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 House voted to kill it. The governor declined to renominate its leader. Then that gutted, leaderless office caught state employees breaking a child’s bone on camera. If the House had gotten its way, 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. Its statutory home is RSA 21-V, which created the office as an independent agency attached to the Department of Administrative Services; it was recodified there in 2020 from RSA 170-G:18–:19. 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 House 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 researcher who had spent eleven years doing similar work in Connecticut and had written her doctoral dissertation on children’s ombudsman offices. 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. There are now 33 similar positions nationwide. 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 hundreds of millions from the governor’s proposed budget, and 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. House votes to eliminate the office fell largely along party lines, with Republicans favoring the cut, and the full House passed a budget with the office zeroed out.

Sanchez’s answer to McGuire’s charge was on the record: “It is very concerning to me that someone could throw out a wild accusation like that.” And Rep. Rosemarie Rung, a Democrat from Merrimack, put the stakes in front of the chamber: “It’s not a hypothetical, but real to those of us in Merrimack who were left stunned and grief-stricken. The Office of the Child Advocate was created to prevent tragedies like these.”

The Senate restored the office, but at reduced funding. A $500,000 cut dropped the staff from nine to four. Senate President Sharon Carson 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 from 2007 to 2015. 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. Sanchez stayed on in holdover status — unfired, unconfirmed, running a four-person office with no indication whether the governor wanted it to continue. Holdover is not an irregularity: RSA 21-V:3 provides that the child advocate serves a four-year term “and until a successor is appointed and qualified.”

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 roughly 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 approximately three and a half minutes on March 17 — a restraint that broke the child’s bone, that was contradicted by the facility’s own internal reports, and that was followed by a delay in 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

The House zeroed this office out, and only the Senate put it back — at two-thirds of its former staff. That is how close New Hampshire came to having no 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. Sanchez walked into Bledsoe and found barbed wire and a boy eating alone on a carpet. The state’s own placement process had not produced that finding. 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 about $239 million paid to victims over four years. The Office of the Child Advocate was created specifically to prevent a recurrence. Then the House tried to eliminate it to save $2.2 million — about one percent of what the state has already paid out.

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. 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 in 2025 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 state has paid about $239 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.

Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a dated note identifying what changed and when. The corrections policy and the corrections register are public, and correction notes are never removed.