PHOENIX — The director of Arizona’s Department of Child Safety wants to change how foster care providers handle some runaway cases, suggesting group homes try to find missing children themselves before calling police, ABC15 reported.
Director Kathryn Ptak raised the idea Wednesday on KTAR’s Mike Broomhead show, months after ABC15 reported that Queen Creek police received more than 600 missing-person calls in under four years from a group home campus that includes Canyon State Academy and Desert Lily Academy.
“If you’re in foster care, we have to call the police, and now it’s a law enforcement matter for something that really sometimes is normal childhood behavior,” Ptak said, adding that most children missing from care come back on their own within 24 hours. She said immediate police reports would still make sense for higher-risk youth, such as prior trafficking victims and pregnant teens.
Advocates warn against loosening the rules. They point to Xion Ervin-Jenkins, 15, who was found dead of heat exposure six weeks after leaving Canyon State Academy in 2025, and to Emily Pike and Zariah Dodd, foster youth who died after running away from group homes that year.
Sources: ABC15. Thee Arizona Times uses AI-assisted reporting reviewed against the sources listed.
Photo: David Jiang / CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
