(The Center Square) – The Washington State Department of Children, Youth & Families reports that at least 45 children under its supervision died or suffered near-fatal incidents in the first nine months of 2025.
Those figures were released on Friday by DCYF, more than a month after the agency announced that it had second- and third-quarter numbers but was not prepared to release them.
The 45 figure puts the state on track for the worst year for children under state supervision. A total of 49 incidents were reported in 2024.
The number of incidents is significantly higher than what DCYF reports, according to the Office of the Family and Children’s Ombuds, an independent office that investigates complaints about state agencies serving children, youth, and families, and works to improve the child welfare system.
As reported by The Center Square, OFCO announced in July that 92 children were killed or nearly killed in the first six months of 2025.
Normally, OFCO does not release critical incident data for the current year; however, given the alarming nature of the numbers, the office decided to do so.
“We didn’t want to give the impression that things are getting better, and are actually starting to decline, when in fact we had preliminary information for the first quarter of 2025 that might paint a very different picture,” OFCO Director Patrick Dowd said.
According to DCYF, 36 children under the agency’s supervision were killed or nearly killed in the first half of this year.
Why are the figures from the two offices so different?
According to a slide presentation from DCYF on Friday, “OFCO examines child fatality reported to the office, including those not directly caused by maltreatment, as long as there are concerns about child welfare or systemic issues. DCYF is limited by statute (RCW 74.13.640) to reviewing only those child fatalities and near fatalities that are maltreatment-related and where there was prior DCYF involvement within the 12 months preceding the incident.”
As reported by The Center Square, many DCYF critics and lawmakers pushing for change blame House Bill 1227, the Keeping Families Together Act, which took effect in 2023, for the rise in critical incidents.
The law aims to reduce the number of children entering foster care by fundamentally changing how courts make decisions regarding removal. The law requires courts to weigh the potential short-term and long-term harms of removal against the risk of imminent physical harm to a child. It also prohibits poverty, homelessness, or disability alone from being the sole reason for removing a child from their home.
During a July public hearing when OFCO announced the 92 critical incidents, several members of the public urged DCYF to reverse course on the Keeping Families Together Act.
“I am here today as someone who is deeply disgusted by the direction our child welfare system is headed,” said foster parent and labor and delivery nurse Jamie Williams. “Health care providers have never had to advocate this hard to keep children safe. We are sending our most vulnerable home to the most lethal environments. A 200% increase in critical incidents is not just a statistic; it’s a failure. A failure to protect the very children that our system was created to protect.”
Rep. Travis Couture, R-Allyn, told The Center Square in a Friday interview that he will reintroduce House Bill 1092, which he views as a fix to the Keeping Families Together Act.
“At the end of the day, these kids deserve better than this. DCYF is fundamentally broken, and when you have bureaucrats whose No. 1 job is to protect children and families and they seem to want to throw under the rug the deaths of innocent kids, oftentimes babies and toddlers in our state, it makes me sick,” Couture said.
During the Friday briefing, DCYF staff members pointed to the 2024 implementation of Senate Bill 6109, which gave judges more discretion in removing children from homes where fentanyl is present.
“It makes us believe that 6109 as a corrective to 1227 was having its intended effect,” said Dr. Vickie Ybarra, assistant secretary of Partnership, Prevention, and Services at DCYF.
Couture says if SB 6109 were truly saving lives, the number of children killed and nearly killed would be going down.
“All that bill did was try to create an imminent harm for things like highly potent synthetic opioids like fentanyl, but it created all of these kind of escape clauses and you basically can’t even remove a child and even when you do they get sent back days later to the same squalid condition that they were once living in and once endangered by where you have these homes with biological parents who are abusing hard drugs and leaving it around for their kids to get into,” Couture said.
He thinks that the numbers will worsen significantly if lawmakers don’t intervene.
“It just drives me nuts how you have a group of six-figure paid bureaucrats sitting around like a bunch of elitists talking about how it’s getting better, as 30 kids nearly died and 15 kids died, and we say we’ve solved it,” Couture said. “Are you kidding me? I don’t think it’s too far off when we’ll have 100 or more kids killed every year if we don’t fix this.”
