Beyond the Report is public. The reading page is dajai.io/beyond-the-report. The author is Tarsha Stewart, M.A.Ed. She is a child protective services investigator in Clark County, Las Vegas, and this is her first book.
The subtitle is the assignment. A Parent's Guide to Understanding Child Protective Services, the Courts, and the Road to Reunification. It is written for the person who meets the system at the door and has never been handed a map.
What she is qualified to explain
The media kit states the record plainly. Tarsha Stewart holds a B.A. in Sociology from UNLV and an M.A. in Education from Pepperdine. She has spent more than 20 years in child welfare in Las Vegas, and the last 15 of those as a CPS investigator with the Clark County Department of Family Services. The book is an insider account that also names the failures of the field. That combination is the reason the manuscript exists. A guide that only defends the agency is a brochure. A guide that only attacks it is not useful to a parent who still has a hearing on the calendar.
The one-line pitch in the kit is the right length for a search result. A 21-year investigator pulls back the curtain on a system millions of families fear and almost no one understands, with the honesty to defend the work and confront its failures.
What the book walks through
The chapters follow the path a family actually walks. Why CPS becomes involved. What investigators look for. How a safety decision gets made. What court looks like. What it takes to bring a family back together. Later chapters turn to the harder facts of the field: poverty mistaken for neglect, the unequal weight of the system on Black and Native families, and the cost that every removal carries even when removal is the decision that protects a child.
Three lines from the book are the ones worth keeping in a short post.
CPS is not in the business of measuring love. It is in the business of assessing safety.
A parent who cannot provide is not the same as a parent who will not protect. A system that confuses the two does harm in the name of help.
Removal is sometimes necessary. It is never free.
Those sentences are the argument. The rest of the book is the procedure and the evidence around them.
The numbers the kit is willing to print
The kit does not ask the reader to take the tone on faith. It points at federal and county figures, and it names the sources.
In federal fiscal year 2023, 546,159 U.S. children were determined to be maltreatment victims, and neglect, not abuse, was about two-thirds of those findings. That is HHS, Child Maltreatment 2023. Kim and colleagues, in the American Journal of Public Health in 2017, estimated that 37.4 percent of all children, and 53.0 percent of Black children, experience a CPS investigation by age 18. Doyle's work in the American Economic Review and the Journal of Political Economy found that children on the margin of removal did two to three times worse on adult crime when they were placed than when they were kept home. A one-thousand-dollar income boost through the EITC was linked, in Berger and colleagues 2017, to 8 to 10 percent less CPS involvement. Interdisciplinary family defense, in Gerber and colleagues, cut time in foster care by about four months with no loss of safety.
Clark County's own 2024 snapshot, from the Department of Family Services, is the local picture. 30,484 reports. 12,087 investigations. More children placed with relatives, 1,225, than in foster care, 651. Nevada's maltreatment numbers rose about 32 percent from 2019 to 2023, the largest increase of any state in that HHS report, even while the national count fell.
A blog post is not the book. Anyone who needs the footnotes should read the book. The point of listing the figures here is to show that the public page is an evidence book, not a memoir with numbers sprinkled on top.
Who it is for
Parents who have a case, or who are afraid they might. Caseworkers, judges, and advocates who want the same map the parent is holding, so the conversation in court is about the same facts. The ISBN on the kit is 978-1-963789-01-0. The category is parenting and social science. The manuscript runs about 24,000 words.
The public reading page is the copy that is online now. Start there.
FAQ
Where is the book?
https://dajai.io/beyond-the-report
Who wrote it?
Tarsha Stewart, M.A.Ed., a CPS investigator with Clark County Department of Family Services in Las Vegas.
Is this legal advice?
No. The book explains the process. A parent with a hearing still needs a lawyer for advice on that case.
What is the ISBN?
978-1-963789-01-0, as printed in the media kit.