By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
On Wednesday morning, Maryland’s Department of Human Services confirmed to Spotlight on Maryland that 26 children are currently missing from state foster care. The agency classified all of them as “runaways.” It took two weeks, and a published story shaming the agency into responding, before DHS would answer what should have been a routine transparency question.
MDBayNews has been asking Maryland about its missing foster children since last fall. What we found then was far worse than what the state admitted this morning.
In October 2025, through a Maryland Public Information Act request filed by survivor-advocates Jennifer Guskin and Bailey Templeton, DHS disclosed that 990 children in state foster care went missing between January 1, 2020, and August 17, 2025. That’s nearly 1,000 children — an average of roughly 200 per year — who disappeared while under Maryland’s legal custody. The state had never volunteered that number. It took a formal records request to extract it.
Today’s disclosure of 26 currently missing children is not a new problem surfacing. It is the same problem, still unresolved, with the same agency still managing its public image more carefully than it manages the children in its care.
The 2021 sleight-of-hand that made the problem invisible
The October 2025 MPIA response revealed something more troubling than the raw numbers. In 2021, DHS quietly merged two separate tracking categories — “runaway” and “unknown whereabouts” — into a single label under Policy #23-01. The department described the change as an effort to “streamline reporting.”
The practical effect was to make the data nearly unreadable. Under the merged system, a teenager who ran away and a toddler whose caseworker simply lost track of them are now recorded identically. A child abducted by a non-custodial parent looks the same in the database as a child who left voluntarily. The state’s own MPIA data showed 29 children under the age of 9 classified as “runaways” during the five-year period — children too young to run anywhere.
“Maryland merged the ‘unknown whereabouts’ category with ‘runaway’ in 2021,” advocate Bailey Templeton said at the time. “That’s not transparency — that’s concealment.”
That same concealment architecture is still in place today. When DHS confirmed 26 missing children this morning, it used the same “runaway status” framing — the same single label that has been obscuring the true nature of these disappearances for five years. There is no way to know from DHS’s response how many of today’s 26 children are genuinely runaways, how many are in unknown or dangerous situations, and how many may have been missing for weeks before today’s count.
Kanaiyah’s Law passed. Children are still disappearing.
Maryland’s legislative response to the DHS accountability crisis was Kanaiyah’s Law, signed by Governor Moore in April 2026, following the September 2025 death of 16-year-old foster youth Kanaiyah Ward in a Baltimore hotel room. The law created an independent child welfare ombudsman, banned unlicensed foster placements, and tightened guardianship requirements.
It has been law for less than two months. Twenty-six children are missing right now. The ombudsman office it created has not yet been fully stood up. The structural transparency problems MDBayNews documented last fall — the category merge, the absence of outcome data, the CJAMS database’s lack of real-time tracking — were not addressed by the legislation.
Passing a law named after a child who died in state care does not protect the children currently in state care. The 26 children DHS confirmed missing today are under the protection of the same agency, the same data infrastructure, and the same classification system that produced 990 disappearances over five years.
The legislature killed a bill DHS said it couldn’t handle — while hiding data on cases it already has
The same 2026 session that passed Kanaiyah’s Law also quietly killed HB 834 and SB 711, companion bills that would have made the “failure or refusal to provide a child the education required by law” an explicit form of child neglect under Maryland Family Law. Both bills died in committee — House Judiciary and Senate Judicial Proceedings, respectively — without advancing to a floor vote.
DHS was among the opponents. The agency’s concern, reflected in fiscal and policy testimony, was that the broad language could trigger an unmanageable surge of mandated CPS investigations over chronic absenteeism. The argument was institutional capacity: DHS said, in effect, that it could not absorb the additional caseload.
That argument sits uneasily alongside everything documented above. The agency that warned the legislature it couldn’t handle more cases is the same agency that has refused for seven months to produce outcome data on 990 children already missing from its existing caseload. It opposed new investigative obligations while stonewalling basic transparency requests about the obligations it already carries. The capacity concern may be legitimate. The credibility to make it is harder to sustain.
Silver Oak adds new displacement risk
Today’s numbers arrive against the backdrop of Silver Oak Academy’s forced closure. State regulators declined to renew the Carroll County facility’s license, and DHS has been relocating its residents since December — with a hard deadline of June 30. Silver Oak generated more than 100 emergency calls since January 2025, including reports of assaults, arsons, and runaway juveniles. A 16-year-old foster child disappeared from the campus in early May and was missing for 14 days before being found 22 miles away in Frederick.
Facility closures are known displacement events in child welfare research — they increase short-term instability for residents, disrupt placements, and raise runaway risk. Relocating an unknown number of Silver Oak residents in the same month that DHS confirms 26 children are already missing is not a reassuring combination. DHS has not provided public figures on how many Silver Oak residents have been successfully relocated or how many remain in transition.
What DHS still hasn’t answered
As of today, the following questions remain publicly unanswered — some of them since October 2025:
MDBayNews filed follow-up MPIA requests last fall for aggregate outcome data on the 990 cases, recovery rates, and the internal 2021 memo authorizing the category merge under Policy #23-01. Seven months later, those requests remain unfulfilled. A source assisting MDBayNews in obtaining the data was contacted again this week; as of publication, no response has been received. DHS has not provided the number of children from the 990 who were never recovered. It has not provided Maryland’s 2026 trafficking involvement rate for missing foster youth — a figure that matters because national averages show 17 percent of missing foster children are connected to child sex trafficking. And as of this morning, it has not explained why it took two weeks and a published news story to answer a question about how many children it is currently responsible for finding.
The agency’s press secretary confirmed the 26 figure in an email Wednesday morning, describing them as being in “runaway status.” That is the same language, and the same classification architecture, that has been in place since 2021.
A pattern, not an incident
What Maryland’s DHS has demonstrated across this story is not a series of isolated failures. It is a consistent institutional posture: release the minimum required, classify broadly to reduce apparent severity, and respond to transparency requests only under direct public pressure.
The 990-child figure was never volunteered — it required an MPIA request. The 26 current missing children were never volunteered — they required two weeks of repeated press inquiries and a published accountability story. The outcome data for those 990 cases has still never been provided. The internal memo authorizing the 2021 category merge has still never been released.
Twenty-six children are currently missing from Maryland state care. At the current historical rate, roughly 200 more will go missing before the end of this year. Kanaiyah’s Law is on the books. The ombudsman it created is not yet operational. The database it relies on still uses a classification system designed, in 2021, to make the problem harder to see.
Maryland has had seven months since MDBayNews first documented this pattern to get ahead of it. Instead, it took a reporter two weeks to get a number the state should publish every week without being asked.
Prior MDBayNews coverage: Maryland Admits Nearly 1,000 Foster Children Missing Since 2020 — Most Are Teenage Girls (Oct. 22, 2025)
Related Father & Co. coverage: Hotel Room, No Second Chances — The Kanaiyah Ward Case (Nov. 2025); Maryland Just Created an Independent Watchdog for Foster Kids (April 2026); Baltimore Child Sex Trafficking Indictment Highlights Growing Crisis (Feb. 2026)
Sources: Maryland DHS, MPIA #25-120 (Oct. 22, 2025); Fox45/Spotlight on Maryland (May 27, 2026); Fox45/Spotlight on Maryland (May 19–21, 2026 — Silver Oak closure); DHS Policy #23-01; COMAR 07.02.11.18; Father & Co. (April 13, 2026 — Kanaiyah’s Law); Maryland General Assembly, HB 834 / SB 711 fiscal notes and legislative history (2026RS); WJLA (2026 session recap)
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