Arizona’s great big rate increase for a group home provider: State officials deny it was pay-for-play; but their own explanation is nearly as bad.

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs

Shortly after taking office as Governor of Arizona, Katie Hobbs announced what could have been a breakthrough: She named a real reformer, Matthew Stewart, to run the state family police agency, the Department of Child Safety. For the first time in decades, the agency would have a leader who understood that the root of Arizona’s child welfare problems was the fact that it tears apart families at a rate well above the national average. That’s compounded by Arizona’s obsession with institutionalizing the children it takes. 

  National Average       Arizona
                  Source: U.S. Deparrtment of Health and Human Services AFCARS Dashboard               

Indeed, the culture of child removal runs so deep that workers in one office thought they would get away with wearing t-shirts that said: “Professional Kidnapper.” 

Right after the governor named Stewart, I wrote a column for the Arizona Republic praising her decision. “Stewart will need ongoing support from the governor,” I wrote. “It looks like he’s going to get it.” 

Boy, did I ever get that wrong! Just weeks after he was nominated, while on the job but still awaiting a confirmation vote from the State Senate, Hobbs withdrew the nomination and replaced him with David Lujan. 

It’s never been clear why. But one possible explanation has emerged, thanks to some great investigative reporting by the Republic. 

The story recounts this chain of events: 

● Sunshine Residential, an Arizona for-profit operator of group homes, run by Simon Kottoor, donates $300,000 to Hobbs’ campaign and another $100,000 to her inaugural – the latter in response to a personal request from Hobbs herself.

● Sunshine Residential asks for a 30% rate increase. They threaten to refuse children from DCS, claiming they got a better offer from the federal government to house migrant children. Three other providers also seek increases.

● Matthew Stewart says no.

● Stuart is replaced by David Lujan.

● Lujan says yes – to Sunshine Residential.

From the story: 

“We are weak, no leadership, perfect time to get what they want,” Alex Ong, then the head of contracts and procurement at DCS, wrote about the requests from group homes. He wrote to then-Deputy Director Robert Navarro in late January 2023 that it wasn’t the time to approve higher rates. 

“I agree...But when simon gives money to the gov...it can make magic happen,” Navarro responded. 

Later, the Republic reports 

Ong would make an eyebrow-raising comment in May 2023. 

"We gotta pay to play now," he wrote. 

DCS spokesman Darren DaRonco said that comment was not related to group homes but made during a conversation about contracts for supervised visitation in DCS cases. 

Lujan says contributions had nothing to do with the rate increase.  But his own explanation isn’t much better. He says DCS needed the beds that Kottoor was threatening to take away. 

Lujan said Sunshine Residential is one of Arizona’s better group home providers.  As the story explains:

Their work was well-regarded by DCS officials, though the company has also faced scrutiny and is named in an ongoing lawsuit over the death of a 9-year-old boy. The boy, Jakob Blodgett, was allowed to refuse diabetes medication before his death. Earlier this year, pregnant 16-year-old Zariah Finley Dodd was murdered shortly after leaving her placement at a group home run by Sunshine Residential. 

And, using the sleazy argument agencies always use to institutionalize children, Lujan said Sunshine Residential's beds were needed to keep siblings together.

In fact, DCS doesn’t need those beds – from Sunshine Residential or anyone else. Rather, DCS still takes away children at a rate well above the national average, even when rates of family poverty are factored in. Children are more likely, by far, to be torn from their parents in Phoenix than any other of America’s ten largest cities and their surrounding counties when rates of child poverty are factored in. 

And no, that’s not because Arizona is a cesspool of depravity with vastly more child abuse.  

Of all the children torn from their families and thrown into foster care in Arizona in 2024, 89% did not involve even an allegation of physical or sexual abuse. In 59% of cases, there was not involve even an allegation of any form of drug abuse.  Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with “neglect.” 

But even more damning than the high rate of needless removal is where the children end up. DCS is obsessed with stashing away the children it takes in so-called “congregate care” – group homes and institutions.  Nationwide, on average, 15% of children taken in 2024 were placed in such settings. In Arizona, it was 41%! 

Stop doing that, and there will be plenty of room in family foster homes for the children who really need them - including sibling groups.

Perhaps Matthew Stewart understood that was the real problem. And perhaps that’s why his tenure was so brief. 

Children abandoned in the OTHER Arizona desert

A news desert makes it easy for an extremist lawmaker to pressure a governor into firing the first Black director of the state “child welfare” agency – less than two months after appointing him. 

MARCH 3: See also the update here.

Shortly after taking office, the new Governor of Arizona, Democrat Katie Hobbs, named a reformer to run the state “child welfare” agency.  Matthew Stewart would be the first Black leader of the Department of Child Safety (DCS).  Arizona is a state which has one of the worst records f in America for racial bias in child welfare, a state where some caseworkers thought it was funny to wear t-shirts emblazoned with the words “Professional kidnapper.” 

Hobbs, a social worker herself, knew exactly what she was getting when she chose Stewart.  But she fired Stewart after less than two months.  She fired him before he could even get a confirmation hearing – because of a smear campaign led by Republican State Sen. Jake Hoffman, who chairs the committee that would have held the hearing.  Hoffman doesn’t even accept the legitimacy of Hobbs’ election.  He’s been banned from some social media spaces for running a “troll farm.”  

But this is more than a failure of one governor – it’s an example of how a state can become a “news desert” even when, technically, the news organizations haven’t shut down. 

None of the facts about what really happened to Stewart was uncovered by an Arizona news organization.  On the contrary, they simply cut-and-pasted Hoffman’s claims.  They did this even though they knew or should have known all about the troll farming (something the Arizona Republic reported in 2020) and the election denying.  The Republic quoted exhaustively from Hoffman’s press release gloating about his triumph. (I can’t link to it due to their paywall.)  A breathless “breaking news” story from KPNX-TV could have been scripted by Hoffman. 

At a minimum, local news organizations could have reminded readers of Hoffman’s own track record.  For example, Hoffman implied that, during his brief tenure, Stewart fired employees because they were gay.  It might have helped readers weigh the credibility of the claim had they been told that Hoffman 

is leading a group of conservatives who plan to sue Hobbs for issuing an executive order guaranteeing equal employment opportunities for LGBTQ people working at state agencies. He also wrote a bill that would have banned books from schools that depict “acts” of “homosexuality.” 

That’s a quote from a news organization, but not one based in Arizona.  It’s from ProPublica, which told the full story that Arizona media missed.  

Yes, ProPublica had an advantage.  Reporter Eli Hager had met Matthew Stewart well before he was appointed, while doing an outstanding series of stories on the failings of family policing across the country.  In the only Arizona news account I’ve found that mentions even asking Stewart for comment, the one in the Republic, he declined.  But Hager didn’t just talk to Stewart.  He found plenty of employees within DCS who vouched for him and debunked the allegations.  Nothing published so far indicates that any Arizona news organization even tried. 

That is not a function of malice or bias – it’s a function of the evisceration of local news. Between 2008 and 2020, the number of Newspaper newsroom employees plummeted by 57% - and there’s no end to the decline in sight.  A few years ago both the Arizona Republic and the Arizona Daily Star received grants to do in-depth reporting on child welfare.  Both did some very good work.  But the grants have run out, and so has any serious reporting. 

But how much would it have taken to at least put Hoffman’s smears into context?  A paragraph or two, from earlier news stories, such as the one from the Republic, would have helped.  And you still can reprint the ProPublica story at no charge.

If lawmakers are going to run troll factories, the least local media can do is not help them spread the trolling.  Because a news desert is a dangerous place to leave children.

“Child welfare” in Arizona: The parent punishment system in action

Studies have found abuse in at least one-quarter to one-third of foster homes. The record of group homes is worse.  So when Arizona’s so-called “Department of Child Safety” needlessly tore four little girls from their father and threw them into separate group homes, they should have known what was likely to happen.

Suppose, hypothetically, a child protective services agency said this:

            You spanked your ten-year-old boy too hard.  We have to punish you for this. So to punish you we’re going to arrange to have two of your daughters sexually abused. That’ll teach you a lesson!

            Absurd, right?  No one could possibly be so cruel – and so shortsighted.  But while the part about the child protective services agency arranging the sexual abuse on purpose is entirely made up, everything else really happened.  And while of course no child protective services agency would try to do this to a child on purpose, the caseworkers should have known that the odds were better than 50/50 that something like this would happen.

            Here’s the actual story, as told by the Arizona Republic in the first installment of a series following five families over two years.  In addition to the print stories, these families are the subject of a documentary that premiered in Arizona on Nov. 11.  The Republic included this except about the case of Stephan McCray and his children.

             McCray’s then ten-year-old son was misbehaving in school; he threw something at another student.  “That’s behavior I won’t tolerate,” McCray says.  So McCray spanked him.  The police and the Arizona agency that goes by the Orwellian name “Department of Child Safety” alleged that McCray left "numerous marks across [the child’s] back and left arm." McCray says the investigators “mistook scars from childhood scrapes as evidence of child abuse.”

Whichever is the case, had McCray been white and middle class, odds are he simply would have been sent off to “counseling” with a private therapist and that would have been the end of it.  But, of course, he is neither.  (He’s also a follower of the Nation of Islam, which, he says, further discomfited the white, middle-class caseworkers he dealt with.)

Though there was never any allegation that McCray abused or neglected his other four children, all of them were taken – possibly illegally.

            According to the story:

Four of [the children] shouldn’t have been taken from him, [McCray] says: Stephan Jr. was the only child listed in the court order, so why were all five removed?  But when he asks DCS, he says he’s told too bad, his attorney should have caught the error.

            .          

McCray also was charged criminally.

McCray’s own mother – a former foster parent – was ready and willing to take the children. But she was turned down - because she didn’t see her son exactly the way DCS did – as a danger to his children.

            What did DCS think was going to happen?  Did they think McCray would sneak into his mother’s home through an open window in the middle of the night to spank his kids?

          

  Instead, all of the children, their ages ranging from six to 10, were torn not only from their father but also from each other. Then they were institutionalized – consigned to the worst placements of all, group homes.  For months they were not even allowed to visit each other.  McCray says one of his daughters became so upset that the group home called police – for a child who couldn’t have been more than eight years old. The police took her to “a psych ward at a hospital.”

            And then, Stephan and his mother say, two of the young girls were sexually abused. 

High rates of abuse in foster care

            Multiple studies have found abuse in one-quarter to one-third of family foster homes. The record of group homes and institutions is even worse.  Thus, DCS had every reason to know that if they took five young children and placed them in five separate group homes, at least one of them was likely to be abused there.

            Nevertheless the “Department of Child Safety” took away four children who they never so much as alleged were abused in their own homes and placed them at enormously high risk of abuse.  And that, of course, is on top of all the emotional trauma inflicted on the children by being taken from their father, their extended family and each other.

            Ultimately, DCS decided it would be o.k. to place the children with their grandmother after all.  Then, two years after they were removed, the children were reunited with their father – much the worse for the experience.

For the "Department of Child Safety," it’s not really about child safety

            

            The agency name notwithstanding, “child safety” was never really the point.

            Critics of the system often say that it is not really a child protection system at all; it’s a parent punishment system.  The child welfare establishment denies this. So it was striking to find a 30-year veteran of that establishment actually admit as much, albeit accidentally. 

Karen Kline, a former caseworker who now runs child welfare initiatives for something called the Family Involvement Center.  In the story and the documentary, she pays the usual lip service to understanding the trauma of removal.  But when she is asked about allegations by McCray and his mother that the case was affected by racial bias, she replies:

Case managers get training in racial and cultural sensitivity, she says. But it's wrong to equate a punishment for spanking with racial bias, she says. [Emphasis added.]

            Kline is wrong. Punishing a parent for spanking might not be racial bias if all parents who spanked their children were treated the same way.  An overwhelming body of research tells us they are not.

            But more revealing is Kline’s apparent acknowledgment that the primary purpose here was to punish the parent.  That would help explain how easy it was for DCS to be blinded to all the harm the agency was doing to the children.         

Other typical blunders

The story reveals other examples of child welfare practices that are as typical as they are harmful to children.

            ● One of the strikes against McCray in the spanking case was the fact that he’d been in trouble with DCS before – for what was, in fact, a classic example of child welfare confusing poverty with neglect.  As the story explains:

Five years earlier, DCS checked out complaints of neglect against him after he left his younger children alone in his apartment while he ran to a school, less than a block away, to walk his daughter home from kindergarten.

For that the children were placed for two years in kinship foster care – with the same grandmother DCS later would say was unfit to be a caretaker.

● At one point, McCray was criticized for missing drug testing, something required because he was on probation due to the criminal charge.  But why were drug tests ever ordered in the first place?  There is nothing in the story suggesting McCray abused drugs.

            ● McCray pled guilty to the criminal charge – because, his lawyer said, if he fought it the case would drag on and on, foster care would be prolonged, and DCS then could turn around and use the very fact of the delay to move to terminate his parental rights.  But that means he has a criminal record – so it’s harder to get a job.

            ● At one point, he had a job but he lost it “due to the demands of court hearings, classes and meetings mandated by the state plan to reunify him with his kids.”  Then, not having a job itself became an obstacle to getting his children back.

            ● The final obstacle was housing – making the McCray children among the estimated 30 percent of foster children who were kept away from their families because of housing.  Ultimately, as McCray himself notes, DCS really did help with that – but it never should have been an issue at all.

            None of this agency behavior would make sense in a real child protection system. It makes perfect sense in a parent punishment system.

News and commentary round-up, week ending June 10, 2019

Catching up with some of the news over the past three weeks while I was away, starting with two important stories from Arizona:

● The Arizona Daily Star reports on the state’s use of coerced “voluntary” placements into foster care that deny families even the minimum due process protections of the formal system.  There are hundreds of such placements, and, like other states, Arizona admits they don’t even report them to the federal government as entries into care.  That is an apparent violation of federal regulations.  I discuss those regulations in this blog post about Texas, where the practice is so widespread it probably accounts for nearly two-thirds of foster care entries.

● The Arizona Republic reports on a scathing decision by an Arizona appellate court overturning the termination of a father’s parental rights. As the Republic story puts it: “Sloppy work, lack of evidence and outright lies caused a father to lose parental rights to his daughter, the Court of Appeals argued in an opinion that criticizes the work of nearly everyone involved in the four-year-long case.” Republic columnist Laurie Roberts has an excellent column linking this case to other failings in Arizona child welfare.

The court decision aptly illustrates the point made by Vivek Sankaran inhis latest column: High quality appellate advocacy also is essential to prevent this kind of harm to children.

● I often write about how child welfare systems err in all directions.  It doesn’t always err in all directions involving the same person – but that’s what happened to Sarah Harris. As a child, her cries of sexual abuse were ignored. As a mother, her own child was taken needlessly.  Few people are in a better position to critique HBO’s documentary Foster.  Ms. Harris does just that in this excellent column for Rise.

Arizona Daily Star takes on how to fix foster care

It's unusual to see two large newspapers in one state take on massive projects about child welfare. It's even more unusual to see both newspapers do it really well.  Last year, the Arizona Republic did excellent stories, such as this one and this one. about decades of failure in Arizona child welfare.

Now the Arizona Daily Star has published the first parts of a three-week series on how to fix child welfare in Arizona (which turns out to be how to fix child welfare everywhere).  The stories are an excellent guide to reform.  This video offers an overview:

Child welfare reform in Arizona: Teeing up the backlash when the frontlash has barely begun

In January, 2003, just four days after taking office, in the wake of the disclosure of a high-profile child abuse tragedy, the governor of Arizona, Janet Napolitano, gave a speech in which she told child protective services caseworkers to just take away the kids “and we’ll sort it out later.”

Fifteen years later, Arizona is only beginning to sort it out. And if a story in the Arizona Republic Sunday is any indication, the groundwork for a backlash already is being laid.

Napolitano’s remarks helped kick-start what would become the nation’s longest foster-care panic. The number of children taken from their parents skyrocketed, increasing year after year after year all the way through 2015. Even with a slight decline in 2016, Arizona took away children at a rate more than 50 percent above the national average.

For some of that time, the panic was encouraged by the state’s largest newspaper, the Republic. But last year that changed.

The Republic received a three-year grant to fund in-depth reporting on child welfare. Editors brought back to the Republic an outstanding investigative reporter, Bob Ortega.  He was tasked with, in effect, leading the Republic to take a bold, new look at child welfare, a look that would question everyone’s assumptions, including the newspaper’s own. That led to superb stories such as this one.  And this one.

Though the project continues, there’s been a setback. Unfortunately for Arizona, Ortega left the Republic to join the investigative unit at CNN. 

The latest story

This latest story, about promises by the Arizona Department of Child Safety (DCS) to do more to keep families together, still has a lot to commend it. The story focuses on a mother struggling with drug abuse.  But instead of the usual horror story, this case is far closer to the norm – a mother who dearly loves her child and is winning her battle with addition.  In addition, a lot of space is devoted to trying to explain the emotional harm done to children by needless foster care. 

But, at the same time, one can almost feel some of the old Republic assumptions sneaking back into the coverage.

The story resurrects some myths that have plagued child welfare systems and child welfare news coverage for decades.

● The myth that child removal equals child safety. As noted above, the story acknowledges theemotional harm of needless removal – and doesn’t just brush it off in a paragraph.  But it still implies that if you take away the child at least the child will be physically safe.

Like so many stories before, this one implies, wrongly, that child safety and family preservation are opposites that need to be balanced. Leaving the child at home is constantly described in terms of risk – even if the story suggests the risk might be worth it.

But study after study shows high rates of abuse in foster care itself. Indeed, one of Ortega’s stories examined this very point.  He wrote:

In 2014, of 46 states that reported data to the federal Children's Bureau, all claimed that fewer than 2 percent of children in foster care had been harmed in the prior year. Arizona said that barely a tenth of 1 percent of children in care were verifiably harmed. But in surveys going back for decades, from 25 percent to as high as 40 percent of former foster children report having been abused or neglected in care.

For the overwhelming majority of children family preservation is the safer option.  It is foster care that is riskier – in every respect.

Consequences of needless foster care

And discussions of emotional harm that largely lack specifics about outcomes don’t tell the full story of that harm.

Since the mother at the center of the Republic story is recovering from drug addiction, it would seem particularly important to explain why helping her recover without placing her newborn in foster care is better for the child.

But there is no reference to research such as a the  landmak study of two groups of children born with cocaine in their systems,  One group was placed in foster care, another left with birth mothers able to care for them.  After six months, the babies were tested using all the usual measures of infant development: rolling over, sitting up, reaching out. Typically, the children left with their birth mothers did better.  For the foster children, the separation from their mothers was more toxic than the cocaine.

And, of course, there are those two massive studies of more than 15,000 typical cases, which show that children left in their own homes fared better in later life even than comparably maltreated children placed in foster care.

So from the point of view of child safety in all its forms, Arizona’s stated new approach – which emphasizes working harder to find ways to keep children safe without resorting to foster care --  makes sense.

● The myth of the ever-swinging pendulum.  What is it with journalists and pendulums, anyway?

Even when I was a reporter, I never understood the fondness of my fellow journalists for thinking of just about everything in terms of a swinging pendulum.  The Republic story is no exception. It keeps coming back to whether the pendulum is swinging and how to set that pendulum in just the right spot. Editors love those pendulums, too.  The metaphor makes it into a subhead and a pullquote.

The problem with the metaphor is illustrated by how it’s used in the story itself. The story notes a recent drop in the number of children in foster care in Arizona and promptly invokes the pendulum. But even with that decline, Arizona still holds children in foster care at a rate more than 30 percent above the national average. In child welfare, the pendulum generally swings only from taking away too many children to taking away far too many children. (I think I’ll make that one of my pullquotes.)

● Setting the reforms up for scapegoating. The story tells us that

since the new practice started late last summer, there have been child deaths and near-fatalities in which [the State Department of Child Safety] was involved. It's unclear, at this point, whether any of those cases involved a decision to leave a child at home, or under the supervision of a “safety monitor.” Investigations are ongoing.

In fact, even if it hasn’t happened yet there will be cases in which the new approach leads to leaving a child at home and something horrible happens to that child.

But the same thing happened under the old “take the child and run” approach, when caseworkers were so overwhelmed with children who didn’t belong in foster care that they had no time to investigate any case properly, and overlooked more children in real danger. And, of course, it happened every time a child was needlessly removed only to be abused in foster care.

But that won’t stop those wedded to the take-the-child-and-run approach from exploiting the tragedy, whenever it occurs and whatever the circumstances, to try to sabotage this first small effort to curb Arizona’s 14-year foster care panic. As I’ve noted before, opponents of safe, proven alternatives to foster care will never give up their horror stories – because it’s all they’ve got.

There is no approach to child welfare that eliminates every tragedy.  If you judge a system by its horror stories, all systems fail.  The question is which approach typically makes children safer – and on that the evidence is overwhelming: You can’t have child safety without family preservation.

For more about Arizona and its long, long foster-care panic, see our 2007 report on Arizona child welfare.

Remember when Joe Arpaio’s men allegedly threatened to have a reporter’s children taken away?

Joe Arpaio (Photo by Gage Skidmore)

Among the many unpardonable (or is that the wrong word?) things that allegedly happened during the reign of former Maricopa County, Arizona, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, let’s not forget the time two of his top deputies allegedly threatened to have a reporter’s children taken from her.

According to a report from another county sheriff’s office, it happened several times. According to the Phoenix alternative weekly New Times, “’[The reporter] was always threatened that her child would end up in the hands of CPS, which was very upsetting to her,’ the report states.”

It allegedly happened in 2009, but didn’t come to light until two years later. I wrote about it at the time, and that post is reprinted below.  A couple of updates:

● In the 2011 post, I discussed a foster-care panic ending in Florida and continuing in Arizona.  Now, Florida is panicking again and in Arizona, at long last, the foster-care panic may be ending.

● The post criticizes coverage of child welfare in the Arizona Republic. That coverage improved significantly over the past year, as a result of a new project led by reporter Bob Ortega. Unfortunately, Ortega recently left the Republic to join the investigative unit of CNN, to it is not clear whether the progress will continue.

Here’s the original post:

Thursday, August 18, 2011

Child welfare in Arizona: They don’t threaten reporters, do they?

Two top deputies in the Maricopa County Sheriff’s office allegedly threatened to retaliate against a reporter by taking away her child.  That should give Arizona journalists second thoughts about their embrace of unchecked power to intervene in families – but it probably won't.

It took Florida seven years to end the foster-care panic that swept through the state starting in 1999.  But with Florida having reversed course and made children saferwhile significantly reducing entries into care, there now is a new record-holder for perennial foster care panic: Arizona.

That state’s panic started much like Florida’s: First a high-profile death of a child “known to the system” then a new governor embraces a take-the-child-and-run approach. In Florida it was a Republican, Jeb Bush, in Arizona it was a Democrat, Janet Napolitano.  (In child welfare idiocy tends to be bipartisan.) 

Just four days after taking office Napolitano told caseworkers to just take away the kids “and we’ll sort it out later.”

Although there are strong indications Napolitano herself realized within months that this was a huge mistake, she never said so publicly.  Now, more than eight years later, Arizona still hasn’t sorted it out.  Details are in our report on Arizona child welfare.  The Arizona Foster-Care panic has broken Florida’s record.   Nationwide, between 2002 and 2010 entries into foster care over the course of a year declined nearly 15 percent.  In Arizona they soared 70 percent, with no end in sight.

As always with foster-care panics, the one in Arizona backfired.  All those false allegations and trivial cases and all that needless removal of children from their homes further overloaded caseworkers leaving them less time to find children in real danger.  So the cycle of failure continues year after year. Every few years, when a new high-profile case or cases grabs headlines, everyone repeats the same mistakes – like assuming that the solution is to encourage everyone to report their slightest suspicions to CPS, further overloading the system.  As a matter of fact, that’s happening right now.

And sometimes it gets worse.  Although politicians started the Arizona Foster Care Panic, a lot of the responsibility for keeping it going rests with the state’s press corps.  The one reporter at a daily newspaper in the state who really came to understand child welfare, Karina Bland of the Arizona Republic, was transferred off the beat several years ago.  So whenever there were signs the panic might abate, someone at the Republic in Phoenix and/or the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson would respond to a horror story by pouring on the hype and hysteria and start it up again. 

It’s not that these reporters didn’t hear from parents who said they were falsely accused or threatened with removal of their children for no good reason, perhaps as retaliation for being insufficiently cooperative with authorities.  It’s just that, like many reporters across the country, the journalists at the big Arizona dailies rolled their eyes and figured it was probably just some lousy parent making up excuses.

But one would think they’d reconsider after it happened to one of their own.

Actually, it happened a couple of years ago, but only became public in May, and I just stumbled on it this week.  It’s all explained in this story from the “Valley Fever” Blogon the website of the Phoenix alternative weekly New Times.

The story revolves around one of the many scandals involving the right-wing sheriff of Maricopa County, (metropolitan Phoenix) Joe Arpaio.  (The “Valley Fever” home pageon the New Times website includes a countdown clock – or, more accurately a count-up clock, ticking off the days that the sheriff has been under investigation by the federal government. Click on it and you’ll get to a page with 15 years of New Timesinvestigative stories about Arpaio and his office.)

But here’s the bottom line. According to the Valley Fever post on May 13, a reporter for the Republic, Yvonne Wingett-Sanchez, says two deputy chiefs of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, Dave Hendershott and Paul Chagolla, threatened to arrest her  – and take away her child – because the reporter was doing her job. The story quotes from a report on an investigation of Arpaio’s office done by the sheriff in another county.  Here’s the relevant section of the story:

A year [after the incident], after Arpaio had put Hendershott on administrative leave, Wingett complained to [sheriff’s office spokeswoman] Lisa Allen that he and Chagolla repeatedly had threatened to arrest her over the incident.

"Next week, Yvonne, you're going to be arrested ... and your child is going to end up with Child Protective Services," they said, Wingett Sanchez told Allen, adding that she could barely speak about it without getting "emotional."

The threats to Wingett Sanchez came in person and, at least once, by telephone, Allen reported.  "She was always threatened that her child would end up in the hands of CPS, which was very upsetting to her," the report states.

So maybe some of those parents some of those Arizona reporters have been rolling their eyes about aren’t so crazy after all.  And maybe the kind of unchecked power law enforcement and child protective services have in the child welfare arena isn’t such a great idea after all.

It’s not only reporters at the dailies who could learn from this story.  If this little itemin the Valley Fever Blog itself is any indication, it seems that when the reporter who understood these issues best, Sarah Fenske, left New Times to become managing editor of Riverfront Times in St. Louis, the paper’s institutional memory concerning these issues left with her.

In fact, it’s not just journalists who could learn from this story.  I’ve often written about the hypocrisy of  some of my fellow liberals - those on the left who forget everything they claim to believe in about civil liberties when someone whispers the words “child abuse” in their ears. (The response among many on the left to the FLDS case in Texas being a prime example.)  But there’s plenty of hypocrisy among those on the right who say they’re against state interference in families and abuse of power by “big government” - but love people like Joe Arpaio. 

A lot of good journalism about child welfare

Here’s a good problem to have: So much good journalism about child welfare lately that it’s hard to keep up.

●The Arizona Republic has begun a new project on child welfare – and it’s off to an excellent start. Check out the first story.  And a strong editorial.

● But you don’t have to be a relatively large news organization to do outstanding work.  Check out this story from The Day in New London, Ct., about the biggest problem in American child welfare: the confusion of poverty with “neglect.” The same reporter wrote this excellent story as well.

● The nonprofit journalism site ProPublica has a detailed look at the misuse of “psych evals” – and how advocates in New York City brought about some improvement.

● And, as you read this story from the Philadelphia Inquirer, imagine what the response would be if the status of the alleged killer and the people who lost custody of the child were reversed.

Foster care in D.C.: Another timely reminder of the price of panic

The previous post to this Blog described how some excellent reporting in New York Magazine exposed the true state of New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services, through the story of one caseworker and one supervisor.  A grandstanding district attorney charged them with criminally-negligent homicide after a child on their caseload died.  Their boss hung them out to dry.

While criminal charges are extremely rare, there is nothing unusual about politicians destroying the lives of child welfare caseworkers – and children – to boost their own fortunes. 

A prime example is former Washington D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty.  As readers of this Blog will recall, after the bodies of the children of Banita Jacks were discovered, in January, 2008, Fenty fired everyone who came anywhere near that case, without pausing to check if they’d actually done anything wrong.

They hadn’t.

Last week, Washington Post metro columnist Petula Dvorak wrote about the price paid by the workers and by D.C.’s vulnerable children.

She writes:

Canning those social workers sent a chill across the agency that the city’s abused and neglected children are still paying for today.

Social workers make serious decisions every day, balancing the level of abuse or neglect in a dysfunctional family against the knowledge that removing any child from a home is additional trauma.

In the months after the Jacks case and the firings, social workers went with an “if in doubt, pull them out” policy, yanking hundreds of kids from their homes and placing them in foster care.

Everyone was worried that they had a Jacks case next door, so the agency also experienced a 600 percent increase in calls reporting suspected child abuse. Foster homes were packed. Social workers had gigantic caseloads.

The agency cratered. It has an interim director, the third person to head the agency since the Jacks case ripped it apart. And still, the latest report by a court monitor on the agency’s performance was not stellar.

Here’s how the children still pay:

The number of children torn from their homes soared in 2008, then declined but stayed above the pre-panic level, then soared again last year, to the highest level since 2005.  Washington D.C. takes away proportionately more children than Los Angeles, New York, Cleveland, Detroit, Atlanta and several other cities, even when rates of child poverty are factored in.

D.C. tears apart families at a rate nearly triple the rate in Miami and five times the rate of Chicago.  But in those communities independent court monitors have found that the reforms that curbed needless removal of children also made children safer.

And just this week the new D.C. Edition of The Huffington Post has a very good column about another D.C. child welfare outrage.

But on one point Dvorak is mistaken.  In describing the climate in 2008, she writes:  “who was going to listen to [the fired workers] back then?” 

Actually, she did. 

As a reporter at the time she wrote about the foster-care panic and its consequences when almost no one else was interested.  The story is worth rereading again – and every time a high-profile child welfare tragedy is in the news.

When Dvorak became a columnist she did not stop being a reporter.  Before writing her columns about the aftermath of the Jacks case, Dvorak did more reporting.  Issac Bailey of The Sun News in Myrtle Beach, S.C. takes the same approach.  All the really good columnists do.  And as Dvorak notes in the column, doing her own reporting changed her view of the case and the role of the workers.

Perhaps that’s what The Great Regurgitator, Laurie Roberts of The Arizona Republic, is so afraid of – that if she actually did some reporting she might find out that the crap she’s been writing, over and over, in more than 40 columns is wrong.

Here’s what I’m afraid of.  I’m afraid that, given the state of the newspaper industry, a real reporter for the Republic – someone who went out and actually gathered news - may have been laid off or taken a buyout in order to keep Laurie Roberts employed.


UPDATE, OCTOBER 19: Laurie Roberts has just proven me wrong about those last two paragraphs.  I'm eating a bit of crow in a post here.

Foster care in Arizona: The failed journalism of Laurie Roberts (Part two)

UPDATE, OCTOBER 19: Laurie Roberts proved me wrong today - not about Arizona child welfare, but about Laurie Roberts. See this post to see what I mean.

Yesterday’s post to this blog discussed the harm to Arizona’s vulnerable children caused by the state’s perennial foster care panic, and how that panic is kept alive in part by Arizona Republic columnist Laurie Roberts.

Since the panic began in 2003, Roberts has written at least 40 columns (or, more accurately, the same basic column 40 times) in an attempt to pressure caseworkers to tear apart more families.

Those columns contributed to the fact that, since she began this crusade, the number of children torn from their parents in Arizona has soared by 70 percent, even as nationwide, the number has declined by 15 percent.

Yet just this past Saturday, Roberts herself said her efforts to make children safer have utterly failed.   So it should be obvious that taking away more children and shoveling them into foster care is not the answer. 

One of the real reasons the tragedies continue actually was cited in Roberts’ column on Aug. 24, when she wrote:

…[C]caseworkers say privately that they can’t possibly do the job with workloads that exceed the recommended level by 60 percent or more.

But Roberts is either oblivious to the contradiction in her own column – scapegoating family preservation and then admitting workers don’t have time to make good decisions - or simply doesn’t care.

In part the overload almost certainly is because of budget cuts by the legislature and Gov. Jan Brewer, just as Roberts says. 

(Oh, wait: Perhaps because she had a chance to see a preview of these Blog posts when I sent excerpts to NCCPR’s list of Arizona journalists on Friday, she backed away from the one part of her writing that makes any sense on Saturday.  Now she says:

But budget cuts are neither an excuse nor the whole story. I've been watching and writing about kids like Jacob Gibson for 20 years, during times when caseloads were half of what they are now.)

In fact, the rest of the story is the part Roberts keeps leaving out: Children in real danger are missed because caseworkers are overloaded with all those hotline calls that never got screened out (the way they would have been screened out in other states, something discussed in detail in the previous post).  And in part it’s because of all the time workers have wasted taking children needlessly from everyone they know and love because they are terrified of things like being the subject of Roberts’ 41st iteration of The Column – and the likely response from their boss.

Indeed, it appears that their current boss, Clarence Carter, director of the Arizona Department of Economic Security, is big on scapegoating frontline workers – and Roberts loves it.  She writes:

Carter has vowed … to hold workers accountable if they blew it, to fix systems if they aren't working and to change the culture, in the hope that the ashes of no more children will be swept under that well-worn rug over at the CPS.  He promised much the same thing after 23-month-old Janie Buelna died in March while the CPS should have been watching.

 The caseworker and her supervisor were fired, and the supervisor's boss was reassigned.   And so, I take Carter at his word, that he will sort out what happened here and, if warranted, hold people accountable.

So Roberts approves of Carter sending a message to the frontlines that boils down to: Take away all the kids you want and, though the kids will suffer terribly, your job will be safe.  Leave one child home and have something go wrong and you’re fired.  That is, of course, the perfect formula for continuing the foster-care panic.

Roberts also is pleased with another Carter initiative:

Effective immediately, he said, all active cases in which there have been three or more reports of abuse will be reviewed monthly by senior management -- something that already is supposed to be happening at the lower supervisory levels.

           

In other words, if you want to be sure your attempt to use the Arizona child abuse hotline to harass your ex-spouse or neighbor, or anyone else is effective, don’t forget to make that third call.

FOSTER CARE PANIC TODAY, MORE CHILD ABUSE DEATHS TOMORROW

The heart of the problem with all this, of course, is that foster care panics can cost children’s lives.   In one city and state after another, such panics have done nothing to reduce child abuse deaths – often those deaths have increased.   Arizona is a classic example.

According to the annual reports from Arizona Child Fatality Review Program,  in 2002, the last year before the Arizona Foster Care Panic, there were 36 child abuse deaths in Arizona.  By 2009, after seven years of Laurie Roberts writing that same column over and over again, and seven years of foster care panic, the number had reached at least 57.  (The official figure for 2009 is 64, but seven of those deaths are attributed to a change in the state’s definition of a maltreatment fatality.)

The reports did not break down child maltreatment deaths of children “known to the system” until 2004.  But that year there were 18 such deaths.  By 2009, the figure had doubled to 36. 

Both these increases far outpace the growth in both the total child population and the impoverished child population in the state.

As readers of this Blog know, I’m not keen on using fatalities, or horror stories in general, as a yardstick.  But I didn’t choose that measure for Arizona, Laurie Roberts did – in column after column after column.

And every time Laurie Roberts hits the send button on that same basic column, it feeds the panic just a little more and makes Arizona’s children just a little less safe.

DESPAIR-MONGERING

But that isn’t the only danger in Roberts’ approach.  The other danger is that people will conclude that because Roberts’ bad idea – 40 columns explicitly or implicitly demanding that Arizona CPS tear apart more families - doesn’t work, nothing will work.

Roberts herself suggested as much in her column Saturday when she wrote:

Yeah, I know. I'm angry, too. And astonished, and amazed and about ready to throw in the towel and admit that there is no hope for these children. The last line of defense is just too often absent.

The part about no hope is as wrong as almost everything else Laurie Roberts has written about child welfare.  There is hope.  There are states and localities all over America that have made children significantly safer.  Examples are in our publication about best practices across the country.

But Roberts’ regurgitation of her same failed party line over and over only convinces everyone, apparently including herself, that nothing works, so why bother even trying?  That is child abandonment on a mass scale.

That kind of despair-mongering is especially dangerous in Arizona, which if some of the state’s journalists are any indication, operates with a bizarre sort of inferiority complex unlike anything I’ve seen in any other state.

Over and over, when I met with Arizona journalists, a startling number of them, especially among the editorial writers, would insist that no other state could possibly have problems as severe as Arizona problems, no citizenry was as hapless, incompetent and/or malevolent as Arizona citizenry.  Therefore, it was argued, there are no lessons from any other state that could possibly apply to Arizona.  The fact that Alabama – about the last state anyone would expect – is among those to transform its child welfare system into, relatively speaking, a national model, is irrelevant, I was told.  Though none of these various Arizona doom-sayers knew a thing about Alabama, all were certain that state’s  problems were nothing compared to Arizona’s. 

Nowhere else in America have I encountered a state where so many journalists are imbued with such a strong can’t-do spirit.  And the despair-mongering of Laurie Roberts only encourages that nonsense.

THE USUAL RESPONSE

The usual response of journalists called out on their sloppy work covering child welfare is to set up a straw man.  They write something like this:  “Oh, so you don’t want me to report it when children die horrible deaths! You want journalists to ignore the horrors parents inflicted on their children! You want us to cover up for CPS!  Well, I’m not about to stop showing how much I care about (fill in names of dead children) no matter who demands that I look the other way!”

The “journalists” who write that kind of defensive drivel know it’s b.s.  What someone like myself wants, having spent 35 years following this issue, first as a reporter and now as an advocate, is not less coverage of child welfare – including the worst of the horrors - but more coverage, and most important, better coverage.

For starters, Laurie, ask yourself one question:  If caseworkers are as overloaded as you say they are, (or said they were on Aug. 24 before having some second thoughts on Aug. 27) how can all of the errors possibly go only in one direction?

Then, get out from behind that desk, Laurie.  Go out and meet the leaders of Black and Hispanic advocacy groups in Phoenix and see how CPS looks to them.  Check with the people who run anti-poverty programs, and housing aid programs and programs to help people with what passes for public assistance in Arizona and see the CPS they see.  Find out the danger of having an agency with so much power that law enforcement can use it to try to intimidate just about anyone (you can find that story right in your own newsroom.) Check out what’s going on in other states – states that are doing a better job than Arizona – in some cases without even spending much more.

Then come back and write columns that are informed by some original reporting for once.  Write some columns that tell Arizonans how to really fix their system, instead of just scaring workers into taking away more kids, persuading the public there’s no point even trying to fix the system, and prolonging Arizona’s perennial panic.  If you want to see how it’s done, check out the work of Issac Bailey, metro columnist for The Sun News in Myrtle Beach, S.C.

Who knows?  You might finally write something that helps to make kids safer.