The House Health and Human Resources Committee convened Thursday to consider multiple bills, one which deals with the protection and recovery of missing children.
House Bill 4415 aims to improve the response, protection and recovery of this state’s missing and endangered children. The bill states that schools and foster care agencies must work in cooperation with law enforcement while handling these cases. Specifically, this bill would establish a missing foster child locator program. This would ensure that caseworkers will be required to participate in missing children cases in a more involved way. Foster children, or children otherwise in state custody, are more likely to be missing or endangered than other children.
According to testimony from DHHR general counsel Cammie Chapman, there were 545 cases of missing and endangered foster children in the entire year of 2019. The number was brought down to 70 cases by the end of the year.
Under this bill, the Department of Health and Human Resources would designate three employees specifically for the cases of missing and endangered children. Two employees would work actively in the field, and one employee would be centralized in the department. DHHR believes that designating a specific role to these employees would alleviate some of the case overload and would allow these employees to focus their attention on helping missing and endangered foster children.
House Bill 4415 was advanced by the Health and Human Resources Committee and will be reported to the floor.
