by Chris Andrews
April 16, 2008

Jack Kresnak’s stories had an edge to them. At times even a snarkiness. They made him angry. They made him cry.

And why not? He came across two little girls eating rats because they were so hungry. An eight-year-old boy “without a bad bone in his body“ charged with a felony for riding his bike across wet cement. He chronicled young boys and girls murdered by their parents. Foster children of all ages missing, and no one even looking for them.

“I never planned to be a child advocate, didn’t even know what one was specifically. I just started getting mad,” Kresnak says. “I guess I was empathetic, sympathetic to what happens to kids. I just started getting an attitude, and people started telling me I was a child advocate.”

Now, Kresnak has packed up 38 years of journalism, a boatload of awards and a raging passion for protecting vulnerable kids and come to Lansing to become president and CEO of the advocacy group Michigan’s Children. “The children need a loud voice here,” he says. “And I intend to be that voice.”

It’s an unusual — and yet obvious — career change for a reporter who started at the Detroit Free Press in 1969 as a teen sharpening pencils and filling glue pots. He loved the job, the paper, and long thought they’d have to carry him out of the Freep feet first.

But when he heard last August that Sharon Claytor Peters was leaving her Michigan Children’s post, “Something clicked. I said maybe I could do that job.”

Strong backing from powerful figures in child welfare circles helped Kresnak land the post in a 49-candidate field, though the choice wasn’t made before he had to decide whether to take a buyout offered at the newspaper. Former Department of Human Services Director Marianne Udow said his extensive knowledge of the child welfare system, along with great communications skills, are a powerful combination.

“Before I even started my work at the department, I sat down with Jack and asked him to give me his perspective on the child welfare system. He really had a great influence on my thinking,” said Udow, director from 2004–07. “He had a very strong view that children were, in the end, overall better off with their families than if they were removed from their families and put into foster family situations.”

Kresnak, who began the job in February, acknowledges there’s plenty to learn. He’s only beginning to know key lawmakers and to better understand policy analysis. Running an office and raising money are new to him as well.

He says Michigan’s Children has an important role to play in building bipartisan support for programs and policies that benefit children. One of its top priorities is supporting a $30 million increase in funding for early childhood education proposed by Governor Jennifer Granholm.

Kresnak said he is nonpartisan and believes lawmakers in both parties understand that investing in children will in the long run save the state money.

“I like the idea that this organization is independent, that we don’t get any government money, that our work and our recommendations are all about the kids,” he said. “When we go to the legislature and recommend something, they know we are not trying to get their money, but that we think they ought to spend their money in specific ways that will help our children — especially at-risk children — to thrive and to become well-educated and law abiding citizens.”

Photo by Bruce Giffin

Telling children’s stories
Kresnak began covering juvenile justice at the Free Press in 1988, a year after the newspaper ran a series about “Young Outlaws” and the revolving door juvenile justice system. He sought out the beat after spending a year covering drug dealers.

“I didn’t have an agenda other than finding good human interest stories. That was my purpose,” Kresnak said in an interview in the Michigan’s Children offices three blocks south of the Capitol.

The stories were often gripping, heart-breaking, maddening. He earned a reputation for caring for troubled kids, and sources supplied him, sometimes illegally, with documents to fully lay out stories.

Politicians and bureaucrats paid attention.

A series of articles in 1994 led to the creation of the Office of Children’s Ombudsman to investigate problems in child protective services, foster care and adoptions.

In 2000 he wrote a series on the life and death of Ariana Swinson, a two-year-old girl who was abused and murdered by her parents near Port Huron. His reporting exposed failures in the child welfare system. His persistence led to new laws aimed at preventing similar tragedies.

After the series ran, then-State Rep. Lauren Hager (R-Port Huron) led a special committee to investigate child welfare and drafted legislation strengthening the Children’s Ombudsman by, among other things, providing subpoena power.

Hager said the law — which became known as Ariana’s Law and passed on Hager’s final day in session — never would have passed without Kresnak’s journalistic prodding. The lawmaker said the Granholm administration had indicated its opposition.

“Jack wrote a front-page article in the Free Press, saying this bill is going to the Senate,” Hager said. “I give him a tremendous amount of credit for bringing it to bear and having Gov. Granholm actually see the value of it.”

When Granholm signed the bill into law in January 2005, both Hager and Kresnak were present. “It was a proud day to be there when the governor signed something that you created or had a hand in creating,” Kresnak said.

Missing foster children
In 2002 Kresnak started writing stories about missing foster care children, including one found on the streets of Dallas begging for money so her mother could buy crack cocaine. Family Independence Agency Director Doug Howard heatedly insisted the children were not missing, but simply “absent without legal permission.” To Kresnak, it was a distinction without a difference.

Supreme Court Justice Maura Corrigan said the articles convinced then-Gov. John Engler that there was a serious problem and ultimately led to better coordination between the Department of Human Services and the courts. The chief judges in every jurisdiction now have a docket of children who go missing.

“The judge holds hearings and calls in the social worker and asks what efforts have been made,” said Corrigan, who nominated Kresnak for the Wade H. McCree Award for Excellence in Legal Journalism, which he won in 2003. “As a consequence of this, we found between 75 and 80 percent of the children who go missing every year. That’s a huge change.”

Corrigan also said that now-pending legislation to address the problems of “legal orphans” whose parents’ rights have been terminated is the result of Kresnak’s work.

Corrigan, who backed him for the job, is confident he will do outstanding work.

“Jack can walk into any room in the state of Michigan and have instant credibility,” Corrigan said. “That puts a social agency director a foot ahead of most of his or her counterparts.”

Chris Andrews is the award-winning former politics editor of the Lansing State Journal.