Was it bad for the children? We couldn’t help wondering as we read the Oregon Department of Human Services report reviewing contracting to take care of some of the state’s neediest children.

The report is heartbreaking, frustrating and pathetic, all at once. State employees must feel the same or worse.

The report goes into detail about mistakes in oversight and controls. There are plans for improvements by the state — some of which have already been made.

The report does not focus on any impacts on the 43 children provided care under these contracts. When we asked, DHS told us other investigations are ongoing and that the department did increase monitoring of the children once concerns were raised.

Dynamic Life, a religious nonprofit, was taking care of some children for the state with temporary lodging. The contract’s beginnings were when the Child Welfare Division was having trouble finding housing for a child in 2022 who had “challenging behaviors” after being through “severe trauma.”

Care for that child was apparently successful. Dynamic Life was allowed to grow to serve more children for the state. In October 2022 the contract was expanded to $500,000. Districts in other parts of the state began using the services over the course of the next year. The contract was later expanded to up to $12 million.

Dynamic Life was not licensed by the state. Its type of care did not fit neatly into the categories of the state’s licenses. There was an attempt, though, to require incident reports and daily logs, which is similar to what is required of other licensed entities.

Concerns began to arise in July 2023 after social media posts by people working for Dynamic Life that “might be harmful to children in the care of Child Welfare,” the report says. Then in August questions were raised about background checks for employees. The Oregon Department of Human Services began an investigation in October 2023.

The money involved was high per child per day. OPB reported in November 2023 how the contract enabled Dynamic Life to be paid multiples of what foster parents did to care for children. Dynamic Life was paid up to $2,916 per day to care for every teenager in its care. A foster parent in Oregon only gets about $800 per month with an additional few hundred dollars per month more if a child has high needs.

The Department of Human Services noticed Dynamic Life in December that it was going to terminate the contract as of Jan. 10.

So many things went wrong. The contract was expanded without requiring oversight. Background checks were done for some employees of Dynamic Life and not for others. And when performance issues arose with the contractor, state staff were apparently unclear how that should be handled.

The core problem is not that the state government let a contract get out of control, though that is a problem. It’s that again there is another chapter in how Oregon let down the neediest of children.