In the week since a teen mom in foster care went public about her struggles with Missouri’s social services agency to keep her baby, she’s faced renewed threats of being separated from her 9-week-old daughter.
The uncertainty is nothing new for Hailey, who has been in foster care since she was 2 and became pregnant at 15. After being told abortion wasn’t an option, she was determined to be a mom in the hopes of keeping her daughter from repeating the traumatic childhood she experienced.
Hailey was taken from the home of her great-aunt, Jodi Spradley, with whom she’d been living during her pregnancy, just days before going into labor. Postpartum, Hailey was shuffled between foster homes, hospitals and group homes across Missouri and occasionally separated from her daughter for long stretches. Her pleas to live with with Spradley — who is just as eager to take her in — largely went ignored.
Hailey’s story, which was published by The Independent last week, drew immediate outrage from across the political spectrum and from all sides of the abortion debate, highlighting systemic issues advocates and lawmakers have spent years trying to fix.
“The workers at the Children’s Division probably meant well,” said Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, after reading The Independent’s reporting. “But if they had deliberately set out to emotionally torture three generations of a single family — Hailey, her aunt and, most important, her infant — they couldn’t have done a more thorough, efficient job of it than they did and continue to do in this case.”
State Sen. Mary Elizabeth Coleman, a Republican from Arnold, called Hailey’s case “an amalgamation of all of the horrible things that can happen to kids when they’re in care.”
“This poor kid has just absolutely had the state fail her over and over and over again,” said Coleman, who has long advocated for improvements to the state’s foster care system as well as increased resources for mothers and their children. “And to then be portrayed as if the child is the problem is really horrifying.”
Hailey’s story is a checklist of the issues lawmakers have been trying to fix for years, Coleman said, from the failure to place Hailey with a family member, failure to get foster benefits to that family member and the confiscation of Hailey’s Social Security benefits, among others.
The number of children in foster care in Missouri outpaces the national average. There is also scrutiny on how long these children remain in the system. In fiscal year 2024, roughly 44% of Missouri foster children were reunited with their family within a year of entering the system. The federal government wants to see 75% reunification rates.
Hailey receives Social Security benefits because her mother died when she was a child. She is among the more than 1,200 foster kids who had those benefits seized by the state last year. Children’s Division told an advocate helping Hailey that her $400 a month in benefits was being put toward Medicaid expenses and the cost of her transportation to doctor’s appointments.
Last week, lawmakers passed an expansive child welfare bill. Included is a provision, if signed into law by the governor, that would ban the state from seizing Social Security benefits from foster kids.
Former Republican state Rep. Hannah Kelly filed numerous pieces of legislation over the years seeking improvements to the child welfare system, including a version of the legislation that passed this year. She is calling for a “major overhaul” of Missouri’s Department of Social Services after reading Hailey’s story, blaming the systematic failures on inconsistent leadership.
“These are actual lives on the line, kids’ lives are on the line and we need a system that empowers families, both biological and foster, to do what is right for the children. Then everything else will work itself around that,” said Kelly, who left the House last year due to term limits and is now running for state Senate.
Hailey’s experience goes to show, Coleman said, that while fixing state law is important, it’s not enough.
“The focus has to be on leadership in the department,” Coleman said.
In March, the Department of Social Services announced the appointment of Sara Smith as the new director of Children’s Division, which investigates child abuse allegations and overseas the foster care system. Smith in a recent interview with the Kansas City Star emphasized her focus on safety. The prior administration’s public priorities centered on keeping more families together.
Baylee Watts, a spokeswoman for the Department of Social Services, said in an email Friday said Smith wants to improve Children’s Division’s training and curriculum, as well as put “a heightened emphasis on follow through support in response to Newborn Crisis Assessments, which involve calls concerning the well-being of children under one year of age made by medical professionals.”
Lack of resources
Wexler, with the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, called the “rampant confusion of poverty with neglect” the largest problem in child welfare.
Hailey’s story is a prime example of this, he said, and a look at how families attempt to “cobble together a safety net” only to have it torn apart by the state, including by seizing Hailey’s Social Security payments.
“But that’s not the only tragedy,” Wexler said. “Think of all the time, money and effort devoted to destroying this family. All of it was, in effect, stolen from finding some child in real danger who really did need to be removed from her or his home. And that’s almost always the reason for the tragic deaths that, rightly, make headlines.”
Hailey’s experience as a teen mom in foster care would have been vastly different if she lived in Illinois, said Amy Dworsky, a senior research fellow at Chapin Hall, a youth and families research and policy center in Chicago.
For youth who choose to parent, the state has a Teen Parenting Services Network to help minors in foster care, Dworsky said. Hailey may even have been assigned a doula to help support her through pregnancy, childbirth and postpartum.
While Missouri has funneled millions of dollars into pregnancy resource centers and Alternatives to Abortion programs, Spradley said Hailey was not informed of how they could have helped their family. The only program she and Hailey said they were told about was a maternity home in the St. Louis area that Hailey initially resisted going to, saying she instead wanted to stay with her great-aunt.
Hailey and Spradley were often left to fend for themselves during Hailey’s pregnancy, Spradley said, forced to reach out to nonprofits to help them secure housing and calling on friends to help prepare and furnish their apartment for a baby. Their cabinets were stocked with items from local food pantries.
Sen. Mary Elizabeth Coleman enters the Missouri Senate on the first day of the 2023 legislative session (Annelise Hanshaw/Missouri Independent). Sam Lee, a longtime anti-abortion lobbyist who has assisted with legislation that supports mothers and children, said he hopes Children’s Division can better work with the family to connect to resources.
“While the living situation of the three together might be less than perfect, it’s far better than the constant displacement and separation ordered by state workers,” Lee said. “A caring family — even one living in poverty and with difficulties — is far better than no permanent family at all.”
Kelley Fong, a sociology professor at the University of California, Irvine, said it was notable how much Hailey did to prepare for her daughter’s arrival. She enrolled in teen parenting classes and lined up transportation to prenatal appointments. Spradley and her friends helped purchase and gather baby gear.
“It’s hard to imagine what else they could have been doing to convey to the state their commitment to caring for this baby,” Fong said.
The state seemed determined, Fong said, to “take the baby and put the baby somewhere else, which may or may not be safer for them, instead of trying to address the underlying conditions that they’re concerned about.”
What the state didn’t seem to be paying attention to, she said, is the family member who continues expressing a desire to take Hailey in.
“There’s this person that’s willing and interested and ready to help and support mom and baby however she can, and potentially, the only challenge she’s facing is poverty, as she describes,” Fong said of Spradley. “So it’s really striking that rather than provide her with what she needs to provide a stable home for mom and baby, the response is just to separate everyone. That is extremely traumatic for the new mom, for the baby, for everyone involved.”
Spradley started fighting for Hailey to be with family immediately after Hailey’s mother died in 2011. Hailey was 4 years old at the time and living with a foster family.
In an email to then-Gov. Jay Nixon’s office, Spradley said she was writing “with concerns about Child Protective Services” and what she saw as their unwillingness to reunite Hailey with family.
“Hailey is all we have left of my niece … and we love her very much,” Spradley wrote in the email more than 13 years ago.
She received an automated reply.
‘…not going to be passed around anymore’
Soon after the Department of Social Services responded to a request for comment to The Independent last month, Hailey and Spradley got good news for the first time in weeks.
Hailey’s case worker called Spradley to inform her the state would allow Hailey and her daughter to return to Spradley’s care, at least until a court made a more permanent placement decision. While they waited for Hailey to return to Spradley’s home in Cuba, Hailey was authorized by the state to stay temporarily with a longtime friend of Spradley’s in Illinois.
By Friday morning, the smidge of calm that had settled over the family was again decimated when an email from the state indicated Hailey would be moved into a new foster home that wouldn’t allow her to have her daughter with her.
The state reversed course by Friday afternoon, and Hailey and her daughter were allowed to return to Spradley’s home. Hailey remains in the custody of Children’s Division, but can live with Spradley for an “indeterminate period” until a judge decides on a permanent placement.
When Hailey heard the news, she burst into a huge smile and started clapping, Spradley said. Earlier that day Hailey said she’d been so nervous she had picked a spot on her skin until it bled.
Now her voice was bright. Hailey said that she felt “great.”
“I know that we’re not going to be passed around anymore,” she told The Independent.
Spradley said despite the good news, their journey and her mission isn’t over.
“We still want to protect other kids,” Spradley said. “We don’t want to just stop with Hailey. We want other kids who don’t have the support that Hailey has, we want to speak for them, too.”
Hailey can exhale and focus on being a mother.
Last week, Spradley reached out to Coleman, who has since been working with the family to get answers in a case she described as “a litany of the scale of the human cost when these things are so badly handled.”
Coleman encourages anyone facing similar struggles to reach out to their state lawmakers.
She believes in Hailey’s future as a successful adult because of her determination to advocate for herself and for her daughter “in the face of all this tragedy.”
“She’s going to be able to have a happy life,” Coleman said. “I’m hopeful for her, but that’s in spite of, not because of, any of the care that she’s received.”
This story was published by the Missouri Independent, part of the States Newsroom.
