By Greg Bishop | The Center Square
The Center Square

(The Center Square) – The number of missing foster children on the radar of the state’s child welfare agency will be clarified this week as a potential Illinois Statehouse candidate looks for answers.

Public records obtained by Bailey Templeton from the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services show in 2023, 16 children did not return to either previous placement or a new one. That number jumped 935% to 166 missing children in 2024.

An agency spokesperson told The Center Square the numbers are “not completely accurate.” Updated numbers were not immediately available through public records requests.

Separate open records requests from both Templeton and The Center Square for updated numbers from the agency were due Friday. The agency delayed the release, saying “the requested records have not been located in the course of routine search and additional efforts are being made to locate them.”

“The records were due to be produced within five business days of October 24, 2025,” DCFS Freedom of Information Act told The Center Square in an email. “I have requested the documents from the necessary division, and it is still working to gather documents, and the FOIA Office is still working to review the documents as well.”

Templeton told The Center Square there needs to be answers.

“Something has happened in the past two years that has made it either easier to lose foster children, or the followthrough or the tracking of these foster children is not being property done,” Templeton said. “So, we’re missing a large amount of children and I feel like this should be getting attention that children are missing and that accountability and oversight should be happening as well.”

A spokesperson for the agency said they want to ensure that they release the “most accurate information” and that there is a “narrative” around the data to be publicly released.

The agency noted it has a Child Intake Recovery Unit, an entire division dedicated to assisting caseworkers in locating missing youth. The spokesperson also said they do track the youth in care that do go missing by where they are placed, how many days they are missing and the date.

“Many of our children who are missing go missing from our group of homes or residential facilities,” the spokesperson said.

Templeton is demanding there be an outside audit of the issue.

“To look at what’s going on with these children, to see if these children that are missing are receiving any state or federal benefits, where that money is going, things of that such,” she said. “Specifically, we need to find these children.”

In a recent management audit of DCFS’s search for missing children, one recommendation made by the Illinois Auditor General in 2014 was partially implemented by 2024. The auditor’s report said 71% of instances they checked where a child went missing, the initial forms could not be provided by the department to ensure accuracy.

“Department Procedure 329, Locating and Returning Missing, Runaway, and Abducted Children, provides the documentation of supervisor reviews through the submission of the CFS 1014 form,” the report said. “As a result of the Department being unable to provide the 43 initial CFS 1014 forms noted above, the auditors also could not test documentation of supervisor reviews.”

When a child goes missing, the agency told The Center Square it reports the matter to local law enforcement, the caseworker provides as much identifying information as possible, to include finger prints if available, and they contact the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, among other steps.

In another partially implemented recommendation from the 2024 management audit, the auditor general’s office found that in only 15% of instances where a child went missing, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children were notified within three hours of when a child was reported missing.