The Office That Almost Didn’t Exist

New Hampshire created its Office of the Child Advocate after two toddlers died in state care. Seven years later, the legislature voted to kill it. The governor tried to replace its leader. Then that gutted, leaderless office caught state employees breaking a child’s bone on camera. If the House had gotten its way last spring, nobody would have taken the call.

Cassandra Sanchez hadn’t left the parking lot. She was sitting in a rental car in Tennessee, staring at what she’d just walked out of — a facility that New Hampshire was paying to treat two of its children and that looked, from the inside, like a prison. Barbed wire around the perimeter. A culture of shame and retaliation behind it. One boy eating lunch alone on a sticky carpet, separated from the other kids. The brochures had promised therapy, field trips, family visits. The reality was a cage.

Sanchez sent an email to state leaders before she started the engine. Bring the boys home. They were back within the month.

That was the Office of the Child Advocate doing its job. An independent watchdog, answerable to no agency, with the authority to access state records and walk into any facility holding New Hampshire children. The office exists because two toddlers died in state care in 2014 and 2015, and the legislature decided someone needed to be watching. Seven years later, the legislature voted to stop watching.

How the Office Was Built

The Office of the Child Advocate was created in 2018, part of a broader overhaul of New Hampshire’s child protection system. A 2016 review by the Center for the Support of Families had found the Division for Children, Youth and Families grossly understaffed, with social worker turnover well above national averages and abuse investigations languishing past their 60-day deadlines. The system was failing. The deaths of two children made the failure impossible to ignore.

Moira O’Neill, the first child advocate, was a Yale-trained researcher who had spent eleven years doing similar work in Connecticut. She built the office from scratch — New Hampshire was the thirteenth state to create one — and turned it into what colleagues called a national model. Thirty-three states now have comparable offices. O’Neill served one four-year term and stepped aside in 2022, saying the office’s strength shouldn’t depend on one person.

Gov. Chris Sununu appointed Cassandra Sanchez to succeed her. Sanchez came from the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families with a child welfare background that O’Neill herself endorsed. She expanded the office’s work, audited out-of-state residential placements like Bledsoe in Tennessee, and pushed for systemic reforms. She did her job. And doing her job made her enemies.

How They Tried to Kill It

In April 2024, Sanchez joined a coalition of child welfare advocates opposing a set of Republican bills: bans on gender-affirming care for minors, prohibitions on transgender girls playing on girls’ sports teams, requirements that teachers disclose students’ sexuality to parents. Sanchez’s position was that these bills threatened children in her care. Multiple Republican lawmakers were furious. Within a year, they moved to eliminate her office.

Rep. Dan McGuire of Epsom led the effort. His initial pitch was simple math: cutting the Office of the Child Advocate would save $2.2 million over two years. The state needed to trim $800 million from the governor’s proposed budget, and McGuire was tasked with finding $200 million of it. The child advocate was a line item.

But when the budget reached the House floor, McGuire changed his argument. The office, he told his colleagues, had “interfered with rather than assisted needed legislation to reform child abuse and child welfare laws.” The cost-cutting rationale gave way to the real one: the watchdog was barking at the wrong people. The House voted 5–4 along party lines to recommend elimination. The full House passed the budget with the office zeroed out.

One lawmaker’s question hung in the room during the debate. Rep. Rosemarie Rung, a Democrat from Merrimack, asked McGuire directly: “Are you sure about the child advocate? They’re the overseer of YDC.”

The Senate restored the office, but at reduced funding. A $500,000 cut dropped the staff from nine to four. Senate President Sharon Carson — the same Republican who had helped create the office in 2018 — fought to keep it alive. Gov. Ayotte said she supported the office too, and would work with the Senate. But when Sanchez’s term expired in January 2026, Ayotte did not renominate her.

The Replacement Who Wasn’t

Ayotte nominated Diana Fenton, an attorney in the Department of Education’s governance unit, to take over. Fenton had worked as an assistant attorney general. She had no child welfare experience. Sanchez warned publicly that the learning curve would be steep. The child welfare system, she said, is “so unique and such a nuanced field” that without direct experience, the new advocate would struggle to do the work that keeps children safe.

Fenton withdrew before the Executive Council could vote on her confirmation, facing criticism over potential conflicts of interest. Ayotte’s office never named a replacement. It never called Sanchez. She stayed on in holdover status — unfired, unconfirmed, running a four-person office with no indication whether the governor wanted it to continue.

On March 9, 2026, a child inside the Sununu Youth Services Center called that office. The child said something was wrong.

What the Office Found

Sanchez sent investigators. They found children locked down for six weeks. No outdoor access. Abbreviated classes. Meals in isolation. A “correctional mindset” replacing the treatment model the facility had promised to adopt. They found security camera footage of a staff member holding a child in an illegal prone restraint for three and a half minutes on March 17 — a restraint that broke the child’s bone, that was misreported in the facility’s own paperwork, and that delayed medical care for the injury.

The Attorney General’s office has since opened an independent investigation. The Senate has formed a subcommittee. The governor says she takes the allegations seriously. The apparatus of accountability is cranking into motion. All of it follows from one phone call, placed by one child, received by an office that the New Hampshire House voted to shut down eleven months earlier.

The Counterfactual

New Hampshire came within one Senate vote of not having a child advocate when that call came in.

Without the Office of the Child Advocate, the call goes nowhere. DCYF — the division that runs the facility — investigates itself. It has done so before. State employees visited the Bledsoe Academy in Tennessee before Sanchez did and reported no concerns. Sanchez walked in and found barbed wire and a boy eating alone on a carpet. The state saw compliance. The watchdog saw a cage.

Without the office, nobody reviews the security footage from March 17. The facility’s internal report — the one that doesn’t match the video — becomes the official record. A child’s broken bone gets buried in paperwork.

Without the office, the six-week lockdown continues. Children stay in their rooms. The one accommodation — standing in a doorway to feel the air — continues as the outer boundary of what the facility considers humane. Nobody from outside the building walks in unannounced, interviews the children, and tells the state to start giving them a full school day again. Sanchez’s team did that. The school schedule resumed on March 16. Absent her intervention, it would not have.

The cost of not having the office is not hypothetical. New Hampshire ran its youth detention system for decades without independent oversight. The result was more than 2,200 abuse claims and a settlement tab approaching a quarter of a billion dollars. The Office of the Child Advocate was created specifically to prevent a recurrence. Then the legislature tried to eliminate it to save $2.2 million — less than one percent of the settlement liability it was designed to avert.

What Happens Now

Sanchez remains in holdover. Her replacement has not been named. Her office has four staff members doing the work that nine used to handle. The legislature that voted to eliminate the office has not reconsidered, and the budget process for FY26–27 remains in flux. The governor who declined to renominate Sanchez is now calling for investigations into abuse that Sanchez uncovered.

Only one state in the country has eliminated its Office of the Child Advocate once creating one: New Jersey, under Gov. Chris Christie, in 2010. Former child advocate Moira O’Neill warned New Hampshire lawmakers last year about where that path leads. Budget cuts to children’s services produce tragedies. Tragedies produce public outcry. Outcry produces new offices. And then the next round of budget cuts targets those offices again.

New Hampshire has a choice that the numbers make simple. The child advocate’s office costs roughly $1 million a year and employs four people. It caught, on camera, abuse that every other arm of state government missed. The YDC settlement fund has paid out $240 million for abuse that happened when no such office existed. The math is not complicated. The question is whether anyone in Concord is willing to do it.

Dexter Dow is the editor of Granite State Report and the author of Generational Malpractice.