Trust is a hard thing to offer when the state takes a child away from his or her parents. How does the public know the Department of Human Services and the court are acting in the child’s best interest? Confidentiality laws, necessary to protect the children involved, prevent outsiders from knowing much about the situation, but it is possible to gain more assurance if a third party were to look into the cases.

Three bills before the Legislature would add an ombudsman to DHS. Although the three vary in scope and authority for the position, the goal is the same in each: To let an independent office look into cases and determine whether the department acted properly. In the highly emotional circumstances that almost always surrounds the removal of a child from a home, the oversight of a trained neutral observer can help parents who have been treated unjustly or tell the public, without going into details, that the removal was in the child’s best interest.

Like many good ideas, the proposal for a DHS ombudsman is not new. The department already has such a position overseeing long-term care and that office gets good marks from all sides. More to the point, DHS already has an unfilled position for an ombudsman of child-welfare services. Funding for the position was suspended in the early 1990s and has yet to be replaced. The last person in that job, interestingly, was Jane Sheehan, who later became commissioner of the department.

DHS, like any other agency, is hardly perfect. But despite protests of some groups in Maine, it is also not a heartless institution bent on breaking up families. Its case workers have a hugely difficult job of sorting out the tangle of emotionally charged family battles that often have no good solution. The public merely sees the aftermath of all this, when the child has been removed, the parents are outraged and no one is willing or able to give enough details to provide a complete picture.

The challenge of this job is all the more reason to have a stronger link to the public. An ombudsman who could explain not the specifics of a case but the process behind it would help public understanding. An announcement from an ombudsman when DHS did err would build confidence in the system overall.

But despite this being an idea that would benefit both the public and the department, lawmakers need to be financially realistic and start small. There’s is no sense establishing wide oversight for an ombudsman’s office if, as before, it loses its funding in economically troubled times. That misleads the public into thinking someone is watching over these cases when, in fact, no one is.

The Legislature would do well to simply supply funding to fill the ombudsman position for child-welfare left vacant for much of the decade. If that works out, the idea could be expanded later. Trust, in both DHS and the Legislature’s funding commitment, is best built in small steps.