Child welfare loses two heroes

There are not many true heroes in child welfare. Recently, we lost two of them.

Paul Vincent

Paul Vincent died on July 25. Paul led the child welfare division of the Alabama Department of Human Resources when it was the subject of a pioneering class-action lawsuit that demanded the system rebuild to emphasize keeping families together. (A member of NCCPR’s Board of Directors, Ira Burnim of the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, was co-counsel for the plaintiffs.) Paul welcomed the suit and worked hard to make it succeed.  And it did. For a while, Alabama was the unlikely leader in doing child welfare right – to the point that it made the front page of The New York Times. 

Paul also served on the “Marisol Panel,” an advisory group that grew out of a class-action lawsuit settlement in New York City. The group was strictly advisory. But because of who was on it, and because the head of New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services, Nicholas Scoppetta, surprised almost everyone by taking a lot of the panel’s advice, it did a lot to set in motion some of the changes for the better in  New York City. 

Then Paul founded the Child Welfare Policy and Practice Group, which issues outstanding reports on systems across the country, including Iowa, Indiana and Philadelphia. You can read more about Paul here. 

Karl Dennis 

Karl Dennis, the "father of Wraparound” -- or, as he preferred to call it, Unconditional Care -- died in June.  In a tribute to Dennis in Youth Today, David Osher writes: 

Karl also understood that each person and each context was unique and that settings, programs and even systems had to adapt to the youth and family rather than the opposite. Just as Karl never wrote off a young person, he never wrote off families even though most or perhaps all Kaleidoscope youth had experienced trauma, and agencies claimed the parents were hard to find and would not comply. He believed in family ties and understood that family included aunts, uncles, grandparents, even close friends, neighbors, and the whole tribe. Because Karl viewed families as valuable resources — and Kaleidoscope worked hard to find them — when they found them they treated them with respect and worked to earn trust, believing that wraparound should be family-driven. 

Karl understood the toxic impacts of language on people, worker-youth/family alliance, and organizational behavior. Karl insisted that his staff never applied the pejorative clinical language of “dysfunction” to families; rather, he saw systems that did not provide appropriate support to families and youth as dysfunctional. 

But it’s best to let Karl Dennis speak for himself, as he did in this presentation in 2009: 

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending August 5, 2025

● All over the country, private foster care agencies are fearmongering in a desperate attempt to get taxpayer bailouts and/or near immunity from liability – because now that victims of child abuse on their watch can sue, there are so many lawsuits that the agencies can’t afford insurance. In Youth Today, NCCPR suggests a better idea. 

● In a column for The Imprint, one of a series documenting what it takes to stop families from being torn apart when their poverty is confused with neglect, Sarah Winograd of Together With Families writes about a case in Georgia which began with this ultimatum: 

Child Protective Services gave Maurice a deadline: fix your home, or your granddaughters will be placed in foster care. 

That’s pretty amazing, since foster care apologists keep telling us such cases don’t exist. The column documents how much it took to cobble together the support this grandfather needed to save his children from foster care. It reminded me of the question I posed concerning a similar example from Missouri: Why is foster care so easy and everything else so hard? 

● Also in The Imprint, Prof. Dale Margolin Cecka, Director of the Family Violence Litigation Clinic at Albany Law School, documents the enormous harm of anonymous child abuse reporting, and why New York Gov. Kathy Hochul should sign a bill to replace it with confidential reporting. 

● If we must have offices of Child Advocate/Ombudsman, then at least let's structure them to be unbiased and recognize error in all directions. In a column for the Maine Morning Star about what is currently one of the worst such offices, I suggest ways to do that. 

● The American Law Institute periodically issues what it calls “Restatements” of aspects of American law. They are massive undertakings, and until now ALI had not tried it with child welfare law. Now that they have, Prof. Martin Guggenheim has written a commentary on the Restatement for Family Court Review that also is an assessment of the current state of family defense – and the current state of the teaching of family defense in law schools.  

In the same issue, Prof. Shanta Trivedi writes that 

The family policing system separates families every day. As a result, children and their parents suffer lifelong, irreversible trauma and a host of other negative consequences. The Restatement acknowledges these harms and directs courts to consider the harms of removal throughout court proceedings when deciding whether a child should be removed from their parents or in determining if reunification is appropriate.

NCCPR in Youth Today: Seize the foster care insurance “crisis” as an opportunity — to curb foster care

As California faces a $12 billion budget deficit, here are some of the programs that were proposed for cuts: 

● Crisis services for foster youth

● Services for the homeless

● Medi-Cal, the state’s health insurance program for the poor 

But one group not only isn’t being cut, they’re in line for a great big increase. They’re getting a $31.5 million taxpayer bailout for private agencies that operate group homes and institutions and oversee some family foster homes. There are far better answers, including not taking so many children needlessly in the first place. ...

Read the full column in Youth Today