Senator Walley’s Bill Will Deny Children The Right To Sue (Op-Ed By Connie Reguli, J.D.)

HB 1879 / SB 1470

Image Credit: Senator Page Walley / Facebook & capitol.tn.gov

By Connie Reguli, J.D. 

On the heels of the December 2025 audit, which revealed that the Department of Children’s Services under Commissioner Quin continued to operate a battered ship that failed children across the State of Tennessee, two state legislators propose that all of DCS’s nonprofit contractors should be immune from civil damages for all acts and omissions of its employees, volunteers, and caregivers.  A slim exception provides relief if the injured plaintiff can wiggle through a showing that the defendant agency failed to screen or train employees.  HB1879 (Hicks – R6). SB1470 (Walley – R26).  

DCS’s failure to properly investigate children harmed in State’s custody. 

A plaintiff, in any action brought against a DCS contractor, will be, of course, a CHILD; a child injured while in state’s custody, separated from their parents, and under the care and control of a third-party contractor. An entire section of the 2025  audit, i.e, the first area of concern and twenty-five pages of the report, are dedicated to the safety issues in the “special investigations unit” (SIU).  The SIU is specialized to investigate reports of harm to children caused by individuals in official roles, such as foster parents, teachers, daycare workers, and provider staff.  

The 2025 audit noted that in the DCS 2022 audit, children remained in unsafe situations because management did not meet key timelines for child SIU investigations.  After the 2024-2025 budget hearing, Commissioner Quin was able to fund nineteen new SUI investigator positions.  The 2025 audit shows that children are still left in unsafe environments with authority figures (such as foster parents and teachers) and 51% of those cases are not properly documented or suffer from untimely investigations.  Of the 65 cases reviewed for the audit, only four were substantiated as abuse or neglect which was well below the national standard.  Policies are inconsistent.  Investigators sympathized with perpetrators.  And, SIU investigators too often turned over the investigation to the Provider Quality Team, i.e., the contract provider.  Which brings us back to HB 1879/SB 1470.  

DCS’s growing “franchise” style of government services.

For those who believe that DCS operates as government services for children, the Tennessee Checkbook tells a different story.  For the last fiscal year, Tennessee taxpayers paid $782,100,789 to vendors to provide services for children through DCS.  

These vendors are paid millions of dollars to provide foster care, community-based care, and child welfare services.  DCS essentially manages dozens of “franchise-setting” third party providers.  Even though DCS still employs more than 4,000 state employees on the payroll, the services have been diluted and handed off to contractors.  

The vendors/contractors receiving the bulk of taxpayer dollars are providing foster care services.  That means they select the foster parents, train them, and bear the responsibility for supervising the child’s stay in that home.  The 2024-2025 budget showed totals for these top vendors: 

Youth Villages $155,901,177

Youth Opportunity Investments $57,310,453

Omni Visions Inc $51,427,477

Keysgroup Holding LLC $30,189,651

Camelot Care Centers LLC $24,061,532

Parkridge Valley $17,489,924

Audits, lawsuits, and courts all reveal harm to children in state’s custody. 

Not only did the 2025 audit show that DCS did not protect children when special abuse investigations occurred, multiple lawsuits filed against DCS and its contractors show the high risk for children in the custody of the state. 

Currently, there are two class actions lawsuits.  One lawsuit  filed in 2024 describes that children were denied medical and mental health treatment in detention facilities and faced abusive attacks that amount to torture: a 17-year-old boy beaten more than 31 times, a 15-year-old girl shackled, dragged across the floor and placed in a solitary cell, where she was later pepper sprayed while naked, a single Middle Tennessee juvenile detention facility with 48 instances of pepper sprayings each month, kids left in solitary 23 hours a day, sleeping on bare bed frames in bug-infested cells with no education or mental health care provided, and multiple DCS facilities where “bounties” are used to induce kids to attack other kids, singling out those who filed grievances against staff or conditions. Ramen noodles were a popular reward for kids who beat other kids, the lawsuit noted.  Disability Rights Tennessee explained that they sought to remedy these conditions for two years prior to filing the lawsuit.  

The second class action lawsuit filed in 2025 described disabled children in foster care warehoused for months without proper care and denied access to their family.  The lawsuit states that DCS historically “contracts with facilities which possess well-known track records for physical, mental, and sexual abuse.” 

After a teenage girl died in the custody of Youth Villages in 2023, another mother reported that her son had been sexually assaulted at a Youth Villages facility in 2015. 

In 2020, Youth Opportunity Investments (YOI) was sued in Roane County by an employee claiming a hostile work environment due to staff having sex with the children.  Even after this lawsuit brought the abuses to the attention of DCS and the public, the YOI continued to get larger and larger contracts in Tennessee.  In 2023, New Hampshire advocates came to Tennessee to inspect Bledsoe Youth Academy which was housing New Hampshire youth.  They found appalling conditions.  Bledsoe, Rosewood, and Davidson County Juvenile Detention were all operated by YOI.  In 2022, an administrator at Rosewood Youth Academy was arrested after firing shots at a car filled with runaways and in 2019, four youth escaped from the Davidson County facility raising sharp criticism for the negligent operation of the facility.   

This year, a juvenile court judge found that a five-year-old disabled autistic child had been bounced from home to home by the StepStone private agency (also known as Alternative Youth Services).  The child did not receive physical therapy, occupational therapy, neurological services, or ortho care while under StepStone’s supervision.  The child reported physical abuse in the StepStone foster home.  The judge found that this already fragile child suffered “significant regression” while in foster care.  The child was released after suffering four months of brutality.  The court specifically stated that the case brought to him was full of blame-shifting between StepStone and DCS, and that StepStone did not update information about the child in the DCS TFacts computer system.  The circumstances reflected a comprehensive failure of the system as a whole.  

Another child, a mere nine years old, was taken into state’s custody by DCS and was moved from a psychiatric facility to a StepStone foster home that was not qualified or trained to deal with such high needs children.  To control his conduct in the home, he was placed on seven separate psychotropic medications which resulted in a zombie-like state and a drooling incoherent child.  While placed in the same StepStone foster home with the autistic child, he was physically abused.  He was moved to a private Youth Villages group home in Memphis.  In both cases, DCS knew about and hid the abusive treatment of the children.  

Both of these cases required an inquiry by the Special Investigations Unit, which has already been found to be incompetent.  

Alternative Youth Services, Inc. (ALS) received more than six million dollars a year for fiscal years 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 from Tennessee taxpayers.  Currently, they receive $600,000 a month through DCS.  While it is true that ALS is not operating as a non-profit, it does have a sister nonprofit, Threshold Center for Alternative Youth Services, Inc. and the blanket of complete immunity in this legislation will quickly inspire them to convert or reinvent their corporate structure. 

A child’s limited ability to find compensation when harmed in State custody. 

When a person is harmed by the “state”, like a state employee, their opportunity to be made whole through money damages is restricted.  The Eleventh Amendment of the U.S. Constitution prevents an individual from suing the state.  An individual can attempt to file a lawsuit with the Tennessee Claims Commission under Title 9, Chapter 8.  But those claims are limited to the direct damages due to the acts of omissions of state employees and punitive damages are not available no matter how heinous their conduct.  And if an action is filed with the Claims Commission, the plaintiff (injured person) waives the right to seek damages in any other court or any other cause of action, such as a civil rights claim.  

An injured person can file a federal lawsuit under 42 U.S.C. Sec. 1983 for violation of one’s civil rights, such as unlawful search and seizure, due process violations, toxic conditions of confinement, and injury, however, these claims are fraught with challenges, including the broad grant of qualified immunity to the state employees.  Generally, “qualified immunity” requires the Plaintiff to jump through the proverbial legal hoop, often losing, to show that this constitutional right has been “clearly established”.  This near impossible legal feat often depends on semantics and legal rhetoric carefully crafted and argued by the Tennessee Attorney General’s staff to block recovery for the injured plaintiff.  

Where a private corporation provides a function “traditionally attributable to the state”, the private corporation is deemed to be acting under color of law and therefore, can be sued for a civil rights violation for monetary damages and attorney fees.  

When Tennessee’s home grown private prison industry grew out of Correction Corporation of America (CCA), now known as CoreCivic, lawsuits sprouted wings for the broad abuses against prisoners.  This opened litigation from a new angle.  By 1994, the federal courts had clarified that a private party, in other words the employee of a private corporation, is not faced with the conflict of public officials and is not principally interested in the good of the public at large.  “A private party is governed only by self-interest and is not invested with the responsibility of executing the duties of a public official in the public interest.”  There is always the risk that the private entity will diverge from the public interest and seek to make a profit instead of serving the public.  Therefore, employees of private corporations are NOT entitled to qualified immunity and may be sued for money damages.  See Manis v. CCA (1994).  

Immunity leaves children at risk of harm with no recourse. 

Now, back to HB 1879/SB 1470, where does this leave an injured child victim.  This bill seeks to grant immunity from money damages, full stop.  Supporters of the bill may say that it does not entirely prevent lawsuits.  The bill provides that if the injured plaintiff can show that the third-party contractor failed to do a background check, or failed to train, or failed to take personnel action against the offender, the lawsuit can proceed.  However, this puts a threshold burden on the injured plaintiff.  This information is rarely known to the injured person.  For all practical purposes, the bill will prevent ANY injury claims against third-party contractors who are entrusted with the most vulnerable children in this state.  

It is unclear why Senator Walley, a psychologist, a businessman, Baptist Minister, and former DCS commissioner, would garner favor towards private contractors over protecting children.  Walley moved to Alabama to serve as Commissioner of Human Services from 2004 to 2008. In returning to Tennessee, just prior to his campaign for state senate, he was the chief public policy officer for St. Francis Children and Families Ministries. St. Francis provides the largest segment of third-party contract foster care services in Kansas and Oklahoma.  

Children have no choice when they are ordered into the custody of the State of Tennessee.  Most of those children are not criminals but have been cast into the system due to circumstances beyond their control.  They are held hostages by the state and are the token required for the state to receive millions of dollars in federal funding.  The state has a heightened duty to protect them from harm while in custody.  Contractors who elect to engage as business partners with the State are well equipped to provide insurance for the acts or omissions of their employees like any other business.  Children injured in their care deserve to have the right to sue for damages.  

There simply is no public interest served by granting immunity to contract providers.  Transparency and accountability of government would require the opposite: full disclosure of entity history of litigation, full disclosure of entity ownership and financial interests, full disclosure of corporate structure, owners, and profit structure, and finally, full insurability to protect our children. 

This bill should be rejected. 

Say NO to HB 1879 / SB 1470.

Contact the sponsors: 

Hicks 615-741-1717 / rep.tim.hicks@capitol.tn.gov 

Walley 615-741-2368 /  sen.page.walley@capitol.tn.gov 

The bill in the Senate has been assigned to the Judiciary.  

The members are listed here.  

Todd Gardenhire 615-741-6682 / sen.todd.gardenhire@capitol.tn.gov 

Kerry Roberts 615-741-4499 / sen.kerry.roberts@capitol.tn.gov 

Paul Rose 615-741-1967 / sen.paul.rose@capitol.tn.gov 

Bobby Harshbarger 615-741-5761 / sen.bobby.harshbarger@capitol.tn.gov 

Sara Kyle 615-741-4167 / sen.sara.kyle@capitol.tn.gov 

London Lamar 615-741-2509 / sen.london.lamar@capitol.tn.gov 

John Stevens 615-741-4576 / sen.john.stevens@capitol.tn.gov 

Brent Taylor 615-741-3036 / sen.brent.taylor@capitol.tn.gov 

Dawn White 615-741-6853 / sen.dawn.white@capitol.tn.gov 

Connie Reguli J.D. is a former family and juvenile law attorney and political activist for child welfare reform.  

She organized the Family Forward Project through social media and has 27,000 families nationwide working towards reform.  She can be contacted at connie.familyforward@gmail.com or through Facebook messenger.