Steven D. Capps Runs Michigan's FOC Grievance System. Kalamazoo Parents Have Not Had a Single Complaint Upheld in Five Years. How Is That Legal?

What would you do if the government gave you a process to file a complaint and then denied every complaint filed through it for five straight years?

That is what happened in Kalamazoo County. From 2020 through 2024, the Friend of the Court denied or dismissed 100 percent of parent grievances. Every single one. Zero were acknowledged in full. Zero were acknowledged in part. No corrective action was ever taken. No policy was ever changed. No employee was ever disciplined.

The question is not whether the system failed. The data already answered that. The question is how a 0 percent success rate is allowed to exist for five years without anyone in state government intervening.

Michigan law requires every FOC office to maintain a grievance process under MCL 552.526. Parents are told this is their remedy when the FOC mishandles their case. File a grievance. The FOC will review it. That is the promise. In Kalamazoo County, the promise has been empty since at least 2020.

In 2022, the Kalamazoo FOC classified 83 percent of grievances as "nongrievable." That means the office looked at the complaint and decided it did not even qualify for review before examining the facts. The statewide average was 23 percent. Kalamazoo was throwing out complaints before they started at 3.6 times the rate of every other county.

What makes this worse is that the person responsible for overseeing this system statewide knows exactly what the numbers say. Steven D. Capps is the Director of the Friend of the Court Bureau at the Michigan Supreme Court's State Court Administrative Office. His bureau compiles and publishes the annual grievance data for all 75 FOC offices in Michigan. The Kalamazoo numbers pass through his office every year.

Instead of addressing the data, Capps has spent the last several years writing blog posts and accepting awards. In 2021, the Michigan Family Support Council gave him its Outstanding Achievement Award (https://mifsc.org/awards-program/) while Kalamazoo parents were receiving the same outcome on every grievance: denied. In May 2020, while courthouses were closed during COVID, Capps published a blog post celebrating 300,000 additional portal visits and calling it "An Awakening" (https://michildsupportpundit.blogspot.com/2020/05/an-awakening-signs-of-life-after-long.html). Parents who could not get a hearing were counted as website traffic.

In February 2026, Capps led a training webinar for new FOC employees on "Customer Service and Practical Tips" (https://legalnews.com/Home/Articles?DataId=1593071). In April 2026, one of his bureau's own staff, Gracee G. Wisniewski, a part-time law clerk, denied a father's formal complaint without substantive review. The customer service training did not produce a different outcome.

There is no independent oversight in Kalamazoo County. No Citizen Advisory Committee exists to review FOC complaints from the outside. 73 of Michigan's 75 counties are in the same position. The FOC investigates complaints against itself, decides whether they have merit, and reports the results to Steven D. Capps's bureau. His bureau publishes the data. Then nothing happens.

West Michigan families should be asking a simple question: if this is happening in Kalamazoo, what does the grievance data look like in their county? The annual reports are public. The data is available. If a 0 percent success rate can persist for five years in one county without consequence, what stops it from happening in any county?

The Kalamazoo Transparency Act submitted a press inquiry to the FOC Bureau on April 8, 2026. As of publication, Steven D. Capps's office has not responded.

The full press release and sourced data are available at https://www.kalamazootransparencyact.com/press.