Reporting on child welfare requires digging past surface-level stories

LOUISVILLE — When I began reporting on child welfare, I brought with me the baggage that plagues all humans: misconceptions and blind spots about a system that I had never lived through.

I had been covering health, which for me always included children’s well-being and family issues, for nearly five years. So I knew a few things for certain.

Kentucky, the state where I was born, raised and educated, has a rampant child abuse and neglect problem that’s left thousands of children in out-of-home placements. Some children who can’t find placement sleep in office buildings; others go to kinship care families who, thanks to a dispute between the executive and legislative branches of government, aren’t getting the financial assistance they need.

But, because of privacy issues and other factors, I had never been quite able to peek around the metaphorical curtain and see the inner workings of the child welfare system in the commonwealth. I was left with gaps about the complexities and bureaucracies in the system, too often covering the system as it is and not as it could (and perhaps should) be.