The New York Times on foster care as the new “Jane Crow” and some alarming data on New York’s foster care panic

A post to this blog on Wednesday discussed the foster-care panic in New York City and how David Hansell, the new commissioner of the EACS (Embattled Administration for Children’s Services), is making things worse.

On Friday The New York Times brilliantly brought to life the harm this kind of foster-care panic does to children, under the apt headline: “Foster Care as Punishment: The New Reality of ‘Jane Crow.’”

If you haven’t read it yet, please don’t keep reading this. Click the link instead and read the Times story.  You’ll thank me for the suggestion.  Then come back here for a discussion of the implications of the story and another report that came out this week. 

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Welcome back – and you’re welcome.

The Times story shouldn’t overshadow some other good journalism about New York City child welfare published last week. On Thursday, the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School, which publishes Child Welfare Watch, issued a brief report that adds important additional context.

The report zeros-in on all the harm that a foster-care panic does over and above additional entries into care.

During the seven months after the death of Zymere Perkins, the number of investigations conducted by ACS increased by 20 percent.  But the number of families hauled into court skyrocketed by 64 percent.

Hauled into court is not always the same thing as placed in foster care. Rather it can be a way of coercing a family in a case where previously they would have been offered voluntary help. Or it can put the family under a microscope while requiring that they jump through a long list of hoops.

In the Times story, Hansell suggests that somehow this is a good thing, saying:

With increasing frequency over the past six months or so, the outcome of our involvement with family court has not been removal of children but court-ordered supervision, under which families are required to participate in services to address the risks that we’ve identified.

But as the Center for New York City Affairs report explains, this clogs up the entire child welfare system and sets off a cascade of other harms. Court hearings are delayed, and it takes longer to actually set up the hoops through which the families must jump. Where families really do need help, the help is delayed, so family problems can worsen.  The court delays, as well as new CYA bureaucratic procedures also are delaying when children are allowed to leave foster care and return home.

And, of course, caseloads for investigators are increasing, giving them less time to find children in real danger.

As Chris Gottlieb, co-director (with NCCPR’s president Martin Guggenheim) of the New York University School of Law Family Defense Clinic put it:

There appears to be a culture of fear driving decision-making … There’s every reason to think that flooding the system with new cases means you’re giving less attention to the ones who should be getting more attention.

The Sandusky Rule

The other problem, of course, is the increase in entries themselves – and this is the one place where the Center’s analysis is incomplete.

The Center’s analysis says entries into foster care have increased by 20 percent – the same rate as investigations. So of course, ACS will rush to say: “Panic, what panic? We’re just taking more children because we’re finding more abuse!” 

But there are several problems with this reasoning.

First, the 20 percent figure covers the seven months from October, 2016, the first month after the death of Zymere Perkins set off the foster-care panic, until May 2017. But the Times found that in the more recent part of this time period, things have gotten worse.

The Times reported that in the first quarter of 2017 requests to tear apart families jumped by 40 percent.  And ACS’ latest data show that in May 2017 the number of children consigned to foster care was more than double the number in May 2016.

Even a 20 percent increase in entries is a significant setback. Not only would that result in more children taken than in the city’s 2016 fiscal year, but more than FY 2015 as well and almost as many as in FY 2014.  It would reverse a steady, careful decline in entries that was accompanied by improvements in key measures of child safety. (Detailed stats are on Page 19 of our full report on New York City child welfare).

But even were it true that entries into care were increasing at “only” the same rate as investigations, that’s still a sign of big trouble. That’s because of what should be called the Sandusky Rule.

During a foster-care panic, there is a rise in the proportion of b------t reports.  That’s because anyone and everyone is constantly encouraged to report anything and everything, so they do just that.  And, of course, “mandated reporters,” such as school personnel, who can be punished for failing to report, are even more scared than usual, so they’re even more prone to report cases they know are ridiculous.

Therefore, during a foster-care panic, the percentage of investigations that lead to removal should decrease.  If that percentage isn’t going down, then it’s likely that an even greater proportion of removals than usual are unnecessary.

I call this the Sandusky Rule because of what happened in Pennsylvania, after the legislature in that state passed a wave of absurd laws encouraging more reporting in the wake of the sexual abuse conviction of former foster parent and group home operator (and former Penn State football coach) Jerry Sandusky.

As in New York, in Pennsylvania individual counties run child welfare systems.  Philadelphia responded as New York City is responding now: a surge in foster care placements and the “What do you expect? there are more reports” excuse.

In Allegheny County (Pittsburgh), on the other hand, the longtime director of the human services agency knew that a lot of the new cases would be absurd and demanded that his staff not panic. So there was no increase in foster care in Allegheny County.

So the next time ACS or another child protective services agency offers up the standard excuse about why foster care numbers are increasing during a foster-care panic, I hope someone will finally call b------t on it. 

Foster care in New York: Two views from the frontlines

On Friday, the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School in New York City, which publishes Child Welfare Watch, sent out excerpts from an interview with a caseworker for New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services.

It was pretty much what you’d expect, and pretty much like dozens of other such stories that have appeared all over the country.  The caseworker talked about the enormous stress of the job and the constant fear of having something go terribly wrong with one of the cases on her caseload.

It begins this way:

I always wanted to work here and now that I'm here I'm like, "You've gotta be kidding." When the school year picks up, we just get case after case, and once a case is generated the clock is ticking. It's like a ticking time bomb. It's a juggling act. It's like that guy in the circus spinning those plates, and that's how I feel, I'm spinning those plates, and I can't drop one because that means a kid could be dead or a kid could be hurt.

As I read it, I was reminded of another perspective from an ACS worker.  The worker herself wrote it, more than ten years ago, for City Limits magazine.  This was not the typical “life of a caseworker” story.  Rather, it was what really went on at the time.  Some excerpts:

To the manager … who makes the fateful decision to remove a child and the judge who approves it, a child exists only on a piece of paper, alongside a list of disturbing circumstances.  They don’t see a child having a panic attack at 3 a.m. because he is suddenly alone in the world.  Or slamming his head against the wall out of protest or desperation.  The good intentions that go into the decision to remove a child often have little to do with the sometimes brutal outcomes of that choice. … Unlike fatalities, the trauma a child endures from being wrongly removed, followed by years of difficulty growing up in foster care, are not measurable.

A manager or supervisor has no one to answer to if a child who shouldn’t be in foster care is removed from home anyway.  There is no penalty for the wrongful taking of a child.

At moments of uncertainty, the mantra was ‘Cover your ass’ – a phrase heard often around the office. … The obsessive concern with liability at the field offices quickly overshadows the reasonable criteria [workers] have been taught for identifying abuse and neglect. Most quickly learn to abandon their training and to do what it takes to survive.

One week after the investigation begins, caseworkers have to file an electronic report.  The computer offers two options: ‘safe’ and ‘unsafe.’  But my manager accepted only one.  Any time I determined a child to be ‘safe’ my manager rejected it and returned it to me.  The first step to protect yourself, I quickly discovered, is to determine that a child is ‘unsafe’ from the outset of an investigation.

Any caseworker can tell you that they have done removals that they did not personally agree with. But they rarely complain to management, since they will never get in trouble for removing a child under supervisors' orders. Caseworkers are also quiet about unnecessary removals because doing a removal and then transferring a case to foster care takes them a lot less time than keeping it and trying to work with a family. Keeping a case obligates a worker to do regular home visits and follow-ups to make sure a family is getting preventive services. It also means dealing with anything that may go wrong and continuing to be responsible for the children's safety.

By the time I resigned, I felt strongly that the system was working against children instead of for them. [Emphasis added.]

The full story is still available on the City Limits website.

Back when it was written, New York City was taking away even more children than it takes now.  Gradually, the culture changed.  Removals steadily declined.  Workers no longer had to be constantly on the defensive about choosing the best option for the overwhelming majority of children the overwhelming majority of the time: leaving them in their own homes.

But then came Nixzmary Brown and a new surge in removals.  Today, the rate of removal in New York City still is lower than it was in 2000, when this caseworker told her story.  But now a grandstanding D.A. has responded to the death of a child “known to the system” by bringing charges of criminally negligent homicide against a caseworker and his supervisor. How much longer will it be until the CYA, take-the-child-and-run mentality this worker described once again is the norm at the Administration for Children’s Services.