Lauren Hackney got on her toddler’s shoes and her husband, Andrew, carried her down the stairs where he handed his daughter over and waved goodbye. "If you lose someone you love and you really want them and it's like she's your world. It's basically you feel like you lose everything," said Andrew Hackney, after a weekly supervised visitation with his child that lasted only a few hours. It was in October 2021 when their 7-month-old daughter began refusing her bottle. Her pediatrician first reassured the Hackneys that babies sometimes can be fickle with feeding and offered ideas to help her get back her appetite, they said. When she grew lethargic days later, they said, the same doctor told them to take her to the emergency room, where the Hackneys believe medical staff alerted child protective services after they showed up with a baby who was dehydrated and malnourished. That's when they believe their information was fed into the Allegheny Family Screening Tool, which county officials say is standard procedure for neglect allegations. Soon, a social worker appeared to question them, and their daughter was sent to foster care at 8 months old.
As part of a yearlong investigation, The Associated Press obtained the data points underpinning several algorithms deployed by child welfare agencies to understand how they predict which children could be at risk of harm.
