The child welfare surveillance state: When the school bullies include the School Board President

● A Pennsylvania school district sent letters telling parents if they didn’t pay overdue bills averaging $22 each, their children could be placed in foster care.  They backed down when even the child protective services agency objected.

● But there is nothing unusual about a school district “weaponizing” CPS for its own convenience – because politicians and CPS agencies have spent decades encouraging it.

 

The Wyoming Valley West school district in action?
Drawing by Pimkie

We all know the classic story about the school bully who threatens to beat up little kids if they don’t give him their lunch money.  But what do you do when one of the school bullies is the president of the school board – and the threat is far more dire: A letter to parents warning that if they don’t pay up, their children might wind up in foster care.

You probably know the story by now.  But it’s important to understand the context.  

There is nothing unusual about school districts using child protective services agencies as a weapon. It happens because we allow it to happen. Half a century of horror stories that bear no resemblance to what CPS agencies typically see, combined with politicians trying to score points by “cracking down on child abuse” have led us to this: a child welfare surveillance state where everyone is under constant suspicion and CPS is the weapon of choice for all sorts of bureaucratic bullies. 

 ICYMI: Here’s what happened in Pennsylvania

The bullying that made headlines across the country is from the Wyoming Valley West school district in Luzerne County, Pa.

More than three-quarters of the students are considered “economically disadvantaged.”  Some of their parents had fallen behind in paying for their children’s school lunches.  About 1,000 students owed a total of $22,467 – an average of $22.47 per student.

What’s a school district to do?  Isn’t it obvious? Send out a letter to parents warning that if they didn’t pay up, their children might be taken away.  The letter reads like the text of those scam phone calls meant to dupe people into thinking they’re about to be arrested by the IRS.

But this letters is real.  It says:

“Your child has been sent to school every day without money and without a breakfast and/or lunch.  This is a failure to provide your child with proper nutrition and you can be sent to dependency court for neglecting your child’s right to food.  If you are taken to dependency court, the result may be your child being removed from your home and placed in foster care. ... [P]lease remit payment as soon as possible to avoid being reported to the proper authorities.”

The letter was sent by the district’s Director of Federal Programs, Joseph Muth.  They were staunchly defended by the School Board President, Joe Mazur.  According to the Wilkes Barre Times Leader:

Mazur insisted the letter “certainly did the job” in generating responses. “We took a drastic measure. It probably wasn’t very popular, but it never is when you try to collect payment.”

Well, yes. Kidnapping the children and holding them for ransom also would have done the job.  Was that going to be the next step?

To his credit, the board vice president was appalled.  But the district’s lawyer – who wrote the letter – was practically gloating about it to television station WBRE: 

The cruelty of the letters is mind-boggling – and so is the ignorance of the school board president and administrators. They have no clue concerning the enormous trauma a child abuse investigation inflicts on a family – even when it doesn’t lead to foster care placement.  (If they do know and did it anyway, then it’s even worse.) Apparently they also had no problem with the prospect of calling in scores of false reports, stealing caseworker time from finding children in real danger.

School officials and school board members should know better than most about what can traumatize a child, and the need to avoid inflicting such trauma. Those who don’t understand this don’t belong in jobs dealing with young people.

UPDATE, JULY 24: But clearly Mazur, for one, still doesn't get it. Because of the publicity, offers have been coming in to cover the parents' debt - and, NPR reports, the school district has been turning them down. When an assistant to  Todd Carmichael, a potential donor, contacted Mazur, Carmichael says "the conversation quickly became combative before Mazur abruptly hung up the phone.” [UPDATE 8:20PM - the school district has now changed its mind, and will accept the donations.]

"This really isn't about the money," Carmichael told NPR before the district changed its mind. "I think it's about teaching people who are struggling some sort of moral lesson they need to learn, no matter what the consequences are."

That also is one of the major failings of the so-called child protection system. It isn't about child protection at all, it's about punishing parents for their "moral failings."  The mentality cuts across all sorts of government systems that encounter poor people.  But this time ...

Even cps couldn’t stomach it

You know what you’re doing to families is inexcusable when even the child protective services agency won’t make excuses for it.

"Our agency was weaponized to terrorize children and families and that's something that's just unacceptable," Joanne Van Saun, the executive director of Luzerne County Children and Youth Services told WOLF-TV. "We want to support families and maintain families whenever possible." 

(The data, show that they’re not fully living up to that claim. Luzerne County takes away children at a rate 20 percent above the national average and five percent above the state average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in. But the county has been steadily improving in recent years - and at least they don’t want the school district to make things worse.)

After Van Saun and County Manager David Pedri wrote a letter to the school district demanding that it “cease and desist from making these representations” the district backed off. They plan to send letters of apology to the families.

While that should be what we expect from such child protective services agencies; sadly, it’s unusual.

I suspect that, while most CPS agencies wouldn’t have endorsed what the school district did, they wouldn’t condemn it either – since their party line is report! report! report!  Call in with anything and everything, no matter how absurd, they say, and let our “professionals” decide. 

In Philadelphia, for example, 114 miles away, the head of the city’s Department of Human Services reportedly tells people to just “follow their intuition” when deciding whether to call in a report. Late last year New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services decided that, what with families getting together for the holidays this was a great time to try to ratchet up their suspicion of each other.

And school officials can hide behind “mandatory reporting” laws that require them to report their suspicions.

That’s why there’s nothing unusual in the school district’s behavior.  There is, in fact, no penalty for a school district for weaponizing CPS.   In June, Searchlight New Mexico reported on how child protective services was weaponized by a school district in that state to bully a parent when she complained that her children were being bullied.  And last year, HuffPost and The Hechinger Report documented the extent of the problem nationwide.

Half a century of horror stories

After 50 years of building a child welfare surveillance state, it’s no wonder one study found that over the course of their childhoods one third of all American children – and more than half of African-American children – will have to endure a child abuse investigation, almost always due to an allegation that turns out to be false.

The corrosive effect on all of us was explained well in this courageous tweet thread from a family defense attorney.

Sen. Bob Casey has spent
years stoking fear and hysteria
about child abuse. Now that it's
backfired in a particularly obvious
way, he claims to be outraged.

Among the worst offenders in all this: U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa.  In 2011, he tried to score political points off of the notorious Penn State sex abuse scandal involving former foster parent and group home operator Jerry Sandusky by introducing legislation that would have turned every American into a mandated reporter of child abuse – even though there is not a shred of evidence that mandated reporting actually curbs child abuse, and even former proponents of mandated reporting have become skeptics.

Now, when the atmosphere of fear and paranoia he helped stoke backfires in a particularly obvious way, he rushes out a tweet condemning the school district.

Preventing further damage

Preventing further damage requires far more drastic action than simply telling a school district they should stop using CPS as a weapon to get their hands on lunch money.  Here are some crucial steps (supporting data and scholarship are available in NCCPR’s Due Process Agenda).

● Put teeth into laws making malicious false reporting illegal.  It should be made a criminal offense. That is currently the case only in a few states, including Pennsylvania. But such laws can’t be enforced until we …

● Replace anonymous reporting with confidential reporting.  That is, under most circumstances the accused would not know who made the report, but the CPS agency must be given a verifiable name and contact information.  Otherwise there is no way to enforce penalties for false reporting. 

Anonymous reports are, by far, the least reliable – and people who refuse to report even confidentially are likely to be less reliable still.  The fear mongers say banning anonymous reporting would lead to some real abuse being overlooked.  But we overlook far more such abuse now – when anonymous false reports deluge CPS agencies so they don’t have time to find children in real danger.

● Go in precisely the opposite direction from that proposed by Sen. Casey – abolish mandatory  reporting and allow professionals to use their professional judgment concerning when to report – judgment that is likely to be superior to that of an underprepared, undertrained, overloaded CPS caseworker. 

● Public information campaigns need to change from fear-based calls upon people to report based on “intuition” to education on what to report and what not to report. They also need to explain the consequences both of failing to report when there is reasonable cause to suspect abuse, and the harm that can be done by reports based on “intuition” or “gut feeling.”

Perhaps then fewer children will be threatened for their lunch money – by their own schools.

Child welfare in Pennsylvania: A state official’s bizarre rant

The state’s “Auditor General," Eugene DePasquale, attacks an agency called the Bureau of Hearings and Appeals – for holding hearings and ruling on appeals.  He even suggests there's something nefarious in the agency's choice of name.

It’s always risky to say that a particular politician’s claims about child welfare set a record for foolishness, but a bizarre rant by Pennsylvania Auditor General Eugene DePasquale about a division of the state Department of Human Services (DHS) is a contender.  It isn’t just that DePasquale’s statements are weird. Worse, those statements endanger the children I’m sure he genuinely wants to protect.

DePasquale spoke last week at a news conference announcing an investigation of a division of DHS known as the Bureau of Hearings and Appeals (BHA). But he’s not waiting to actually investigate to draw conclusions. He’s already decided that “If that sounds like something out of bureaucracy purgatory, that’s exactly what this is” and branded it a “shadow justice system.” 

It isn’t.  And DePasquale’s ill-informed fear-mongering only adds to the climate of hysteria that surrounds child welfare in Pennsylvania. That leads to overloading the system with false reports, trivial cases and cases in which family poverty is confused with neglect.  And that overloads workers so they have less time to find children in real danger.

Anyone who wants to know what the BHA is and what it does can find it on the internet, right here. And if you search for “Bureau of Hearings and Appeals” you’ll also find lots and lots of similar divisions of government agencies all over the country. Administrative tribunals are a routine part of American law – not some nefarious secret creation of one agency in Pennsylvania.

First page of results when I typed "Bureau of
Hearings and Appeals" into a search engine.
(I used DuckDuckGo instead of Google, because
it produces the same results for everyone )

In the case of that one agency in Pennsylvania, however, the Bureau of Hearings and Appeals holds hearings and rules on appeals involving many situations, including a narrow subset of decisions by caseworkers for county child protective services agencies, usually known in Pennsylvania as Children and Youth Services (CYS) agencies.  But BHA has no jurisdiction over the decisions DePasquale seems to think they have jurisdiction over.

DePasquale further claims that in hearing appeals, BHA upholds CYS caseworker findings only four percent of the time.  As a result, he claims, “the system is potentially sending hundreds of children back into the homes where CYS caseworkers found they were being abused.”  Then he ratchets up the fear rhetoric with this:  “No child should ever have to go back into an abusive situation because bureaucrats have their heads buried in the sand.”

There are two problems with this: The four percent figure is contradicted by readily available data, and BHA decisions have no bearing on whether children are removed from or returned to their homes.

What BHA does NOT do:

Here’s how the system really works:

Caseworkers for CYS agencies investigate allegations of abuse and neglect and then make a series of decisions including whether the family should be put under some kind of agency supervision and whether children should be taken from their parents. 

DePasquale seems to think these decisions can be appealed to the BHA.  They can’t. He seems to think BHA can overturn these decisions and return children to their homes.  It can’t.  BHA has no role whatsoever in these decisions.

Yet DePasquale makes this bizarre claim:

Most people believe that once CYS has determined that someone abused a child, criminal charges automatically follow. In reality, only a small percentage of those cases result in criminal charges.

Most of the time, this administrative court is as far as it gets.

No; it’s not.

If CYS decides either to remove a child or place a child under in-home supervision it does indeed go to court – a court of which DePasquale appears blissfully unaware: Juvenile Court (sometimes called Family Court). These courts, not BHA, decide whether or not CYS should be allowed to take away a child (or if caseworkers already have done it on their own authority, whether to continue placement).  These courts, not BHA, decide whether the child will ever go home again. 

The real problem with these courts, all over the country, is their tendency to rubber-stamp child protective services agency decisions, not overturn them.  As a practical matter, the decision almost always rests with the CYS agency.

Few cases also go to criminal court because typical cases are nothing like the horror stories. Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with neglect.  And the fact that these juvenile court cases are handled as civil, not criminal matters, actually gives more power to CYS agencies. That’s because in these courts the protections for the accused in criminal cases don’t apply. 

In criminal court, for example, the accused must be guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.  But in juvenile court a child can be torn from her or his family and consigned to the chaos of foster care if CYS shows only that it is slightly more likely than not that abuse or neglect occurred.  If DePasquale really wants to apply criminal court standards of proof to all these cases, that’s fine with me. The number of children torn from their homes would plummet.

What BHA actually does:

As for BHA, it’s much more limited role involves only one, separate decision made by CYS workers: whether to check a box on the form declaring the allegation “indicated” or “unfounded.”   This is something CYS workers and supervisors do on their own authority, with no chance for the family to defend itself in front of a neutral arbiter beforehand.

The consequences of checking the “indicated” box are severe. The accused is listed in a statewide blacklist and, as a practical matter, barred from professions that involve working with children. Often it then becomes that much harder for impoverished Pennsylvanians to earn a living, increasing the poverty that may have been confused with “neglect” in the first place.  (And, if the family happens to live in Allegheny County, the consequences can be worse.)  This is why federal law requires all states to have some sort of process to appeal these findings.

This is the one and only place where BHA gets involved in child welfare. They can overturn the decision to check the “substantiated” box.  But a majority of the time, they don’t.

I have no idea where DePasquale got his four percent figure – and apparently neither does the Department of Human Services, which tactfully declared that it "looks forward to better understanding the data referenced.”  As DHS points out, state data, presented in easy-to-read graphics on page 20 of this report, show otherwise:

The Pennsylvania Department of Human Services has an easy-to-follow
guide to what the BHA is and the results of its decisions on Page 20 of this report.

But though caseworker decisions are not overturned 96 percent of the time, as DePasquale suggests, A DHS spokeswoman says they are overturned about 46 percent of the time.  In fact, the data appear to show a higher reversal rate, more like 70 percent. But that would be entirely in keeping with other states, such as New York and Illinois.  That is, indeed, alarming – but not in the way DePasquale thinks.  The fact that as soon as families get even a minimal opportunity to make their case before a neutral arbiter, the arbiter so often finds CYS is wrong shows the extent to which CYS decisions are arbitrary, capricious and cruel.

That should come as no surprise to DePasquale. He has himself expressed alarm at the inexperience, overload, and high turnover among CYS caseworkers. Since these are precisely the conditions most likely to lead to errors in all directions, DePasquale should be leading the charge for a strong appeals process.  But he’s not.

Instead, at one point DePasquale even suggests something that sounds vaguely like a conspiracy theory. He suggests there is something nefarious in the agency’s choice of name. Says DePasquale:

“You come up with that name when nobody cares about it. Because if it was actually about protecting children, they would call it the something-dealing-with-protection-of-children.  That’s just someone that threw in the towel and came up with a bureaucratic name hoping nobody would pay attention to it.”

I suppose that’s one possibility. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s called the Bureau of Hearings and Appeals because it holds hearings and decides appeals.

As for calling it the “something-dealing-with-protection-of-children” that might be a little confusing.  That’s because in addition to hearing appeals of listings on the state’s blacklist it also deals with disputes in nearly 279 other areas of state government including

the denial, suspension, termination, or reduction of any DHS-issued benefit (Cash Assistance; Medical Assistance; Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, formerly known as Food Stamps; social services; durable equipment; etc.).

Calling it the “something-dealing-with-protection-of-children” might be particularly confusing for those appealing decisions by the state Department of Aging – BHA handles those, too.

Of course, if DePasquale would prefer a system in which the accused are not put on a blacklist of alleged child abusers without an actual court conviction first, I would be glad to support such an approach.  Indeed, some Pennsylvania appellate judges have expressed qualms about Pennsylvania’s blacklist-first-ask-questions-later approach.

I also have a more modest proposal: Next time, Mr. DePasquale, try doing the investigating first and then holding the news conference.