Foster care in Nebraska: Beware of the teddy bear subsidy bill

Suppose your child had to be placed out of your care because of some emergency – illness perhaps – and no one in your extended family was available.

Suppose a stranger came forward and said:

I’ll take care of him, I’ll even love him as my own  – just as long as you pay me for absolutely everything.  Not just food and clothing, mind you.  But if you want me to send him to an after-school activity you pay me.  If you want him to go to a movie, you pay me.  If you want him to have a teddy bear to comfort him at night – you better pay me for that, too!

Oh, and by the way, your kid opens and closes the refrigerator door an awful lot, and he keeps leaving the lights on.  You need to pay me for the additional electric bill as well.

Bet you wouldn’t want your child placed with anyone that greedy.

Yet a bill scheduled for a public hearing today in Nebraska would require that the state pay foster parents to cover all of these costs and more.

The bill would require that monthly pay for foster parents be jacked up to the point that it meets meet the level called for in a so-called study conducted by, among others, the group that so arrogantly calls itself “Children’s Rights” (CR) and the National Foster Parent Association (NFPA).  The study estimated a so-called “minimum adequate rate” that foster parents supposedly should be paid in each state.

“Minimum” sounds like they mean enough to cover the basics. After all, any parent who “loves a foster child like my own” would have no problem paying for a teddy bear or a movie ticket, right?

Not according to the twisted logic of CR and NFPA.

Their so-called “minimum” rate includes all of the items I just mentioned, and more.  (See for yourself: Check out the hard-to-find “technical report” issued by CR and NFPA which explains how the “minimum” was calculated.  I suspect it's called a “technical report” precisely because they hope no one will read it.)

THE PRICE TAG

This won’t come cheap.  Even though the report actually understated what Nebraska pays foster parents now, according to an estimate from the office of the Nebraska Legislative Fiscal Analyst, raising the rate to cover every toy, game, movie ticket and almost-everything-else-you- can-think-of will cost the state nearly $3.6 million in state funds every year, with the federal government forced to shell out nearly $900,000 more.  That's a lot of money for a small state.

Here’s what else $3.6 million can do:

● Provide $600-a-month rent subsidies for 500 families for a year, so their children aren’t taken away because of lack of housing.

● Provide $100-a-week day care subsidies for 692 families so their children aren’t taken on "lack of supervision" charges.  (By the way, the so-called minimum rate in the NFPA study includes reimbursing the foster parents for all day care and babysitting expenses.  So, under this bill, a child can be taken from impoverished birth parents because they can’t afford day care and then handed over to middle-class foster parents whose day care expenses would be  fully reimbursed by Nebraska taxpayers.)

● Provide Intensive Family Preservation Services interventions for 480 families. 

● Provide inpatient drug treatment at a family treatment center where children can stay with their parents for 144 families.

This would be outrageous in any state, but especially in Nebraska.  Any list of worst child welfare systems in America would be incomplete without Nebraska.  Year after year, Nebraska tears apart families at one of the highest rates in the nation – and traps proportionately more children in foster care on any given day than almost any other.  Most other lousy systems across the country could adopt as their slogan: “Hey, at least we’re not as bad as Nebraska.”

So at a time when Nebraska already tears apart families at one of the highest rates in the nation, some legislators in that state actually want to take scarce funds that finally could reduce Nebraska’s obscene rate of removal and divert those funds to cover a giant, needless subsidy for middle-class foster parents.

AN INSULT TO FOSTER PARENTS

On top of everything else, the bill is incredibly insulting to foster parents.  

When foster parents are polled on why they leave foster parenting, low pay consistently ranks low on the list.  Far more important to most foster parents is the fact that child welfare agencies so often treat them the same way they often treat birth parents – like dirt.

 Foster parents often say that they can’t be in it for the money because there is not enough money.  For the overwhelming majority of foster parents it’s true.  But if this bill passes it will attract a lot of the wrong kinds of people to foster parenting.

The whole bill raises a fundamental question I’ve discussed on this Blog before: What is our “social contract” with foster parents?  If, as I believe, most foster parents really are in it for  the right reasons, including the good feeling it gives them to help children in need, why is it unreasonable that reimbursement not quite cover every expense – for children who, after all, foster parents say they love as their own?

If someone volunteers to tutor children at an after-school program, or serve meals at a soup-kitchen, he doesn’t get reimbursed for the mileage to get to and from the program.  He may even dip into his own pocket for some supplies.  Why is it wrong to expect the same of foster parents?

The best foster parents understand this.  Here’s how one I’ve quoted often on this Blog, Mary Callahan, explained it in an op ed column for the Los Angeles Times.

In addition:

● Existing rates aren’t as low as  CR and NFPA want people to think.  The existing rates cited in their “study” always are the “base rates.” But many states add additional payments and/or have additional tiers of rates.  In the case of Nebraska, for example, the Legislative Fiscal Analyst found that CR and NFPA failed to factor in the state’s coverage of liability insurance for foster parents.

Payments are tax-free since they are considered “reimbursement.”  In addition, foster children’s health insurance is covered by Medicaid.

● CR’s executive director, Marcia Lowry has suggested that if you don’t favor the rates she demands be paid to all foster parents, you want to take toys from foster children.  On the contrary, we want children placed with foster parents who care enough about those children to give them toys without demanding government reimbursement.

● Some proponents have argued this kind of huge increase is needed to help kinship foster parents who often are poor.  But it’s absurd to spend $3.6 million on mostly middle-class stranger-care parents because a little of it will trickle down to grandparents who provide kinship care.  There are other ways to target aid specifically to kinship care parents.


It will be interesting to see how many Nebraska foster parents really are so greedy that they'll come out and testify today demanding teddy bear subsidies.

Foster care in South Dakota: NPR stories get the ACLU’s attention

            This will give you some idea of the power of NPR’s three-part series on the destruction of Native American families by child protective services in South Dakota: The stories were a 2 x 4 so big they even got the attention of the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

            That has the potential to jump-start efforts to stop the practices exposed by NPR.  Up to now, the small and underfunded Lakota People’s Law Project has stood virtually alone in fighting for the rights of South Dakota’s Native Americans under the Indian Child Welfare Act.  (Their director has posted a blog to answer the many people who have asked how they can help as individuals.)

            One would think ACLU involvement would be a no-brainier: A state tears apart families at one of the highest rates in the nation, repeatedly confuses family poverty with neglect and tramples on a federal law designed to protect Native Americans.

            But as I’ve noted often before on this Blog, too many of my fellow liberals forget everything they claim to believe about civil liberties as soon as someone whispers the words “child abuse” in their ears. That’s a major reason why the traditional due process protections Americans take for granted in other fields of law are almost non-existent in child welfare.  (For details see our Due Process Agenda).

            There is no clearer example of this myopia than the behavior of the ACLU, nationally and in most states.  Typically, when it comes to the rights of children to live with their own families, the ACLU is AWOL.  NCCPR’s founder, Elizabeth Vorenberg, resigned from the ACLU’s National Board over its failure to defend the civil liberties of families facing the unchecked power of child protective services.

            The child welfare field is filled with issues that would seem to be obvious choices for ACLU litigation: Secret trials, lack of adequate (or sometimes any) defense counsel, searches and seizures without warrants, and on and on. 

REFUSING TO DEFEND CHILDREN’S FOURTH AMENDMENT RIGHTS

            But consider what happened this year when the first major child welfare case in 21 years, Camreta v. Greene, reached the U.S. Supreme Court.  As we explain on our special website about the case:

The child was only nine years old when she was called out of her classroom and forced to endure a two-hour interrogation by a male caseworker for the Oregon Department of Human Services because DHS had received a false allegation of sexual abuse.  Sitting silently in the room during the entire interrogation was another man - an armed deputy sheriff. 

            The child repeatedly denied any abuse, only to be browbeaten by the caseworker, who kept insisting she was giving the wrong answers while questioning the little girl about the most intimate details of her life. …  The experience so traumatized the child that she became physically ill.

           The child sued and the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed that her Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure had been violated.

           

            NCCPR’s Vice President, Carolyn Kubitschek represented the child. The Family Defense Center co-ordinated an extraordinary effort leading to the filing of 18 amicus briefs by 70 individuals and organizations in support of this child’s Fourth Amendment rights.

            Several of the groups, including the Legal Aid Society Juvenile Rights Practice,  Lawyers for Children, and the Children’s Law Clinic at Penn State University specialize in representing children in cases involving alleged child maltreatment.  All of them understood how destructive it is to a child to deny that child her rights under the Fourth Amendment.

            But not the ACLU.  The ACLU remained silent.

            It is much the same at the state level.  Over and over, families have told me about how they sought help from the ACLU in their state and were turned away.  Sometimes it’s even worse.  

In Indiana, the state chapter of the ACLU actually sued to block modest reductions in pay for foster parents.  Even if one believes that foster parents somehow should be exempt from the sacrifices being made by everyone else in a recession, (which can only lead to more cuts elsewhere, such as help for birth parents) how exactly is that a civil liberties issue? 

In Michigan, the ACLU did go to bat for the upper-middle-class white child taken from his parents after his father accidentally bought him Mike’s Hard Lemonade at a baseball game, and the redress they are seeking will help all families.  But they did nothing to help Maryanne Godboldo’s child, who is poor and Black, and was taken from her mother when she exercised her legal right to stop giving the child psychiatric medication with severe side-effects.   Godboldo and her grassroots allies had to win that case without the ACLU’s help.

Certainly, there are exceptions.  The ACLU of Pennsylvania repeatedly has championed the rights of children against the power of CPS agencies (their legal director is a member of NCCPR’s Board of Director).  And one of the class-action lawsuits that has helped dramatically improve child welfare in Illinois was brought by the Illinois ACLU.

Now, the South Dakota ACLU is stepping in to help champion the right of Native American children to their own families.  But the Indian Child Welfare Act is a federal law, and, as NPR notes, it is being violated in 32 states.  Where is the National ACLU?  Doing what it usually does: Exercising its very own right to remain silent.

PRIDE OF THE YANKEES

Part of the explanation lies in an unfortunate decision made by the ACLU when it set up a Children’s Rights Project in 1979.  They hired as its director the person who was already running a similar project for the New York Civil Liberties Union – Marcia Lowry.

One of Marcia’s earliest suits in New York was an attempt to bolster the rights of foster parents to prevent children from being transferred to other homes – including the homes they came from in the first place.   Real champions of civil liberties, like Louise Gans, who then was with Community Action for Legal Services, were furious.  As Nina Bernstein writes in her brilliant book, The Lost Children of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care:

For Gans and many of her colleagues, the true road to children’s rights lay in defending poor parents against the state’s abuses of power.  Gans believed that poor families were routinely misled and mistreated by foster care agencies – their children unnecessarily removed, their visits curtailed, and reunification wrongfully discouraged.  More passionately that most, she felt that legal reform efforts should concentrate on changing the state’s s treatment of biological parents.  Yet here, instead was CLU litigation that risked establishing some kind of constitutional right for foster parents – another weapon agencies could use against poor families …

Gans and other Legal Services people felt embattled.  Their clients had terrible problems, and their staff and resources were always inadequate to help. By their standards the CLU was rich.   That made it all the more galling that with a million lawsuits to choose from, Lowry should bring one that in their view threatened to make things worse instead of better.

Or as Danny Greenberg, then Managing Attorney for MFY Legal Services put it in a confrontation with Ira Glasser, then executive director of the NYCLU (and later executive director of the ACLU):

My God, Ira.  Think of the class issues in this.  You think of yourself as a Brooklyn Dodger fan, a supporter of the underdog.  Only a Yankee fan could bring a lawsuit like this.  The Yankees would love this lawsuit.

Today, of course, Marcia Lowry still is the pride of the Yankees.

She actually left the ACLU to create the group that so arrogantly calls itself “Children’s Rights” because even Ira Glasser’s liberalism was too much for her.  She told the Chronicle of Philanthropy that too much of what the ACLU did was tied to a “liberal agenda.”  Leaving the ACLU also may have made her more appealing to Carl Icahn, the corporate raider who once chaired her Board of Directors.

So no one should be surprised at CR’s response to NPR’s revelations about what’s being done to Native American families in South Dakota:

Silence.   

Foster care in Michigan: How Marcia Lowry helped make Michigan’s poor families even poorer

Not since Newt Gingrich suggested throwing poor people’s children into orphanages has anyone stated the connection between plunging families deeper into poverty and taking away their children more bluntly than a spokeswoman for the Governor of Michigan did last week.

The comments are in a New York Times story about the impact of state budget cuts on the poorest families.  According to the story:

Here in Michigan, more than 11,000 families received letters last week notifying them that in October they will lose the cash assistance they have been provided for years. Next year, people who lose their jobs here will receive fewer weeks of state unemployment benefits, and those making little enough to qualify for the state’s earned income tax credit will see a far smaller benefit from it.

But don’t worry, says a spokeswoman for the Governor -- just look what we’ve done instead:

Sara Wurfel, a spokeswoman for Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican in his first term, said his efforts had focused on creating an economic climate in the state for more and better jobs, while also protecting and even enhancing core safety-net services like Medicaid, she said.  Ms. Wurfel added that the state had, for instance, hired hundreds of new child welfare workers. [Emphasis added.]

So you see, there’s really no problem at all.  When the parents can’t afford food, clothing or shelter for the kids, Michigan’s newly-hired child abuse investigators will be ready and waiting to take the kids away!

The version of the story on the Times website included a link to this press release about the hiring.  The release also touted a claim that  Michigan is doing even more to speed up the process of getting those children it takes away adopted.

What the Times story doesn’t mention, and the reporter almost certainly didn’t know, is the role of one person in helping to plunge more Michigan families deeper into poverty, despair, and the possible loss of their children: Marcia Lowry.

Marcia is the founder and executive director of the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children’s Rights (CR).  It was their dreadful settlement of a class-action lawsuit that calls for the child abuse investigator / foster care worker hiring binge.

Yes, that’s the same settlement that has led to the expulsion of at least 1,500 children in kinship foster care from the homes of their grandparents and other relatives because those relatives couldn’t comply with ten single-spaced pages of hypertechnical licensing requirements.

Did Marcia demand that the hiring binge be financed by slashing benefits for poor people?  Of course not.  The problem is, her settlement did nothing to prevent it.  The settlement included no provision requiring the state to maintain its already meager level of help for poor families.  The settlement did not even include a “maintenance of effort” provision requiring the state to maintain programs specifically targeted at child abuse prevention and family preservation.  So those were cut back, too.

Marcia Lowry is not an idiot.  She had to know that a state in desperate financial straits would finance her settlement by taking the money from those least able to fight back.

Apparently, she just didn’t care.

The Marcia Lowry who demonstrated she once understood the value of families, even poor families, is long gone.  As I wrote on this Blog two years ago:

More than 20 years ago, Marcia brought to a Congressional hearing the lead plaintiff in one of her class-action lawsuits – a 12-year-old named Boyd, forced to endure five years in foster care just because his mother lacked adequate housing. At the time Marcia was crusading to enforce a 1980 law requiring "reasonable efforts" to keep families together.

''Boyd's mother had a difficulty, not a very serious difficulty, but it took her five years to get her children back,'' Marcia testified, according to a New York Times story. ''There was never any question of abuse with this family. These are children who are supposed to be protected by this very fine legislation. But reasonable efforts were not made in this case or in thousands of cases.''

And then the Times quoted Boyd: ''They took almost five years away from my life," he said, "and I'm only 12.''…

I have no doubt that, were a child like Boyd to show up at CR's offices today, their reaction would boil down to: "Go 'way kid, ya bother me."

Back when she brought Boyd to testify before Congress, Marcia’s organization was a project of the American Civil Liberties Union.  But that didn’t last.  Marcia told the Chronicle of Philanthropy that she left the ACLU in part because too much of what the ACLU did was tied to a “liberal agenda.”  Leaving the ACLU also may have made her more appealing to Carl Icahn, the corporate raider who once chaired her Board of Directors.

Marcia likes to say that she doesn’t know how to fix poverty, but she knows how to fix foster care.  In fact, notwithstanding the disgusting love fest in federal court in July, Marcia has made Michigan foster care worse.   Entries into foster care are increasing – and that doesn’t even include all the children already in foster care with grandparents who were kicked out of those homes and placed with strangers.

And now, once again, she is helping to make poverty worse, too.

So while Marcia hobnobs with celebrities at CR’s next glitzy fundraiser, thousands more Michigan families will be trying to figure out how to put food on the table, and keep those newly-hired child abuse investigators away from the door.

Foster care in Michigan: Another reason for the love fest in federal court

For an overview of our perspective on Michigan child welfare, listen to this segment of  The Craig Fahle Show on WDET public radio.

The Detroit News had a story yesterday which further explains why a lawyer for the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children’s Rights was cracking jokes with Maura Corrigan in federal court yesterday even as children continue to suffer.

Corrigan turns out to be a big backer of still another of CR founder Marcia Lowry’s bureaucratic obsessions: separating the state child welfare agency from the larger human services agency.

There is not a shred of evidence that this kind of change makes a child welfare system any better – and a pattern is beginning to emerge suggesting it may be easier to create an improved system without such a change.

When you look at the few child welfare systems that are, relatively speaking, national models – with strong, independent evidence that child safety has improved, they all have one thing in common: They focused on reducing the number of children torn from their families.  But many have something else in common as well: They are not stand-alone agencies.  Rather they are part of larger human services agencies.

●A class action lawsuit brought by the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law transformed the child welfare system in Alabama into, relatively-speaking, a national model.  (Co-counsel for plaintiffs is a member of NCCPR’s volunteer Board of Directors.) The New York Times wrote about it here. In Alabama, the child welfare system is part of the larger human services agency.

●A former Michigan DHS official who got fed up with having all his reform ideas stymied in Michigan, Jim Beougher, went to Maine and led a transformation of child welfare so remarkable that, in 2009, it was a finalist in Harvard’s Innovations in American Government awards.  I’d be glad to send stories about Maine to anyone interested.  Beougher runs the child welfare division within a larger human services agency.

● Still another fed up Michigander / Michiganian (I’m neutral on that one), David Berns, led a similar transformation of child welfare in the county-run system in El Paso County Colorado.  Key to making the transformation work was the fact that child welfare and other human services were in the same agency, according to an evaluation by the Center for Law and Social Policy.

● Similarly, Marc Cherna, who was hired to run the child welfare division of the Allegheny Department of Human Services and now runs the entire agency thinks having everything in one agency was crucial to his success.

● And in Florida, although it sounds like the Department of Children and Families deals with nothing else, Florida DCF actually has pretty much the same functions as Michigan DHS.  Florida’s dramatic improvements were the result of bold new leadership and a waiver from federal funding restrictions (the same waiver Michigan got, but then turned down at the last minute.) The Florida reforms also caught the attention of The New York Times.

● In Illinois, which was transformed thanks largely to a number of class-action lawsuits and a relatively brief outbreak of good leadership, the child welfare agency is a stand-alone agency.

● In New Jersey, making the child welfare agency a separate agency was a way to get CR off everybody’s back.  The separate agency per se changed nothing.  What made the difference was an unusually good settlement, largely because CR was guided by the Annie E. Casey Foundation (a former funder of NCCPR), and, especially, strong leadership from the first commissioner of that new agency, Kevin Ryan.  Ryan now is the monitor for the Michigan decree.

INDIANA: A MODEL OF FAILURE

The most ludicrous claim is the one from Corrigan that Indiana is doing well by creating a separate child welfare agency.  I am aware of no one anywhere in the country who cites the Indiana system as it exists today as a model of anything good.

On the contrary, Indiana takes away children at a rate more than 60 percent above the national average and nearly triple the rate of Illinois.  In 2009, the most recent year for which data are available, even as most states were able to reduce entries into care, Indiana saw an increase.  Perhaps that’s exactly what Corrigan likes about Indiana, which certainly wouldn’t bode well for Michigan.  Or perhaps Corrigan simply assumes the child welfare agency in Indiana must have improved because a conservative governor named a grandstanding judge to run it.

So why does CR keep pushing for a change for which there is no evidence of benefit?  Probably two reasons.  First, anything that separates children from their families, whether individually or in bulk, seems to appeal to Maura Corrigan and to Marcia Lowry.  And CR loves anything that involves more bureaucracy.  Add another form to fill out, move around the boxes on a table of organization, and somehow CR thinks something has been accomplished.  As I’ve said before, the people at CR are like the clerk you least want to see when you finally make it to the front of the line at the DMV.

Foster care in Michigan: CR makes its indifference to families perfectly clear

            According to a new statement from the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children’s Rights

 … the overarching aim of the [Michigan] reform campaign holds true — permanent, stable families for older youth; enhanced services for teens aging out of the system without a permanent family in place; increased adoptions for all kids. 

            Notice anything missing?

            To hear what CR forgot about, listen to NCCPR’s take on WDET Public Radio.

Foster care in Michigan: Here comes the new settlement, just like the old settlement

UPDATE, JULY 19: I discussed the failings of the new consent decree on The Craig Fahle Show on WDET public radio.  You can hear it here.


            The previous post to this blog predicted a disgusting spectacle in a federal court in Michigan today – and that’s just what it was.

            Sure enough, according to one news account, there was DHS Director Maura Corrigan “cracking jokes” with one of the lawyers suing DHS on behalf of the group that so arrogantly calls itself “Children’s Rights” (CR) as they agreed to a new settlement which is every bit as bad as the old settlement.

For the vulnerable children of Michigan, there is nothing to laugh about.  They gain absolutely nothing.  And all the harmful provisions of the old decree remain in effect.  That guarantees that many more children in Michigan will be shedding a lot more tears, while Corrigan and her new pals at CR pat each other on the back.

THE WAR AGAINST GRANDPARENTS CONTINUES

            The worst provision of the old settlement required grandparents and other relatives taking in their own family to comply with all of the hypertechnical licensing requirements imposed on strangers. 

            Of course, certain minimal health and safety standards are essential.  But the Michigan regulations, all ten single-spaced pages of them, go far beyond that; often revolving around middle-class creature comforts.  As I’ve noted often before, the apartment in Hawaii where President Obama was raised by his grandmother could not have passed inspection under the Michigan standards.

            The old settlement included cumbersome bureaucratic procedures to allow for the occasional exemption from some of these requirements or for waivers from licensing.  But the overall message was clear: The safer easier path, not for the families, but for DHS workers, was to say: No license, no child.

            That’s exactly what DHS has done.  As a result, by March, 2010, anywhere from 1,500 to 2,400 children had been expelled from the homes of their own grandparents and other relatives.  By September 30 of that year, the figure probably was at least 1,300 higher.   No one is keeping track of what happens to them.  Neither DHS nor CR seems to care.

            The new settlement changes none of this.  It has the same cumbersome procedures, and that sends the same dreadful message to the frontlines.  This puts at risk every grandchild now in the loving home of a grandmother or grandfather who is not licensed in accord with the bureaucratic mentality of DHS and CR. 

            Another onerous provision from the original settlement appears to give a preference to adoption of a child by total strangers over guardianship by a relative.  That, too, remains in the new agreement.

THERE IS NO “MAINTENANCE OF EFFORT” REQUIREMENT FOR FAMILY SERVICES

            The old settlement required DHS to conduct a “needs assessment” and then, based on that assessment, spend a small amount of money on services to help families.  By implication this was supposed to be additional money.  But DHS played a shell game.  DHS simply cut existing services to help families to fund the ones called for in the needs assessment.  DHS also has cut other prevention and family preservation services to fund other parts of the settlement, like the child abuse investigator / foster care worker hiring binge.

            Having seen how disingenuous DHS was about the first settlement, one would think that the new settlement would include a specific requirement that new funding for prevention and family preservation be additional funds, not just money moved from one pot to another.

            There is no such provision in the new settlement.

            That’s not surprising.  Since the settlement is with a group, CR, that doesn’t give a damn about keeping children safely in their own homes, obviously CR isn’t going to fight to avoid cuts to those programs.

STILL TRYING TO REPEAL THE LAWS OF HUMAN NATURE

The original settlement contained an attempt to repeal the laws of human nature known as “concurrent planning.”  Under concurrent planning, people who desperately want to adopt a child – and the child welfare agencies that desperately want those people to adopt -- are told, in effect: “Now remember, your first goal is to work with the birth parents and do everything you can to help them get the child back – but if, by some chance, you fail at this then you get what you really want – someone else’s child for your very own.”

One parent in New Jersey was honest enough to tell The New York Times what she called “the mantra” of parents in this kind of program, which is: “I’m on the next plane to South America if they think they’re getting this baby back.”

Meanwhile, the caseworkers are supposed to work equally hard to get the child adopted by people they like and can identify with – typically middle-class foster parents - as they do to try to reunite the child with people they often can’t stand, overwhelmingly poor disproportionately minority birth parents.

The new settlement continues “concurrent planning.”  Anything else would have been a shock, given that it’s hard to know who is more fanatical about adoption-at-all-costs, the director of CR, Marcia Lowry, or the Director of DHS, Maura Corrigan. 

BARELY A WORD ABOUT KEEPING CHILDREN OUT OF FOSTER CARE IN THE FIRST PLACE

            The original settlement was nearly silent on efforts to keep children in their own homes.  So is the new settlement.  Once again no surprise.  Keeping families together is the best option for the overwhelming majority of children the overwhelming majority of the time, it is of almost no interest to either Corrigan or Lowry.

            So children at risk of foster care in Michigan, overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately minority, remain at the mercy of CR and DHS, both of which appear to far prefer seeing them in the  middle-class suburban homes of strangers than in the poor, urban but loving homes that most of them came from.

            Only one question remains.  When Corrigan signed the new document, did she do it herself with a pen, or did she do it the Michigan way and just have some clerk  rubber-stamp it?

See the previous post to this Blog for a review of the record of DHS – and Maura Corrigan.

Foster care in Michigan: What they won’t be talking about in federal court Monday

Sometime tomorrow (Monday), according to one news account, there may be an announcement about a new modified consent decree between the Michigan Department of Human Services and the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children’s Rights. If it happens, it’s likely to be a pretty disgusting spectacle.

On one side: the director of the Michigan Department of Human Services, Maura Corrigan will be there.  In her previous job on the Michigan Supreme Court, she turned the court’s website into a propaganda organ for adoption as the only form of permanence.  While serving on one of those pointless Obligatory Blue Ribbon Commissions she walked out during the one part of one session in which birth parents told their stories.

On the other side: someone from the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children’s Rights.  Since they, too, view permanence almost exclusively in terms of adoption, and they don’t care about keeping families together either, there’s not much to argue about, is there?

So here’s a reminder of what neither side will be talking about.  It was written in response to a request for statements of support by organizers of a Speak Out in support of Maryanne Godboldo, whose children was taken needlessly after Godboldo, in consultation with the child’s doctor, took her off psychiatric mediation.

            I am sorry I cannot be with you in person; I am honored to be with you in spirit.

            Maryanne Godboldo has been doing what the overwhelming majority of parents – that giant majority who do not abuse or neglect their children - do in one way or another, for as long as they are parents: She is fighting for her child.

            Maryanne Godboldo did not volunteer for this fight.  You might say she was drafted.  But in fighting with such determination and courage for her own child, she has become a leader in a fight for thousands of children all over America needlessly torn by child protective services agencies from everyone they know and love.

            Just last week, we learned about Prince and Charlomane Leonard in Houston.  When Prince Leonard could not get full-time work as a welder, there was no housing he could afford where the family could live safely.  So they moved to a gated community – the storage shed they had rented for some of their belongings.  Prince Leonard built shelves and a loft, installed heating and air conditioning.  The children were happy and healthy.  Then the helping hand of child protective services struck.  They offered no help of any kind, they just took away the children on the spot.

            How common is that?  Three major studies have found that 30 percent of America’s foster children could be home right now if their parents just had decent housing.

            But what about Michigan?

            ●Michigan is a state so backward, that a former District Attorney in Oakland County tore apart a family and tried to jail the parents on charges of sexual abuse based on something called “facilitated communication” – essentially a glorified Ouija board.

            ●Michigan is a state where a study of case records found that when a white family is asked about drug use and says there is none, the case record would say “no history of drug abuse.”  When the same question produces the same answer in a black family, the file would  say “denies history of drug abuse.”

            ●Michigan is a state where millions of dollars are paid to agencies that are supposed to provide in-home help to families. Some of the agencies keep the money, and then refuse to go into Black neighborhoods.

            ●Michigan is a state where, if a family makes the mistake of calling DHS because they don’t have heat in the winter, all they’re likely to get is a cold house with a child abuse investigator at the door.

            ● Michigan is the state where, in an anonymous survey, 40 percent of juvenile court  judges admitted they lied about one of their most fundamental responsibilities.  Under federal law, states are required to make “reasonable efforts” to keep families together and avoid placing children in foster care.  A judge – a real, live, judge – is supposed to certify either that reasonable efforts were made, or that there was no way to do it safely.  If they don’t at least check one of those boxes on a form, foster care in that case is not eligible for federal funds.

            In that survey I mentioned, 40 percent of the judges admitted that they lied, and said reasonable efforts had been made when they didn’t really believe it themselves.

            ●Michigan is a state where, as is discussed in our first report on Michigan child welfare, on page 52, if one parent – even a non-custodial parent - “admits” maltreatment, the other parent is denied a trial, forced to do whatever DHS wants her or him do and may lose the child forever; all without a court ever determining if that parent ever did anything wrong.

            A challenge to that law is heading for the Michigan Supreme Court.  A lawyer for the father – a father who didn’t even have custody of the children - submitted a brief citing the many times the U.S. Supreme Court and courts in Michigan have written decisions emphasizing that children need to be raised by their own parents, decisions making clear that this bond is sacred, and should be severed only in the most serious cases.  In its brief in reply, Michigan DHS dismissed those noble statements as, and this is a direct quote:  “platitudes.”

            So that’s what Maryanne Godboldo, her daughter, and so many others like them are up against: a child welfare agency, run by a former state supreme court judge, no less – that dismisses some of the most important writing in American jurisprudence as “platitudes.”

RUBBER-STAMP REMOVALS

            But, of course, that’s not all DHS dismisses.  DHS also dismisses notions like due process of law.

            For decades I’ve written about how there are no real checks and balances in child welfare – how anything these agencies want is rubber-stamped.

            I thought it was just a figure of speech.

            But now, thanks to Maryanne Godboldo, her lawyers, and some very good journalists at Channel 7, we know that in Michigan, it’s literally true.  No real live judge signed the order to remove Maryanne’s daughter from her home.  The order was, literally, rubber-stamped.  The same thing happened in the Mike’s Hard Lemonade case.

            And consider this: That DHS bureaucracy doesn’t come cheap.  All those investigators and foster care workers and group homes and institutions and court hearings (not to mention the occasional SWAT team and helicopter) cost a lot of money.  And the whole process takes a lot of time.

            All the time, money and effort wasted doing so much harm to Maryanne Godboldo’s daughter is being stolen from some child in real danger who really does need to be taken from her or his home.  So those children are overlooked.  And that’s the real reason for the horror story cases of real abuse that make headlines.

            But you’re not just up against DHS.

THE PERMANENT GOVERNMENT

            Governors, legislators and DHS directors come and go, but always lurking in the shadows are scores of private agencies paid for every day they hold your children in foster care.  To use the late columnist Jack Newfield’s phrase, they are the “permanent government” of Michigan child welfare.  They are the ones who stand most strongly opposed to doing anything to keep families together.  They are the ones who oppose programs to keep Black children in their own communities.

            In 2006, the head of a trade association for private agencies told the Michigan Legislature that impoverished black children are better off far away with total strangers than close by with their own kin, because the strangers, he said, live in better neighborhoods with better schools. (See our first Michigan report, page 61).

            Now consider all the money that was wasted just on institutionalizing Maryanne Godboldo’s daughter.  That money could have gone to rent subsidies, so families aren’t destroyed because they can’t afford housing, or day care, so children are not taken on “lack of supervision” charges.

            But you’re not just up against the private agencies, either.

            Tomorrow, there is going to be another kind of court hearing.  According to one news account, the hearing will discuss a plan to revise the consent decree between DHS and a group of lawyers who operate under the Orwellian name “Children’s Rights.”

            The people at CR, as I call them, are good people.  They really think they are helping children.  But they’re not helping children in Michigan.

            I say the group’s name is “Orwellian” because I don’t know many children who crave the “right” to be torn from everyone they know and love.  But CR has done nothing to pressure Michigan to do more to keep families together.  In fact, CR’s settlement with DHS has made things worse.

            The Michigan settlement has sent DHS on a hiring binge, hiring more child abuse investigators and foster care workers – paid for, in part, by cutting programs to help keep families together.

Few children are demanding the “right” to be taken from grandma and grandpa  because those grandparents can’t comply with ten single-spaced pages of hypertechnical licensing requirements – requirements so absurd that the apartment in Hawaii where President Obama was raised by his grandmother would not have qualified.

            As a result, more than a thousand children have been expelled from the homes of grandparents and other relatives across Michigan.

            Yet CR won’t even say who invited them to Michigan in the first place.

And of course CR stands silent in the face of everything that has been done to Maryanne Godboldo’s daughter, refusing to stand up for her children’s rights.

            So I hope that you will take your protests to the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children’s Rights as well.  Send them polite, civil e-mails (don’t let them divert attention from what they’ve done to how you’re complaining about it).  Tell them you want to know who invited them into Michigan in the first place.  Tell them to speak out against what is being done to Maryanne Godboldo’s daughter and all the children like her. And tell them to either fix their consent decree to address wrongful removal – or get out of Michigan.

           

            And there is one more thing I will ask of you.

            After Maryanne Godboldo and her daughter win this fight – and they will – don’t stop fighting.  Please keep up the fight for all the other children like them.  Or, as Joe Hill said nearly a century ago: Don’t grieve. Organize.

            Other cities have grassroots organizations of families fighting to reform their child welfare systems. You know some of them, in Philadelphia, in Los Angeles and in New York.  Detroit doesn’t have one – yet.  You can become that organization.  Those other organizations, and NCCPR, stand ready to help.  

            Thank you for your courage, thank you for your determination.