Cassandra Sanchez, of Methuen, Massachusetts, will be the state’s second director for the Office of the Child Advocate if confirmed by the executive council.
Gov. Chris Sununu nominated Sanchez Thursday to oversee the state agency responsible for child protection and welfare cases, and to “assure that the best interests of children are protected.”
Sanchez worked at the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families since 2016 as a “kinship supervisor.”
“With experience on the front lines in Massachusetts, Cassandra will bring a valuable perspective to our child welfare system while helping us increase lines of communications with our neighboring state,” Sununu said in a statement.
Moira O’Neill, who was appointed New Hampshire’s first State Child Advocate after the position was created in 2017, announced last year that she would not seek a second, four-year term. O’Neill had been an assistant child advocate in Connecticut for 11 years before coming to New Hampshire.
The transition comes as New Hampshire’s Division for Children, Youth and Families has come under fire for the disappearance of Harmony Montgomery.
The young girl, age 5 at the time she was last seen, has been missing since 2019, but her disappearance was not reported until late 2021. She was in the legal custody of her father, Adam Montgomery, when she vanished. He has since been charged with several crimes, including failing to have Harmony in his custody, and has pleaded not guilty.
Manchester police records show that the Division for Children, Youth and Families had repeated involvement in the case. Crystal Renee Sorey, Harmony’s mother, lost custody of her daughter after substance abuse struggles. She reported her daughter missing in November 2021 after not seeing her since Easter in 2019.
In an email to the office of Manchester’s mayor, she explained that DCYF had an open case on her daughter but hadn’t done anything to help her.
“DCYF failed my child 100%, and everyone in our family will vouch for that,” she wrote in the email.
Moira O’Neill, the outgoing director for the office of the Child Advocate, said Harmony’s disappearance isn’t necessarily a systemic failure.
The Office of the Child Advocate was established shortly after the agency came under fire for the death of two children, Sadee Willott in 2014 and Brielle Gage in 2015.
Child protection workers were involved in Sadee Willott’s life just days after her birth. Over the first 21 months of her short life, caseworkers met with Sadee’s family 30 times to check whether the toddler was being physically abused and neglected. Every report was dismissed, except for the last – but by then it was far too late. When the ruling was made, Sadee had already been dead for more than a year.
In the year before Brielle Gage died, DCYF received at least five reports of abuse and neglect involving the toddler or her four brothers, who ranged in age from nine months to 8 years old.
A 2017 Monitor investigation found that crushing caseloads, high staff turnover and a lack of thorough investigations were to blame for the oversights.
Sununu has publicly stood by the division as Director Joseph Ribsam has tried to improve outcomes.
“No, the system is not in disarray,” Sununu told WMUR. “We brought in a whole new team just a few years ago, revamped our quality assurance and control process, and they work very hard on all these cases all across the state.”