At the same Capitol hearing where lawmakers heard wrenching testimony from a family about a traumatic child-abuse investigation, Arkansas’s child-welfare chief walked them through the hard numbers of a hard subject.
Those numbers show tens of thousands of maltreatment calls, a shrinking foster care population, and better compliance on some key benchmarks. They also show uneven workloads, placement instability, and a puzzling trend: fewer maltreatment reports accepted and fewer cases substantiated, even as legislators say they see no sign that child abuse itself is actually declining.
Tiffany Wright, director of the Division of Children and Family Services (DCFS), gave a big picture for state fiscal year 2025:
On timeliness, Wright’s report card gave lawmakers a split-screen:
At the end of SFY 2025, DCFS was closing investigations on time about 75% of the time, which Wright acknowledged was “less than the prior state fiscal year.” In the first quarter of SFY 2026, that number improved to 80%, which she credited to “some strategic work” focused on closures and differential response.
The timeliness of closing differential response cases climbed to 73% for the year and 84% in the first quarter of SFY 2026.
Rep. Mary Bentley praised the trend, especially the push for face-to-face contact with children in open cases. “I see some really good results,” she said, adding that she liked seeing the increase in in-person visits.
At the same time, Wright acknowledged that workloads, turnover, and documentation remain constant pressure points. When asked if supervisors are spot-checking case files to ensure documentation is happening in real time, she said some are, but “probably just not as consistent as we need to.”
Wright highlighted one of the biggest shifts in recent years: the total number of children in foster care.
The reasons kids enter care are largely unchanged:
On the exit side:
Placement types and stability were more worrying:
On placement stability, Wright was frank: “We still do have work” to do. Just 37% of children achieved permanency within 12 months, a slight decline from the previous year. Re-entries into foster care after reunification were at 5.4%, meaning a small but significant share of children return to care after going home.
On the adoption side, Wright highlighted several numbers:
In the first quarter of FY 2026, children ages 10–17 made up 34% of finalized adoptions — a notable point, given the longstanding difficulty of finding permanent homes for older youth.
She told lawmakers that in just one recent month, DCFS was able to move 30 children in those situations across the finish line to adoption, but finalizing “kids who had been waiting for thousands of days” can make the average time from termination of parental rights to adoption look worse.
One bright spot Wright emphasized: average caseloads have come down.
Rep. Joy Springer, who has pressed for workload data for years, pointed to the map in the back of the report showing county-level averages. In Pulaski County, the average caseload is about 23.3. Wright noted that Cleveland and Lafayette counties have caseloads in the low 30s, reflecting staffing shortages and turnover.
“It appears that Pulaski County has the highest case workload per employee,” Springer said, before Wright pointed out the two smaller counties that are even higher on average. The pattern, Wright said, is driven by “staffing turnover and having to move cases and staff and try to balance out the work.”
Rep. Beaty, who has been outspoken about workforce issues, told Wright he didn’t envy the job and called the children in the system “the most vulnerable part of our state.”
The most unsettling line of questioning came from Rep. Ryan Rose, who walked through a series of trends in the 2024 family preservation report:
Rose’s concern was not that the numbers looked bad — but that they looked too good without a clear explanation.
“I don’t believe that there are indicators broadly that there is less child abuse taking place in our state, unfortunately,” he told Wright. “But it does look like this report indicates that we are accepting fewer maltreatment reports and we are seeing fewer substantiated investigations.”
“Can you explain what is contributing to that trend in our reporting?” he asked.
Wright said she couldn’t point to a single cause. She noted that reporting dropped during COVID and has since rebounded as life returned to normal, but suggested that more analysis — potentially through the interim study lawmakers approved earlier in the day — may be needed.
Rose pressed the underlying question:
If the numbers say fewer reports and fewer substantiated cases, but no one believes abuse itself is actually decreasing, is the system missing something?
That tension between improvements the numbers clearly show and the gaps legislators still fear may be the central takeaway from Arkansas’s 2025 child welfare “report card.”
The data look better in many ways. But the trust issue is far from resolved.
The first-quarter update for FY 2026 shows:
Performance improved but remains uneven statewide.
Documentation continues to be an agency-wide challenge, with ongoing efforts to give workers “protected time” to write case notes and complete required entries.
The foster care population continues to shrink:
Sibling placements:
Placement stability:
Statewide averages look good, but local workloads vary sharply.
DCFS highlighted several internal efforts: stronger training, improved supervisor preparation, secondary-trauma support programs, and monthly county-level data monitoring.
The data shows:
At the same time:
