For journalists
Everything on this site is built to survive your editor and your fact checker. Every figure names its federal table inline. If you find a number here you cannot trace to the cited source, that is a correction we owe you: write us and we will fix it. See the methodology for the sources and vintages behind every figure.
What you can take
- Citation packs. Every chart has a download button that hands you the chart as SVG and PNG, the full citation text, and the CC-BY license in one zip. Print it, broadcast it, adapt it. Attribution is the only condition.
- State pages. All 52 jurisdictions, ten metrics, with the reporting gaps labeled. When a cell says not reported, that phrasing is quotable: the state did not report the figure to the federal system that exists to collect it.
- The archive. Two decades of KARA reporting back to 2005, republished as written, with original news citations preserved. See the editorial policy on naming children.
Story starters that are already in the record
- Why did Massachusetts stop reporting child fatalities to NCANDS after FFY2021, and who in state government signed off on that?
- Which states' foster care populations fell fastest since 2018, and did exits rise or did entries simply stop being filed?
- What does your state's termination of parental rights count look like against its adoption count, year over year?
Ground rules
We do not identify children, name family members alongside a child, or republish images from the original corpus, and we will not help you do so. Public officials acting in official roles are named. There is no tracking on this site; we cannot tell you who read what, because we do not know.