GOOD NEWS FOR FLORIDA CHILDREN: State gets short term extension of foster care funding waiver

WAIVER THAT HELPED MAKE FLORIDA AN EMERGING NATIONAL LEADER IN CHILD WELFARE EXTENDED FOR TEN MONTHS

    NCCPR has learned that the Department of Health and Human Services has granted Florida a ten-month extension on its unique-in-the-nation statewide waiver from federal foster care funding restrictions.

    In a letter to Florida Department of Children and Families Secretary George Sheldon, Acting HHS Assistant Secretary for Children and Families David Hansell extended the waiver until July 31, 2012. At that time, HHS will decide whether to extend the waiver for a full five years.  

    This is very good news for Florida's vulnerable children. It means Florida gets ten more months to take money that other states can use only on foster care and use it for better alternatives. The waiver has been a key factor in turning Florida from the national example of child welfare failure to an emerging national leader in safely protecting children by doing more to keep families together. The "maintenance of effort" provisions of the waiver also protected DCF from the kinds of state budget cuts to child welfare that other states have endured.

    This is the same kind of waiver granted to Michigan – but that state chickened out at the last minute.

We've posted the letter from ACF, followed by the letter from Sheldon requesting the waiver on our website here.

    More about the waiver, and how it's helped Florida's vulnerable children is in this previous posts to this Blog which includes links to other posts describing the waiver in more detail.

Some good journalism about some bad foster care systems

    This doesn't happen very often: There's been so much good reporting on child welfare that it's been hard to keep up. So here's a round-up:

     For starters, there have been many good stories on the case of Noah Kirkman, the Canadian boy held in Oregon foster care for two years. There are links in the previous post to this Blog.

Also noted previously, the Los Angeles Daily News story about the foster-care panic in Los Angeles County. But there's lot's more:

    ● A dogged columnist for the Myrtle Beach, S.C. Sun News, Issac Bailey, has spent months investigating the case of a father whose child was brutally abused by the children of her mother's new boyfriend. The child has been trapped in foster care for two years, for just one reason: Until the columnist started asking questions, the State of South Carolina deemed the father too poor to raise her – even though he'd been raising her before mom fled with her, and even though he's raising his other children with no problem. It's a six-part series.  This link, to today's installment, will get you to the rest.  And see, especially, part three,

    ● The Lincoln Journal Star has an excellent editorial, pegged to NCCPR's data, asking why, as most of the nation does a better job of keeping children safe in their own homes, Nebraska is getting even worse. The Daily Nonpareil, in Council Bluffs Iowa, also citing NCCPR, is asking the same question about Iowa.

    ● Also in Iowa, the Des Moines Register has a very good story about what the state child welfare agency does when one of its caseworkers allegedly "goes rogue" and interferes in a custody dispute involving her own family. (It does absolutely nothing). The Register also has done excellent editorials, like this one, on the dangers of "central registries" of alleged child abusers that are utterly lacking in due process protections for families.

    ● And then there's this incredibly botched case in Texas, which illustrates the first rule of lousy child welfare systems: No matter how much it hurts the child, never, ever admit you made a mistake. KPRC-TV in Houston broke the story, and did a follow-up story the next day about the (relatively) happy ending.

It's the second time a Houston television station has beaten the you-know-what out of the Houston Chronicle. (The Fox affiliate, KRIV, did it with this story, and this one.) That's because the longtime reporter on the child welfare beat at the Chronicle, Terri Langford, appears to view it as her mission in life to make sure that this side of the child welfare story never makes it into her paper's news pages.

Which just goes to show that child welfare and the journalism of child welfare have something in common: There's been some real improvement in some places, while others remain mired in failure.

UPDATED SEPT. 15: Oregon foster care agency to Canadian family: In lieu of a pound of flesh, we’ll take your money

UPDATE: The Oregon AP has a very good story about the Kirkman case today.  The story appears on the websites of several newspapers, including the Oregonian - and that's probably the only place in the Oregonian where Lisa Kirkman will get a fair shake.  
Meanwhile KATU-TV in Portland and Canadian media are reporting that legal proceedings in Canada have been delayed - because Oregon DHS screwed-up the paperwork.  So now, in addition to looking vengeful and greedy, Oregon DHS looks pretty dumb.
    
I've written several times on this Blog about the case of Lisa Kirkman, a Canadian mother whose son was thrown into foster care while he was staying with his stepfather in Oregon. After two years, and multiple foster homes, the boy finally was returned home; largely, I believe, thanks to international media pressure.

    But clearly, the Oregon Department of Human Services doesn't like being made fools of in two countries. And they've found a great way to get even: Go to court in Canada, and try to make Lisa Kirkman pay Oregon for expenses the state incurred after it wrongfully took away her child. A hearing on Oregon's demand is scheduled to take place today.

    Though crossing an international border in search of these payments is unusual if not unprecedented, sadly, the practice itself is not. In another case, one of the most poignant I've ever read about, Oregon DHS is adding insult to the enormous injury it inflicted on a family by seeking the same sort of payment.

    In many cases, the payments can be the final obstacle standing between a foster child and return to his own parents.

    There is a word for taking away someone's child and making that person pay money to get the child back: Ransom. And it hurts everyone in the system, even the agencies themselves.

●The overwhelming majority of parents who lose children to the system have no money to spare. Often that's why their children are in foster care in the first place.

● Because the standard of proof in child welfare proceedings is so low, this provision inevitably punishes many innocent families.

●The purpose of foster care is to keep the child safe. Everyone concedes it is harmful to take a child from his or her parents and the longer the foster care the greater the harm. If you make ransom a condition of returning the child and the birth parents manage to do everything else but still owe the ransom, the foster care is prolonged even though the home is now safe. That is punishing the child for the alleged financial failings of the parents.

Prof. Daniel Hatcher of the University of Baltimore School of Law has an excellent article about the entire issue in the Brooklyn Law Review.

One can certainly imagine a child welfare system like Oregon's not giving a damn about the harm to the children. One can see how they'd be desperate for the money – after all, when you take away children at a rate that now is more than 80 percent above the national average, those costs really mount up.

But what really makes ransom an insane practice, even by the standards of child welfare agencies, is the fact that not only does it do enormous harm to the children and their parents, it actually costs the government money.

Collecting ransom actually increases the cost of foster care. No impoverished family ever will come up with the full cost of foster care – instead they are charged for their "share" of the costs. But for every extra day a child is held in foster care because the birth parents haven't paid their "share" of the costs, the state has to foot the entire bill. The birth parents wind up in a deeper and deeper hole and the state winds up paying more and more.

Even if the birth parents scrape together the money to get their child back; or, in cases like the Kirkman case, where the child already is home, the payments only make it harder on the family financially, a particularly steep burden for families that already are poor.

Poverty often creates stress can lead to actual child abuse, or poverty itself is confused with neglect – so the ransom increases the chances of actual child abuse and/or having the child taken away again because of poverty. Once again, you harm the child – and cost the state more money.

So why do these policies exist? Because grandstanding state legislators love them. They get to issue press releases about how they're "cracking down on child abuse" and since in their fantasy world, only parents who are evil, sadistic brutes lose their children to foster care, it's only fair to make 'em pay, right?

Not in the real world.

The Canadian Press, CBC News, CTV News, and the Calgary Herald all have stories about the latest turn in the Kirkman case. And so does the Eugene Register Guard, which has done a far better job than the Oregonian on the whole case.

In the Register Guard story, I posed a question, which I'll repeat here: If DHS is supposed to do everything it does "in the best interests of the child," how is it in this child's best interests to make his family poorer and inflict even more stress?

Michigan logic: Sure, the foster child is dead, but the licensing report was glowing!

    You know the expression "the operation was a success, but the patient died"? There's an equivalent way to think of the behavior of the Michigan Department of Human Services and the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children's Rights (CR): The licensing report was glowing, but the foster child died.

In July, I wrote about Emily Meno, the latest foster child to be licensed to death in Michigan. Taken needlessly from her own home, she was placed in the home of a duly-licensed stranger, Joy Heaven.

    Heaven didn't just pass muster with the private agency that recommended she be licensed. She passed with flying colors. According to the Grand Rapids Press, the agency worker wrote in her evaluation that Heaven's "patient, loving and compassionate personality will be a tremendous asset in her caring for children."

    According to police that patience apparently wore thin when, they allege, she violently shoved Emily, causing fatal injuries.

    This is not the first time DHS may have erred in falling head over heels for a licensed foster parent. The state was at least as thrilled about the duly-licensed foster/adoptive parents of Ricky Holland. The adoptive mother tortured him, and ultimately murdered him. Throughout the process, the Michigan Department of Human Services ignored one blatant warning sign after another. Even during the time after Ricky Holland had disappeared but his body had not yet been found, during the time police already strongly suspected the Hollands of murdering Ricky, DHS gave the Hollands final approval to adopt another foster child in their care.

    The extra element of tragedy, of course, is that, in Michigan, hundreds of children have been
expelled from the loving homes of grandparents and other relatives solely because they can't meet ten pages of hypertechnical licensing requirements, many of which are unrelated to health and safety. And why is that happening? Because CR demanded it, and won it in a class-action lawsuit settlement. So even more children now face the same risks as Ricky Holland, Emily Meno and others.

    As I said in July, a jury ultimately will decide the guilt or innocence of the licensed stranger who cared for Emily Meno. But this much we already know: Emily Meno is one more child "protected to death" and "licensed to death" by the Michigan Department of Human Services. And a consent decree it never should have signed sure isn't helping.

GUEST BLOG: Countering the “reflex to remove children”

    Here is another response from the comments posted to the New York Times website, reacting to Chris Gottlieb's excellent essay on the Times' "Motherlode" blog:

Anonymous
East Coast
August 26th, 2010
2:55 pm

I am a county solicitor in a city on the East Coast, representing the County Children and Youth agency in court, and a parent who commutes to work with her child. Thank you for writing this. Although many of the social workers I represent in court care deeply about maintaining and supporting intact families, too often there is a reflex to remove children for 'choices' or problems that result from poverty. And there's just an awful lot of judging of parents in general.

During my commute people have periodically told me I should smack my child for fidgeting (he's a toddler), and just as many others have told me I'm too strict. One woman chased me up the subway stairs berating me about my parenting. I don't think she was "well," but it didn't make it feel any better.

The abuse that commenter No. 5 writes about is terrible -- but that's not how most kids come into care. After bringing her kid to the ER with a broken wrist and a black eye, from two different skating accidents, one of my friends noted that not one person took her or the child aside to ask questions about the injuries, which certainly they would have done if she'd been poor and black or Latino. So thank you for what you do.

       That last paragraph, about the experience of the white middle-class professional, reminds me of another professional who has written essays about child abuse – someone who still has a lot to learn, as is discussed in this previous post.

A Los Angeles newspaper covers the foster care panic (of course, it’s not the Times)

WHAT DO THE LOS ANGELES TIMES AND THE LOS ANGELES COUNTY DEPARTMENT OF CHILDREN AND FAMILY SERVICES HAVE IN COMMON? THEY BOTH TRY TO COVER UP NEWS THAT REVEALS THEY SCREWED UP.

    The Los Angeles Times has been having a field day reporting on efforts by the county Department of Children and Family Services to cover up the true number of deaths of children previously known to the agency. It's an important story and they're right to cover it intensively.

    But the Times has been trying to keep a secret, too. For months, the newspaper has refused to tell readers that entries into foster care shot up by 16 percent – starting just when the Times' one-sided out-of-context reporting on child welfare reached critical mass last year. The Times wouldn't even ask for the data from DCFS – NCCPR had to file its own California Public Records Act request.

    Fortunately, the competing, but much smaller, Los Angeles Daily News has been willing to report what the Times won't. A year ago, the Daily News reported on the likelihood of such a panic. And this week, they confirmed it.

Whether you agree or disagree with our take on the numbers, discussed in our report on Los Angeles child welfare, it's hard to see how the Times can claim the huge increase in entries into foster care isn't news at all.

And check out the comments at the end of the Daily News story from Deanne Tilton Durfee. Durfee heads L.A.'s Interagency Council on Abuse and Neglect, serves on the county's child abuse death review team, heads the National Center for Child Fatality Review – and is no friend of family preservation. But even Durfee says that child abuse deaths really have gone down since the days, in the late 1990s, when the county was taking away far more children, and had vastly more children trapped in foster care.

Her analysis, and DCFS trying to cover up such fatalities are not mutually exclusive.

And these four facts are not mutually exclusive either:

●DCFS is stonewalling, digging itself ever deeper into a bunker to try to hide its screw-ups, possibly breaking the law in the process.

●DCFS Director Trish Ploehn's comments on any number of issues have been disingenuous at best.

●Ploehn should be fired, despite the long odds against finding someone who is both really good at the job of running a huge child welfare agency and willing to work for the LA County Board of Supervisors.

●The Los Angeles Times blew the child welfare story and set off a foster care panic.

Foster care and family preservation In New York City: There are very few “gains” left to lose

There's been another death of a child "known to the system" in New York City. Actually, that's not unusual. In a city as huge as New York, that happens once every nine days or so.

But this one is the first in awhile to get a lot of media attention. The case is more ambiguous than the death of Nixzmary Brown, whose death set off a huge surge in removals of children from their homes. In particular, it's not at all clear that the city's Administration for Children's Services could have seen this one coming.

But facts have never stopped Bill De Blasio. He chaired the City Council's Human Services Committee at the time Nixzmary Brown died, and he never missed a chance to score political points by attacking ACS in ways that encouraged the agency to take even more children.

Now, De Blasio is telling The New York Times he's concerned that some of the "gains" in child protection since the death of Nixzmary Brown have been lost. He can relax. There were no gains in the years since Nixzmary Brown died, there were only losses.

THE PROGRESS STOPPED IN 2006

There were considerable gains made starting in 1999, when the first commissioner of ACS, Nicholas Scoppetta, abandoned his embrace of the take-the-child-and-run approach and began pushing efforts to keep families together. But almost all of those gains under Scoppetta and his successors were wiped out after Nixzmary Brown died in January of 2006. And the person most responsible for that is the current ACS Commissioner, John Mattingly.

ACS' own statistics and the annual Mayor's Management Reports show that the "gains" since then are a fiction. The perception of improvement is a result of some slick pandering by Mattingly, who either played to the crowd or worse, really believed the answers lay in talking tough, tearing apart more families, creating a sibling confiscation policy, and opposing just about every real reform in child welfare.

Since gut instinct says that should work, people like De Blasio, who fanned the flames of hysteria throughout, were glad to claim that it did. (It certainly worked for De Blasio. It probably helped him get elected to his current job as the city's "Public Advocate.")

But the numbers tell a very different story. The table below is an excerpt from the data page (Page 20) of NCCPR's report on New York City child welfare (where you'll find data for some measures all the way back to 1993 as well as full source citations). It shows entries into care, deaths of children "known to the system" and the two key measures used to evaluate child safety: Reabuse of children left in their own homes and foster care "recidivism," – the proportion of children taken from their homes who have to be placed again. The time period starts with the last year before Nixzmary Brown died.

Does this look like progress?  Do these look like “gains”?

Year*	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009
Entries into foster care	4,813	6,213	7,132	7,451	7474
Recidivism %	8.8	7.8	11.4	11.1	14.1
Re-abuse %	11.7	12.6	14.7	14.2	14.7
Fatalities, “known to the  system”	30	44	41	49	NA

*-Fatality data are for calendar years, the other measures are for fiscal years.

Every measure has gotten worse. I agree with those who say you can't judge safety based on fatalities (I only wish I could convince more reporters). But you can get some idea based on reabuse and recidivism – particularly when it's a trend over several years.

THE RETREAT FROM REFORM

And it doesn't end there: The list of ways John Mattingly has retreated from reform keeps growing:

reneging on a pledge to use "differential response" (a national innovation he's long opposed) to deal with some "educational neglect" cases, opposing state legislation to encourage workers to be slightly more flexible about rushing to seek termination of parental rights for some mothers who are in jail or drug treatment, and even opposing legislation to place more children permanently with relatives through subsidized guardianship. Fortunately, both bills passed despite Mattingly's objections.

Now, even one of ACS' signature achievements during Mattingly's tenure, a remarkably successful initiative in the Highbridge section of the Bronx called Bridge Builders, is in jeopardy. (In 2005, NCCPR received a grant from one of the foundations that helped create Bridge Builders, the Child Welfare Fund, to write about the initiative).

Mattingly's actually become one of the most regressive forces in child welfare nationwide. In an appalling presentation to an Urban Institute symposium last December, he suggested that child welfare agencies were going too far in efforts to combat racial bias, took another swipe at subsidized guardianship, and said we really shouldn't talk so much about foster care as a "bad outcome" because it makes foster parents sad. He even suggested caseworkers might be getting too careful about not taking children from battered mothers.

The damage Mattingly has been doing becomes even clearer when his retreat from reform is contrasted with the dynamic, progressive leader of New York State's Office of Children and Family Services, Gladys Carrion. She championed the bills Mattingly opposed, and has led a huge reform of the state's juvenile justice system (an issue where she and Mattingly are in agreement).

Mattingly's retreat from reform has harmed children not only directly, through needless foster care, and making all children less safe, but also by scarfing up resources that could have been used to save prevention programs from recent budget cuts.

While it is progress of a sort to see Mr. De Blasio zero in on cuts in prevention as his primary concern – or so he says at the moment – it's also hypocritical, given how much he did to push ACS into taking away so many more children. There could be a lot more money available for such programs had the number of children taken from their homes each year not shot up by 50 percent.

Not everything is gone. Mattingly has done a good job of curbing the use of group homes and institutions. And he's made a serious attempt finally to set up a mechanism to hold accountable the scores of private agencies that provide almost all foster care and most other child welfare services other than investigations. It's been partially successful. Though ACS botched the scoring on the latest "request for proposals" as part of this process, causing turmoil among the agencies, I don't think that was Mattingly's fault.

So relax Mr. De Blasio. John Mattingly already undid almost all the progress he made in his early years as commissioner, and before that, as an advisor to Scoppetta. In New York City child welfare, there are very few "gains" left.

The only thing to be determined now is whether this latest tragedy will set off another surge in needless removals of children, make things even worse, and jeopardize what little progress still exists.