Adoption of children from foster care: National Child Welfare Hypocrisy Day, 2018

This post originally appeared in 2008. Since the event is annual, I've reprinted it on several occasions since, with revisions and updates as appropriate.  

How do we know what's really important to a person, or to a corporation, or to an institution?

    One way, of course, is how we choose to spend money, and I've written before about how child welfare agencies do that. But there's also another good measure: what we choose to celebrate.

    The father who has memorized the schedule of his favorite football team but always forgets his children's birthdays is sending a message. So, too, is the child welfare agency which claims that its first priority when a child is taken away is to reunify that child with her or his birth parents, with adoption as the second choice, but chooses to celebrate only the supposed second choice.

    Often, adoption is the right second choice; for some children it is the right first choice. Adoption can be, both literally and figuratively, a life saver for a child; it should be one important component of any good child welfare system; and there is nothing wrong with celebrating it as one avenue to permanence.

How child welfare systems view keeping families together

How child welfare systems view keeping families together

But if the true intent of child welfare systems is revealed by what they celebrate, then one of the most noble concepts in child welfare, giving children permanence, has been perverted into a synonym for adoption and only adoption. 

Reunification gets lip service until everyone in the system, from frontline workers, to agency chiefs to top judges can get what they really want: children taken from poor people and placed with middle class families; families like their own. 

The real agenda of most child welfare systems, and most of the people in them, is made apparent every year on National Adoption Day; or, as it should properly be called, National Child Welfare Hypocrisy Day.

EVERYBODY KNOWS THE DRILL

How child welfare systems view adoption

    The day actually is celebrated on different dates in different states, but it's always in November and most places will hold their celebrations on Saturday. 

You know the drill. Open the court on a Saturday, bring in cake and balloons, finalize foster-child adoptions en masse – and reinforce every stereotype about how the system rescues children from horrible birth parents and places them with vastly superior adoptive parents. 

And, of course, get a guaranteed puff piece in the local newspaper, with no tough questions. This one, from the St. Petersburg Times (Now Tampa Bay Times) in 2008, is typical:

In general, a courthouse is not a happy place. People go there to get divorced, to fight eviction, to file for bankruptcy, to watch loved ones sent away to prison. You see a lot of suffering, and you hear it in the cries and cursing that echo through the hallways. Forty children, sugar-laden with sheet cake and bouncing around a lobby with balloons, made Friday an exception at the county courthouse in Tampa. As part of a National Adoption Day celebration, they were legally united with "forever families," mothers and fathers giving them a one-way ticket out of the foster care system. …

The treacle aside, it's almost certainly inaccurate. Given what we know about adoption "disruption" for some of the children, it may well be round trip. And, as is discussed below, stories like this one make such tragedies, and others, a little more likely.

(As for how the Tampa Bay Times regards birth parents – see this post from 2017.)

    If nothing else, this is the day when almost all the people in almost every child welfare system in the country, from frontline workers to agency chiefs, show their true colors. This is the day that makes them genuinely happy. Yet all these same players will turn on a dime and blather on about how their first priority is reunification. 

Well, if that's your first priority, why aren't you celebrating it? Why do so many fewer communities take part in National Reunification Day, a project that only began in 2009? Why is there no happiness expressed over doing what you yourselves claim is priority #1?  Why don't reporters note that, when a child finally gets to return to the birth mother she loves after months or years needlessly separated, that, too, can bring some happiness to a courtroom?

Clearly, reunification is not priority #1. Priority #1 is carrying out those middle-class rescue fantasies – taking children from people like them and placing them with people like us; people of the same race and, especially the same income level, as your average caseworker, judge, lawyer – or reporter. (No newspaper took the whole "people like us" thing as literally as Foster's Daily Democrat and its sister papers in New Hampshire. In 2008 -- a four story 4,900-word Sunday package of glop and goo about adoption day included a sidebar in which the saintly foster mother – who kept complaining about not getting enough taxpayer money for her adoptions – was none other than the newspaper's managing editor!)

For almost everyone working in the system, the truth is that keeping families together is the broccoli on the child welfare menu and adoption is the dessert. National Child Welfare Hypocrisy Day is another way to bring out the dessert tray before anyone's eaten their broccoli.

The exceptions are few and far between. The first to recognize the hypocrisy was Marc Cherna, long-time reform-minded leader of the human services agency in Allegheny County, Pa. He was the first to create an annual celebration of reunified families and push it at least as hard as the adoption celebration. After NCCPR started spreading the word about this, a few other communities followed suit.

Then the Parents’ Representation Project of the American Bar Association Center on Children and the Law sponsored the first National Reunification Day – but even now that's it's become National Reunification Month, relatively few places take part, compared to the hundreds of Adoption Day events.  And some of the best reunification events are sponsored not by child welfare agencies or courts, but by groups like the Family Defense Center and Legal Services of New Jersey.

THE DANGERS OF ADOPTION DAY

    It's not just hypocritical, it's also dangerous.

    When the only kind of "permanence" that receives any reward is adoption, the message to the frontlines is obvious: Don't try to reunify, rush to terminate parental rights. And that's exactly what happens. In Kentucky it led to a scandal, as the Lexington Herald-Leader exposed "quick trigger adoptions" with workers rushing to terminate parental rights in cases where children may never have needed to be taken from their parents. 

The only difference between Kentucky and the rest of the nation is, in Kentucky, the Herald-Leader was paying attention. That caught the attention of NBC Nightly News which offered an excellent overview of the Kentucky scandal.

But there are other dangers as well. Year after year, terminations of parental rights outrun actual adoptions. The result: A generation of legal orphans with no ties to their parents and little or no hope of adoption – with or without cake and balloons - either. The combination of these non-financial incentives, plus the adoption bounties paid by the federal government goes a long way to explain the sharp increase in the number of children who "aged out" of foster care over the past 20 years. 

We estimate that the mad rush to embrace adoption-as-panacea has contributed to creating more than 100,000 additional children who age out with no permanent home.  UPDATE, 2018: And data compiled by the Annie E. Casey Foundation show that of all the children who leave the foster care system at age 16 or older, half have no permanent home.  It's even worse for nonwhite foster children.

And then there is the matter of where these children wind up.

Another reason for the mad rush to adoption-at-all-costs is the fact that getting those adoption numbers up is the one time a child welfare agency is guaranteed good press. Everyone knows the reporters will write a story like the one quoted above and not ask any tough questions about whether the children really needed to be taken, and how carefully the adoptive parents were checked out. 

And then, the same journalists will wonder how it could happen that children like Ricky Holland and Timothy Boss in Michigan and others across the country could be murdered by adoptive parents - in effect, adopted to death. In 2017, in Iowa alone, there have been four cases of horrific, sometimes fatal abuse, involving children adopted from foster care.

Of course abuse in adoptive homes is rare – just like abuse in birth parent homes. The bigger problem is adoption "disruption," when agencies rush children into a bad match and the parents change their minds. No one really knows how often that happens – child welfare systems almost never ask questions to which they don't want to know the answers. Some rough estimates are in NCCPR's Issue Paper on adoption.  And journalists rarely follow up on those adoption "happy endings" - unless the adoption itself got an exceptional amount of attention - as happened here.

But whether the problem is legal orphans, disruption or, rarely, severe, even fatal abuse in adoptive homes, it's all encouraged by adoption bounties and the adoption day mentality, both of which promote quick-and-dirty, slipshod placements.

Even Marcia Lowry, who used to run the group that so arrogantly calls itself "Children's Rights" has said that "… Congress should realize that far too many states … when they do, for example, raise their adoption numbers, are doing so by including many clearly inadequate families … along with the genuinely committed, loving families who want to make a home for these children, just to 'succeed' by boosting their numbers." That her own lawsuit settlements have been known to push states the same way is a contradiction someone might want to ask her about someday.

Chronicle of Social Change apologizes for – and removes – column that used a crude racial stereotype

Last week, I repeated NCCPR’s longstanding call for the Chronicle of Social Change to apologize for a column that included a section that bullied an impoverished African-American mother with a vile racial stereotype about poor people wasting money on sneakers.

I said it needed to be a real apology, without reservation - not one of those “if-anyone-was-offended” non-apology apologies.  And it needed to be prominent on the Chronicle site, in front of the paywall.

On Monday, to the credit of its editor and publisher, the Chronicle issued just such an apology.  In their statement, editor John Kelly and publisher Daniel Heimpel wrote: 

[The author of the column] has told us that she doesn’t consider this allusion to be racist. And despite criticism of the column related to this section, our initial decision was to keep it on our site.

We were wrong. The fact is that the trope of a low-income mom buying children designer clothes, at the expense of spending on more critical family needs, does exist as a crude and often racial stereotype. Its inclusion in this piece may not have been intended in that way, but our editorial process should have identified this and we should have insisted on its removal from the piece. 

Once it was live on our site, we should have considered more carefully the criticism of this reference and taken it down. We mishandled this decision, and in so doing have allowed a callous dismissal of a young single mother’s very human efforts to do right by her daughter to remain in our pages. …

We regret it, we have learned from it, and today we remove this column from our website with our sincere apologies.

I believe the apology is sincere – which is why I’m not referring to the Chronicle as the – well, you know.

J. Khadijah Abdurahman, an astute observer of issues involving race and child welfare, and someone who regularly asks challenging questions of all of us, points out in a tweet that it took a long time to reach this point and “there’s no reflection on why not a single person in their office raised a red flag before publishing.”

My guess, and my hope, is that such reflection has taken place internally. 

There also are a number of other issues with how the Chronicle approaches news coverage of child welfare.  For example, an event they sponsored in Washington yesterday on the so-called shortage of foster homes does not appear to have included  anyone taking the position that the problem isn’t too few foster parents – it’s too many foster children.

But I prefer to assume that  this is reflection of the old way of doing things at the Chronicle, and now that is going to change.  So, as far as I’m concerned, as of today, the slate is clean.

Impressive reporting on racial bias in Texas child welfare

There’s a pervasive stereotype – especially in Texas - about those of us who think there should be less coercive intervention into families. It goes like this:

If you want to take away fewer children you must be one of those right-wing extremists who doesn’t care if parents beat up their kids!  This stereotype has been reinforced for at least 20 years by the most prominent liberal in Texas child welfare -- a “Godsource” for Texas journalists -- who has crusaded endlessly to tear apart more families.  (I see no reason to name him here, but you’ll find plenty about him in the report we released about Texas child welfare in 2005.)

So mainstream media coverage consists almost entirely of the following “master narrative”: Texas spends too little on child welfare, the only mistake Texas child welfare makes is to leave children in dangerous homes, Texas should take away more children and anyone who thinks otherwise must be one of those right-wing spare-the-rod-spoil-the-child “parents rights” fanatics.

One of those themes actually is correct: Texas should spend more.  The rest is Texas-sized misrepresentation.  It misrepresents not only those of us on the Left, but also many smart, principled conservatives with whom I disagree on almost everything but who care passionately about protecting children and see that the current approach isn’t doing the job.

Greetings from the Family Values Left

Speaking only for myself, I’m a lifelong tax-and-spend liberal who proudly cast his first vote in a Presidential election for George McGovern and his last vote in a Presidential primary for Bernie Sanders.  And one look at the Board of NCCPR (go ahead, have a look) makes clear we’re not exactly a right-wing bunch.

But that stereotype also may explain some interesting findings about racial disproportionality in Texas child welfare, discussed in an excellent story that, itself, breaks the mold for Texas media.

The story, by Julie Chang of the Austin American-Statesman, reports that statewide, African American children are, proportionately, twice as likely to be torn from their families as white children.  But in the liberal bastion of metropolitan Austin, Travis County, they are eight times more likely to be taken away. 

Statewide, Latino children were less likely to be removed than white children, but in Travis County they were three times more likely to be removed.

“I was really appalled when I saw [the data],”Aurora Martinez Jones, an associate Travis County district judge who oversees child welfare cases told the Statesman. She added:

“Ultimately, racism still exists, and it’s alive and well in Austin. We like to look at ourselves as a very liberal and progressive community, and we can be in a lot of respects, but ... people still haven’t acknowledged the implicit bias and explicit bias they may experience when interacting with other people in our community.”

Indeed, that progressive tradition actually might contribute to the problem.

Because many on the Left have a blind spot when it comes to child welfare, they are not as vigilant   And because they see an intervention by Child Protective Services as benevolent, they are less sensitive to both racial and class bias, and more likely to needlessly call a child abuse hotline and trigger a child abuse investigation. Of course, all that winds up hurting the very children my fellow liberals want to help.
about protecting civil liberties as they are when confronted by the abuses of law enforcement.

But most notable is Chang’s refusal to simply accept the usual excuses from child welfare’s “caucus of denial” – those who insist that people in child welfare are so much better than the rest of us that they are magically immune from the racial bias that permeates every other aspect of American life.  As Chang notes:

Financial pressure in part caused by the rising cost of living, limited community resources such as affordable housing, and institutional racism drive the differences in Travis County, which have widened over the last decade, according to child welfare advocates.

In other words, it’s both the confusion of poverty with neglect and racial bias. The story also notes that

Two Texas studies conducted in 2008 and 2011 found that even though African-American children were considered at lower risks of maltreatment than white children, CPS workers were more likely to remove an African-American child from the home.

Other studies have shown that when controlled for income, African-American children are still more likely to be involved with CPS than their white peers.

This of course jibes with a wealth of other research that the denial caucus chooses to ignore.

But remember how I said one part of the media’s “master narrative” – the part about Texas spending too little on child welfare – is correct? That, too, is borne out by the Statesman story:

Advocates fear that the disparities will worsen with the loss of the state’s Office of Minority Health Statistics and Engagement, which had shared data with the child welfare agency but was shuttered Sept. 1 after the Republican-led Legislature cut funding.

But this also illustrates another point: Texas doesn’t just need to spend more, it needs to spend smarter, on everything from tracking racial bias in child welfare to actually doing something about it.

All of which leads Aurora Martinez Jones to conclude:

We have to admit that this child welfare system was not created for African-American children. We did not have African-American children in mind when we started looking at a state agency that would intervene in a parent’s right to be a parent. We were looking mostly at Anglo children and how we could support their families. This system needs reform.

The rest of the media in Texas should pay attention.

NCCPR statement on new foster care data

The federal government released new data today about children in foster care. (New means the data are "only" about one year old - covering Federal Fiscal Year 2017).  They show a small increase in the number of children trapped in foster care on the last day of that year, Sept. 30 compared to the same day a year earlier. They also show a small decrease in the number of children taken from their homes over the course of a year compared to the previous year.

NCCPR Executive Director Richard Wexler released this statement concerning the data.

The ongoing increase in the number of children in foster care on any given day is not due to the opioid epidemic. Rather, it’s due to child welfare’s typical failed knee-jerk take-the-child-and-run response to the opioid epidemic.  It is a response that lives at the intersectionof ignorance and arrogance.

The research is clear – even when substance abuse is the issue, in the typical cases seen by child protective services workers children do better when left in their own homes even than comparably maltreated children placed in foster care.  That’s why the first response should be drug treatment for the parents, not foster care for the children – not for the sake of the parents, but for the sake of the children.

The small decline in the number of children entering foster care gives hope that child welfare finally might be learning that lesson.

Still waiting for the Chronicle of Social Change to apologize for its exercise in bullying and racial stereotyping

UPDATE, NOV 12, 2018: THE WAIT IS OVER: To its great credit, the Chronicle has offered a full apology. I believe it is sincere.  As far as I am concerned, the slate is now clean.

A stereotype in that infamous column published by the Fox News of child welfare bears a striking resemblance to widely-condemned dog-whistle political ads

Last week, The Washington Post ran a story about a negative campaign ad in which a Jewish candidate was portrayed as “holding a wad of cash in front of him, with a crazed look in his eyes.”

The story went on to list example after example of candidates using crude racial stereotypes:

In New York, Republicans have continually assailed a Democratic congressional hopeful’s decade-old rap career, despite his work as an attorney and a Rhodes Scholar.

In Georgia, Republican Brian Kemp used an ad with a tap dancer to show his opponent in the governor’s race, black Democrat Stacey Abrams, “dancing around the truth,” that was also criticized as having a racist undertone.

In Florida, a Republican official claimed that if black Democrat Andrew Gillum won the governor’s race, “his people” would be getting paid back for slavery. …

In California, Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter … has falsely accused his opponent, an American of Palestinian and Mexican descent, of trying to “infiltrate” the government and trying to “hide” family ties to terrorism.

Now, suppose, hypothetically there had been another example.  Suppose the article also had said:

 In New Jersey, a white candidate for State Senate accused his opponent, a Black woman, of “wanting to raise your taxes so her people can waste the money.” The text was illustrated by an African-American buying expensive sneakers.

It would fit right in, wouldn’t it?  In fact, there is no such ad. 

But now consider what actually did appear in a column for the Chronicle of Social Change – the Fox News of child welfare - last year.  The column, by the Chronicle’s one-time “Blogger of the Year,” Marie Cohen, criticized a New York Times story about foster care as the new “Jane Crow.”  In the process it dredged up the sneaker stereotype. 

As I explained in a post to this blog last year:

Here’s how the Times story actually begins:

Maisha Joefield thought she was getting by pretty well as a young single mother in Brooklyn, splurging on her daughter, Deja, even though money was tight. When Deja was a baby, she bought her Luvs instead of generic diapers when she could. When her daughter got a little older, Ms. Joefield outfitted the bedroom in their apartment with a princess bed for Deja, while she slept on a pullout couch.

Here’s how Cohen paraphrases that paragraph and comments on it:

Reporters Stephanie Clifford and Jessica Silver-Greenberg began with a description of Maisha Joefield, a mother who “splurged” on her daughter even when money was tight. For example, the reporters added helpfully, Ms. Joefield “bought her Luvs instead of generic diapers when she could.” It is odd to me that the authors seem to consider splurging on brand-name diapers, sneakers, or apparel to be an indicator of good motherhood.

Sneakers?  What sneakers?  The Times story never mentions sneakers – or any other “apparel” aside from the diapers.

I don’t know why Cohen brought sneakers into the discussion. I do know that there is a crude, pernicious racial stereotype that says African-Americans are poor because they waste money on expensive sneakers.

The element of bullying

In one sense this is even worse than the campaign ads.  Vile as they are, the ads attacked opposing candidates - people who could fight back relatively easily. The Chronicle column attacked an impoverished single mother. So in addition to being an exercise in stereotyping, the Chronicle column was an exercise in bullying.

More than a year later, in a tweet on Oct. 22 Chronicle Publisher and self-proclaimed “child welfare expert” Daniel Heimpel finally acknowledged that the column was “unfortunate” and they would “correct” it. 

So, where’s the “correction”?  Either there is none, or there is, but it’s partially hidden.

After being generally available for weeks, the original column was moved behind a paywall.  It’s possible that now there is a correction of some kind there too.  I’m not going to pay to find out.  But since the original column was fully public, any correction needs to be fully public as well.  In fact a correction is not enough.  What’s needed is a full-throated apology, without reservation, without whataboutism and without hiding it behind a paywall.  [UPDATE, NOV 12: AND TO ITS CREDIT, THE CHRONICLE HAS NOW DONE JUST THAT]

In the absence of that kind of real apology, real news organizations should refuse to partner with the Chronicle and should treat its “news coverage” with the utmost skepticism.

Was it subconscious bias?

There is one possible difference between the campaign ads and the infamous Chronicle column: As much as the campaigns may deny it, it’s clear that the dog-whistling in the ads was deliberate.  It’s possible that Cohen and the editors who reviewed her column and approved it for publication misread the original Times story and thought it really did mention sneakers.  In fact, I think that is the most likely explanation.  If so, that would make this a classic example of subconscious bias.

That would make the column, and in particular, the failure to apologize for it, no less reprehensible.  But it would add a certain extra irony to something else Cohen once wrote for The Chronicle:

“As a social worker in the District of Columbia, I was subjected to multiple low-quality, heavy-handed trainings that tried to help me discover my hidden biases.”

As I’ve said before, I don’t believe either Cohen or Heimpel is a racist. In fact, I think they both really want to help vulnerable children, even if they are wrong about how to go about it.

But we all have hidden biases.  Perhaps they should try another one of those “trainings.”

The failure of residential treatment: An alternative weekly in Washington State asks the questions bigger media won’t

● The questions arise through the story of a 15-year-old boy who walked more than 100 miles in the middle of a Pacific Northwest winter to escape “residential treatment” – and return to his mother - where he is doing well.

 ● A county court commissioner put it best: "Until you can show me that those sorts of institutions work, why would we build another one?"

 

It's a long way from Spokane, Washington to Libby, Montana. 
But one 15-year-old boy walked most of the way - in the middle of winter -
in order to escape "residential treatment" and return to his mother.

SECOND OF TWO PARTS

Read the full story from the Spokane alternative weekly Inlander here.

In a previous post to this blog, I wrote about how Washington State’s practice of stashing away foster children in out-of-state institutions, including one where alleged verbal and physical abuse of the residents was exposed in a comprehensive report not by a big news organization but by an advocacy group, Disability Rights Washington.

But one reporter, Wilson Criscione of the Spokane-area alternative weekly Inlander, has done outstanding reporting on this issue; journalism that puts its larger counterparts to shame.  In fact, DRW first found out about Washington State’s out-of-sight-out-of-mind-we-don’t-care-we-don’t-have-to approach to these children thanks to a 2017 story by Criscione exposing problems at an in-state institution, the Excelsior Youth Center.

(And if you think “we-don’t-care-we-don’t-have-to” is a little harsh, check out the full DRW report, including the story of the Washington State caseworker who responded to an institutionalized out-of-state child’s plea to talk to him or her on the phone by replying: “my work phone is not working at the moment.”)

It was probably this paragraph in the Inlander story that prompted DRW to begin asking questions:

For some kids at Excelsior, their behavior only gets worse, and officials take the extreme step of shipping them out of state.

But the Inlander story does much more than reveal the way Washington State throws away foster youth.  It includes the views of those who challenge the entire “master narrative” crafted by the Washington State child welfare agency and the state’s major media: that there are some children for whom residential treatment is the only alternative, and that only children with the most severe problems are institutionalized.

It does all this by telling the story of Timothy Moore, a 15-year-old who escaped being shipped out of state by running away – back to the mother who never should have had to give him up in the first place.  It also tells the larger story of the failure of institutionalization in general and in Washington State in particular.

The story of Tim Moore

Tim Moore was born in Montana. He was  never beaten or tortured or starved by his mother, Lynnette Haines. Haines’ only crime was to, herself, be a victim of severe beatings by a man from whom she could not get away.  No, Montana did not take Tim away because of that.  But apparently no one helped her either. That left her no choice: At the end of 2013, in the hope it would stop him from getting hurt, Haines sent Tim to live with relatives in Washington State. He was 12-years-old.

But Tim says those relatives beat him with spoons, whipped him with barbed wire – and worse. (The relatives deny it.)

After Tim told a school counselor about being abused, Washington State caseworkers could have searched for Tim’s mother and pressed Montana authorities to provide the help she needed to escape an abusive boyfriend (if she had not escaped already).  Instead they put him in a foster home with strangers. 

But they don’t seem to have done much to help Tim, or the foster parents. Inlander reports that Tim was expelled from school “and therefore expelled from the home.”  A placement with an older sister didn’t work out.  But instead of thinking: Let’s provide Wraparound services to Tim and his sister so they can stay together, caseworkers decided that if they just institutionalized him at Excelsior the “more therapeutic setting” might make him well enough to live with his sister again.

At the institution, everything gets worse

But at Excelsior, everything got worse. Tim felt unsafe, and he felt no one cared about him so he started running away. He committed crimes to survive on the streets.  It happened with a lot of residents, Tim told Inlander. “They’re pretty much turning into criminals on the streets, because Excelsior’s not a good place for kids.”

Tim was jailed. When he was released, Excelsior – whose whole reason for being is supposedly to take in the children with the most severe problems – refused to take the 15-year-old back.  In other words, they were engaging in a common industry practice known as “creaming” – as in skimming the cream.  And unlike some states, which have what are called “no reject, no eject” requirements in their contracts with providers, Washington State apparently allows this.

In this case, Excelsior’s exercise in creaming may have been the best thing that ever happened to Tim.  He was told he’d be sent to Iowa – probably to the place exposed in the DRW report. Instead he ran away. He found out his mother was living 160 miles away, in Libby, Montana. 

So he went home. He jumped out of a caseworker’s car and ran away.  He asked strangers for directions.  He hitchhiked part of the way, but mostly he walked, from Spokane, across the Idaho Panhandle, to Montana, in the middle of winter. He told Inlander he didn’t eat or sleep for three days. He drank water from gas station restroom faucets.

Three-and-a-half days later, Criscione writes,

he showed up on the doorstep of his mother's trailer at 3 am, in the rain, with holes in his shoes, blisters on his feet and tears running down his face.

And how did all that work out?  As of April, 2017, when the Inlander story was published:

Tim, now 16, lives about as normal a life as he could ask for with his mom in Montana. She bakes cookies when he gets home from school as his little brother plays with Play-Doh. In school, Haines says he's getting A's and B's, and he even corrected his math teacher in front of the class. He has sleepovers with friends, plays sports, and draws pictures that are hung on the fridge. When his mom hears him curse, she warns him about his language. He rolls his eyes and obeys.

One last attempt at state-sanctioned sabotage

But Washington State made one last attempt to sabotage all this.

Incredibly, the state still wanted to institutionalize Tim in Iowa.  Why? Because Haines had a “history” of “exposing” her children to domestic violence.

Of all the reasons to break up a family, witnessing domestic violence is among the very worst – for the children.  As one expert put it, for a child, tearing her or him from a parent whose only crime is to be a domestic violence victim is “tantamount to pouring salt into an open wound.”  That’s why in one state, New York, it’s illegal, thanks to a class-action lawsuit. (NCCPR’s Vice President was co-counsel for plaintiffs.)

The solution in cases such as Tim’s is to remove the abuser.  No one helped Haines do that – but by the time Tim found his way back to her, she’d done it herself.

So, as Criscone writes:

[Juvenile Court Commissioner] Rachelle Anderson, presiding over the case, had to choose. Either Tim would be placed in Iowa, as the state recommended, or he'd be allowed to stay with his mom, where he was already doing well in school, did everything his mother asked, and had counseling appointments scheduled.

Fortunately she made the right choice.

All of which prompted Tim’s lawyer, Katie Maucione, to ask the obvious question.

"If a kid like Tim needs a … placement like Excelsior to be successful," she told Criscione,  "then how do we explain his successful and sudden streamlining right back into society?"

The failure of residential treatment

In fact, nobody needs a placement like Excelsior to be successful.  On the contrary, the evidence is overwhelming that such placement does no good and often reduces the chances of success.  Tim’s story offers a classic example of the failure of residential treatment – and why the excuses for continuing to use it don’t stand up for scrutiny.

The director of field operations for the Washington State Department of Health and Human Services at the time, Connie Lambert-Eckel told Inlander that “Excelsior is unique because of its location, its history and the nature of its facility in taking some of the most difficult-to-serve kids in the state.” (Lambert-Eckel has since been promoted.)

But Tim wasn’t really “difficult” until after he had experienced Excelsior. And he stopped being “difficult” as soon as he made his way back to his own mother.  And remember, Excelsior had actually kicked Tim out for supposedly being too difficult. 

So what Lambert-Eckel really is saying is: Excelsior is an easy place to dump kids.

And apparently the dumping can start early.  Inlander notes that that “a 10-year-old girl snuck out of Excelsior and was allegedly raped — twice — by a 13-year-old boy.”  Yes, Washington State is institutionalizing ten year olds.

Yet Lambert-Eckel’s only solution is to build more dumping grounds.  The child welfare agency wants more money, so it can pay the institutions even more than the over $90,000 per year per child that they get now. 

In the year since the Inlander story was published, the state legislature rearranged some deck chairs on its child welfare Titanic and created a separate agency for child welfare.

But in response to the DRW report the new agency offered only the same old same old: We want to pay “providers” more money so we can keep on institutionalizing children, but do it all in-state.

And what kind of results does this $90,000+ per year per child produce?

Turning victims into criminals

From the Inlander story:

Michelle Ressa, a Spokane County court commissioner, suggests that group homes are more likely to call police for something that in a family setting would result in, for instance, a child being grounded. "I have seen examples of kids throwing food, and police being called," Ressa says. "I don't think that would happen with Mom and Dad. … "I haven't seen that what's happening at Excelsior is working for the majority of kids," Ressa says.

It’s not just Excelsior:

Local public defenders who represent these kids say they consistently notice their client's criminal history starting or getting worse once placed in a group home. Mike Elston, a Spokane County public defender, says he has four clients who are group home residents, and together, 90 percent of their pending charges come from incidents against the group home or its employees. For those clients, about half of their criminal history prior to those charges came from group homes.

And it’s not just Washington State.  Karen de Sa of the San Francisco Chronicle found the same thing happening at “shelters” in California.

In the Inlander story, one a public defender cut to the heart of the matter:

Brooke Foley, a Spokane County public defender representing juveniles, says the problem is that kids are put in these group homes, especially Excelsior, in the first place. "I think it's borderline negligence for the state to put them there, when they know this is happening," Foley says.

And how does the director of Excelsior explain the dismal results? It’s all the fault of the kids – or their parents – or maybe their foster parents; anyone but us.  As he explained to Inlander:

Whether or not it happens when they lived with you, or they lived with me, doesn't make you or me the reason they're making negative behavior choices Their choices are a result, again, from their disabilities. Their choices, again, are from their abuse and neglect histories. Their choices, again, are from the learned environment, which was not what we would call orthodox.

But even if that were true, the reason the state is paying places like Excelsior more than $90,000 per year per child is so they’ll actually fix those problems.

Or as Michelle Ressa told Inlander:

Until you can show me that those sorts of institutions work, why would we build another one?

Washington State threw away foster children in an out-of-state institution where, one youth says, you can be punished for trying to wipe away a tear

Clarinda Academy in Iowa, where, according to Disability Rights
Washington, Washington State foster children were verbally and
physically abused.  The big newspapers in both states never noticed.
(Photo from Disability Rights Washington) 

FIRST OF TWO PARTS (Read Part Two here)

KEY POINTS

● It went on for years while major media in two states were asleep.  It took an alt-weekly in Spokane and an advocacy group to raise the alarm.

● The advocacy group found that Washington State caseworkers knew what was happening – and did nothing.  One refused to even call a child pleading to talk because “my work phone is not working at the moment.”

● They found that Washington State may be violating state law, at least two federal laws, and the United States Constitution.

● The state’s child welfare agency’s clueless response: Spend more to stash children in in-state institutions.

Here’s what Washington State considers the best way to “treat” children who have been taken from their parents and are said to have behavior problems.

● Ship them more than a thousand miles from home.

● Isolate them in an institution run like a prison.

● Subject them to verbal and physical abuse.

Almost as bad as what Washington State has been doing to these children is the state’s response when the abuses were exposed: We’ll stop institutionalizing the children out-of-state – by spending more money to entice “providers” to institutionalize them in-state!

The state’s child protective services agency – and almost all of the media who finally caught up with the story -  missed the point: The problem isn’t that one particular out-of-state institution is abusive – the problem is that institutionalization is inherently abusive – and unnecessary.

The evidence is overwhelming that residential treatment is a failure  (You can read all about that evidence here).  The claims that there are some children for whom nothing else works don’t hold up to scrutiny.  On the contrary, residential treatment “works” only for child welfare agencies – they can stash the children out-of-sight and out-of-mind.

Indeed, through an unusual chain of events, the exposure of what was being done to children at an out-of-state institution has its roots in a newspaper expose of failings at a similar institution right in Washington State.  But that expose didn’t come from one of the big players in Washington State journalism – it came from Inlander, a Spokane-area alternative weekly, and reporter Wilson Criscione.

What really works

What actually works for children is Wrapraround – which brings all the help a child needs directly into the child’s own home or a foster home.  This video provides an example of how it works:

But of course, all this was lost on Washington State media – except for Inlander. Instead, Washington State media accepted the state’s promises at face value and blamed the shipping of Washington State foster youth all over the country on what one online news site called “Washington’s long-festering and desperate shortage of foster homes and group homes for youth with behavioral and mental health challenges.”

Wow. Long-festering and desperate.

But that is bull.  Like so many other states, Washington State doesn’t have too few foster parents, Washington State has too many foster children.

While not as bad as, say, neighboring Oregon, Washington State still takes away children at a rate 17 percent above the national average. The rate of removal in Washington State is more than 60 percent above states that are, relatively speaking, national models for keeping children safe by emphasizing safe, proven alternatives to tearing apart families in the first place.

How we know about the abuses

The reason we know about what is being done to children shipped to that jail-like institution has nothing to do with media in Washington State (again except for Inlander as I’ll explain in part two of this post).

The story was not “broken” by any big media organization in Washington State.  And it was not broken by any news organization in Iowa, even though the institution where all these abuses took place – Clarinda Academy - is in Iowa.  Indeed, in Iowa, coverage of this prison-like facility for children who often have committed no crime appears to have been confined largely to reporting the scores of games played by Clarinda’s sports teams.  (And no, the collapse of the newspaper industry is no excuse. That started around 2006. Clarinda opened in 1992.)

So we found out what Washington State has been doing to these children thanks to an advocacy group, Disability Rights Washington (DRW).  Federal law requires states to designate agencies such as DRW to serve as watchdogs for people with disabilities. And they got interested thanks to a story in Inlander.

After DRW did the actdual reporting, Washington State’s largest newspaper, The Seattle Times was reduced to writing a story based entirely on DRW’s findings.  And Iowa’s largest newspaper, the Des Moines Register, was reduced to reprinting the Seattle Times story.

It was DRW that actually sent investigators to Iowa to find out what was happening to the Washington State children at Clarinda Academy, part of a for-profit chain called Sequel. Among the findings in their comprehensive report:

● Youths were lured into “voluntarily” going to Clarinda by false claims about the place. One foster youth who loves music was told there was a choir – and a swimming pool.  But there was no pool.  And there was no choir. In fact, she wound up in a dorm where young people were not even allowed to sing.

● The no-singing rule is one example of the prison-like rigidity to every aspect of daily life.  Others include having to move from place to place lined up single file, being barred from talking to the opposite gender, almost never being allowed off the facility grounds and severe restrictions on phone calls to friends and families.  Some dorms add on restrictions such as no leaning on walls, no talking during meals, no walking on grass, and no going to the bathroom without permission.

● There is a coercive, almost Orwellian system of exploiting peer pressure to keep the young people in line, complete with “hundreds, if not thousands” of unwritten “norms” the youth have to follow.  (Clarinda officials told DRW their system was modeled on an institution in Pennsylvania, Glen Mills. But even DRW may not know that Glen Mills itself has been the subject of controversy over its discipline practices).

● When peer pressure wasn’t enough, DRW found that Clarinda misused and overused painful physical “restraints”  DRW reports that every student they spoke to “reported that restraints they experienced were physically painful and frequently resulted in back, shoulder, and neck pain for several days or weeks.” 

Restraints were used at Clarinda when residents dared to move or clench their hands during a verbal intervention.  Restraints were used on a student because the student scratched his or her leg.  At Clarinda, one foster youth told Inlander, you can even endure physical restraint if you “raise your hand to wipe a tear.”

● One reason Clarinda could do this is that Iowa’s laws limiting the use of restraints on children are far more lax than those in Washington State. (Perhaps Iowa media should find out why that’s the case.)  Clarinda residents repeatedly described methods of restraint that are illegal in Washington State but perfectly o.k. in Iowa. 

From the Disability Rights Washington report on Clarinda Academy

● To the extent that there may be a problem with past criminal behavior, the problem may rest more with the staff than the residents.  According to DRW “over a third of the twenty-six staff who had participated in restraining Washington youth had convictions for criminal driving offenses or illegal use of alcohol and controlled substances.”

The report also found that the Washington State caseworkers for these Washington State children knew about it – and apparently took no action. 

No Washington State child at Clarinda was visited by her or his Washington State caseworker.  They contract with Iowa workers instead.  According to the DRW report:

Despite numerous statements that Clarinda Academy uses restraints “all the time” as a “consequence” for breaking the rules, “to be on safe side,” or even “for no reason,” Children’s Administration case notes do not document any follow up by Washington social workers to talk with or visit the youth who had reported abusive restraints. DRW found no other evidence that reports by contracted social workers resulted in any action by Washington State to determine whether Clarinda Academy improperly uses restraints in violation of Washington’s own standards …

(Now that the DRW report is public, the state child welfare agency finally is making such visits.)

One telling example of caseworker callousness: When a Washington State caseworker was specifically asked in an email to please call a Clarinda student who  “is having a hard time with restraints and wants to talk about it” the worker replied: “Unfotunately, my work phone is not working at the moment.”

DRW summed it all up this way:

The documentation DRW obtained demonstrates that Washington and Clarinda Academy are both failing to protect against the use of restraints for coercion or punishment for not following expectations. The Academy’s vague policy, generic crisis plans, inconsistent training, and tolerance for various staff misconduct - including tolerance for inappropriate restraints - create a fertile breeding ground for improper practices that would violate both Iowa and Washington rules. 

Making trauma worse

An expert who reviewed the records for DRW, Dr. Gauri Goel, found that being warehoused at Clarinda may have worsened whatever problems the youths had to begin with.  Their treatment at Clarinda “can be potentially harmful to the child over time … the treatment they are receiving is likely to be ineffective and potentially counterproductive in attending to their trauma-related needs.”

The problems are further compounded by being sent so far from home.  “They are being distanced from those who may be able to provide them with a sense of safety and security both within the here-and-now and as potential future caretakers,” Dr. Goel said.

DRW argues that what Washington State does to these children may violate Washington State law, at least two federal laws, the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and the U.S. Constitution.

Now that DRW has exposed what should have been exposed by big news organizations,  Washington State has offered up a depressingly predictable response.

Now, suddenly the agency realizes it really should send caseworkers to meet with the children it’s essentially thrown away out of state.  They’re promising to get all the children “into other situations” by the end of January.

But “other” doesn’t necessarily mean better.  Remember that foster youth who was lured to Clarinda by false promises of a pool and a choir? She’s still institutionalized, but now she’s even farther away in South Carolina.  Perhaps saddest of all, she’s been persuaded that somehow this was her fault and she has to plead with the very people who did this to her.  So, Inlander reports,

"They think I'm going to go back and be a monster in Washington," she says. "All I struggled with was self-harm."

She says she's overcome that and is not letting that define her anymore. She says all she wants to do is graduate school, go to college and help homeless people. She herself wants to be home.

"I want to be there. I can't spend another Christmas Day at placement," she says. "I just can't."

But blaming the victims is Washington State’s entire rationale. 

So the state says the children placed out of state usually have “complex behavioral health challenges that require 24-hour care not feasible in individual foster homes or have other challenging therapeutic needs.”

Again, that’s 100 percent Grade A bull----.  When these children really need to be out of their own homes, family foster homes can work – provided the foster parents are given the intensive help they need – 24 hours a day if necessary.  That’s how Wraparound works.

And if you get the children who don’t need to be in foster care back into their own homes, there will be plenty of room in good, safe foster homes for the children who really need to be taken away, provided the state gives the foster parents the intensive support they may need.

But instead of bolstering Wraparound the state proposes to increase pay rates to get more providers to be willing to institutionalize children in Washington State.  (They already pay more than $90,000 per year per child.)

But institutions do not become magically better because they’re in Washington State.  Granted, the rules on restraints are better than those in Iowa, but given how lackadaisical the child welfare agency seems to be, it’s hard to believe much is done to enforce even that. And better rules on restraints doesn’t alter the fact that residential treatment doesn’t work and often does harm.

Indeed, the entire chain of events leading to DRW’s expose actually began with a cover story in Inlander – and much of that story focused on serious problems at a residential treatment center right in Washington State.

That story in part two.