On our Blog at Youth Today: Foster care in America: It’s not the recession, it’s the RESPONSE to the recession

The long decline in the number of children in foster care on any given day is slowing way down.  And the decline in the number of children taken  away over the course of a year stopped entirely in 2010.

America’s latter-day “child savers” will claim, almost gleefully, that this is a result of the recession supposedly causing more child abuse.

But it’s not.  The real reason is discussed on our Blog at the trade journal Youth Today.


And on Monday: A major magazine article reveals the failed legacy of a child welfare agency leader.

FOSTER CARE IN LOS ANGELES: THE TIMES WAS DEAD WRONG

New data show how the Los Angeles Times 

blew the story on child abuse fatalities

Add the new data released today to all the other revelations about the newspaper’s shoddy reporting and the Times case against child welfare reform in Los Angeles collapses like a house of cards.

UPDATE, APRIL 2: See also the very good story in the Los Angeles Daily News.

UPDATE MARCH 31: See also the very good analysis of the new data at WitnessLA.


Pursuant to a resolution of the Board of Supervisors, Los Angeles County has released data on deaths of children “known to the system” all the way back to 2000.

However, the figures before 2005 and after can’t be compared because of a radical change in which types of deaths were reported by the County Coroner.  (See Page 10 of Attachment A in the report released late today for details).

But that still gives us enough data to compare DCFS before and after the waiver from federal financing restrictions which the Los Angeles Times falsely suggested compromised child safety and led to more child abuse deaths.

The waiver began in 2008.  The decline in entries into care it should have produced was thwarted by the foster-care panic set off by the Times stories.  (Full details are in our report on the panic.)  The waiver probably did prevent the panic from being even worse.

The one thing that is abundantly clear from the data is that there is no correlation between the number of children taken away by DCFS over the course of a year, and the number of children “known to the system” who died.  The only pattern is no pattern.  And as NCCPR has noted before, there is no evidence of any kind that the waiver compromised safety.  The key data are at the end of this post, and the full report is available here.

This is not particularly surprising.  There are 2.75 million children in Los Angeles. In 2010 there were 55,443 children who have open cases with DCFS.  Add in the number who ever have been investigated by DCFS at any time in their childhoods, or whose siblings ever were subject to such an investigation, and, of course, the number gets vastly higher.  The only acceptable goal for child abuse deaths is zero.  But while each death of a child “known to the system” is the worst form of tragedy, they are needles in a huge haystack.

It makes no sense to believe you can find all the needles by attempting to vacuum up the entire haystack.  But that, in effect, is what the Times was suggesting.

The failure of this approach is borne out by this study from a Texas think tank which actually tends to be sympathetic to a take-the-child-and-run approach.  Nevertheless, they were forced to conclude that :

● The rate at which people report child abuse does not contribute to more child abuse deaths.

● The rate at which a state screens in reports for investigation does not contribute to more deaths.

● The rate at which a state takes children from their parents does not contribute to more deaths.

In short, none of the traditional investigative and "police" functions of child protective services contributes anything to raising or lowering the rate of child abuse fatalities.

So, what does reduce child abuse deaths? According to the report:

●Reducing poverty

●Reducing teen pregnancy

●More investment in prevention programs (which is, of course, exactly what DCFS was trying to do with the waiver).

Two other points stand out:

●Between 2000 and 2010, 37 percent of the deaths actually occurred while the children were in out-of-home care; in 2010 it still was 25 percent.  That does not mean that substitute caregivers were responsible for all of those deaths.  It’s possible that the children died of abuse inflicted before they were taken away, or during a visit with birth parents. And it also includes deaths not due to abuse or neglect at all. But this certainly deserves further investigation.

● Supervisors Mark Ridley-Thomas and Michael Antonovich deserve credit for forgoing past practice of the supervisors – which was to rush to come up with a suitably- outraged sound bite – and seek hard facts instead, by sponsoring the resolution requesting these data. 

The silver lining to the recent controversy over child welfare in Los Angeles has been the mature response by the Board.  That should make the job of running DCFS permanently a little more attractive to good candidates.

As Ridley-Thomas said in a press release:

It is particularly important to resist the temptation to exploit child deaths to push ideological agendas.  The CEO’s report shows we cannot honestly link child deaths to specific policies or the performance of particular government departments or individuals. …  It would be negligent to be satisfied with any total more than zero; but it is also reckless to suggest there are quick fixes.  We must shun policy gimmicks that produce sound bites for news conferences but yield no true solutions.

Add these latest findings to what we already known about how the Times distorted the evaluation of the waiver, and the well-documented  allegations that reporter Garrett Therolf quoted people as saying things they never actually said, and the entire Times case against reform in Los Angeles County collapses like a house of cards.

Of course, that’s not how the Times will write it.  Given how they handled findings challenging their system for evaluating teachers, no doubt the Times headline will be something like: “County data confirm Times findings on child abuse deaths.”

But I suspect most people in Los Angeles know better than to believe that anymore.

DEATHS OF CHILDREN KNOWN TO THE LOS ANGELES COUNTY DEPARTMENT OF CHILDREN AND FAMILIES AND ENTRIES INTO CARE 2006-2010

Calendar Year	2006	2007	2008	2009	2010
Deaths from all causes	242	220	205	192	200 / 175*
Homicides	69	58	46	41	30
Children removed from their homes	11,331	11,683	10,935	11,323	10,935**

*For 2010, the county was able to re-analyze data in ways not available in previous years.  As a result, they came up with two different figures, one before the re-analysis, one after.  Full details are in the county power point presentation, starting on Page 10.

**This figure includes an estimate for December 2010, since the figure was not available at the time the county fulfilled our Public Records Act request.

Sources:

Fatality Data: William T. Fujioka, Response to Reporting Aggregate Trend Data on Child Deaths Board Motion, County of Los Angeles, Chief Executive Office, March 31, 2011, available online at http://www.nccpr.org/reports/laceo.pdf

Entries: DCFS responses to California Public Records Act requests submitted by NCCPR.  Full details are in our report on the Los Angeles County foster care panic.

UPDATED, 7:15PM ET: Foster care in Texas: CR's latest McLawsuit won't help

SEE UPDATE AT THE END OF THIS POST


While it may have come as a surprise to some in the state, readers of this Blog have known for nearly a year that the next target for a McLawsuit from the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children’s Rights would be Texas. 

The Texas child welfare system is every bit as bad as CR says it is in its Complaint.   Indeed, we cited many of the same problems in our own report on Texas child welfare in 2005.  And, as always, CR has good intentions. But, of course, the lawsuit won’t solve the problems, and might even make the Texas system worse.  

That’s because, as always, CR ignores the elephant in the room: the urgent need to reduce the number of children taken from their parents needlessly in the first place.  CR actually has thwarted efforts to reduce wrongful removal in other states, including Georgia Tennessee, and, most recently, Oklahoma.

And its recent settlements actually are worse than those it negotiated in previous years.  Most notorious is Michigan, where the settlement has made the child welfare system worse.  Among other things, the settlement has led to the expulsion of nearly 1,800 children from the homes of grandparents and other relatives.   It’s also led to a foster care worker / child abuse investigator hiring binge – funded by cutting prevention and family preservation.

Texas tried that back in 2005.  The result: The same lousy system, only bigger.  More hiring only works when it’s part of a comprehensive reform plan that emphasizes safe, proven programs to keep families together. 

As always with a CR suit, there is a deafening silence on the issue of keeping children safely out of foster care in the first place.

That is all the more astounding in light of what happened to some of the named plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

In the case of A.M., for example, (Complaint, p. 15) all the horrors she endured in foster care began when she was taken from her mother, not because the mother abused or neglected her, but because the witnessed domestic violence – a fight among her mother and the mother’s current and former boyfriends.

But while witnessing domestic violence can be harmful to children, tearing them away from their mothers is far, far worse.  That was documented in detail in a class-action lawsuit that banned the practice of taking away children in these cases in New York City.  The section of the judge’s decision summarizing the research, with a link to the full decision, is on our website here. (Of course this lawsuit was not brought by CR.  My organization’s volunteer vice president was co-counsel for the plaintiffs.)

One expert called taking away a child under these circumstances “tantamount to pouring salt into an open wound.”  In Texas, it seems, as in much of the country, the policy in these cases boils down to “please pass the salt” – and this lawsuit does absolutely nothing about it.

Read the Complaint to see all of the horrors that befell A.M. after she was needlessly removed – including, by the way, repeatedly witnessing domestic violence in one of her foster homes.  Only unlike in the home or her own mother, in the foster home, A.M. was abused as well.

CR proposes to do nothing about this – even as the Houston Chronicle is reporting on how a judge blasted Texas CPS for an egregious case of wrongful removal and misleading the court, and the Dallas Morning News has a huge story (behind its paywall) about the harm done to families by the state’s central registry of alleged child abusers.

Fighting the lawsuit also is the wrong answer.  While someone quoted in the Dallas Morning News story about the lawsuit was wrong in claiming CR has never lost, (and the News reporter never checked) they rarely lose.  But they don’t really win either.  They settle.  And the hyperbureaucratic, hypertechnical settlements often drag on for years, sometimes decades with little improvement and, as noted above, sometimes the settlements make things worse.

The other problem with the people at CR is their love of bureaucracy.  More forms!  More paperwork!  More training manuals! Move more boxes around on tables of organization!  A columnist in Connecticut reported that CR’s settlement there (which hasn’t fixed that system in 20 years) included creation of training manuals including one specifying that classrooms where training takes place have wastebaskets.   The people at CR are like the clerk you least want to see when you finally make it to the front of the line at the DMV.

So the only hope for Texas children is if the state is smart enough to hold out for a better settlement than usually is negotiated with CR – one that emphasizes safe, proven alternatives to taking away children.

Such settlements turned Illinois and Alabama into, relatively speaking, national models for keeping children safe.  (Another volunteer NCCPR Board member was co-counsel for plaintiffs in the Alabama suit).  There are many posts about CR and its failures on NCCPR’s Child Welfare Blog.  They’re grouped here  And there’s an overview of CR’s failed approach on our second report on Michigan child welfare.  See the section called “The children wronged by Children’s Rights” starting on page 30.


UPDATE 7:09PM:

A few other notes from the lawsuit Complaint:

● Buried at the very end is something that should scare every grandparent in Texas who is serving as a kinship foster parent: CR wants the court to force all such grandparents, and other relatives, to become licensed.  That, of course, is exactly what caused the disaster in Michigan.

● In spite of the facts concerning one of their own named plaintiffs, A.M., CR refuses to acknowledge that any foster child anywhere in Texas was wrongfully removed.  The Complaint falsely claims that all Texas foster children were abused or neglected.  According to the Complaint, the children “have been doubly traumatized: first by the abuse and neglect that brought them into foster care, and second by their treatment at the hands of their state custodians.”  Abuse in foster care is referred to as “further maltreatment” and “further trauma.”

That is a betrayal of A.M. and all the other Texas children who were abused and neglected only by “their state custodians.”

● CR also makes clear its priorities for what should happen to children after they are removed.  The word “reunification” appears seven times in the Complaint.  The word “adoption” appears 47 times, and gets its own subsection.

Foster care in Washington: The Grinches who stole DC kids’ Christmas

            They would be the head of the Washington D.C. child welfare agency and the chair of the relevant committee of the D.C. council, who cut help for grandparents raising kids to keep them out of foster care, and other help for kids already in foster care.

            But they spared the network of powerful private agencies that dominates DC child welfare, and the nation’s best-paid foster parents.  Details are in this NCCPR op ed for the local opinions section of The Washington Post.


And for our take on child welfare in Oklahoma, see the NCCPR Op Ed in The Oklahoman.

Covering foster care at the LA Times: The “readers’ representative” sets the fairness bar very low

            According to the Organization of News Ombudsmen (ONO), back when it was considered one of America’s great regional dailies, the Louisville Courier Journal was the first to name an ombudsman – someone to respond to reader complaints about the newspaper, both privately to the staff and by writing a column assessing how well the newspaper was doing its job. 

            Any institution that constantly demands that everyone else be held “accountable” should have a truly independent ombudsman.  Very few news organizations do - it took the Jayson Blair scandal to push The New York Times into creating such a position - and fewer still have anyone in the job worthy of the name.  The Courier Journal itself does not appear to have one anymore.

            The best way to do this is the method used by the Times and, for much longer, The Washington Post.  They hire someone from outside the paper for a fixed term, typically two years.  That way the ombudsman doesn’t have to worry about being fired for being too hard on the paper – he or she’s already been fired.

            The best of the ombudsmen, among those whose work I’ve read, was Geneva Overholser, when she was at the Post.  One of the few items entirely unrelated to child welfare on the bulletin board here at NCCPR World Headquarters is her 1996 critique of the Post, the Times and the Los Angeles Times over how all three mishandled a major media controversy of the day.  (It’s available in the Post’s paid archive.)

            But ombudsmen like Overholser are very rare.  People naturally hire in their own image.  So editors tend to hire ombudsmen who think pretty much like the editors – and then tell them, in effect, “go ahead, criticize my work.”

            But at least when they call the job ombudsman (or, in the case of the Times, Public Editor) one sometimes sees serious criticism of the news organization’s performance.  When the job is labeled “readers’ representative” or something similar, it generally seems to be held by a longtime employee of the paper whose job is to write columns like “Buyouts, layoffs, will make your Daily Bugle even better!” (If anyone knows of an exception to this rule, I’d be glad to hear about it.)

            So I wasn’t really expecting much when I submitted my own complaint about Los Angeles Times child welfare coverage to their “readers’ representative,” Deirdre Edgar.

            Just before all hell broke loose concerning Times child welfare coverage (meaning, before I knew that there are questions about things like the accuracy of quotes) I complained about one specific item: how Garrett Therolf, the embattled reporter for the beleaguered Times, had misrepresented an evaluation of the Los Angeles County child welfare waiver.

             My e-mail read in part:

   As is described in detail in my organization’s child welfare Blog today, in three separate stories, Garrett has suggested that an independent evaluation of Los Angeles County’s child welfare “waiver” concludes that the waiver caused an alleged increase in reabuse of children known to the Department of Children and Family Services.

            Not only does the evaluation report say nothing of the kind, in three separate places – p.2, p.11 and p.137 - the report specifically warns readers against drawing any such conclusions.

            To which the readers’ repesentative replied in an e-mail:

I understand what you’re saying, but I don’t think the articles make the conclusion that you believe they do, and therefore no correction is warranted. You even couch your words in your e-mail and in your post – saying the articles “suggest” or “imply” that the waiver led to the increase in child deaths. But the articles don’t say that. However, the Oct. 19 article does directly quote Charlie Ferguson, one of the researchers, who says the data show “an area of concern.”

            So apparently, it’s o.k. to mention the alleged increase in three separate stories about the waiver, and quote the author of the study as saying it’s “an area of concern” but leave out the fact that any increase in child abuse for any reason always is “an area of concern.”  And, apparently, it’s o.k. to leave out the same author’s three specific warnings that there is no evidence of cause and effect.  All of this is fine with the readers’ representative, just as long as the reporter doesn’t use the exact words “the waiver caused the increase.”

            The readers’ representative continues:

That same article also quotes an advocate for abused and neglected children who questions a link between the waiver and the increase in deaths. That’s clearly giving voice to both sides of the issue.

             Actually, the article doesn’t do that.  The readers’ representative is talking about these two paragraphs:

Carole Shauffer, executive director of the San Francisco-based Youth Law Center and one of the state's leading advocates for abused or neglected children, said she was hesitant to connect the waiver with the rise in child fatalities because she worried that too little information is available.

"What analysis has been done by the department?" she asked. "Have they really looked at this? Have they looked at the experience level of the social workers who handled these cases? If they are ignoring this type of analysis, they are foolish."

            One of the few things Therolf has gotten right in all this is that Carole Shauffer is, indeed, “one of the state's leading advocates for abused or neglected children” and her comment reflects this.  But she is not psychic.  She could not be expected to definitively comment on a waiver evaluation she hadn’t read.  She had to depend on whatever Therolf told her about the evaluation.

            And why in the world would even the view of one of the state’s best child advocates be a substitute, as opposed to a supplement, to the views, in full and in context, of the evaluation author himself?

            So the readers representative’s version of  “both sides” is  “yes” and “we don’t know.”  The side that says no, there is no relationship  is entirely absent.  So is the side that says newer data call into question whether there has been such an increase.  So is the side that points out that, even with the alleged increase, the rate of reabuse is lower than it was in 2002, well before the waiver.  So is the side that could have presented more likely explanations for any increase, if there is one, etc. etc.  And, of course, there is no mention of the fact that the evaluation itself says there is no evidence of cause and effect.

           In other words, it’s the Fox News version of “fair and balanced.”

           I followed up by asking the readers’ representative if she also had no problems with the questions about accuracy raised in Daniel Heimpel’s column for The Huffington Post.  She did not reply.  Perhaps she was too busy working on things like her Nov. 29 column.  The one headlined: “Readers respond to demise of Bridge column.”

Covering foster care: Writing the stories others ignore

            It happens all the time after a reporter does “the fatality series” – the story or series about deaths of children “known to the system.”

            The reporter is deluged with calls and e-mails from parents who feel their children were wrongfully taken from them.  Naively, they assume that the reporter really cares about children and now that he’s seen how often the system fails, “he’s bound to want to know about my story.”

            The reporter never responds.  Within the newsroom he and his colleagues may well treat such requests with contempt.

            So the stories of children needlessly taken from everyone they know and love and consigned to the chaos of foster care are far less likely to be told.

            There are a lot of reasons.

THE RIGHTEOUS INDIGNATION HIGH

            For one thing, after immersing oneself in the gruesome details of what a tiny minority of sadistic, brutal parents do to their children, the reporter is likely to be on a “righteous indignation high” – the last thing he wants to hear is someone saying “yes, but…” – least of all someone he’s sure really is a child abuser.

            But there are other reasons as well.  Child welfare may be the only beat where the story most likely to advance a reporter’s career also is the easiest to do.

            The “fatality series” is the low-hanging fruit of the child welfare beat, because the death of a child “known to the system” is the time when it’s hardest for child welfare systems to hide their failings behind confidentiality laws.

            Some years ago, I read with disgust a “how I got that story” piece by a reporter who had done one of these series – complete with all the usual false assumptions and scapegoating.  He advised any journalist starting out covering child welfare to begin with “the fatality series” – precisely because it’s the easiest to do.

            It’s also the quickest, easiest way to glory on the child welfare beat.

            For the same reason most parents are good parents – we’re “hard wired” to respond with horror and revulsion to a child being hurt – these usually are high-impact series, guaranteed to win journalism awards.  Unfortunately the impact often is a foster-care panic which makes everything worse (and no, David Lauter, assistant managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, that does not mean reporters shouldn’t cover child abuse fatalities, it means they should cover them better.)  The “fatality series” also leaves the impression that the only mistake child welfare agencies make is to leave children in dangerous homes - because so many reporters won’t do the harder stories.

            Oh, and one other thing: The professionals in the child welfare system and foster and adoptive parents usually are of the same race and class as most reporters; they’re people journalists naturally are comfortable with.  Most birth parents who lose children to foster care are not.

            Similarly, almost every middle-class professional has a friend or colleague who has adopted a child, few journalists personally know anyone, aside from, very rarely, story subjects, who has had a child returned to her or him from foster care.

            This helps explain why, on those rare cases when wrongful removal does make the front page, or at least the front page of the metro section, it’s usually one of those very rare times that the long arm of child protective services reaches into the middle class: a story like this one or this one.

FROM SOUTH CAROLINA, AN EXCEPTION

            Fortunately, there are exceptions.

            For several years, Issac J. Bailey, metro columnist for The Sun News in Myrtle Beach, S.C. has reported on stories other journalists ignore.  Some of his columns have been collected in a book.

            Bailey is Black.  He was one of eleven children raised in rural South Carolina.  He is also, in his own words “a proud product of handouts.”  He writes:

The government provided me with food stamps and free lunches and big, long rectangular boxes of cheese and powdered milk and bags of beans and Pell grants and health insurance to nourish my body and mind in ways my family's precarious financial predicament did not allow.

           So his background is closer to that of a lot of parents caught up in the system than that of many reporters.

          A background like Bailey’s is by no means a prerequisite for getting the child welfare story right – some outstanding child welfare reporting has been done by journalists from backgrounds every bit as privileged as that of reporters prone to taking the cheapest of shots.   Conversely, there are plenty of poor people who, while escaping from poverty, developed amnesia.  That’s even more true if their “handouts” were the kind that have no stigma, like the G.I. Bill or an FHA-backed home loan, or the mortgage interest tax deduction.

         But I’m guessing that a background like Issac Bailey’s sometimes may make a reporter more willing to listen.

         But there’s something else: Bailey also just works harder than many reporters.

Tomorrow: How that hard work helped reunite a daughter with her father – and what probably is the most important reason why so many reporters won’t write a story like that.

A win for kids: House passes child welfare waiver bill, allowing flexible use of foster care funds

The House of Representatives passed legislation Thursday to restore the authority of the Department of Health and Human Services to grant funding waivers like the one that has helped Florida dramatically improve its child welfare system.

                How big a win is this?  I’m not sure.  Members of Congress want to get out of town to start campaigning as soon as possible, and I’m aware of no action at all on this in the Senate.  But this is at least a small step in the right direction.

                The bill would restore HHS’ authority to authorize a wide variety of waivers, but the most important are waivers like the one granted to Florida.  That one allows the state to use all of the federal aid other states can use only on foster care for better alternatives as well.  In exchange, Florida gave up the right to receive ever more federal money for taking away ever more children.  So it’s no wonder the child welfare establishment is not thrilled by this.

                In keeping with their approach of never say no, just “yes, but…” it to death, the Child Welfare League of America, the trade association for public and private agencies, many of which can’t exist without a steady supply of foster children, and the Children’s Defense Fund, which thinks we’re still living in 1968 and can’t conceive of anything that doesn’t involve federal control and “entitlement” funding as being good, declared that  “CDF, CWLA and others have concerns that extending waivers now will have a chilling effect next year on comprehensive child welfare financing reform.”

                But what CWLA and CDF want is neither comprehensive nor reform.  They want to keep the open-ended entitlement for foster care, and they want something called “delinking” which would eliminate the one small brake on that entitlement. (For details, see our report on child welfare financing.) Even were this a good idea – and it isn’t – this is already in the deep freeze in Congress for one simple reason: At a time when any new spending is poison, this plan is not cost-neutral.  The waivers, however, are.

                What CWLA, CDF and much of the rest of the child welfare establishment really fear is that more states will opt for such waivers and succeed, reducing needless removal of children from their homes – and putting at least a few private agencies out of business in the process.  Or worse, from CWLA’s point of view, Congress might see how well the waivers are working and simply offer the Florida option to every state without a complex waiver process.

                I suspect that’s the kind of real reform the bill’s co-sponsor, Rep. John Linder (R-Georgia) had in mind in his remarks on the bill:

This bill comes to the floor in a fashion too many bills have not in this Congress: First, we held a subcommittee hearing; then the legislation was drafted with bipartisan support; and finally we ensured it does not increase the deficit by even a penny.  It is an example of what can happen if we pursue in a bipartisan way goals that are widely shared, and that have been demonstrated to achieve real results.

The legislation before us would allow all States to follow the successful child welfare reform model tested in Florida and other places.  As we learned in our hearing, those reforms reduced the number of Florida children in foster care by 36 percent, increased adoptions by 12,000, and improved child safety - all without spending more taxpayer money.  …

Since 1994, 22 States have joined Florida in using child welfare waivers. This legislation extends the authority for all States to do so for 5 years. This will allow other States to test and replicate policies that are working.  And it is my hope this will one day pave the way for successful Federal reforms covering all States.  Meanwhile, let's move this bill forward and continue our efforts to improve the lives of all children.

                Actually, Florida’s waiver wasn’t the first, as that line about “joined Florida” may imply – but it is the only comprehensive waiver that applies statewide.  Michigan initially accepted the same deal and chickened out at the last minute.

                Oh, and it was nice of CWLA to put that little “yes, but…” statement out yesterday morning, just hours after the website for Youth Today published an NCCPR Blog about how CWLA has impedes real child welfare reform. 

                I’ll have more news related to Florida on Monday.

Worse than foster care: Scandal at America's most famous orphanage

Last April, I noted on this Blog an excellent series of stories in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about the problems plaguing many of that state’s latter-day orphanages.   As one story reported:

Fights. Sexual assaults. Consensual sex between young teens. Abuse by foster parents and group home employees. Escapes. Suicide attempts. All occur with regularity at many of Georgia's 336 private foster care agencies, the Journal-Constitution's examination found.

                But it’s not just your obscure, run-of-the-mill orphanages that are plagued with problems.  Every few years, a newspaper reveals big trouble at one of the model institutions – the very places orphanage advocates point to in support of their calls to warehouse children.

                ● In 2001, it was SOS Children’s Village in Florida.  The South Florida Sun-Sentinel revealed that between 1999 and 2001 33 reports were filed with Florida’s child abuse hotline alleging abuse of children at the 50-bed facility; 21 were "substantiated" or "indicated."  During the same time period 13 "house parents" and 14 "parent assistants" quit or were fired.  (So much for that argument you always hear from orphanage proponents about how the places provide “stability.”)

● Then came Maryville, one of the places to which media flocked after Newt Gingrich proposed throwing poor people’s children into orphanages if their parents couldn’t afford to raise them after welfare “reform.” In 2002, the main campus at Maryville, near Chicago, was revealed as a place of terror for many of the children confined there, according to documents obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times.  The newspaper reported that “the place is often up for grabs, with staff struggling to handle suicide attempts, sex abuse, drug use, fights and vandalism…” In 2001, police were called to Maryville 909 times.

In 2004, Illinois pulled all 270 state wards out of Maryville – something it could do because it had done such a good job of reducing needless foster care.  In Illinois, substitute care no longer is a “sellers market.”

● And now scandal has reached the very pinnacle of American orphanages – the very place Gingrich himself cited as the perfect place to stash poor people’s children.  The Omaha World-Herald reports that the State of Nebraska has suspended admissions to two programs at Boys Town.

The reason: “investigators found staffers improperly restraining and isolating children.”

According to the World-Herald: “Staffers at a Boys Town National Research Hospital program, for instance, sometimes placed children face down on gurneys and locked them into place with belts. They used the practice, which has been discontinued, to prevent children from harming themselves and others.”  The story also reports that “A program director at the hospital reported 19 times in the last year that drugs were used to calm patients, although Boys Town says it doesn't use drugs.”  A Boys Town official said the state must have misquoted the program director.

The decision to suspend admissions is all-the-more remarkable since it was made by the state child welfare agency in Nebraska.  There may be no child welfare agency in America more in love with taking away children and holding them in foster care.  When NCCPR compares states we compare entries into care and the number of children in foster care on any given day.  And we use both the fairest method, comparing to impoverished child population, and comparing to total child population.  Year after year, only one state is among the three worst states in all four catagories: Nebraska.

Will the problems at these particular programs be fixed?  Sure.  Boys Town will implement a “corrective action plan” and the programs will clean up their acts – just the way SOS and Maryville did.  And things will be fine.  For awhile.  But when you’re dealing with a population that is either hated or feared that is out of sight out of mind, sooner or later things will deteriorate again.

And no corrective action plan can correct for the fact that institutionalization is inherently harmful and almost always unnecessary.

In the meantime, if what that program director reportedly said is true, perhaps Boys Town needs to change its famous slogan.  How about: “He’s not heavy, he’s overmedicated!”

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.

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.