Hillsborough Foster Agency Quietly Split Hundreds of Families, Investigation Finds

Essence Wright is 26 years old and lives in Tampa, Florida. Nearly three years ago, her daughter was removed from her care not through a foster care court proceeding, but through what's known as a temporary custody transfer — an informal arrangement that kept mother and daughter apart for almost three years.

Wright's case is one piece of a much larger pattern uncovered by a Tampa Bay Times investigation, which found that Hillsborough County's lead foster care agency, Children's Network of Hillsborough, pushed hundreds of parents and children apart outside of the county's usual foster care system. The investigation was reported by health reporter Lauren Peace and data reporter Teghan Simonton, who detailed how families like Wright's were separated through informal arrangements that bypassed the courts, formal case files, and the oversight that comes with the traditional foster care process.

A System Rebuilt After Scandal

Children's Network took over Hillsborough County's foster care system on July 1, 2022, stepping in after the county's previous provider, Eckerd Connects, collapsed under scrutiny. The Pinellas County Sheriff's Office had opened a criminal investigation into Eckerd Connects in November 2021 after finding foster children sleeping on cots and under desks in unlicensed offices, according to WTSP. State officials ended Eckerd's contracts across Pinellas, Pasco, and Hillsborough counties by July 2022 in response.

Before that collapse, the scale of the crisis was staggering. In February 2022, the Tampa Bay Times reported that Eckerd Connects had assigned up to 154 foster children to a single caseworker — more than nine times the maximum workload recommended by the Child Welfare League of America. That overload contributed to the systemic breakdowns that led children to sleep in offices rather than licensed homes.

A Program Credited With Cutting Foster Numbers In Half

After taking over, Children's Network launched what it called an Intensive Family Services Team, a program the agency credited with reducing formal foster care placements by half and serving more than 6,000 families, per the Times investigation. The drop in foster care numbers drew praise from local institutions; in December 2025, the DeBartolo Family Foundation awarded Children's Network its $25,000 Spirit of Humanity Award, citing the agency's success in keeping families intact and reducing foster removals.

But the newspaper's reporting found that much of that statistical decline was achieved by diverting hundreds of children into informal custody arrangements conducted outside the state's formal tracking systems — arrangements critics describe as a kind of hidden or shadow foster care operating under the banner of family preservation. The agency inherited an acute placement shortage: Children's Network CEO Terri Balliet acknowledged in April 2023 that foster youth in Hillsborough County had continued sleeping in unlicensed settings such as office spaces during the agency's initial transition, even as the agency reported reaching zero children in unlicensed settings only weeks earlier, according to WTSP.

Why Agencies Might Avoid Formal Foster Care

The financial incentives behind such diversions are documented in the agency's own paperwork. In a March 2023 legislative budget request submitted to the Florida Senate, Children's Network estimated that keeping a child out of formal foster care through non-judicial, intensive in-home supervision saves approximately $16,000 per child. Under Florida's privatized Community-Based Care model, enacted in 1996, the Department of Children and Families contracts foster and safety management out to 18 regional lead agencies operating on fixed state funding — meaning formal foster placements can eat into an agency's net operating resources.

Legal scholars have been raising alarms about this practice for years. In an April 2020 study published in the Stanford Law Review, legal scholar Josh Gupta-Kagan coined the term hidden foster care to describe how child protection agencies induce parents to transfer physical custody to relative caregivers under threat of court removal — a process that bypasses judicial oversight and constitutional due process. Parents in these arrangements are deprived of court-appointed legal representation, and the relatives who take in the children receive none of the state financial subsidies available to licensed foster parents.

A National Pattern Draws Federal Attention

Hillsborough's numbers echo a much larger national trend. A December 2021 investigation by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine estimated that roughly 250,000 children are diverted into informal shadow foster care each year nationwide — a figure roughly equal to the number of children who enter the formal foster system annually.

That scale has prompted action in Washington. U.S. Senators John Cornyn and Jon Ossoff introduced Senate Bill 5214, the Foster Care Placement Transparency Act, in September 2024, which would require state child welfare agencies to track and report informal hidden foster care arrangements to the federal government. The bill followed a 13-month Senate Subcommittee investigation into unmonitored child welfare practices nationwide, as reported by WABE.

For Wright, the policy debate is measured in years lost. Nearly three years passed between the temporary custody transfer that separated her from her daughter and any resolution — time that unfolded, according to the Times investigation, largely outside the formal system built to provide oversight, legal representation, and a clear path back home.