A Kids at Risk Action project
The systems are measured. The children are seen.
KARA SIGNAL publishes what the federal record actually says about each state: how many children entered foster care, how many waited for adoption, how many were found to be victims of maltreatment, and how many died. When a state did not report a number, we say so, in those words. A missing number is never a zero here.
Featured investigation
Start with Washington327,364 children in foster care on September 30, FFY2024, national estimate. Washington sent no number.
Source: AFCARS Dashboard (Print Version), No. 33, preliminary FFY2025 estimates, submissions received by 2026-02-27, Numbers at a Glance. Retrieved 2026-08-04.
Children in foster care on September 30, reported under the AFCARS 2020 rule, FFY2023 to FFY2025.
Washington's first number under the 2020 rule arrived in FFY2025, preliminary. For FFY2023 and FFY2024 the federal table prints a dash. The dash is the record.
Source: AFCARS Dashboard, No. 33, preliminary FFY2025 estimates, submissions received by 2026-02-27, jurisdiction-level counts. Retrieved 2026-07-25.
Each count is a child in state custody with a case file the public never reads. The federal record ends at the number. KARA's reporting carries what the numbers leave out.
The record and the reporting, side by side:
Source: AFCARS Dashboard, No. 33, preliminary FFY2025 estimates, submissions received by 2026-02-27, jurisdiction-level counts. Retrieved 2026-07-25. Counts children ages 0 to 23.
369,000
children in foster care on September 30, 2022, an estimate the Children’s Bureau publishes rounded to the nearest thousand
532,228
child maltreatment victims, FFY2024, reported by all 52 jurisdictions
1,773
child fatalities reported to NCANDS, FFY2024, an undercount by the report's own account
All 52 jurisdictions reported, so the Bureau publishes no adjusted estimate for this year. 46 sent case-level records covering 1,480 deaths and 38 sent aggregate counts covering 293. The report states that deaths may never reach a CPS agency at all, which is what makes the total a floor rather than a count.
Sources: children in foster care, AFCARS Trends in Foster Care and Adoption FY2013 to FY2022, national file, submissions as of 2023-05-09, retrieved 2026-08-04. Victims and fatalities, Child Maltreatment 2024 (NCANDS), Table 3-3 page 38 and Table 4-1 page 67, retrieved 2026-08-04.
Ten federal metrics, 52 jurisdictions, every gap labeled. Start with Washington, which sent no foster care data under the AFCARS 2020 rule for FFY2023 and FFY2024. Its first number arrived in the preliminary FFY2025 estimates.
Two decades of reporting on children the systems failed, drawn from KARA's founder Mike Tikkanen. Original citations and news links preserved; no images from the original corpus. Where a piece names a specific child, it does so because the case is already part of the public record.
Briefs with the citations already attached.
What Kids at Risk Action runs alongside the data: current KARA news, podcasts, college student research, and the standing project with Hamline University.
Since 1994
KARA began in Hennepin County juvenile court. Read the history →
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