2024 AFCARS data are up – and they suggest a huge foster-care panic in Indiana

 

We’re breaking a little news on the blog today:

The federal Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families yesterday released the annual “AFCARS Report,” vital data on foster care for Federal Fiscal Year 2024. 

In an email to NCCPR this afternoon, HHS explained that the data went live yesterday, but the formal announcement didn't come until today, after we posted an earlier version of this blog. That's because, HHS says, they needed to be sure the dashboard would work. (Previous versions of this post noted that we were not sure if the release was intentional or complete. It was both.)

Here are some of the key data points:

 ● The number of children torn from their families in 2024 declined slightly compared with the previous year.  There were 170,993 known entries into foster care in FFY 2024, down from 174,112 in FFY 2023.  (I use the term known entries because, by definition, this does not include “hidden foster care,” in which parents are coerced into surrendering custody but the placement is never reported in official figures.) 

● There were 328,947 children known to be trapped in foster care on September 30, 2024, down from 340,050 on September 30, 2023. 

Both these figures leave out Washington State and Wyoming, because they still haven’t managed the basic task of submitting these data for 2024 or even 2023. 

As usual, most states saw relatively small decreases in the number of children taken away; a few saw relatively small increases. But there were two alarming exceptions: 

● In Indiana, a state which, year after year, tears apart families at rates well above the national average, things got even worse – much worse. The number of children taken skyrocketed by 30%. Indiana now tears apart families at the sixth-highest rate in the country, even when rates of family poverty are factored in. That’s a rate nearly triple the national average. 

Just a few days ago, we posted to this blog about an example of how Indiana confuses poverty with neglect.  At the end of that post, we included some context on other dismal data from that state.  I’ve added that context at the end of this post as well. 

● There was an even worse rate of increase in the District of Columbia – 46%. But the raw numbers are relatively low, so it doesn’t take as much of a change to get a huge percentage difference. Nevertheless, this should alarm the D.C. Council, which needs to ask what’s going wrong at the city’s family police agency. 

● But there was also some good news: The biggest year-to-year decrease in entries into foster care was in Idaho, down 18.3% between 2023 and 2024. That’s particularly good news since, at the time, the Idaho child welfare agency was run by Alex Adams, who has been nominated to run the federal Administration for Children and Families.  

● Entries into foster care in Missouri declined by nearly 11%. That left  Missouri tearing apart families at a rate 35% above the national average. For Missouri, that was real progress.  But it’s not likely to last. The improvement came when the state family police agency was led by Darrell Missey, who understood the enormous harm of needless foster care. But he retired, and his replacement has made clear she wants to reverse all of Missey’s progress.

The reasons family police agencies (a more accurate term than “child welfare” agencies) give for taking the children haven’t changed much. Once again, 87% of children were not taken because of even an accusation of physical or sexual abuse. And though the take-the-child-and-run crowd wants us to believe every parent who loses a child to foster care is a hopeless drug addict, 62% were not taken because of parental drug or alcohol abuse – not just no proof of such abuse, not even an accusation of any drug use of any kind. 

In contrast, the number of children taken in cases in which the family police agency admits the problem was housing equals the number involving physical abuse. 

Racial disparities haven’t changed much either: 

● Black children made up 22% of those placed in foster care, compared with 14% of the total child population. 

● Native American children made up 3% of foster children – triple their representation in the general child population. 

For the first time, the report separately lists data for eight Indian tribes.  Some tribes run their own systems. The numbers are small, fewer than 600 entries total, and it’s not clear if these data are complete. Nor is it clear whether or not these entries also are included in the entry figures for their respective states. [UPDATE: OCT 10: In response to a query from NCCPR, HHS said the figures for the tribes are not also included in the totals for their states, and these data are complete to the best of their knowledge.]

Here’s how bad Indiana was even before 2024:

● Nationwide, 37% of children will be forced to endure the trauma of a child abuse investigation before they turn 18.  In Indiana, it’s 58%.  Nationwide, 53% of Black children will have to endure this trauma. In Indiana, it’s 79% - the highest rate in America. 

● In any given year, among all children, Indiana takes them from their homes at a rate 66% above the national average, even when rates of family poverty are factored in. 

● When going up against this family police juggernaut, families often are almost literally defense-less – because their lawyers often have so little time and so many clients. Many Indiana counties want to keep it that way. One in five actually turns down federal funds to improve representation for parents and also for children. One county court administrator explained that county’s refusal this way: “[T]he system we have works well.” 

None of this is because Indiana is a cesspool of depravity with vastly more child abuse than the national average.  In fact, in Indiana in 2024, 87% of the time, when children were thrown into foster care, their parents were not even accused of physical or sexual abuse. Forty-one percent of the time, there wasn’t even an allegation of drug abuse.

 

Foster care in D.C.: The stories behind the statistics

A previous post to this Blog dealt with a report by the District of Columbia Citizens Review Panel (CRP), a group mandated by federal law to assess the performance of D.C.’s child welfare agency, the Child and Family Services Administration.

The report is a scathing indictment of CFSA for tearing apart hundreds of families needlessly – and often, probably, illegally.  The previous post sums up the facts and figures.  But one of the most notable features of the report are the case histories, and the appalling responses from CFSA.

Consider this case:

The “D” Family. A child was living with his uncle, who reported to CFSA that he was facing eviction. The uncle said he was feeling overwhelmed, “tired, frustrated, and hungry” and that caring for the child would hinder his relinquishing his apartment. CFSA interpreted this situation as an admission of the uncle’s inability to raise the child and an immediate threat to the child – even though the eviction was not imminent and the uncle’s story could reasonably have been understood as a request for assistance. CFSA removed the child.

The case record reveals a later email from CFSA’s lawyer to a Child Protective Services staff member stating “had CFSA responded differently to the uncle’s repeated requests for help, this case might never have led to a removal.” The Panel agrees with this assessment. No imminent danger was present. The eviction was not scheduled for several weeks. CFSA could have helped the uncle obtain a housing lawyer to help him fight the eviction in landlord-tenant court or helped him obtain housing assistance, but instead CFSA removed the child. It is possible that the uncle would have refused to take the child back even if CFSA had provided this sort of assistance. But there is no way to know. We do know that the uncle did take the child back just three days later – strongly suggesting that the uncle did desire to keep the child. [Emphasis added].

In response, CFSA argues that it was absolutely essential to remove this child on the spot because, according to the case record:

the child had been born prematurely had been exposed to PCP and was believed to have developmental delays. … [T]he uncle “noted several times …that he would not take the child back [emphasis added]… noting that he wants to leave the apartment as quickly as he could and having to care for the child would hinder this effort.”

The investigator further quoted that the uncle as saying [sic] that providing care for his nephew was “getting to me feeling overwhelmed” and the uncle was “tired, frustrated and hungry.”

Further, the uncle was himself a recovering PCP user.  The dangers associated with forcing this man to continue to care for a child under these circumstances are not acknowledged by the CRP reviewers.

But, of course, neither the CRP reviewers nor anyone else was suggesting that the uncle be forced to keep the child.  Rather, CRP was suggesting that had CFSA offered to ease the enormous stress faced by the uncle by providing him the help he needed – including a lawyer to fight the eviction or a new place for the entire family to live - the uncle would no longer feel overwhelmed and be glad to continue taking care of his nephew.

The fact that the nephew was, in fact, returned to the uncle three days later, suggests that CRP got it right.  And, of course, it’s not just the Review Panel that drew this conclusion.  As is noted in the Panel report, CFSA’s own lawyer reviewing the case reached the same conclusion.

The Panel also found appalling behavior by CFSA in cases involving battered mothers, like this one:

The “L” Family. The father of four children assaulted their mother. The Metropolitan Police Department arrested both the father and the mother following this incident.  … An aunt of the children appeared on the scene but neither MPD nor CFSA considered releasing the children to her. The case record reflected no effort to determine the mother’s wishes regarding short-term care of her children. CFSA removed the children. Their mother was released from jail very shortly and CFSA returned the children three days after their removal. CFSA could have avoided this traumatic separation and the placement of the mother on the child protection registry by permitting the aunt to take the children or asking the mother to designate a temporary caretaker via a custodial power of attorney.

Incredibly, CFSA responds that whenever it uses its emergency power to tear apart a family it has concluded, on its own and on the spot, that the parents must be “unfit” and it would be “improper” to have an “unfit” parent “make a custodial decision.”

But how, exactly, does being beaten by a man make a mother unfit?  This speaks volumes about the mindset at CFSA, as does this case, which raises the same issue:

The “M” Family. This child’s parents were in the process of divorcing, and her
father physically assaulted her mother. MPD arrested both parents and contacted CFSA. The child’s brother was temporarily staying with the children’s grandmother. The grandmother physically came to CFSA to request that she take care of the child who was removed, but CFSA did not release the child to her grandmother. The case record indicates no effort to ask the mother to designate a caretaker. CFSA removed the child, placed her with strangers, and placed her mother on the child protection registry. Her mother was quickly released and reunified with her daughter four days after the removal.

Thanks to a successful class-action lawsuit, in New York City such behavior by the child welfare agency is illegal.  (NCCPR’s Vice President, Carolyn Kubitschek, was co-counsel for the battered women who brought the suit.)  That’s because the harm of removing a child from a parent is actually worse for that child, sometimes far worse, when the parent is, herself a victim of domestic violence.  As one expert testified, taking a child from a battered mother because that mother has been beaten “is tantamount to pouring salt on an open wound.”

Unfortunately for the children, at CFSA, the policy on these cases boils down to “please pass the salt.”

Foster care in DC: District’s own expert panel blasts widespread needless removal of children

            It’s not unusual for outside agitators – like me – to say that a given child welfare system is taking away a whole lot of children needlessly.  It’s quite unusual when the charge comes from a panel of experts named by the community’s own government leaders.

            But that’s what happened last month in Washington, D.C., in the form of a scathing report about the D.C. Child and Family Services Administration.  The report was issued by the District’s child welfare Citizen Review Panel (CRP).  Federal law requires at least one such panel in every state to examine child protective services agencies. 

           

            The D.C. panel was appointed by the mayor and the D.C. Council.  It’s quite a distinguished group.  Members of the panel include a former social services administrator in Maryland who now is the legislative policy associate for the National Association of Public Child Welfare Administrators – a trade association for agencies like CFSA.  Another member spent 23 years in human services, including five years as a CPS caseworker.  Another is a senior attorney for the D.C. Children’s Law Center – the group that represents children in child welfare cases in the District.  Another served as Coordinator of Child Abuse and Neglect for the D.C. Public Schools.

            The Review Panel was disturbed by the large numbers of children taken from their parents by CFSA who were sent home again within four months.  Typically, anywhere from 18 to 35 percent are sent home that quickly.  Depending on how you run the numbers that’s an average of anywhere from 161 to 225 children per year.

 It’s not that the CRP doesn’t want children returned home quickly.  But it raised an obvious question: If the children could be returned within four months, did they really need to be taken at all?  After carefully reviewing a random sample of such cases, the CRP concluded that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the answer was no. Said the panel:

This study concludes that, when children leave foster care quickly – a significant and longstanding feature of the District’s child welfare system – it is likely that CFSA removed the child unnecessarily.

            Indeed, the report found that only 25 percent of removals met the legal standard for taking a child away on the spot, without even asking a court’s permission first.  Such removals are supposed to take place only when CFSA “has reasonable grounds to believe that the child is in immediate danger” and removal is necessary to eliminate the danger.  Yet CFSA uses this grab-the-child-first-ask-the-court-later power in 97 percent of all removals.

            Now consider the implications:  75 percent of the cases did not meet the standard for an emergency removal, and that’s pretty much the only kind of removal CFSA does.  That means that every year, D.C. tears anywhere from 121 to 169 children from their families unnecessarily. 

            But that’s probably an underestimate.  Because when families get decent lawyers, the number of children sent home fast soars.

Nearly three years ago, Prof. Matthew Fraidin of the University of the District of Columbia Law School presented the results of his law students’ work representing families whose children had been taken away by CFSA.  (His findings are included in material he released at a joint news conference with NCCPR in January, 2009.)  In fully 60 percent of the cases the children were returned within three months – and in most of those cases, they were returned within a week.

            If the real number of children who can go home that quickly is 60 percent, then the real number of wrongful removals every year is nearly half of all the children taken away by CFSA.

            “For these children,” notes the report, “these are severe, possibly life-changing events.” 

OTHERS REACH SIMILAR CONCLUSIONS

            The review panel and Prof. Fraidin are not alone in sounding the alarm about wrongful removal in the District. 

            ● Organizations that provide “guardians ad litem” for children in child welfare cases typically only complain when a child welfare agency isn’t taking away even more children.  So it speaks volumes that Judith Sandalow, executive director of the Children's Law Center - the group which provides such representation in D.C. wrote a letter to The Washington Post in which she estimated that at least 100 DC children every year are taken from their families unnecessarily.  She writes that "These removals traumatize children and devastate families." 

            ● The independent monitor overseeing the long-running class-action lawsuit settlement in the District also examined a sample of cases. The CRP report points out that the monitor found that CFSA’s action in immediately removing the children was justified in fewer than half of those cases.

One of the strongest features of the CRP report is the case examples, like this one:

In one case, CFSA refused to release two children to their own mother who had done nothing wrong. The children’s maternal grandmother was a recovering substance abuser and had been clean and sober for a substantial amount of time. Their mother reasonably relied on the grandmother’s babysitting. Unfortunately, the grandmother relapsed one evening and left the young children alone. CFSA could not immediately locate the mother and reasonably took custody of the children. But when the mother showed up at CFSA that same day, CFSA inexplicably refused to release her children to her, despite its legal obligation to release them to her “with all reasonable speed.”Instead, CFSA kept the children in foster care for three days and then released them.

The report provides an excellent discussion of precisely what child welfare agencies so often forget – the need to balance harms:

Many parents have had the experience of a toddler crying when dropped off at preschool – even with a parent giving him a goodbye hug, assuring him that she will return within hours, and turning him over to a classroom full of unfamiliar faces.

Now imagine that same child taken away by a stranger, over the parent’s objection, and without anyone able to tell him what will happen next or even when he will see his parent again. Days pass and people still cannot explain what will happen next, or why he hasn’t been able to see mommy for a long time. Weeks pass, and he gets to see his mom for brief visits, and then is taken away again, with no idea when he will see her again. It is not hard to see the emotional toll these separations impose on children or their parents.

On the other hand, very real safety concerns are at stake. Some children do suffer serious abuse and neglect at the hands of their parents and in some cases the only available response is to separate the child from the parent because the emotional harm of that separation is less than the harm inflicted by the parent’s abuse or neglect.

But over and over again, the report found, CFSA flunks this balance-of-harms test.

CFSA: NOTHING’S WRONG – AND LOOK HOW WE’RE FIXING IT!

In a response to the repot most notable for its sheer snottiness (read it and see for yourself – it’s included with the report) CFSA insists that every single decision it made in every one of these cases was the right call.  On the other hand, in a very good story about the report in The Washington Post, CFSA’s acting director talks about how it’s reduced entries into care this year (though even at the reduced rate, children in Washington D.C. are torn from their homes at a far higher rate than in New York, Chicago and Miami, among other cities, even when rates of child poverty are taken into account).  She also discusses new programs to keep families together.

So apparently CFSA’s position is: Look at all we’re doing to fix the problems we deny ever existed in the first place!

In a future post: More case examples, and CFSA’s appalling response to the report. 

Foster care in DC: The perils of paying foster parents too much

As the new year begins, let us pause to consider the plight of a former foster parent in Washington, who wrote a searing account of what it was like to scrape by on nothing more than a six-figure income, her husband’s salary and about $45,000 per year – tax free – in payments for taking in four foster children.  

            The first thing I want you to know is, I did not write the comment I reprint below from the website of The Washington Post.  I did not make up some fictitious foster parent in an effort to make foster parents look bad.  As far as I know the post is genuine and the person who wrote it is real.  

            I reprint her comment below because it’s hard to imagine anything that better illustrates the perils of paying foster parents too much, as Washington D.C. does, or giving foster parents in much of the rest of the country giant pay raises, as is proposed by the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children’s Rights (CR).  I certainly don't believe that this foster parent is typical.  But this is the kind of foster parent you are more likely to attract when you pay them the way CR proposes to do.

            First, a little background:  The effort to close a budget gap in D.C. wound up pitting programs to help children stay out of foster care against programs to help children already in foster care.

            In particular, Roque Gerald, who runs the D.C. Child and Family Services Agency, tried to slash a program to help grandparents keep their children out of foster care.  He argued that since the children were not, in fact, in the system and the grandparents had not been accused of child abuse, this wasn’t really a child abuse prevention program. 

Yes, that really was his reasoning. As I pointed out in an op ed column for the Post:

If torturing logic were a war crime, that statement would get Gerald hauled before an international tribunal.

Every prevention program serves children who have not been maltreated. Maltreatment is what the prevention programs are created to prevent. That’s why they’re called prevention programs. Gerald’s logic is like saying a rent subsidy program doesn’t prevent homelessness because all of the people getting the subsidies are living in apartments.

The DC Council restored some of the cut – but at the expense of deeper cuts in help for children already in foster care.

Neither cut was necessary.  According to an independent monitor of a longstanding consent decree, CFSA warehouses far too many children in group homes and institutions, both the worst form of care and the most expensive.

And DC throws amazing amounts of money at foster parents, paying them at, by far, the highest rate in the country.  In fact, the rate is so high even CR couldn’t claim that DC foster parents weren’t getting enough. 

Keep in mind, CR wants foster parents paid not only for the basics but also for every toy, game, movie ticket and amusement park ride they buy for a foster child.  CR admits that the $940 per month – tax free - it estimates DC pays for a teenage foster child is enough to cover all of this and more.

But it wasn’t enough for “Bodymagicbykim.”  That’s the name a former DC foster parent used in a comment on the Post website under my op ed column.  Below you’ll find her comment, followed by my own response.

As you read Ms. Bodymagic’s comment I would ask you to ponder just one question: If something happened to you and your child had to be placed in foster care, would you want that child placed with this foster parent?

THE COMMENT FROM “BODYMAGICBYKIM”:

For those who commented on DC foster/kinship care parents receiving too much for the monthly costs of these children. I wholeheartedly disagree. I myself was a foster parent of four teenage female siblings. That was not enough money.

Please consider all of the projects these children are required to complete daily that require costly materials (i.e. assigned novels for book reports, magazines for collages, science projects, models of cells, one was even required to model a futuristic community). Please consider the number of leave requests the parents have to put in to get these children to doctor appointments, court hearings, CFSA family meetings, therapy, dentist appointments and include gas, car-maintenance and parking costs- the list goes on along with the hourly cost of leave at an over 6-figure salary.

These children also needed clothing, shoes, coats (replacements for the aforementioned), hair appointments (minimum $40 per head, per bi-weekly appointment - can range up to $180 per appointment for braids), bedding, linens, necessities (sanitary napkins cost us loads of money), etc.

Now, the food? If you have children, you are clear they're always feeding friends. Try feeding four teenagers and one friend each daily - that's about $1,200 per month right there. In raising productive citizens, you want to teach them how to budget and save - factor in allowance. Also, because these children had drivers' licenses, factor in the increased cost of auto insurance on TEENAGERS.

This doesn't take into account high increases to utilities, property damage, birthdays, Christmas, graduations, back-to-school shopping, gifts for their friends' birthdays, prom, summer camps at $150 minimum per week for the two too young to work, transportation and work-clothing costs for the two that could work, tutors, computer and related equipment, SAT prep class & test costs, drivers' education class, college applications, college visits, extracurricular activity costs and supplies, vacations (or should I have left them at home while I traveled the world?? That would certainly be fair).

I could go on for days. The point of the matter is that I (thankfully) wasn't in it for the money, but I can assure you that I invested quite a bit out of my own pocket. The monthly cost was not enough, honestly, if I didn't have a good salary of my own and factor in that of my husband's.

If I were a poor/middle-class fixed-income grandmother, we wouldn't have survived. So, PLEASE before you make some farfetched statements like you have that effect our livelihoods, do your research by talking to the masses who have lived it. Leave the textbook, projections, forecasts based upon bad data alone. A PhD means little if you haven't lived it! Speak to those with their MRS or MOM first - those are the letters that count most when talking about our children. I'm offended, but willing to share more.

MY RESPONSE:

OK, so let me get this straight Ms. bodymagic. You make a six-figure income, you “travel the world” on vacation, and you’re whining because the taxpayers of Washington D.C. supposedly did not pay you enough to cover the cost of your own foster children’s Christmas gifts and school assignments? You demand this money even if it means cutting help to impoverished grandparents raising their own grandchildren?

At least I hope you never also ran around claiming that you treated your foster children “like my own.” And I hope the young people never found out that the thought of doing for them what any loving parent with a six-figure income does for her own children caused so much resentment on your part.

The good news for you, Ms. bodymagic, is that the group that calls itself Children’s Rights completely agrees with you. They think you shouldn’t be expected to do any of this out of caring or, God forbid, love, but rather you should be reimbursed for every penny. The bad news is that they’ve calculated that DC already pays you more than enough for this – even for teenagers, for whom foster parents are paid even more than for younger children.

It’s just that you wanted even more.

And lest anyone think that all foster parents are like Ms. bodymagic, take a look at this op ed, from the kind of foster parent I think we’d all rather see in the system, someone who has indeed “lived it” and who got her MOM degree by majoring in compassion.
                                 __________________

There’s much more at the Post website, including my exchange with Richard Barth, the Dean of the School of Social Work at the University of Maryland who was an advisor for CR’s foster parent pay report.  

The overpaid foster parents of Washington, DC

WOULD YOU WANT A CHILD PLACED WITH SOMEONE WHO DEMANDED GOVERNMENT REIMBURSEMENT FOR BUYING HIM A TEDDY BEAR?

Like most states and cities, Washington, D.C. is facing big budget problems. It was no surprise that, in his proposed budget, Mayor Adrian Fenty targeted for more pain and suffering those who already suffer most, but are least able to fight back – poor people.

In child welfare, the mayor wanted to cut a program that provides housing assistance to poor people on the verge of losing their children to foster care, and a program to help grandparents keep their grandchildren out of foster care. According to the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute, the D.C. Council restored those cuts, but cuts in a separate emergency rental assistance program and in homeless services remain.

While the homeless and those on the verge of homelessness are made to suffer, the Council made sure to spare one group: The overpaid foster parents of Washington. They were spared a ten percent cut in their pay. The Council should revisit this issue next year, if not sooner. Because that's one budget cut that makes sense – provided the savings are plowed into restoring cuts in programs that help keep children out of foster care.

Right now, D.C. foster parents are paid significantly more than they need to cover foster children's expenses - and not just the basics. The DC payment is more than is needed to pay for just about everything. D.C. pays foster parents more than anyplace else in the nation; the payments are 60 to 70 percent above the national average.

Who says so? None other than the group that has been suing D.C. child welfare seemingly forever, the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children's Rights (CR).

Raising foster parent pay has become an obsession for CR; they've taken to demanding it in one lawsuit after another, even though studies show that pay ranks low among the reasons foster parents stay or quit (respect is far more important).

In order to push its case, CR published a report, in which it created a formula that supposedly represented the "minimum" foster parents need to cover expenses. It's more like a maximum. Buried in a separate "technical report" is the fact that CR defines expenses very broadly. They're not just talking about food, clothing and shelter. CR's definition of what foster parents should not have to pay out of their own pockets includes any increase in electric bills caused by foster children leaving the lights on and opening the refrigerator door a lot. It also includes movie tickets, amusement park rides, toys and just about anything else you can think of.

The point is not that foster children don't deserve these things. But here's the question: Would you want a child placed with someone who demanded government reimbursement for buying him a teddy bear?

Naturally, almost every jurisdiction fell short of providing "enough" by this absurd standard. Almost.

Two places pay foster parents more than enough by this standard: Arizona, and the District of Columbia. In fact, with base rates ranging from $869 to $940 per month per child, depending on the child's age, DC pays foster parents from $148 to $240 per month more than CR says they need. (Also, though CR doesn't mention it, in every state the payments are tax free and foster children's health care is covered by Medicaid.)

The report notes that no data were available to adjust the "target" figure for DC for inflation, so they used their national average target figure. But D.C.'s rates are so high that they meet CR's absurdly high targets in every state except three with extremely high costs of living, and even then they come very close.

So here's what Fenty and the council wound up doing: They made it more likely that families will become homeless. Then, the child welfare agency will take away those children because the family us homeless. And then that same child welfare agency will lavish more money than they need on the total strangers who take in those children.

D.C.'s ridiculously high pay rates also may cause problems for Virginia and Maryland. It's been argued that some foster parents in those jurisdictions take D.C. children because the District pays so much more - at least that was part of the rationale in 2008 for spending an extra $20 million per year on foster parent pay in Virginia – money that could have been used to keep kids out of the system in that state.

And D.C.'s rates create the wrong incentive for foster parenting. I agree with those who say very few foster parents are "in it for the money." The vast majority do it for the right reasons. But foster parents are fond of saying that the proof they're not "in it for the money" is that there isn't enough money. That doesn't apply in D.C.

There's also a larger philosophical issue, discussed in previous posts to this Blog and in this excellent op ed column by Maine foster parent Mary Callahan: What is our "social contract" with foster parents? If foster care is an act of charity, then why shouldn't it involve dipping into one's own pocket to a modest degree? The volunteer who helps tutor children after school does not demand reimbursement for mileage or any supplies he may bring to help that child. He does it because the psychic satisfaction outweighs the small financial contribution. Don't we want foster parents who feel the same way?

At a minimum, don't we want foster parents who see a problem in raking in nearly 1,000 a month to care for a child who could have stayed in his own home if his own parents had gotten far less in emergency rental assistance?

A Washington Post story left open the possibility that, had the cuts gone through, CR might have opposed them in court. It certainly would have been interesting to see how they'd justify such a stance, when their own report says DC foster parents are getting more than they need. But given the relative power of foster parents and poor people who lose their children to foster care, we're not likely to see the issue go to court anytime soon.

Foster care hearings: “Sunshine is good for children”

Matthew Fraidin is Associate Professor of law at the David A. Clarke School of Law at the University of the District of Columbia. Two years ago, he started a clinical program in which students represent exclusively birth families in child maltreatment cases – thereby doubling the total number of such programs across the country (the first is run by NCCPR's President, Prof. Martin Guggenheim, at New York University School of Law). His previous work has included representing both children and parents.

Below are excerpts from testimony Prof. Fraidin gave last week at a hearing of the D. C. Council, in which he calls for opening court hearings in these cases to the press and the public. The title for his testimony, "Sunshine is Good for Children" is a quote from the former Chief Judge of New York's highest court, the Court of Appeals, Judith Kaye, who ordered child maltreatment hearings opened in that state.

In my law students' cases, more than 60% -- that is 60% -- of the children taken from their families have been returned without ever being found abused or neglected. Yes, more than 60% of the children taken from their living rooms and schoolhouses, from their brothers and sisters and teachers and grandparents and friends – more than 60% of the children housed in foster care with strangers! – do not need to be there, by the government's own admission. They take the children, the Court rubber-stamps the removal, and only later, when my students find the information the agency missed, explain to the agency the information it distorted, and demonstrate that the child would be safest and healthiest in her own home, does the government agree – voluntarily! – to send the child home and dismiss its own case. Secret proceedings means that you can't meet the children whose lives are turned upside-down, perhaps never to be righted – for no reason.

You can't observe the rubber-stamp hearings. You can't watch a case worker hem and haw an explanation about why a distraught child hasn't been referred to a therapist, despite a court order directing the referral. You can't see a lawyer guessing at his client's position, rather than knowing it, because the lawyer hasn't met with the client since the previous court hearing. You can't sit in the back of a courtroom and shake your head in frustration and disgust at a judge who openly flouts the law, refusing to let a child live with her beloved aunt, simply because it is that judge's "personal policy" not to allow children to live with relatives unless [the Child and Family Services Administration (CFSA), D.C.'s child welfare agency] agrees. You can't know what's going on, and you can't do anything about it.

Operating behind an impenetrable iron curtain that is anathema to American governance, the Family Court deprives children of the checks and balances they need for health, safety, and stability.

I am here to testify that sunshine is good for children.

D.C. IS OUT OF STEP

The District of Columbia is out of step with a growing national trend by guarding the walls that, in turn, guard adults' secrets and their errors of commission and omission:

• Judges say open courts are good for children: The National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges issued a public Resolution in 2005, attached to my testimony, supporting open courts. The National Child Abuse Coalition, the Council of State Court Administrators and the Conference of Chief Justices all agree that states should have discretion to open their courts. …
  
• Seventeen states have opened child welfare proceedings …
  
  
• No state that has moved to transparency has ever shut down again. Many states opened child welfare hearings on a "pilot project" basis, and none retreated to the darkness of secrecy.
  
• Doubters are convinced:
  Even judges and children's advocates who initially were vigorously opposed to transparency become enthusiastic converts, convinced of the benefits to children. After Minnesota's courts had been open for a year, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune noted that "the greatest fear--that troubled children would be victimized and embarrassed by sensationalized new media coverage and community scorn--has yet to be realized."
  
• Open court proceedings empower children: According to Minnesota Judge Heidi Schellhas, "Open child protection proceedings may…assist the psychological recovery of the abused children…'victims of abuse often carry their burden alone, in secret' and closed proceedings simply 'continue the notion that something shameful has happened, and that no one should be told.'"…
  

We cannot be sure adults are serving children unless we can see them. If adults' actions are hidden behind a wall, we are literally in the position of having to take the adults' word that they're doing their job. …

A CASE IN POINT

One of my former child clients, now dead by gunshot, asked his group home not to house him with a roommate because, he admitted, he was disliked by some of the other children and felt uncomfortable with them. The group home ignored him, as well as my similar request on his behalf. Another resident of the group home – also now-deceased by gunshot -- came in and stabbed my client in the shoulder with a screwdriver. Bad enough, but the agency then proposed to bring both boys to the CFSA offices to put them in a room together to "mediate the dispute." No one knew this went on – no one has ever known until you, now, some six or more years later.

Same child: in addition to being stabbed, the child was victimized when his new roommate allowed other boys into the shared room. The other boys stole some of my child client's clothing. It was all he had, in two garbage bags and a battered suitcase. He'd been in foster care since he was nine years old, and had carted sneakers and clothing to the dozen or more homes he'd lived in. He was enraged by the theft, and broke some of the thief's property and kicked a hole in a wall. Arrested for the destruction of property, he was locked up overnight, for the first time ever, and charged as a juvenile. The CFSA worker was set to tell the delinquency judge that the child's best interests would be served by going to Oak Hill [D.C.'s juvenile jail] because it would "be therapeutic for him." I remonstrated with the worker in the courthouse hallway and burned up telephone lines for hours until I located a foster parent with an empty bed and persuaded CFSA that a foster home would be more appropriate for the child than Oak Hill.

Until now, no one has known about this.

No one has known until now that the boy became a loving, gentle, doting father. The baby's mother went off to finish her final semester of college, and the ward was the baby's only caretaker. No one has known that the adults working for CFSA refused to allow the young dad to live with his baby. CFSA had no teen-father placements, they said. They assigned him to programs and buildings that did not allow babies. So he "absconded" every night, meaning he went to his mother's home, or his mother-in-law's home, or to his grown sister, or to an aunt, or to a friend or anywhere he could keep his baby. Demerit after demerit after demerit from the adults at CFSA, harassing him, adding stress to an already-burdened life.

No one has ever known that the adults at CFSA later sought again and again to have this child's neglect case closed because he wasn't appreciative of the services they were offering.

No one has known until now, from this testimony, that when my child client became an adult and buckled under the stress and picked up minor adult criminal charges, the adult employees of CFSA and [the D.C. Office of Attorney General] OAG strenuously resisted my pleas and my client's to install an operating telephone in his residence. See, he was wearing an electronic ankle bracelet, and needed the telephone to be working to connect with the bracelet, so that he would not violate his conditions of release on the criminal charge. The adults working for CFSA and OAG said, again, that it would be better for the child to go to jail – the D.C. Jail, this time – than to reside in their care. So they refused to install the telephone to make sure he would be locked up. Then, they could close his case and get him off the rolls. Voila! Lower caseloads!

The postscript is, of course, my child client's death. CFSA finally having worn down the Family Court Magistrate Judge, the child's case was closed a few months before he turned 21. A bright, sensitive, sweet guy, he had lived in dozens of foster homes, group homes, with his mother and grandmother, with his sisters, and in at least one RTC, and had no ties to anyone but his wife and children. He had attended more than a dozen high schools without graduating. He had a marijuana habit, and maybe others, that seemed relatively low-level to me, but showed no signs of abating. He had been trying to hold down a job, and also had been stealing drug dealers' small stashes and selling those to support his two children.

He was shot at 1408 Girard Street on the day police were installing a crime camera around the corner. He made the paper for that. He made the paper again, though I'm the only one who knew it, because he wasn't identified, when Lafonte Lurie Carlton, his killer, was released a few years later from Oak Hill and killed again.

My child client would have wanted Carlton to be released, by the way. He knew children need lots of chances and lots of help. He also knew, painfully, that adults often fail children, even adults who mean well and certainly, adults who don't care or can't be bothered or who have other priorities. Would that dear child still be alive if the adults who hurt him and ignored him and despised him had been seen for what they'd done? Might they have straightened up a little and flown a little righter if they'd known that, like other adults, they could be held accountable for their actions?

SHIRKING RESPONSIBILITY

It's ironic that teaching our children "responsibility" is a major tenet of parenting. We want children to grow up to understand that that their actions have consequences. While parents try to teach this value to their charges, the adults surrounding children in the foster care system are not responsible for what they do and don't do. In our secret system, adults don't have to live the value, to practice what they preach.

Yes, we must ensure that the right adults have the right information to help children. It is equally important, however, to make sure we don't give adults a blank check to go along with that power. We have to make sure they use their power to help children. We are all responsible and we all must watch: family, friends, neighbors, the press. No one can be healthy in the dark: sunshine is good for children.

Mayor Fenty wins the “Arrogance Bowl”

I used to think Washington, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty couldn't accomplish anything in child welfare. I was mistaken. This week, Fenty managed something I thought was impossible: He managed to "out-arrogant" the group that so arrogantly calls itself "Children's Rights." Indeed, were there a Super Bowl for arrogance, I'd always bet on Adrian Fenty.

    A quick recap:

CR has a longstanding consent decree in Washington. For many years, the decree was ignored, to the point where the system became the first in the nation taken over by a federal court. But under the administration of former Mayor Anthony Williams the District's Child and Family Services Administration (CFSA) earned its way out of receivership. It continued to make improvements –agonizingly slow improvements but improvements nonetheless.

Then along came Fenty. First he ignored warnings of serious problems ahead, warnings from the independent monitor named to oversee compliance with the consent decree. Then he plunged the agency into chaos with his demagogic response to child abuse tragedies. (For details see the press release and other materials issued by NCCPR at a news conference earlier this month.) Fenty's latest party line is that he deserves enormous credit for allegedly improving the agency. But to the extent that there has been any recent improvement it consists solely of undoing the damage he did in the first place. Thus, Fenty repeatedly cites eliminating a backlog of uncompleted investigations. But it was Fenty who caused the backlog.

And all along, some of us feared that the backlog was eliminated at the expense of CFSA's other responsibilities, including its most important, core responsibilities to children.

New data show that is exactly what happened.

The data come from the independent monitor, and they compare CFSA performance in April and November 2008.

In roughly half of the categories monitored, CFSA either was unable to provide data to show if performance improved, provided data the monitor believes are inaccurate, or actually performed more poorly in November than in April.

Areas where performance declined were among the most important, including:

● Percentage of cases where caseworkers made monthly visits to families receiving in-home services.

● Percentage of cases in which workers met with parents as often as they should.

● Percentage of children forced to move from home to home more than once.

● Percentage of children able to visit their own siblings at least twice a month.

In many cases the declines were small – but you don't reward an agency for going in the wrong direction (and I'll get to the reward Fenty is seeking below).

Even where there were improvements, often they weren't anything to brag about.

Nothing is more important to getting a separated family back together again than regular visits between parents and children. CFSA is supposed to be able to ensure that such visits take place weekly in at least 85 percent of cases. (Weekly, in fact, isn't nearly enough, especially since visits tend to be short and supervised – it's a bare minimum the agency must meet). But in April, CFSA managed this in only 33 percent of cases. Yes, it improved in November – to all of 36 percent.

That means that if CFSA were able to maintain this same rate of improvement – and who knows if that even could be done – CFSA would be in compliance with minimum requirements for visits - in about 9.3 years.

So the whole Fenty argument - look how wonderful we are, we eliminated the backlog – is a sham. Not only was it stunningly arrogant on its face, the "accomplishment" was achieved at the expense of children already trapped in the system.

Yet it is based on this claim and one other that Fenty has outdone even the Fenty standard for arrogance.

As The Washington Post reported this morning, Fenty wants out of the consent decree completely.

The District was supposed to come up with the latest in a series of reform plans this week and get approval from the monitor. The monitor didn't think the plan was good enough. So, in violation of the terms of its agreement with CR, Fenty simply marched into court and asked that his plan be approved anyway. He also is demanding, again unilaterally, an exit plan to be released from the consent decree with which he has failed to comply. CR says it will seek to hold the District in contempt of court.

Fenty bases his demand on two arguments: The first is the one about undoing the damage he did in the first place. The other is to cite progress over the past eight years. In other words, Fenty is saying that because his reckless response to child abuse tragedies didn't undo everything CFSA accomplished before Fenty became mayor, Fenty should be trusted to run the agency without court supervision.

    Fenty goes on to accuse CR of trying to "micromanage" CFSA. It could be a potent charge, since CR is known for trying to do that sort of thing. But not this time.

    First of all, it's not CR that said the latest plan wasn't good enough, it was the court monitor.

    The monitor is a neutral arbiter who determines if terms of a settlement, agreed to by both sides, are being met. She is analogous not a prosecutor or a defense attorney, but to a judge.

Assuming you have a good monitor, the monitor's views should have greater weight than either plaintiffs or the District.

    And few people in child welfare are more knowledgeable, more respected – and more reasonable – than Judy Meltzer, the court monitor overseeing this case. Her reports have been rigorous – and measured.

    So it is, in every sense of the word, contemptible, for Fenty to throw a tantrum and simply refuse to implement reform plans to get CFSA where successive D.C. administrations have pledged it will go.

    As for that micromanaging charge, the only example Fenty could come up with is a claim that the monitor and CR want to approve the selection of a new permanent director for CFSA. I don't know if that's true – but I certainly hope so. The only hope for CFSA is getting a director with enough backbone to stand up to Fenty. And whatever else you may call this, it is certainly not micromanaging. Choosing the leader of the agency is the ultimate broad-scope, big picture decision.

    D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles told the Post that "It's important for everyone to realize we are not a bunch of washed-up government servants that need to be monitored."

    Actually, when it comes to child welfare, Fenty and Nickles need more than monitoring. They need adult supervision.