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| Maine State Capitol |
There are some really awful leaders of state and local family police agencies (a more accurate term than “child welfare” agencies). There are a few over the years who have been outstanding. And then there is the broad range in between, including many who may know the right thing to do but may lack the courage to do it.
In Maine, the current director of the Office of Child and Family Services, Bobbi Johnson, is a big improvement over her predecessor – but then, her predecessor was this guy who somehow got hired in Maine after compiling a dismal record in Nebraska.
There is nothing cruel in Bobbi Johnson’s approach. But there is nothing courageous either. Two examples were on display in September.
● One of the few things everyone in child welfare agrees about is that multiple placement – throwing children into one home then uprooting them all over again to be placed in another, and another, and another - is terrible for children. So what is Bobbi Johnson’s idea of innovation? So-called “short-term foster homes” from which the children will be promptly uprooted to be placed elsewhere.
Johnson is selling it with an argument that amounts to: Well, at least it’s better than a hotel room or an emergency room, right? But the reason Maine stashes children in hotel rooms and emergency rooms is because it tears apart families at the ninth highest rate in the country, more than double the national average – even when rates of child poverty are factored in. That creates an artificial “shortage” of foster homes. If Maine would stop doing that, there would be no need to deliberately set up a system that compounds the problem of multiple placement.
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| National Average Maine |
● Johnson already is making excuses for why a commendable change in state law to discourage confusion of poverty with neglect may not change much. Of course, she’s not blaming her agency. It’s because, she says, it’s just so darn hard to get the word out to all those “mandatory reporters” that they should stop doing this.
Oh, come on – really? When states want to encourage reporting anything and everything, they pull out all the stops. News conferences! Posters! Public service announcements! But when one wants to finally urge some caution, it supposedly can’t be done except every four years through formal training?
How many schools are there in Maine? Surely it would be possible to email all the principals with information about the new law and tell them to circulate it to all staff, right? Follow up with snail mail, including great big posters that say POVERTY IS NOT NEGLECT, and go on to explain what to report and what not to report. Do the same with every pediatrician’s office and every police department.
OCFS did update its online mandatory reporter training – but mandatory reporters are required to take that training only every four years.
But that’s not the only problem with Johnson’s excuse.
Just because someone calls a child abuse hotline does not mean the hotline has to accept the call. All states screen out some calls. Surely OCFS can train its own hotline operators to ask the right questions to determine if what the reporter saw is poverty or neglect – and screen in or screen out accordingly.
But the biggest problem here is that, to the extent that anyone is unclear about what the law requires, it’s a problem partly of Johnson’s own making. This year, the Maine Legislature considered two bills addressing this issue. While the bill that passed is a good first step, the bill that failed, LD 891, was far better. That bill made far clearer the difference between poverty and neglect; it made clear the obligations OCFS had to fulfill to distinguish between the two, and it made clear what judges had to demand of OCFS.
Bobbi Johnson opposed it.
