MISSOURI, USA — The head of Missouri’s child welfare division will resign effective Nov. 1, a spokesperson for the agency told The Independent on Monday.
Darrell Missey has served as director of the Children’s Division since January 2022. Housed in the Department of Social Services, the agency oversees the foster care system and investigates child abuse and neglect.
The division has seen frequent turnover at the top, though Missey stayed longer than many. He was the sixth director under Gov. Mike Parson, who was sworn into office in 2018. Missey’s three-year tenure is the longest for directors under Parson.
Missey previously spent two decades as a circuit judge in Jefferson County, where he oversaw the juvenile cases. He ran for judge on a platform of criticizing the incumbent circuit judge for being too willing to remove children from their families’ custody and terminate parental rights.
As director of Children’s Division, he was vocal about trying to reduce the number of kids Missouri takes into foster care and shift resources to prevent them from needing to enter the system. When he took over, there were over 14,000 kids in care. Now there are 11,539, as of August.
Missey led a push last year to get legislative funding for 100 new Children’s Division staff positions to focus on prevention efforts, what he called phase one in an effort to “rebuild and reform” his division. At the front-end, Missouri does too little to prevent kids from entering foster care in the first place, he said, and at the back-end, there are too few resources to move foster kids to stable, permanent homes.
He inherited a department under intense scrutiny from lawmakers for issues ranging from missing foster kids and unlicensed boarding schools to severe staffing issues.
Staffing issues, during a tight labor market, led to delayed child welfare investigations. Those backlogged cases have declined in recent months as staffing levels rebounded.
Kayla Ueligger will serve as the interim director of Children’s Division, said Baylee Watts, a spokeswoman for the department of social services. Ueligger is the department’s current operational excellence director.
Ueligger has worked in Children’s Division since 2013, Watts said, with experience as a front-line child abuse and neglect investigator, family centered services and foster care case worker, supervisor and specialist.
“A search will commence for a new director,” Watts said by email but didn’t immediately provide a timeline.
A new governor will take over in January, when Parson leaves office because of term limits. Both of the major party candidates for governor — Republican Mike Kehoe of Jefferson City and Democrat Crystal Quade of Springfield — have publicly expressed support for boosting salaries in Children’s Division to improve recruitment and retention.
This story from the Missouri Independent is published on KSDK.com under the Creative Commons license. The Missouri Independent is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization covering state government, politics and policy.
