Child welfare in Arkansas: The Legislature is not helping

Last of three parts

If little John or Jane from Little Rock isn't in class today,
a child abuse investigator may be at the door tomorrow.

The previous two posts about Arkansas child welfare deal with the failures of Gov. Asa Hutchinson and the State Division of Children and Family Services.  But while the governor has been leading the state backwards, the legislature has been no help.

Consider the issue of “educational neglect.”  This is how we began a blog post on thisissue in 2010:

Late [in 2009] the highly-regarded Vera Institute of Justice, based in New York, issued a report  on one of the seedier back alleys of child welfare: "Educational Neglect." The majority of states, wisely, don't even include such cases in the mandate of their child welfare agencies. Unfortunately, New York, is not one of them. There, educational neglect reports serve one primary function: They're a lever schools can use to force parents to do what they want – like, for instance, not demand too much in the way of special education for their kids, or not complain about school safety.
 

Here are some highlights from the Vera Institute study, which focused on New York State but applies to any state that still lets CPS investigate "educational neglect":

● Overwhelmingly, these are low-risk cases, and it's idiotic to waste the time of child protective services dealing with them. (While that may be obvious, they've got an actual case reading, from Orange County, to prove it.) In addition to wasting the time of CPS workers, sending a CPS worker to the door only makes the family defensive and makes it harder to solve whatever problem may be causing absenteeism.

● The notion that educational neglect is the "tip of the iceberg," a sign of some other, deeper problem, (the primary excuse for CPS investigating such cases), is nonsense. Generally, "educational neglect" is the tip of nothing except some kind of school problem, often one that is not the parent's fault.

So guess what the Arkansas Legislature did this year: It passed a law expanding the jurisdiction of the state Division of Children and Family Services to include educational neglect.  The rationale: Exactly the “tip of the iceberg” assumptions that the Vera Institute study found were wrong.

This is a bad idea in any state.  It’s even dumber in Arkansas, where one of the key problems identified in a report from child welfare expert Paul Vincent (a report commissioned by the state itself) is impossibly high caseloads.

The other issue concerns cases where DCFS does not remove the child, but demands that the family meet certain conditions to keep the child in the home.  In most states, these “safety plans” are used in low-risk cases, and are agreed to by the agency and the family.

The Arkansas Legislature has decided, however, that in Arkansas, every single one of these plans is going to have to be accompanied by a formal charge of abuse or neglect and approved by the court.

According to Vincent’s report:

Regardless of the merits of the Act, it will undoubtedly increase the DCFS workload, including administrative tasks and time in court. It is also likely to increase the number of children placed in foster care.

But there’s more – and it says a lot about the mindset both of DCFS and some in the court system, Vincent writes: 

It is likely that this bill was introduced because of doubts on the part of some stakeholders that DCFS could assure child safety without court oversight. Some legal stakeholders criticized a DCFS practice which they called coercive placements, meaning that DCFS would threaten removal unless the caregiver placed the child with another family member, for example, … 

OK, let me interrupt here.  When I first read this, I thought: Good.  The courts have discovered that DCFS is unfairly strong-arming parents into placing the child into what is foster care in all but name.  This also raises questions about how many times DCFS does this but doesn’t officially report the placement as an entry into foster care, something discussed on this blog here.  So it’s possible the real rate of removal in Arkansas is much higher than the official figures reported to the federal government.

But now, let me allow Vincent to finish his thought (I've put the portion I left out above in bold): 

Some legal stakeholders criticized a DCFS practice which they called coercive placements, meaning that DCFS would threaten removal unless the caregiver placed the child with another family member, for example, without properly reviewing the alternative caregiver’s suitability or petitioning the court.

In other words, these “legal stakeholders” were just fine with DCFS strong-arming the parents – but, in keeping with the profound bias against kinship care that permeates the state, they just didn’t like where the child went after the parents were strong-armed.

Child welfare in Arkansas: Asa Hutchinson and the faith-BIASED orphanage

Second of three parts

The previous post to this blog described how Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson commissioned a good report about the failings of child welfare in Arkansas – and then proceeded to ignore one of its most important recommendations.  The report, issued in July, found that Arkansas could go a long way toward ending a “shortage” of placements if it would just end the bias against kinship care – foster care provided by grandparents and other relatives.  Indeed, Arkansas makes far less use of this option than neighboring states.

In contrast, Arkansas badly overuses the worst form of care – group homes and institutions, in other words, latter-day orphanages.  The child welfare euphemism is “congregate care.” As the report notes:  “There is considerable evidence that children do better in family-based settings than congregate settings.”

That is an understatement.  It takes three single-spaced pages just to list the citations for some of the studies showing the harm of congregate care.  In addition, no matter how well-meaning the founders may be, orphanages have an unnerving tendency to go bad.  Orphanages are institutions for the poor, and institutions for the poor almost always are poor institutions.

None of the standard excuses for these places stands up to scrutiny.  They do not make children’s lives more stable, they do not help siblings, and often, they doom children to languish in substitute care.

Vincent’s report goes on to suggest that Arkansas adopt a series of guiding principles for its child welfare system including:

Placements should be made in the least restrictive, most normalized setting responsive to the child’s needs. Children should not be placed in congregate settings unless that environment is the only setting in which needed services can be provided [emphasis in original].

Five months later, the governor issued a statement touting “progress” in fixing foster care.  The statement said not a word about increasing kinship care.  Instead it touted the opening of new orphanages.  He even released the statement at a dedication ceremony for one of them, a place called Maggie House.

One thing you can say about Maggie House – it doesn’t try to hide its true nature.

Most of the time, modern orphanages try to do just that.  “How can you call us an institution?” the people who run them say.  “We have ‘cottages’ and beautiful grounds.  

  

But no matter what it may look like, a building that houses large numbers of children, most of them strangers to each other, to be cared for by paid staff hired to dispense indiscriminate pseudo-love to whoever walks in the door – staff that, at best, are  likely to change every year or two - is not a home. It's a dormitory. And a collection of dormitories is an orphanage.

Children are not fooled by pretty grounds and immaculate “cottages.” They know the difference between “homelike” and home. An orphanage is an orphanage is an orphanage. The new ones just come complete with Potemkin Village façades.

At Maggie House, it looks like they’ve pretty well dispensed with the façade.  It’s one building, a former nursing home.  The “cottages” are just different parts of the same building.  Have a look around.  Why place children with grandma when they can be at a place like this, right?

Also, although Maggie House is run by a group calling itself Free Will Baptist Ministries, exercising free will may be difficult for those residents whose religious beliefs don’t precisely match those of the people who run the place.  On their website, before they say almost anything else, the people running Maggie House say this: 

At Family Ministries’ Maggie House, we strive to create a Christian family atmosphere. In addition, we will teach the Word of God as the rule of life. Every child is given the opportunity to accept Christ as their personal Savior. Given the circumstances of many of these children, it is of upmost importance that we share the love of Christ with them. We find that most of them have never been taken to church, owned their own Bible, or had the opportunity to learn about Christ.  

That sounds more faith biased than faith-based.

One can only imagine how the governor would respond if a local mosque decided to build an orphanage for foster children because “we find that most of them have never been taken to a mosque, owned their own Quran, or had the opportunity to learn about Allah.” 

What happens to an LGBT youth placed at Maggie House? 

What about a teenager who wants access to contraception?

But the most important question remains: Why does Arkansas keep opening new institutions of any kind to warehouse children, instead of concentrating on keeping children out of the system and, when children must be taken, placing more of them with  relatives?

In part three: How the Arkansas Legislature made things worse

Child welfare in Arkansas: Full-speed backwards

First of three parts

Give Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson credit for this much: When he called in a consultant to examine the dismal condition of child welfare in his state, he chose well: He chose the Child Welfare Policy and Practice Group, headed by Paul Vincent, who led the transformation of the child welfare system in Alabama into, relatively speaking, a national model.

Arkansas Gov.
Asa Hutshinson

In a report about Arkansas issued in July, Vincent found a system so short of places to put children that some were sleeping in offices or moving to a different placement every night. 

Among the key reasons: A deep-seated hostility to kinship care – placing children with relatives instead of strangers.

Read all about that hostility, and what it does to children in this excellent story from Arkansas Times - including a case in which one relative after another was turned down, and the children wound up placed in the care of a stranger who adopted them - and abused them.

Only 14 percent of Arkansas children are placed with relatives.  The average for surrounding states is nearly double – 25 percent.  Many other states that do better still.  If Arkansas simply performed as well on kinship care as its neighbors, a large part of the “shortage” of placements would be over.  In contrast, Arkansas has the worst record among these states for using the worst form of care – group homes and institutions – latter-day orphanages.

(Of course, it also would help if Arkansas reduced its rate of child removal to the rate of, say Alabama.  As of 2014, the rate of removal in Arkansas was nearly 80 percent higher than Alabama and there are indications the gap may have widened since then.)

Consultants try to use gentle language when writing about the agencies that hire them, but it’s clear from Vincent’s report that there is a strong bias against grandparents in the state Division of Child and Family Services and the courts.

Study after study has shown kinship care to be more humane, more stable and, most important, safer than what should properly be called “stranger care” – see this report, and this one.  Nevertheless, Vincent found

DCFS  staff and stakeholders identified a number of factors limiting the use of relatives. Attitudes toward the suitability of relatives as caregivers on the part of some staff, judges and other legal partners were frequently mentioned as a barrier. This negative view seems to be most prominent among those who view some extended families as sharing a common lack of caregiving capacities.

And now we learn that not only does this bias remain, it goes all the way to the top.

At a legislative hearing this month, grandparents spoke of stepping forward to try to take in their grandchildren, only to be stymied at every turn by DCFS.  The agency director, Cecile Blucker responded first with stonewalling, then with bigotry.

According to the Arkansas Democrat Gazette:

Blucker said the situation is complicated. By law, she said she could not comment on the people who made their cases to lawmakers or comment on any specific case.  "Only one side of the story can be told and only one side of the facts can be told," she told lawmakers.

If such a law exists in Arkansas, it almost certainly exists only because DCFS wants it, so the agency can hide its blunders behind “confidentiality.”  If you really feel hamstrung, Ms. Blucker, ask the legislature to repeal any such law.

If she means the federal government would object if she told the agency’s side of the story, then she needs to explain how it is that at least four states have laws specifically allowing their own child welfare agencies to comment on cases when they have been disclosed by another party – and none has been sanctioned.

But then it got worse.  Again, according to the story:

Generally speaking, [Blucker] said, grandparents can be complicit when they see abuse and sometimes cannot adequately keep their grandchildren safe from the grandchildren's parents.

In other words, “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” That is precisely the claim that’s been debunked by all those studies.  Or, as one of the nation’s leading experts on kinship care, Prof. Mark Testa of the University of North Carolina, put it: “Fortunately, trees have many branches.”

In poor communities all over America there are parents who have waged a battle for decades to save  their  children   from poverty, despair, and the lure of the streets.  They have been forced to call upon reservoirs of strength that most of us can only imagine. Is the mother who won the battle with three children and lost it with a fourth to be denigrated and discarded when she comes forward to take in that fourth child’s children?  Cecile Blucker seems to think so.

And the bias may go even higher.  In a statement released Dec. 1, touting “progress” in fixing foster care, Gov. Hutchinson said not one word about boosting kinship care.

Even worse: He made his remarks at the dedication of a brand new orphanage.

More on that in the next post about Arkansas.