” Her autopsy, finalized October 8, reignited scrutiny just as lawmakers scheduled a hearing and floated “Kanaiyah’s Law” to restrict hotel warehousing of children. Fourteen foster youth still live in hotels as of October 13. This is not yesterday’s scandal; it is today’s government.
The coverage cycle tells the story’s shape. Local outlets hammered the audit in mid-September, attention dipped, and then surged again with Ward’s autopsy, a vendor’s defensive statement, and the hearing announcement. Social media reflected rare bipartisan disgust—Democrats calling it heartbreaking, Republicans demanding firings. For national media, the door remains open: beyond the recitation of audit bullets lies a harder, more consequential critique—the racial-equity hypocrisy, the Title IV-E moral hazard, and the drugging of foster youth as a substitute for care. This essay is about that harder truth.
I) The Numbers Behind the Moral Collapse
Maryland’s foster-care system (framed bureaucratically as “out-of-home care”) serves roughly 3,800 children at any given time. The demographic arithmetic is inescapable:
- ~30% of Maryland’s child population is Black;
- ~57% of children in foster care are Black;
- Black youth spend longer in care (≈ 22 months vs. 18 for White peers), reunify less often (≈ 45% vs. 65% within 12 months), and age out at higher rates without permanency.
Measured as a disproportionality index, Black children are overrepresented by ~90% in Maryland foster care. These are not new anomalies but persistent patterns. In any other context, such a skew would trigger civil rights litigation; in the context of state administration, it prompts training, dashboards, and public relations. The outcome disparities are treated as tragic weather—something that happens—rather than as the foreseeable product of how Maryland governs.
Auditors also found that, as of August 2024, seven registered sex offenders were living at addresses tied to approved guardianship homes where at least ten foster children resided—an outcome traceable to basic failures in post-placement household monitoring.
II) The Tyranny of the Administrative State
Three institutional actors define the landscape:
- Local Departments of Social Services (DSS)—24 county/Baltimore City offices that remove children, control placements, and manage case plans;
- The Social Services Administration (SSA)—the DHS division that licenses providers and is responsible for compliance and oversight;
- The Department of Human Services (DHS), led by Secretary Rafael López, holds the budget (≈ $360 million for foster care alone), signs contracts, and interfaces with the governor’s office.
The OLA’s findings were unsparing: background checks missing or undocumented in up to half of reviewed cases; $34.5 million in unrecovered overpayments; $2.6 million in federal reimbursements left on the table; and a $700,000 federal penalty for safety and education noncompliance. Similar failures appeared in audits in 2008, 2013, and 2022—proof that Maryland’s foster-care dysfunction is not episodic but institutionalized. Every cycle recites the same rites: a report, a press conference, a plan, a fade. The machine returns to its hum.
III) The Economics of Removal: Title IV-E’s Perverse Incentive
Beneath the rhetoric of rescue is a fiscal architecture that pays for the opposite of what reformers claim to want. Under Title IV-E of the Social Security Act, the federal government reimburses states—often 50–75%—for the costs of keeping children in foster care. The longer a child remains, the more administrative dollars flow. In 2024, Maryland drew roughly $180 million from IV-E, its single largest child-welfare funding stream. Prevention and reunification live on separate, smaller streams.
Economically, removal pays; reunification drains. Bureaucratically, permanence is punished; prolongation is rewarded. Maryland’s much-publicized $2.6 million in lost reimbursements from paperwork errors, widely cited in local coverage, obscures the larger moral hazard: the state gains far more financially by keeping children in care than by restoring families. Add the new frontier—hotel placements at ~$1,259 per child per day—and the incentives become not merely misaligned but grotesque. Each unmonitored day of “temporary” warehousing fattens a vendor’s invoice and sustains the illusion that placement scarcity, not governance, drives the crisis.
Zoom out, and the picture is national: >400,000 children in U.S. foster care generate >$10 billion annually in federal flows. Maryland is not aberrant; it is clarifying. A welfare program built to protect children has matured into a self-funding bureaucracy with a measurable bias toward dependency.
IV) From Foster Homes to Hotel Rooms
Between 2023–2024, Maryland placed ~280 foster youth in hotels—some for months or years—in obvious violation of state priorities that require kinship or licensed family homes. Cost: $10.4 million. Oversight: often outsourced to unlicensed or questionably vetted contractors. Case in point: Fenwick Behavioral Services, which provided one-on-one supervision for Kanaiyah Ward. Despite prior complaints and well-known risk factors (multiple suicide attempts), Ward was placed in a hotel room—out of sight, out of accountability. She died there. Only after her autopsy did DHS suspend the vendor. Weeks later, the department advanced a $465 million foster-care expansion contract before comprehensively fixing background checks, vendor vetting, or hotel protocols.
It is difficult to imagine a clearer indictment of incentives: the government that presides over a child’s death in a hotel room continues to extend the contracts, promising to build oversight later. In Maryland, reform is a promissory note; procurement is cash on the barrelhead.
As of mid-October, DHS confirmed the suspension of Fenwick Behavioral Services “pending comprehensive review of contractor compliance.” The department has not specified whether Fenwick will remain eligible for future procurements. The action came only after renewed media scrutiny and a series of legislative inquiries demanding transparency over vendor qualifications, contract rates, and prior complaints.
V) Neglect by Numbers: What the Audit Wasn’t Designed to Feel
Statistics from the audit—1,600 children without required dental exams (some for seven years), 640 without annual physicals, and up to 38% with unverifiable school attendance—translate into specific human harms that bureaucratic language can’t carry:
- A nine-year-old in Prince George’s County develops abscesses from years without dental care while “compliant” in case notes;
- A 14-year-old in Frederick County shows up as “home-schooled” in CJAMS but hasn’t attended classes in two academic years;
- Siblings scattered across three counties after database errors—listed as a “placement challenge,” lived as permanent loss.
The psychological economy of administrative failure is inertia: if the database field says complete, the child disappears. Paper performs where care does not.
VI) Equity Rhetoric vs. Equity Reality
Maryland’s moral brand is equity. The governor’s speeches, the agency mission statements, the budget line-items—all speak the language of balance and repair. Yet the state’s own outcomes tell a different story: Black youth ≈57% of foster care vs. ≈30% of the child population; longer average stays; lower reunification; higher aging-out without permanency; greater exposure to medical and educational neglect while in state custody.
Research controlling for poverty shows Black children are twice as likely to be removed for “neglect” as White peers in comparable circumstances. In urban counties where Black child poverty surpasses 30%, investigators open cases at 1.8–2× the White rate. Poverty explains part of the gap, but not nearly all; discretionary bias and incentive-driven case practices fill in the rest. When disparities in government programs harm people of color, the state calls them unfortunate. When disparities appear in private life, they are called injustice. The same data, different moral grammar.
VII) Medicated Neglect, Part I: Illicit Substance Use and the State’s Blind Spots
A complete account of Maryland’s foster-care crisis must reckon with drugs—not just in the form of parental substance use that triggers removal (~32% of entries nationally; ~26% in Maryland), but in the post-placement rise of youth substance use that the state too often ignores or mismanages.
The picture is stark and consistent across national and Maryland-aligned evidence:
- Initiation & prevalence. By age 17, roughly 49% of foster youth have tried drugs; 54% have used alcohol; 41% have used marijuana. Past-year use among foster youth approaches 40–45%, roughly double comparable general-youth figures. Initiation begins ~2.5× earlier than non-foster peers (hazard ratio ≈ 2.5), with the first exposures increasingly occurring during adolescence in care.
- SUD risk and polysubstance use. Between 19–35% of foster youth meet criteria for a substance use disorder (vs. 2–5% in the general youth population). Polysubstance patterns appear in ~22–34% of cases.
- Screening and supervision. National pediatric standards call for routine screening; in practice, even foster-youth screening hovers around ~77%, with lower consistency in unstable placements. Maryland’s audit revealed no evidence of routine screening in hotel settings—a failure that leaves self-medication and silent risk unaddressed.
- Transition cliff. In the first year after aging out, 10–12% of foster alumni receive a new SUD diagnosis; by age 19, ~25% face elevated risk for drug-related hospitalization. In Maryland, alumni studies show ~12.5% with new SUD diagnosis post-18—heavily associated with unstable placements and weak aftercare.
Overlay race, and the disparities compound: Maryland’s Black foster youth—already overrepresented in care—face 20–30% lower access to timely treatment and recovery services than White peers. The equity rhetoric fades under the reality that wardship too often escalates risk.
Ward’s case is a tragic exemplar of unmonitored medication in a setting least suited for fragile adolescents. Hotels are liminal spaces—neither home nor facility—promising supervision that procurement language cannot make real. A teen with known suicide attempts did not need a room with a key card and a contracted adult. She needed a safe, licensed placement where a clinical team could read her risk and respond to it.
VIII) Medicated Neglect, Part II: Psychotropics as Policy by Prescription Pad
If illicit substance use exposes one side of the crisis, psychotropic medication shows the other: when overwhelmed systems cannot deliver care, they dose behavior. Nationally, foster youth are prescribed psychotropics at 4–5× the rate of non-foster peers. 25–35% of foster children (and ~1 in 4 ages 6–17) receive at least one psychotropic; polymedication is common.
Break the numbers down:
- Any psychotropic: 25–35% of foster youth (vs. ~8% among non-foster Medicaid youth). Maryland tracks ~33%, broadly in line with national figures.
- By class: 15–20% antipsychotics; 10–15% stimulants; polypharmacy averages ~2.9 classes for foster youth vs. ~1.4 for non-foster.
- Oversight gaps: In national samples, ~1/3 of medicated foster youth lack a documented psychiatric diagnosis; 20–30% have inadequate consent or monitoring. Maryland policy nominally aligns with AACAP guidelines, but the OLA’s broader medical-neglect findings (e.g., years without dental or physical examinations) strongly suggest parallel gaps in medication oversight.
- Risks & outcomes: Adverse events and clinically significant side effects appear in 10–15%; weight gain, metabolic syndrome, movement disorders, and paradoxical agitation are known risks of heavy antipsychotic use in adolescents. Class-action litigation in states with similar patterns alleges chemical restraint under color of care.
A 2023 Maryland lawsuit alleged that up to 75% of medicated foster teens lacked robust diagnosis or appropriate monitoring, with reports of self-administration in hotels and repeat hospitalizations. Even when prescriptions are clinically indicated, the state still owes what it routinely fails to deliver: informed consent (from a legal guardian or court), medication reconciliation at every placement change, pharmacist review for interactions, pediatric follow-up at proper intervals, and an appeals pathway for children and caregivers.
There is a bitter irony here: Maryland removes children for parental drug use and then over-medicalizes those children in placements that lack consistent clinical oversight. We call this “treatment,” though the more accurate term may be governance by prescription—policy enacted at the level of the pill, not the plan.
IX) The Politics of Delay
Governor Wes Moore inherited dysfunction. Nearly two years into his tenure, the reform footprint remains rhetorical. The promised “transparency dashboard” is not yet live. Legislative staff report that <20% of 2022 audit recommendations had been implemented by mid-2025. The Democratic legislature withheld $850,000 over data issues, but has neither subpoenaed the necessary records nor insisted on public vendor ledgers. Bureaucratic self-protection, not accountability, sets the tempo.
A statutorily created workgroup charged with delivering foster-care reform recommendations missed its October reporting deadline. Delegate Mike Griffith, sponsor of Kanaiyah’s Law, called the lapse “a moral failure as much as an administrative one,” arguing the state “finds time to issue contracts faster than it fixes systemic abuse.” DHS officials say draft recommendations are in progress, but no publication date has been announced.
The hearing slated the week of October 13 is a simple test of will: compel disclosure—vendor contracts and day-rates, IV-E claim files associated with hotel use, CJAMS exception logs for missed medical and education milestones—or admit that “reform” begins and ends as a press release.
X) Why the Story Is Hot Again: A Brief Timeline
- Sept 12–17: Audit release drives local coverage (unsafe placements, $10.4M hotels, $34.5M overpayments, IV-E penalties).
- Oct 1–7: Social posts and commentary keep the embers warm; vendor questions multiply.
- Oct 8: Autopsy rules Ward’s death a suicide (diphenhydramine); vendor statement follows; outrage resurges.
- Oct 10: Legislative workgroup misses deadline for foster-care reform report; lawmakers express frustration over delays in receiving answers.
- Oct 11–12: DHS confirms Fenwick suspension pending review; advocates renew calls for daily hotel-placement reporting.
- Oct 13–15: Kanaiyah’s Law gains bipartisan co-sponsors; hearing preparation underway. State still reports several children in hotels.
XI) Kanaiyah’s Law: A Test of Moral Priority
The emerging contours of Kanaiyah’s Law are a necessary floor, not a ceiling:
The proposal is collecting co-sponsors from both parties. Advocates urge emergency passage and insist the bill reach beyond hotel bans to mandate vendor vetting, psychotropic oversight, and funding tied to reunification and school/health compliance. The governor’s office has signaled conditional support while exploring administrative avenues—an approach critics say risks recycling press releases without enforcement.
- Cap hotel placements at 24–72 hours absent a public, written secretary-level waiver;
- Require licensed, background-checked 1:1 supervision (no unlicensed vendors, no “temporary” carve-outs);
- Daily public reporting: total hotel headcount, age bands, county category (not exact addresses), vendor name, and length of stay;
- Independent clinical review after 7 days and after any incident, with escalation to a judicial officer;
- Funding linkage: tie state dollars to reunification, school attendance verification, medical/dental compliance, and screening/monitoring of psychotropics—not to raw occupancy or “service units.”
If enacted, this would be Maryland’s first move toward paying for outcomes rather than activity—the inversion Title IV-E never fully accomplished.
XII) What Accountability Must Mean (Now)
Enough dashboards. Maryland needs enforceable rules with visible teeth.
1) Vendor Sunlight, Statutory and Daily. Publish contracts, day-rates, staff credentials, incident summaries, and hotel headcounts every day. Non-reporting triggers fines; falsification triggers suspension and referral to the Attorney General.
2) Real-Time Safety and Health Compliance. Require weekly status files from every local DSS: primary placement, school attendance verification, medical/dental status, psychotropic-medication status (consent on file, last review date), and SUD screening status. Automate the cross-checks; flag exceptions; escalate after 7 days.
3) Independent Inspector for Child Welfare. Subpoena power; audit authority over DHS/SSA/local DSS; public quarterly reports; protected whistleblower channels; standing mandate to review any serious injury or death within 30 days.
4) Medication Stewardship. Enforce informed consent and court oversight for psychotropics; require pharmacist reconciliation at every placement change; prohibit PRN psychotropics for behavior control; publish anonymized polypharmacy rates and adverse-event counts quarterly; fund non-drug therapies first.
5) SUD Screening & Treatment Access. Mandate evidence-based SUD screening at placement and every 90 days; ensure timely treatment slots (not waiting lists) for youth who screen positive; require a warm handoff into aftercare at transition to adulthood, with 12-month follow-up.
6) Title IV-E Redesign Pilot. Seek federal waivers or pilots to link reimbursement to permanency and safety: pay for verified school attendance, documented medical/dental compliance, reunification, kinship placement stability, and reduced time to permanency. Stop paying for failure.
7) Fatality & Serious Incident Transparency. Automatic, public, independent reviews for any death or serious injury in care; publish full findings and corrective orders within 60 days.
These are not aspirational goals; they are minimal conditions for legitimacy.
XIII) Media & Accountability Tracker (What to Watch Next)
- Hearing deliverables: Vendor ledgers (rates, dates, headcounts), IV-E claim files tied to hotels, CJAMS exception logs, corrective-action timelines, and who signs them.
- Metrics that matter: Daily hotel census; average days to kinship; verified school attendance; medical/dental compliance; psychotropic consent compliance; SUD screening and treatment uptake; reunification rate by race and county.
- Signals of seriousness: Suspensions for non-reporting; clawbacks for fraud; personnel consequences up the chain; public publication of waiver memos granted by the Secretary.
- Kanaiyah’s Law text & whip count: Whether the bill embeds funding-to-outcomes and daily vendor transparency or dissolves into platitudes.
XIII-A) The Vendor Question: Procurement Without Accountability
In the weeks since the audit, legislators have focused on the procurement ecosystem that underwrites Maryland’s child-welfare operations. The same agencies that fail safety checks routinely approve multimillion-dollar contracts without publishing profit margins, staffing ratios, or incident rates. Internal ledgers reviewed by lawmakers show hotel supervision routinely billed at more than $1,200 per child per day—exceeding the daily cost of many licensed residential treatment programs with on-site clinical staff. Until procurement oversight mirrors the scrutiny applied to parents and guardians, the imbalance between financial control and moral responsibility will persist.
XIV) The National Mirror
Maryland’s failure is local in detail and national in design. Across the country, foster-care policy combines bureaucratic paternalism with financial dependency: remove more, reimburse more; keep longer, bill longer. Prevention is an afterthought in a ledger that prizes occupancy over outcomes. The vocabulary is humane; the economics are not.
On drugs, the paradox is brutal: the state that removes children for parental substance use fails to screen consistently for youth use, then medicates them—with antipsychotics, antidepressants, stimulants—at rates 4–5× higher than their peers, often without airtight diagnosis, consent, or monitoring. We call this safety; the adolescents who endure it might call it chemical containment. Combine that with race, and the inequity hardens: Black children enter more, stay longer, reunify less, and—because of the same oversight vacuum—face more unaddressed risk and more unmanaged medication while in care.
XV) The Broken Compact
The first duty of a liberal society is to protect the powerless. When the power of the state becomes the principal risk to the powerless, the social compact is not merely strained—it is broken.
Maryland’s leaders have made eloquent promises in the dialect of equity, and then consigned children to hotel rooms, unlicensed supervision, and unmonitored pills. They have assembled dashboards where doctors should be, vendors where families should be, and press statements where accountability should be.
Kanaiyah Ward should be alive. Her death is an audit written in blood. Behind her name stand thousands more rendered into numbers—youth whose attendance is “verified” without schools, whose teeth rot behind codes marked “compliant,” whose grief is numbed with medication because the state does not know how else to sit with their pain.
There is a way back, but it begins with the refusal to confuse process with care, compassionate branding with compassionate action, equity with the equal dignity of a child whose life is not a line item. Until Maryland pays for outcomes instead of occupancy, until it measures and publishes the facts it fears, until it ties money to reunification, safety, schooling, and health—and not to days in rooms and rows in CJAMS—its foster-care system will remain what it has become: a moral economy of neglect financed by taxpayers and sanctified by words.
About the Data
Figures are drawn from Maryland’s Office of Legislative Audits, DHS, HHS/ACF (AFCARS), SAMHSA (NSDUH), and peer-reviewed medical/policy literature. Where possible, metrics were cross-checked across datasets. Rates reflect the most recent releases available as of October 2025. No sealed juvenile records were used; personal examples are anonymized or publicly reported.
This article reflects verified developments through October 15, 2025; subsequent updates will appear in MDBayNews follow-up coverage.
Select Sources and References
- OLA (Sept 2025) — Audit of Maryland SSA/DHS (unsafe placements, finances).
- DHS CFSP 2025–2029 — System plans; counts; reforms.
- AFCARS FY2022–2023 — Foster care totals, race breakdowns.
- Annie E. Casey Kids Count (2023–24) — MD disproportionality context.
- SAMHSA NSDUH 2024 — Youth substance use baselines/trends.
- AAP, Pediatrics (2024) — Substance use among foster youth.
- PubMed / JCAP (2023) — Psychotropic use and polypharmacy in foster care.
- PCORI (2025) — Reducing psychotropic polypharmacy in foster populations.
- OIG HHS (2018, upd. 2024) — States’ oversight of psychotropic prescribing.
- CRS (2024) — Title IV-E structure and financing.
- Pew Commission (2023 update) — Federal financing reform proposals.
- FOX45 (Oct 8–11, 2025) — Ward autopsy & hearing announcements; vendor response.
Support Independent Journalism
Investigative journalism like this takes time, courage, and community backing. If you believe in exposing the systems that profit from family destruction and giving a voice to the silenced—please consider supporting this work.
👉 Make a donation to help fund future investigations ☕ Buy me a coffee to keep the newsroom running 📰 Subscribe on Substack for full access to reports, updates, and exclusive behind-the-scenes insights
Every contribution—large or small—helps keep independent journalism alive. Thank you for standing for truth, transparency, and reform.
