Did Georgia DFCS Really "Lose" 1800 Children?

News media and politicians are hyping a new report that Georgia DFCS lost track of 1790 children between 2018 and 2022. The implication is that DFCS somehow messed up paperwork or otherwise failed to keep track of the foster children. The analysis they rely on however, is too simplistic to support that claim or, indeed, to offer any helpful information.  

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children apparently simply added up the number of children that DFCS reported as no longer being in their placements.  There is no discussion of whether the children ran away (the most common reason for children to go missing) or were abducted or otherwise truly were lost in the system.  More important, there is no analysis of how many children were later located or how long it took to find them.  The report does says that more than 600 children were reported missing more than once. In other words, more than ⅓ of the “lost" children were located, put back into the system, and then went missing again within the same year. The report does not appear to track children located again the following year.  

There's no way of knowing whether the in-depth information that we need actually exists, but there's no doubt that “almost 2000 missing children” makes for a better headline than “more than 1100 runaways.” Certainly, children who run away from care put themselves at risk for a host of bad outcomes, ranging from homelessness to sex trafficking. It's a serious problem for the foster care system. But the solutions are very different for runaways than for children truly lost in the system.

Georgia foster care undoubtedly has some serious problems. This headline-grabbing story doesn't tell us anything useful about the problems or potential solutions.