Foster care in Texas: A CASA rubs salt in families’ wounds

This paragraph in this post concerning a CASA chapter in Kansas contains language some people may find offensive.  I certainly hope so.

            Though the overwhelming majority of volunteers in the Court-Appointed Special Advocates program have only the best of intentions, there are times when  the arrogance, the insensitivity, and the sheer cruelty of some CASAs boggles the mind.

           

            ●There was the CASA in Indiana, a state which, year after year sees the number of children torn from their families escalate and which tears apart families at a rate well above the national average, who insists that

CASA seems to be the counter-balance against a social service system hell-bent on keeping children with their very inadequate families--or putting them into a foster care system where their childhoods will be wasted while their parents “get their acts together."

            But then this CASA doesn’t need facts, because

I can safely and humbly say that there is no one I have ever known who is more familiar than I, on a personal and professional level, with the needs of children who live in families who struggle to rear them.

            I wonder what she says when she’s not being humble?

            ●Then there’s the CASA chapter in Kansas which raised money through an annual Men in Tights drag queen contest.  In 2008, a local mayor won after  dressing up as a woman he named "Smellishis Poon." The "surname" is, in the words of a story in the paid archive of the Arkansas City Traveler, "graphic slang for a female private part." So is the name the mayor chose for his back-up dancers. They were called the "Red Hot Puntangs." Oh, and one more thing: The mayor did his act made up in blackface.

            ●And now there’s Alicia Cardenas, director of the CASA chapter that serves Brownsville, Texas.  She was interviewed in a Brownsville Herald story about a succession of tragic deaths of children in the area.  But these were not children who were beaten, or tortured or starved. 

            So far, charges have been filed in only one of the cases, involving a child left in a hot van.  But even in these cases, a study found that parents were far more likely to be prosecuted if they were poor.

            Another case involved a two-year-old who, the county sheriff says, was “momentarily” out of the mother’s sight when he ingested gasoline from a tube attached to the gas tank of a lawnmower.  A third involved a 13-year-old who broke his neck while jumping and sliding on an inflatable swimming pool.

            Perhaps saddest of all is the death of eight-year-old Anay Alamillo.  Here’s how the Herald told the story today:

Anay, a smart, ambitious girl, died May 31 when she stepped on a live wire in her backyard and was electrocuted. She reportedly was wet from swimming in a neighbor’s pool.

Her family is dealing with more than their grief — they said Child Protective Services is requiring them to fix several things with their trailer if they want to continue living there.

Alamillo said they cannot afford the repairs, so he, his wife and three children have been living with family members for more than a month now.  “They told us they would help us ask for emergency housing, but we haven’t heard from them again,” he said.

He describes his late daughter with reverence.  “She knew more things than us. I was surprised at how she expressed herself, her ideas,” Alamillo said.

No charges have been filed in the case.

If the behavior of Texas CPS sounds familiar, it is, of course, because of the recent case in Houston, where no harm at all had come to any of the children, but, instead of helping with housing, the agency tore apart the family.

The Herald sought responses to the deaths from a number of officials.  The most compassionate was the sheriff.  The cruelest was Ms. Cardenas, from CASA.  I'm sure even she is well-motivated; truly believing that what she does helps children.  But that didn't stop her from offering up a heaping helping of salt to rub in the families’ wounds, including a litany of horror stories utterly unrelated to the deaths that were the subject of the story.

After acknowledging that “Accidents do happen.  I’m not blaming the parents or saying it’s their fault,” Cardenas turns around and says that too many parents “lack common sense.” 

It’s downhill from there.  The Herald story continues:

“Should they not have children? Well, that’s not for us to say. We live in a great country where we’re full of rights,” she said.  … Cardenas urged parents to live up to their responsibilities. Otherwise, parents owe it to their children to ask for help from organizations like CASA, she said. “…[P]ride needs to be set aside if you really care.”

After all, look at how helpful CPS was to the Alamillo family.

And then, a final twist of the knife for all those grieving families:

“We want the children to be reunified with their parents. But, sometimes the parents — honestly — don’t care,” she said. “It’s sad, but true. People become infuriated with my statements, but it’s the truth.”

As is discussed in detail on one of the most popular pages on the NCCPR website, the largest, most comprehensive study ever done of CASA, commissioned by the National CASA Association itself, found that CASA prolongs needless foster care and reinforces the racial and class biases of the child welfare system.  According to the trade journal Youth Today, CASA’s efforts to spin the findings “can border on duplicity.”

Given what’s gone on in Indiana, Kansas, and Texas, that should come as no surprise.

Foster care: More questions about CASA, and the newspaper that didn’t ask them

I've gotten used to the fact that stories about the Court-Appointed Special Advocates program (CASA) almost always are puff pieces, in which reporters almost never check the organization's record.

What record?

The fact that the most comprehensive study ever done of the program, commissioned by the National CASA Association itself, found that the program's only real accomplishments are to prolong foster care and reduce the chance that children will be placed with relatives instead of strangers; with no improvement in child safety. (Details, and a link to the study, are in this previous Blog post.)

I've gotten used to the fact that such stories, like this one in the San Antonio Express News, never ask if having well-meaning, but overwhelmingly white, middle-class people barge into the lives of overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately minority families to pass judgment upon them might raise issues of racial and class bias.

Instead, in the Express News story, one of those middle-class (and, in this case, childless) volunteers is allowed to sneer at those she judges, branding them "a whole subculture of people for whom children are not their first priority." Is "subculture" really just a euphemism for "people who make me uncomfortable because they're a different race or class"?

But here's something I haven't read before: The other CASA profiled in the story, who is supposed to render an objective judgment concerning who can best take care of a child, winds up taking the child for himself.

In fairness, there is nothing to indicate that he suggested this while he was the child's CASA. According to the story it happened sometime afterwards. And, according to the story, it wasn't the CASA's idea. Rather, the idea is said to have come from the child's caseworker.

But still it raises troubling questions – the kinds reporters are supposed to ask. The story says that the child was taken from his birth mother on grounds of "neglect" – which, of course, can mean anything. Then the CASA stepped in. Presumably, he recommended that the child not be returned to his mother. Then, sometime later, when the man no longer was the child's CASA but had continued to maintain a relationship with him, the caseworker urged him to adopt.

So what's the problem? The message it sends to all the other CASAs: If you recommend against returning this child home, someday, he could be yours. Under such circumstances, shouldn't a newspaper at least ask about conflict of interest, instead of simply extolling the case as a model of CASA in action?

Prolonging foster care: The study CASA doesn’t want you to see

FOR YEARS, THE NATIONAL CASA ASSOCIATION BURIED A STUDY SHOWING THE PROGRAM IS A FAILURE DEEP IN ITS WEBSITE. NOW, IT SEEMS, IT'S GONE ALTOGETHER.

Several years ago, the National CASA association commissioned a study in order to tell the world how wonderful the Court-Appointed Special Advocate program is. This is the program in which well-meaning people who are overwhelmingly white, middle class, and have lots of time on their hands go into overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately minority homes to render judgment on the parents and tell judges if those parents ever should get their children back.

But the results of the study were not exactly what the folks at CASA expected.

●The study found that CASA's only real accomplishments were to prolong the time children languished in foster care and reduce the chance that the child will be placed with relatives.

●The study found no evidence that having a CASA on the case does anything to improve child safety – so all that extra foster care is for nothing. (The study specifically controlled for CASA's all-purpose excuse for this – the claim that CASAs handle the most difficult cases.)

●The study also found that when a CASA is assigned to a child who is Black, the CASA spends, on average, significantly less time on the case. (The study also found that CASAs don't spend as much time on cases in general as the organization's p.r. might lead one to believe. CASA volunteers reported spending an average of only 4.3 hours per month on cases involving white children, and only 2.67 hours per month on cases involving Black children.)

In some cases, as we reported previously on this Blog, the racism can be far more flagrant.

A columnist for the trade journal Youth Today aptly summed up the findings this way:

"The more rigorous evaluation … not only challenged the effectiveness of the court volunteers' services, but suggested that they spend little time on cases, particularly those of black children, and are associated with more removals from the home and fewer efforts to reunite children with parents or relatives."

None of this should come as a surprise – the problems are built into the CASA model. Who has time to spend even 4.3 hours a month on a case? Certainly not a poor person holding down two jobs. So it's no wonder CASA programs sometimes are pet projects of the local Junior League and the demographics of CASAs tend to be different from the demographics of the families they judge.

Indeed, in a cover story about the report (available on their website by subscription) Youth Today found that CASA's approach to spinning the study "can border on duplicity"

And now, it seems, that approach includes making sure as few people as possible actually see the report. It's always been hard to find on CASA's website. There used to be two such sites, and the study was buried deep in the one geared to CASAs themselves, not the general public. But when I checked again earlier this month, I found that the two websites had been merged – and the study seems to have disappeared. As far as I can tell, only a brief, self-serving summary remains. (If anyone can find the full report on the site, please let me know and I'll be glad to post the link.)

I'm just glad I downloaded the full report before it was too late. Since it no longer seems to be available on CASA's website, I've posted it on ours.

TexProtects seems to think we’re pretty dumb

A group called TexProtects, The Texas Association for the Protection of Children, has put out an "Advocacy Alert" urging people to write to the Governor to ask him to sign SB 1440, that bill discussed in previous posts to this Blog that would legalize CPS' illegal behavior in cases like the FLDS raid.

Their argument boils down to this: Current law is terribly vague, but this bill supposedly makes things more specific. Therefore, TexProtects says, the bill "actually provides more protections for a parent in connection with orders in aid of an investigation."

Let's leave aside, for the moment, the phony notion implied by that statement that unlimited state power benefits children and basic due process benefits only parents. Let's ignore, for the moment, that in cases like the FLDS raid it was the children who suffered most from CPS' actions.

The argument from TexProtects still leaves out one small detail: Two key court rulings. One is the Texas Supreme Court ruling in the FLDS case, the other came from a federal appellate court in one of those rare cases where CPS picked on someone with the money to hire good lawyers. These rulings have filled in a lot of the blanks. Thanks to those rulings, the law now is a bit more specific. What SB 1440 really tries to do is undermine those court rulings and effectively return things to where they were before those courts ruled.

And let's get serious. If SB 1440 really increases families' protections, why are groups like Texas CASA and the Center for Public Policy Priorities, groups that strongly favored the FLDS raid, desperate to see SB 1440 become law? And why are so many groups that were against the raid urging a veto?

“Enhanced interrogation” in the war against child abuse

    As newspapers do their "one year later" stories about the raid by Texas CPS on the YFZ Ranch, we're learning more about what happened to more than 400 children torn from their families – and why.

    We'll never know the single worst moment for the children. Perhaps it was the initial removal from the Ranch. Perhaps it was the terrible conditions where the children were interned for the first days after the raid – essentially their own private Guantanamo. Maybe it was being sent to institutions hundreds of miles from home. But for many of the children, especially the youngest, the worst moment probably came a year ago yesterday, when they were taken from their mothers.

    None of the mothers had been accused of abusing the children. They had not been accused of arranging underage marriages. Some were accused of "failure to protect" children from underage marriages – which, in fact, is a euphemism for sexual abuse. Most were accused, in essence, of living in the same place where other mothers may have failed to protect children from this kind of sexual abuse. This is much like the all-too-common practice of taking children from battered women simply because the women had been beaten and they had "failed to protect" the children from witnessing the beating. A class-action lawsuit led to a ban on this pernicious practice in New York City. (NCCPR's Vice President was co-counsel for plaintiffs in the case.) During the trial one expert testified that, for the child, being taken from his mother under these circumstances is "tantamount to pouring salt into an open wound." The approach of Texas CPS boiled down to "please pass the salt."

    Initially the explanation from Texas CPS was the same chilling explanation they gave for everything they did wrong in this case: "It's what we always do." And, as I've noted before, the most frightening thing about the entire FLDS case is that this particular claim is true.

    But now, it turns out, in the FLDS case, CPS actually tried to be a little kinder to the children. It's well known that many of the children were allowed to stay with their mothers at first, only to be torn from them after their first days in internment. Now we know CPS was pressured into taking the children from their mothers.

But who would do that? Who would know – or care - so little about child development that they would go out of their way to impose an extra measure of misery on helpless children? Who would be so caught up in their own self-righteousness that they could advocate something so cruel?

    CASA, of course.

    The San Angelo Standard Times reports that it was the local chapter of Court-Appointed Special Advocates that "pressed CPS and the court to remove the mothers, something that eventually occurred April 14."

    In several previous posts to this Blog, I've written about the enormous harm CASA does to the children it is supposed to help – and who most CASA volunteers genuinely want to help. I've written about the major national study, commissioned by the National CASA Association itself, which shows that the program accomplishes almost nothing except to prolong foster care and reduce the chance that children will be placed with relatives – while doing nothing to make children safer. And I've written about the vile racism by a performer at a CASA fundraiser in Kansas.

    And now we find similar poor performance by CASA in the FLDS case.

    The CASAs don't even pretend they thought the children actually would be abused by their mothers. No, their only argument was that some of the mothers "began to inhibit efforts to elicit truthful answers from their children." That isn't necessarily cause to take any of the children from those mothers, much less tearing all the children from all of the mothers. What CASA is saying is that it's ok to inflict cruelty on hundreds of children to get "the truth" out of them and build a case against someone who may have abused some of them.

In fact, it might have been easier to question some of the children once their mothers were completely out of the picture – just as it probably is easier to get a story out of a terrorism suspect if you waterboard him. And yes, it's even possible that the information gleaned this way from hundreds of children who were never abused might reveal a child who was abused or prevent some other child from being abused. It also may be that if you waterboard hundreds of innocent people, and a few real terrorists, you might prevent a terrorist attack.

    But there is no more justification for "enhanced interrogation" in the war against child abuse than in the war against terror.

    Of course no CASA wants to hurt a child; on the contrary, they genuinely want to help children and keep them safe. But once you decide the ends justify the means …

    The CASAs go on to dismiss the anguish of mothers seen on television when their children were taken. They say the mothers were faking it. "Most of that was just staged," one of the CASAs said. How do they know? Because the mothers on TV weren't the same mothers they were working with. But CPS took children from all the mothers, not just the ones these particular CASAs were "working with." (Also, as it happens, CPS' justification for taking the children was that the YFZ Ranch functioned as one family. If that's true, then it stands to reason that all the mothers would grieve for all the children. You can't have it both ways.)

And it gets scarier.

    Almost anyone who followed the FLDS case will recall the courage of 11 mental health professionals sent by Texas CPS itself to the places where the children were interned in those first days. They put their careers on the line by breaking confidentiality oaths to tell the world just how horribly the children were being treated. Their statements are available here. Again, these are statements not from advocates for the parents but from professionals sent in by the State of Texas. And what do the CASAs say about this? They suggest it never happened.

    According to the Standard Times: "Although not explicitly questioning the truthfulness of the claims, the CASA workers said they saw none of the alleged incidents detailed in the reports." Talk about being "in denial."

    And, it appears, the CASAs only wish the children were still far from everyone they know and love. They condemned Texas CPS – not for inflicting all this damage in the first place, but for supposedly dropping cases too quickly after the courts ruled that the removals were illegal.

    Toward the end of the story, even one of the CASAs admits that "There were definitely some of the cases where the children shouldn't have been removed and should have been returned quickly." But she expresses no remorse for this, or for her role in it; no sympathy for the suffering these children endured when taken from the ranch and then from their mothers. Rather, she simply declares that "these are children who were removed for a reason."

    Well, yes. But that doesn't mean it was a good reason.

   

UPDATED, NOV 10 2008 AND NOV. 8, 2009: A CASA chapter shows its true colors

Reader advisory: This post contains quotes that include some uses of vulgar slang. Reader discretion is advised.

There may be no more sacred cow in all of child welfare than the Court-Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) program. Under this program, volunteers are assigned to spend a few hours a month on one or two child welfare cases, talking to all parties and then telling the judge what the volunteer thinks would be best for the child.

I collected the gooey feature stories that turn up in almost every newspaper about CASA for a while, until I ran out of file space. In almost every one, the program is praised to the skies and all of its self-promotional material is accepted without question. And CASA itself loves to brag about how much influence the volunteers have over juvenile court judges when those judges decide if a child will be placed in foster care, whether a child will remain there, and where that child will go.

In fact, the CASA model creates enormous potential for bias. Who can be a CASA? Certainly not a poor person working two jobs, or someone who has to work seven days a week; they don't have the time. No, a CASA volunteer is most likely to have lots of time on his or her hands. And that means CASA volunteers are likely to be disproportionately affluent and disproportionately white (and, in fact, 90 percent of CASA volunteers are white). Children who enter the child welfare system, of course, are neither.

So, good intentions notwithstanding – and like almost everyone in child welfare, most CASA volunteers do, indeed, mean well – the potential for racial and class bias is obvious. So it should come as no surprise that the largest, most comprehensive study of CASA ever done – a study commissioned by the National CASA Association itself - produced some truly alarming findings. I'll get to those below. But first, a case in point.

I first learned about this through a very brief item in the excellent trade journal Youth Today, after which I checked the local newspaper and a local news website.

The story is about the CASA chapter in Arkansas City, Kansas, about an hour from Wichita. Every year, their big annual fundraiser is the Men in Tights drag queen contest. No problem there. This year, the winner was the mayor of Arkansas City, Mel Kuhn. He won both the talent competition and the overall Miss CASA title. Still no problem, it's not as if they played favorites and gave him the prize just because he's the mayor.

The problem is the costume that won Mayor Kuhn the coveted Miss CASA title: He dressed up as a woman he named "Smellishis Poon." The "surname" is, in the words of the Arkansas City Traveler "graphic slang for a female private part." So is the name the mayor chose for his back up dancers. They were called the "Red Hot Puntangs." Oh, and one more thing: The mayor did his act made up in blackface.

The mayor initially defended his performance. "All this PC is b-------," the mayor/Miss CASA said. "We go around walking on eggshells all the time, we don't get anything done." But after a meeting with officials of the Wichita Branch of the NAACP, the Mayor/Miss CASA changed his mind and offered what sounds like a sincere apology.

From CASA, however, there has been only one of those non-apology apologies, with the executive director of the Arkansas City CASA program, who earlier gave the mayor's performance rave reviews, later telling The Wichita Eagle that "We're sorry that anyone was offended at this show."

But the Mayor/Miss CASA says the local CASA chapter knew exactly what he planned to do beforehand. According to the Traveler:

He said he ran everything he planned by CASA officials, and that the audience found it all hilarious. "I didn't spring anything on anybody, he said.

After the performance, the local CASA executive director, Linda Groth, did say she was "mortified" by the name the Mayor chose – after a reporter told her what "poon" meant. But other than that, she thought the performance was just fine. She told a local website, The News Cow, (because Arkansas City is in Cowley County, that's why):

"The part of his act I felt was excellent was the dancing. It was good dancing. The back-up singers were gorgeous and could probably back up any professional. It was a pretty professional little act. The audience loved it. The judges must have liked it. We may change some things. We may not. We certainly don't want to offend anybody."

It's unfortunate that anyone is upset. Kuhn wanted to put on a good show and worked hard, according to Groth. Other people saw the program but no one commented on his character's name.

As for the blackface, Groth told the Traveler she didn't think the mayor was trying to portray a different race: "It wasn't black black," she said. "It was all really just tan." (Readers can judge for themselves by having a look at the photos here and here. )

Groth went on to give the Mayor/Miss CASA another rave review, praising all the time Kuhn took to prepare and noting that "the judges and the audience in general seemed very impressed."

Most of the criticism has been directed at the mayor. But that misses the point. The real issue is this: How much harm is being done to impoverished children, especially minority children, by placing their fate in the hands of people who can watch a man dress up in blackface under the name of Smellishis Poon – and see no problem with any of it? What kind of child welfare system lets such astonishingly insensitive white people sit in judgment of overwhelmingly poor disproportionately black families? And where was the National CASA Association while all this is going on? I am aware of no condemnation of the Arkansas City chapter by the national group; certainly there is nothing on National CASA's website about it. Perhaps they don't know about it, though it happened a month ago.

UPDATE, NOV. 10: A p.r. person for National CASA contacted NCCPR this evening by e-mail to say that "Immediately after being made aware of the incident, National CASA contacted the local Arkansas City CASA program, which had sponsored the event. We also contacted the Kansas State CASA program, the office of Mayor Kuhn, and Kevin Myles, the President of the Wichita Branch of NAACP."

The p.r. person says National CASA's efforts led to a more formal apology from the the local chapter. He cited this wire service story, but the story is unclear as to whether the relevant "press release" came from National CASA or the local chapter. The local newspaper story on which the wire account is based makes clear that, after a conference call involving the NAACP, the local chapter and National CASA, the local chapter issued the press release containing the apology. If National CASA has issued its own formal public statement on this matter, I still haven't been able to find it.

None of this, of course, addresses the larger issue of how a CASA chapter could have allowed this performance in the first place, and the rave review the head of the CASA chapter gave the mayor's performance before she was contacted by the national organization.

CASA also got the Wichita NAACP to let them off the hook; another testament to CASA's sacred cow status. I hope the Wichita NAACP will take a closer look, starting with the study cited below:

It would be one thing if this were an isolated problem – a local chapter that had gone rogue. But the disturbing data from that national study I mentioned suggest that, again, good intentions notwithstanding, racial bias permeates CASA.

For starters, the study found that when a CASA is assigned to a child who is black, the CASA spends, on average, significantly less time on the case. (The study also found that CASAs don't spend as much time on cases in general as the organization's p.r. might lead one to believe. CASA volunteers reported spending an average of only 4.3 hours per month on cases involving white children, and only 2.67 hours per month on cases involving Black children).

Worse, the study found that CASA's only real accomplishments were to prolong the time children languished in foster care and reduce the chance that the child will be placed with relatives.

A Youth Today columnist aptly summed up the findings this way:

"The more rigorous evaluation … not only challenged the effectiveness of the court volunteers' services, but suggested that they spend little time on cases, particularly those of black children, and are associated with more removals from the home and fewer efforts to reunite children with parents or relatives."

Worse still, the study found no evidence that having a CASA on the case does anything to improve child safety – so all that extra foster care is for nothing. (The study specifically controlled for CASA's all purpose excuse for this – the claim that CASAs handle the most difficult cases.)

If you doubt any of this, please go see the study for yourself on the National CASA website – if you can find it. [UPDATE, NOV 8, 2009: THE LINK IN THE FOLLOWING SENTENCE NO LONGER WORKS. LOOKS LIKE CASA HAS REMOVED THE FULL STUDY FROM ITS WEBSITE ENTIRELY. I'M SURE GLAD I DOWNLOADED BY OWN COPY.] Actually, I'd better give you the direct link, since it's not on the main website at all, instead it's buried on a second site which, while publicly accessible, appears to be primarily for CASAs themselves. One can certainly understand why they'd rather people not see it.

CASA did not exactly spread the word about this study when it was published. But Youth Today learned about it, and the result was one of the few clear-eyed assessments ever done of the program, an excellent front-page news story in the July/August, 2004 issue which was available on an affiliated website, but now, alas, is available only on their own site by subscription.

Among other things, the news story concluded that CASA's attempts to spin the study's findings "can border on duplicity."

I wonder how National CASA will spin the Miss CASA contest, and what that contest may say about the racial attitudes of CASA volunteers in Arkansas City? It'll be hard to top that line about "it was all really just tan." (See update above for CASAs response).