By Sen. Jeff Timberlake

There hasn’t been much to celebrate at the Maine State House. Democrats bent on satisfying their far-left agenda have passed one bad bill after another. But a bright spot emerged this week in an otherwise dark session. It was Republicans and Democrats coming together to make a drastic change with the agency that handles child welfare in Maine.

Hello, this is Senator Jeff Timberlake of Androscoggin County. It is my pleasure to join you for this week’s Republican Radio Address to share this great news. But first, let me fill you in on some of the background.

Maine’s Office of Child and Family Services, a division within the Department of Health and Human Services, has built a terrible record in managing the safety and welfare of children in our state. More children under the agency’s care or with whom the agency was involved have died in the past three years than in the previous six years combined. To put that into perspective, 88 children have died since 2020.

When four of those kids died within weeks of each other in the summer of 2021, parents were charged in each case and it was discovered that the Office of Child and Family Services had been involved with all of them. Those children who suffered a brutal death at the hands of their parents were:

• Six-week-old Jaden Harding of Brewer, whose father was convicted for his death;
• Three-year-old Maddox Williams of Stockton Springs, whose mother was convicted for his murder;
• Three-year-old Hailey Goding of Old Town, whose mother was convicted for her death;
• And one-month-old Sylus Melvin of Milo, whose father was convicted for the infant’s murder.

This led the Legislature’s Government Oversight Committee, of which I am a member, to begin an investigation into those individual cases. At that point, something was clearly wrong within OCFS and we had to find out what and why. When we began that investigation, however, it was under a different Legislature with different members on the Committee.

I was fortunate to stay on the Committee when a new Legislature convened in 2022; but other members had changed. Still, we took up where we left off and continued the work to find the problems plaguing this agency and look for solutions.

What we did uncover were real systemic problems with OCFS. It began with leadership – well, at least with one leader who resigned and is no longer there. We learned of other problems through the testimony of OCFS employees themselves, who said:

• They “work within a broken system.”
• They were “being reviewed to death.”
• Their office was a “war zone” and OCFS itself is a “sinking ship.”
• They had to deal with supervisors who never even showed up to work.

Our very own director of the Office of Program Evaluation and Government Accountability, the Committee’s nonpartisan agency tasked with doing the investigation, found “Errors on top of errors” as his office reviewed their work. He went on to tell us of many “unsound safety decisions” made by OCFS staff.

Even OCFS itself through its federally mandated annual service and progress report said it was failing. The report described how OCFS failed to identify children’s risk in half their cases; and a review of 200 randomly selected cases showed OCFS failed to meet at least one federal standard in ALL of them – most failed to meet more than one.

And for the third year in a row, our Child Welfare Ombudsman has found “substantial issues” in more than half of the cases she reviewed. In fact, it was actually closer to 60 percent this year, showing that OCFS is just getting worse.

After we got the initial reports on the investigation, it led me to one conclusion – OCFS had to be separated from DHHS and rebuilt into its own department. To me, there was no other path – nothing else we’ve tried has worked and a drastic change was needed.

I submitted LD 779 in order to do just that; and on Wednesday, many of my colleagues in the Senate agreed and we voted 22-8 to advance my bill to the House. In what has been an otherwise partisan session, the majority of us came together in a bipartisan effort to solve this problem. That is how your Legislature should work.

Again, this is Senator Jeff Timberlake of Androscoggin County. I thank you for listening and hope you enjoy the total eclipse on Monday. It’ll be another 55 years until a total eclipse returns to Maine in May 2079.

Senator Jeff Timberlake represents District 17, which includes communities in Androscoggin and Kennebec counties. He is the Senate Republican Lead for the Legislature’s Veterans and Legal Affairs Committee, and a member of the Government Oversight Committee.