Today, two outstanding advocates from Maine, foster and adoptive parent Mary Callahan and family defense attorney Julian Richter of Family Advocacy of Maine, joined me to give a presentation with the above title at the Kempe Center International Virtual Conference: A Call to Action to Change Child Welfare. Here is the text of Ms. Callahan's presentation and mine.
Presentation of Richard Wexler, part one
But something else made Maine stand out: The sheer meanness of the agency under the leadership of its then-Commissioner, Kevin Concannon. For what was then the Maine Department of Human Services, winning wasn’t enough – they had to grind you into the dirt.
That’s what happened in the first Maine case that got my attention. A Maine clinic’s treatment for a little girl with cystic fibrosis wasn’t working, so her mother and grandmother wanted no more than to get a second opinion – from Boston Children’s Hospital. The Maine clinic retaliated by calling DHS, insisting all the problems were the mother’s fault. DHS took the case all the way to termination of parental rights – and even before that, as the child lay all alone in a hospital bed, they denied that child the chance to be comforted by her mother and grandmother. They were denied even the right to visit.
But because this family had dared to go public, TPR was not enough. The agency – which, as they always do, says they can’t comment on anything because of confidentiality – asked a local newspaper to print the entire termination decision, and they agreed. The family didn’t even get a warning. They just woke up one morning and saw it all taking up a full page of the Kennebec Journal.
That was after Concannon already had gotten the judge’s permission to speak out about this case, and news accounts had told his side and reported the decision.
But in some ways, Concannon’s efforts to justify himself backfired. The decision was a psychobabble-drenched mess so bad that the Maine Supreme Court almost overturned it. They didn’t – but a 4-3 decision in a Maine termination case is almost revolutionary. And it left a little doubt in the minds of some Maine journalists – which made them more willing to listen when another tragedy rocked the state at about the same time.
On January 31, 2001, a five-year-old girl named Logan
Marr died, killed by her foster mother, a former caseworker for Maine DHS.
At first, the response to this tragedy was what it usually is when a child dies in foster care: a focus on caseworker visits, background checks and licensing standards. But whether a system will reform in the wake of a foster-care tragedy depends on whether journalists get beyond that and move on to the real problems. In Maine, that meant confronting the culture of child removal embedded in DHS.
NCCPR began raising these larger questions. Within weeks of Logan’s death, we were in Maine to meet with journalists and issue a report on the system - and the state’s newspapers began pursuing these questions, in part, I believe, because of what they’d seen in that earlier case.
An independent office of child welfare ombudsman was created. That would later become a huge obstacle. But initially, unlike most such offices, which often do more harm than good, this one took seriously the mandate to look at errors in all directions.
At about the same time, two other things happened.
First, producers working for the PBS series Frontline contacted NCCPR. They said they were interested in doing a documentary about child welfare and were looking for ideas. “You can always go to Florida,” I said, “something’s always happening there. But if you want to look at something that’s not on anyone’s radar, take a look at the case of Logan Marr in Maine.” I mentioned that, among other things, there was video of Logan complaining about being abused in her foster home, just weeks before she died.
We provided extensive briefing material to the Frontline producers, and we were in touch several times over the following year and a half. The result was the documentary The Taking of Logan Marr, which I urge everyone to see.
But something much more important happened as well. I met one fed-up foster parent – Mary Callahan. And now, you’re going to meet her, too.
Presentation of Mary Callahan
I was a single mother of two teenagers when I started taking in foster kids. My parents had eight kids of their own and always had foster kids in the house, so it was a natural thing for me. I also followed their lead when it came to the hard, fast rule: I don't deal with birth family.
Over a ten-year period, I had ten kids who stayed for a significant length of time, the youngest being nine years old.
When I got my first placement, a 12-year-old named April, I believed what I was told about her parents. They sounded pretty bad. It took me a long time to realize much of what I was told was grossly exaggerated, an anonymous tip or a bold-faced lie. But I recognized immediately that she was abused in foster care. She came to me malnourished and reading four years below grade level. The foster mother before me, who had her for six years, said to me right in front of her: "She's a whore, just like her mother."
And that wasn't her worst foster home. She was molested in the first one by a 14-year-old boy.
When I finally saw the whole picture, that the abuse in her birth family was like a 1 on a 1 to 10 scale, and the abuse once in the system was more like an 8 or a 9, I started going to people in power to show them how she had fallen through the cracks, and somehow we had to make it right.
I was threatened by the head of the private foster care agency and dismissed by the head of the Health and Human Services committee. He said, tellingly: "There is nothing new here. I've got 100 stories just like it." I was also warned that if DHS found out what I was doing, they'd file an abuse complaint against me on the drive home.
I decided to keep my mouth shut. But I started to question everything I was told about my other foster kids’ families. April was not the only one who had fallen through the cracks. Maybe it wasn't really a crack. Maybe it was just the system. I started writing each of their stories just to get it all off my chest.
Then Logan Marr died at the hands of her foster mother. As the details came out in the news, it was shocking how similar her story was to April's. The public was outraged, and there were a lot of people demanding answers, so the HHS committee held a public hearing.
That was the day everything changed for me. The place was overflowing. The stories each person got to tell in their three minutes were heartbreaking. So heartbreaking they almost seemed unbelievable. Like no one could be that cruel, right? When it was my turn, I addressed that. I said, "If you're thinking these stories you've heard before me are exaggerations, they are not. I'm a foster parent and I can tell you that's how the system works." I got a standing ovation from the birth families.
Obviously, I had decided to come out of hiding. But I also decided I would be so public that any retaliation would be public too. So I talked to reporters. I met Richard Wexler, by phone I believe, and let everyone use my name and the fact that I had been warned there would be retaliation. DHS started telling people I was crazy, but that made them look bad, as I was still fostering kids.
I also met so many people that day who felt the same way I did, and they weren't just birth families. There were psychologists and lawyers and other foster parents. There was a local TV reporter. A state representative named Eddie Dugay was already planning a march across the state that would end with a presentation to the Governor.
With that as our starting point, we formed a group we called Maine Alliance for DHS Accountability and Reform or MADAR.
Somewhere around one hundred of us made the trek from Ellsworth to Augusta over a four day period in a snowstorm. That got us on the news every night. The speech to the Governor was carried in the Lewiston Sun Journal.
We started meeting once a month at the Statehouse, thanks to Representative Dugay, and planning more events. The goal was just to be very, very noisy and keep the subject being talked about.
We picketed DHS. We held an event called the Unfair Fair. Example: We had a display of a foster home full of pets (mine) and a grandmother trying to get her grandkids out of the system and placed with her, being told she couldn't because her pets were a health hazard. A nightmare and a health hazard, to be precise, and I had more pets than she did. How fair is that?
We showed the film The Taking of Logan Marr, a brilliant documentary that was shown on PBS, in a church in Portland.
We made sure we got news coverage. We wrote Op Eds and letters to the editor responding to any news item on our issue. Reporters started calling us for a response from MADAR when something came up.
I quickly turned my notes on my kids into a book and self-published it. That led me to give library talks and to do book signings. The head of DHS sent an email to their staff to attend my talks and "set me straight." It backfired when DHS workers at my talks started to cry and talk about families they had split up that now they regretted. One said she quit after her supervisor made her take a new baby when the family issue was a teenager out of control, and the mother had been the one to call for help.
Something else changed
during this time. Maine got a new Governor, John Baldacci, who named a new
commissioner of DHS, Jack Nicholas. Nicholas brought in a new head of the
division of DHS in charge of child welfare, Jim Beougher.
After one of our events, the nightly news said I had a meeting the next day with Nicholas. They even said what time it was, so I hustled up to Augusta even though it was news to me. The first thing he said to me was: "I didn't know we had a meeting until I saw it on the news last night." I still wonder who orchestrated that. But we had a good talk. He said we were on the same side, even if it didn't look that way from the outside.
As I was leaving, I literally bumped into Governor John Baldacci in the hall. He said, "Keep doing what you're doing. DHS is like a steamship at sea. You have to push and push and push to turn it around, and if you let up for a minute it will drift back."
Soon after, he announced the formation of a committee to reform the Child Protection System.
That's when we entered a new phase in our mission. I thought this was where the real work began. But I eventually learned the real work was what led up to the formation of this committee. The committee was where I learned how government works behind the scenes and the games people play for their own personal gain.
There were actually several branches of the committee, and each one had someone on it from MADAR. I was on one and, sadly, the only one to last to the end. The others were members of birth families in our group, and they were made to feel very unimportant and small in their meetings. They refused to go back after a few sessions.
It was an eye-opener for me, too. First of all, it went on for years! We met weekly, and the meetings were hours long. We would beat a subject to death, and then someone would say, "You know who should have been here? So and So. We should invite her to the next meeting." And we would cover the exact same ground in the next meeting with the new person.
We wasted so much time. I overheard a conversation at the coffee pot during one of our breaks and realized it was all very planned and calculated. Everyone else on these committees was either from a foster care agency or from DHS, and saw no need for change so their goal was to stop it.
One member was the head of the foster care agency I worked for, and I heard him talk out of both sides of his mouth. At the reform meetings, he talked about the need to support birth families, and at the foster parent meetings, he promised to "get our placements back up." He said this reform stuff would pass, and we could all get back to business. And it was a business.
Bad news for him and others on the committee: I kept writing Op Eds for the paper about how things were going on the committee. Looking back on it, I was brutal.
After taking over as chairperson for our branch, which I did by raising my hand very fast and not giving anyone else the chance, I asked to go around the room and have everyone say why they were on the committee and whether they had a financial stake in the outcome. Most people refused to answer the second half of the question. I wrote in the paper that "I'm passionate about children" is code for "I could lose money in this deal."
When it was finally coming to an end, we were to write up our proposals for change to present to Governor Baldacci and Commissioner Nicholas. It turned out not a single one of the ideas we researched and discussed at such great length was voted in. They were all voted down for reasons like "It needs more study." We had absolutely nothing to show for our time. Except the rest of the committee had forgotten one thing.
When we were given our
instructions at the beginning of the process, we were told we could write up a
proposal even if it was voted down, as long as it said on the top of the
proposal what the vote was. So I typed up a half a dozen papers, and each one
had on the top of it: Voted down 29 to 1.
When these were presented at a lunch meeting to the Governor and the Commissioner, the others on the committee were surprised and furious. One stood up and wagged her finger at me, saying I had ruined the whole process and wasted all of their time. I knew it was coming so it didn't bother me.
But they were right about the wasted time. Because while we were meeting and meeting and meeting, a new director of the Child Protection arm of DHS was hired and his mission was the same as mine. Jim Bouegher was already putting in place much of what was in the proposals that were voted down.
In retrospect, the important things we did took place before the interminable committees. It was changing public opinion that allowed for the huge improvements made. I noticed the change in the checkout line at the grocery store.
When Logan Marr's death was front-page news, everyone was blaming her mother. Just like I used to think all birth parents were awful people who didn't deserve sympathy, let alone their kids, everyone in the grocery store line said Logan wouldn't have been in foster care if it wasn't for her awful mother.
But that slowly changed. Facts came out that shocked everyone. One of our members produced a newspaper with the true facts about Logan's removal, and we brought stacks of it to convenience stores around the state. Logan, like April and Michael and Jennifer and so many of my kids, was removed for very trivial reasons.
Logan's mother was a loving mother. April's parents were good people, but imperfect. Michael's mother was young and called DHS for help. As these stories got out there and talked about in grocery store lines, the public got ready for change. Even clamored for it.
And change happened.
Presentation of Richard Wexler, part two
So, what kind of change happened?
First, Kevin Concannon began feeling the heat. Once NCCPR and local advocates “kicked down the door,” he had to let other reformers walk through. So, having once scorned the success of states that took away fewer children because they were “southern states.” (Of course, if you’re in Maine, pretty much every place else is a southern state.) Concannon turned for help to the Child Welfare Policy and Practice Group, an organization founded by Paul Vincent, who, sadly, died earlier this year. He is the reformer who did so much to transform child welfare in Alabama.
DHS also brought in the Annie E. Casey Foundation. But, as Mary made clear and a Casey publication about the Maine reforms makes clear, albeit in a genteel sort of way, things didn’t really start to change until Concannon and his old guard were out of the way.
As Casey put it:
Without the right players in the right places at the right time, large scale change in any organization is often doomed. By 2004, a new group of leaders moved into key positions in Maine, people who would be absolutely essential to putting the state on an entirely new child welfare path.
By 2005, four years after Logan died:
● The number of children taken from their homes had dropped by 30 percent, and the number of children in foster care on any given day had been cut in half.
● Maine nearly tripled the proportion of children placed with relatives; by 2011, Maine exceeded the national average – and that is still true.
● Most remarkable: The proportion of Maine foster children who were institutionalized was cut by at least 73 percent.
That first independent child welfare ombudsman found that the reduction in substitute care came with no compromise of safety. He strongly supported the reforms.
It all prompted Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government to make the transformation of child welfare in Maine a finalist for its prestigious Innovations in American Government awards.
But much of that is gone now.
Not everything. As I said, Maine still uses kinship foster care at a rate above the national average, and uses group homes and institutions at a rate below the national average –
But if you were to plot a line graph using entry into care data from Maine since 1999, it would look, perversely, like an ugly, crooked smile. By 2018, Maine was taking away even more children than before Logan Marr died – and the number stayed at that level for every year since, through 2023, except 2021 – and that may have been because of COVID.
Just-released data for 2024 show some improvement – but Maine still took away children at the 12th highest rate in America – more than double the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in.
How was so much lost?
With hindsight, one crucial failing set the stage for the retreat from reform that would follow: Maine’s good leaders didn’t plan for the prospect of bad leaders in the future. They didn’t build an infrastructure of due process for families, so families could have a fighting chance. Instead, everything rose and fell based on the policy choices of political leaders and their appointees.
So what might one expect to happen when Maine elected Paul LePage, a governor who would often be described as Trump-before-Trump because of a penchant for lying, racism, vulgarity and miscellaneous cruelty? Someone who would seek to roll back reform at every opportunity, of course. It started almost as soon as he took office. Then he had the chance to kick into high gear after the deaths of two children in rapid succession in 2018.
Bad as it is when that kind of behavior comes from Trump-before-Trump, I would argue the moral failing may be even greater when it comes from people who know better or should know better.
And that’s what we have now.
The current governor, Janet Mills, has been justly praised for standing up to Trump. The first person she named to run what is now the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, and who was there until last year, Jeanne Lambrew, had a great reputation when she was in the Obama Administration.
But, it seems, she knew nothing about child welfare. How else to explain her choice to run the child welfare division. Todd Landry came from Nebraska, one of the few states even more fanatical about child removal than Maine - and worst in the entire nation when Landry was in charge. Like Concannon, Landry has a mean streak. While in Nebraska, he made a sick joke at the expense of desperate parents surrendering their children because it was the only way they could get those children help.
Fortunately, he’s gone. There is nothing mean about his replacement, an agency veteran, Bobbi Johnson. I think she knows what should be done. But she has yet to show the courage necessary to push back against those fanatically pushing to maintain or even expand Maine’s current take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare.
Before I get to who those people are, let me address two other factors that made it easy to tear down reforms that were so hard to build up. Both involve the loss of institutional memory.
● The Maine Legislature has term limits. The lawmakers who heard Mary Callahan and all those others testify, the lawmakers who watched The Taking of Logan Marr when it first aired on PBS, are long gone.
● Similarly, as everywhere else, Maine media have consolidated. The reporters who became a little skeptical after that first case I cited, and a lot more skeptical after Logan Marr died, also are long gone.
That made it easy for Maine to
revert to what should be called a pre-Logan Marr mentality.
But will that be enough to push back against two powerful players devoted to the take-the-child-and-run approach?
I mentioned that when Maine first created an office of child welfare ombudsman, it worked well. The first ombudsman saw that the reforms were making lives better for hundreds, perhaps thousands of children, with no compromise of safety. He knew that the errors go in all directions.
But his successor, Christine Alberi, has been more typical of the people who generally land these jobs. She has explicitly said that in her entire 12 years as ombudsman, she has never – never – seen a single case of wrongful removal of a child.
But then, she’s never looked. Her office responds only to complaints, and even then, she picks and chooses which complaints. She has explicitly rejected the idea of supplementing this by getting a team of objective reviewers to examine a random sample of cases in order to judge overall system performance.
And here’s the problem with all child welfare ombudsman offices: In systems more secret than the CIA, these offices have a near monopoly on information – giving them enormous power to spin the story of child welfare as they choose. And, because they have this near monopoly, making them great sources, reporters don’t want to get on their bad side.
So over and over, legislators have jerked their knees and given the current ombudsman ever more power. Another such bill is pending. We have proposed better alternatives.
But Bill Diamond became a godsource for Maine media in spite of another couple of jobs he held: Director of Government Relations and Superintendent of Schools for the now shut – thank God – Elan School.
What was the Elan School? Modeled on Synanon, it was possibly the most notorious troubled teen industry institution in America. There is a survivors group. There is a book about it.
And there is a two-hour documentary that is very, very difficult to watch. If I had time, I’d have shown the trailer during the Kempe Conference presentation. I had to settle for this screenshot. But you can see it here:
Diamond – the superintendent of schools – said he never so much as set foot in the place, and thought all the problems ended before he ever got there. Some of the survivors disagree.
In the short time since I originally wrote those last few paragraphs, Bill Diamond died, of cancer, at the age of 81. Diamond’s obituary mentions that he died “with his family by his side.” That family has my sincere sympathy.
Some would argue that I should have softened what I wrote about Diamond or deleted it. But when I read that line in the obituary, I was struck by something:
All over Maine, there are people who will never have the comfort of having family by their side in their final hours. They won’t have family around the tree with them at Christmas, or at the table with them at Thanksgiving.
They won’t have that comfort because the state of Maine tore them apart, often needlessly. And while I’m sure that was never his intent, Bill Diamond’s work, and the failure of Maine media to scrutinize his work, contributed to that tragedy.
So that’s what Maine’s most vulnerable children and
families are up against.
In his presentation, Julian Richter explained how some of their advocates are fighting back.
