When it comes to the problems plaguing “child welfare” wrongful removal drives everything else – including caseworker turnover. Case in point: Massachusetts

A system that tears apart families at a rate 60% above the national average is driving its own caseworkers away.

The Boston Globe had one of those stories almost every major newspaper publishes sooner or later – the one about the enormous number of family police caseworkers who keep quitting and how this adds to the terrible turmoil faced by children and families caught up in the system. 

But this story took things a step further than most.  Every story blames high stress and low pay.  But the Globe story also cited something else: a job that had become like an assembly line, processing children and families, where the workers felt they weren’t helping anyone.  Citing Ethel Everett, a leader of the caseworkers’ union, the story explains that 

the reality of the job clashes with many new employees’ idealism.  

“They think they’re going to be working with families, helping families to engage in services, to be self-sufficient, to move on to higher education,” Everett said. “The reality is we are moving kids night to night, we’re driving kids across the state for one-night placements to get them to school, we’re putting bandages on situations.”… 

A worker from [the Department of Children and Families] Chelsea office, who asked to not be named, left DCF in early 2024 after about two years, frustrated and disillusioned. “They market that they’re here to help families, but some of the situations it just felt like I wasn’t,” he said. 

The story puts a lot of the blame for this on high caseloads.  But it also offers a clue concerning why the caseloads are so high.

The story begins and ends with the story of Maria Toscano and her desperate efforts to schedule a visit with her children in foster care. She discovers that the caseworker she’d been texting – her fifth in less than a year - had left the Massachusetts family police agency, (DCF), and no one at DCF had bothered to tell her. 

At the end, the story circles back to Toscano and reveals why her children were taken in the first place.  She was not accused of beating them or raping them or torturing them No, as happens so often in Massachusetts and across the country, the children were torn from Toscano because she was, herself, allegedly a victim of domestic violence at the hands of her husband.  Taking a child under those circumstances causes the child even more trauma than taking the child for other reasons – that’s one reason it’s illegal to do it in New York. 

Ah, but DCF would surely remind us, that wasn’t the only reason.  According to the story, Toscano’s husband 

was also cited for substance abuse, according to DCF records she shared with the Globe. She was also cited for a history of violence and mental health concerns, though there is no allegation she was violent with her children. 

In other words, probably nothing that couldn’t be fixed by removing the actual abuser instead of the children and then getting Toscano the kind of high-quality therapy that wealthy people can simply go out and buy. 

And, in fact, Toscano tried. But it wasn’t enough: 

Toscano has records of repeatedly enrolling in domestic violence counseling and therapy over the past year, yet the frequent changes in caseworkers leave her feeling like her benchmarks for success keep changing. This fall, DCF shifted her children’s goal from reunification to adoption, she said. 

We don’t know if this was done at the behest of Caseworker #5 before leaving or maybe it was Caseworker #6 after reviewing the file left by Caseworkers 5,4,3,2, and 1.  Whatever the case, as Toscano says: 

“I did all those things and my kids have not been reunified.” 

This is not an aberration.  It is a symptom of the culture of contempt for families and a lust for child removal that has characterized Massachusetts child welfare for decades.  That’s largely a result not of frontline workers’ desires, but pressure from dreadful leadership at DCF compounded by constant hectoring from the state’s so-called “child advocate” Maria Mossaides.  The result: a state that, as of 2022, the most recent year for which data are available tore apart families at a rate 60% above the national average and nearly double the rate of neighboring Connecticut, even when rates of family poverty are factored in. 

In addition to the enormous harm that does to the children, it deluges caseworkers.  That makes the caseloads too high, so workers who really want to help families can’t provide any help.  So they quit. 

So here’s how to keep good caseworkers on the job: 

● Uproot the culture of removal.

● Find leadership for DCF that wants to uproot that culture and will grow a backbone and stand up to the likes of Mossaides. (That’s what happened in Connecticut.)

● Invest in high-quality family defense, basic help to ease the worst stresses of poverty and safe, proven alternatives to foster care. 

Then the cycle can be broken.  The caseloads will come down, and good workers will stay. 

Because when it comes to the problems plaguing “child welfare” wrongful removal drives everything else – including caseworker turnover.

OMG! Druggie moms are rampaging through Massachusetts!

Oh, wait, these are the GOOD kind of druggie moms. 

The cover story in the latest issue of Boston Magazine is a shocker!  It seems druggie moms are everywhere in parts of metropolitan Boston – including children’s play dates!  It was bad enough when mothers coped with the stress of raising kids with wine – (street name: “mommy juice”).  Now, this shocking expose reveals, drug use is rampant and –

Oh, wait.  I seem to have misunderstood.  The story isn’t an expose of these mothers – it’s a celebration!  

A writer whose past work includes an exploration of “mood boards” for your backyard cabana and a deep dive into the declining popularity of varsity jackets now introduces us to the “cannamoms” – mothers who use, and sometimes seem dependent on marijuana to cope with the stresses of raising their children.  

The story includes one testimonial after another from moms who say marijuana makes them better parents.  There’s a long section in which a medical expert says all this is just fine!  And, this being a publication that promises “must-have lifestyle tips,” there’s even “A Beginner's Guide to Weed.”  Gummies seem to be particularly popular. 

Not once does anyone quoted in the story worry that the Massachusetts family police agency, the Department of Children and Families, will be at the door.  The story includes no censorious quotes from DCF or from Massachusetts “Child Advocate” Maria Mossaides. 

That’s because this story unfolds in “the leafy suburbs west of Boston” -- you know, where the affluent white people are.  

And so we read this: 

Cannabis gummies have become as ubiquitous as Lululemon leggings and UppaBaby strollers, particularly among millennial mothers in their thirties and early forties. Moms are popping edibles as they’re folding laundry in the evening, before heading to back-to-school night, and during Friday-afternoon playdates. They’re setting up elaborate home bars decked out with cannabis-infused drinks and bowls of colorful gummies and hosting Cannabis & Crafts nights. 

And then there’s Kate, the mom who explains:

The first time she tried a gummy, “it was just wonderful,” she says. The self-dubbed “100 percent type A” mother found herself less wound-up and more relaxed with her two children. And she appreciates that she’s not drinking in front of her kids. At a Fourth of July gathering, Kate split a gummy with her close friend as the children ran around the yard. “I still have all my wits about me,” she says. “I can still tend to a boo-boo or take a kid to the bathroom.” Cannabis, she explains, is “the perfect balance…it doesn’t make me hung-over, and it doesn’t make me feel full and gross. ... 

And then, with no apparent sense of irony she adds: 

“It’s been a good fix for me.” 

And here’s what the medical expert from Massachusetts General Hospital has to say: 

As for women taking edibles, “Why make them feel bad…if it’s a natural plant-based medicine that helps them relax a little bit and connect with their kids and focus and let go of all the things that are burdening them? That’s a good thing."

Over and over again the story tells us how marijuana makes the cannamoms better parents because it helps them cope with the enormous stress of being parents.  But you can bet that stress is vastly higher in Roxbury than in Brookline.  Yet it’s the Roxbury mom who doesn’t dare use pot – or at least makes sure to hide that use -- because she knows that paints a target on her back and she could lose her children. 

Yes, marijuana is legal in Massachusetts, but that doesn’t necessarily matter.  When marijuana was
legalized in Colorado family police intervention in families where it was used actually increased.  And though the Massachusetts referendum legalizing marijuana included specific language stating marijuana use could not be the “primary or sole” reason for tearing apart a family, that provision was strongly opposed by DCF. 

Once caseworkers from an agency that has shown a deep puritan suspicion of marijuana start poking and prying into every aspect of a family’s life, they can always find some other excuse to tell a judge: “Well, your honor, it’s not just the marijuana.”  That’s why, as a family defender explained, in many Massachusetts counties workers and judges “continue to separate families and find parents guilty of child neglect based, at least in part, on their use of cannabis.” 

The Boston Magazine story is the journalistic equivalent of a public accommodation in the Jim Crow South.  It needs a great big sign explaining to readers that the joys of being a "cannamom" and telling anyone about it are strictly “Whites Only.”   

The story ends with the author deciding to try some pot herself.  At no point in the preceding 4,100 words is even one of those words about the race and class bias underlying it all.    

Hmmm.  Maybe marijuana does muddle your thinking. in Brookline.

Massachusetts pilots the most promising reform in child welfare. Guess who’s trying to undercut it.

 The Massachusetts Legislature needs to step in and provide the funding to make the approach taken by the Family Preservation Project available in every case.  That will require finally standing up to the state’s Fearmonger-in-Chief 

There’s a new program underway that is exactly what children need in a state where they are torn from their families at a rate 60% percent above the national average. 

In Springfield, Mass. the Family Preservation Project provides high-quality interdisciplinary family defense.  Families facing investigation by the state family policing agency, the Department of Children and Families, get a lawyer, a social worker who can come up with alternatives to the cookie-cutter “service plans” issued by DCF, and a parent advocate, usually someone who’s been through the system himself or herself. 

This is the model that’s proven so successful in New York City – where a comprehensive evaluation found that it reduced time in foster care with no compromise of safety.  It’s one reason New York City’s rate of removal is well under one-third the rate of Massachusetts, even when rates of child poverty are factored in.   

New England Public Media reports that the Western Massachusetts program is the first of five to be overseen by the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute with a two-year federal grant. Even DCF says it favors the program (perhaps because they don’t have to pay for it). 

What kind of cases does the program see?  Here’s how the NEPM story begins: 

On an afternoon last January, a 49-year-old artist and mother named Cara was working a warehouse shift, one of two jobs she held to support her family. She was still sharing a house in Greenfield, Massachusetts, with her ex-partner and had left their 4-year-old daughter in his care.  But he got drunk, and Cara — not sure what to do — ended up calling the police. 

Cara, who asked to keep her last name private, said she had already been in touch with a domestic violence organization about her ex. After the drinking incident, she said, that organization called [DCF]. 

“I thought that when DCF stepped in, that it would be an outside authority that could put this situation in control,” she said. “And it did the opposite.” 

The state opened an investigation against Cara for child neglect, saying she should have known her ex might get drunk. That meant she could lose custody of her daughter.  

(Let’s pause here to consider: By that standard President Gerald R. Ford should have been charged with neglect – repeatedly – because his partner got drunk – a lot. She also abused prescription opioids and had mental health issues.  Yet, because the Ford family had money, Gerald’s partner – Betty – could raise their children.) 

In Cara’s case, DCF never should have come to the door.  But at least the agency itself referred the family to the Family Preservation Project, which found a way to keep the family together, sparing a four-year-old from all the trauma of foster care – and the high risk of abuse in foster care itself. 

Enter the Fearmonger-in-Chief 

Mass. "Child Advocate"
Maria Mossaides

Who in the world could be against something like that?  If you’ve followed Massachusetts child welfare at all, you know exactly who:  Massachusetts’ Fearmonger-in-Chief, state “child advocate” Maria Mossaides. 

● Mossaides is the one who led – and misled – a commission on mandatory reporting for a year; making sure the other members of the commission heard only what she wanted them to hear.  When they finally heard the other side of the story, commission members said they were “shocked,” “surprised” and “taken aback.” 

● Mossaides is the one who told the commission that repealing mandatory reporting would cost the state $400 million.  The actual figure would be, at most, more like $1.5 million.  

● Mossaides is the one who has suggested that racial justice is at odds with child safety and racial bias isn’t a problem. Indeed, she seems to think a little racial bias might be good. 

So, keep Cara in mind as you consider what Mossaides told NEPM, and as we parse her comments. 

“I know that the advocacy community conflates neglect with poverty," Mossaides said. "That is not what the Office of the Child Advocate sees. What we see is actual risk to children or imminent risk to children.” 

That’s exactly what she told her mandatory reporting commission when she was misleading it.  As we explained at the time:

But, Ms. Mossaides, you don’t see a typical cross-section of cases – you focus on the most horrible cases.  If you really wanted to know what DCF does in typical cases, you would do what your former counterpart in New Jersey, Kevin Ryan, did when he was that state’s child advocate in 2005.  Not only did he look at a random sample of cases, he made sure the casereading would be objective by having the cases read by two groups with opposite views of the extent to which the state should intervene in families. 

Even DCF’s own annual report makes clear that the neglect cases OCA sees are rare exceptions.  Of all the reports alleging neglect – a total of 63,101, 16 were fatalities.  Another 1,121 involved a substantiated allegation of a substance-exposed newborn – and contrary to the fearmongering from the foster care establishment – and Mossaides --  not every such case by a longshot involves a parent endangering her child. The remainder, 14,345 cases, are labeled simply as “neglect.”  

In her interview with NEPM Mossaides made clear she prefers 

“another new program, based at the nonprofit agency Plummer Youth Promise, that provides mediators to work with parents and the child welfare agency.” 

That program sounds like a warmed-over version of family team meetings / team decision-making – which always put families at a disadvantage.  And, according to its own brochure, the Plummer program encourages something called “concurrent planning” which further stacks the deck against families and in favor of foster parents who want to adopt.* 

The program Mossaides prefers to the Family Preservation Project returns families to the status of supplicants. 

Then it was back to the fearmongering.  Mossaides told NEPM 

most of the cases her office reviews involve parents with substance use problems. She’s concerned the advocates could be too aggressive in siding with those parents and downplaying the risk to children. 

Well, for starters once again we have the problem of Mossaides seeing only what she chooses to see – or in this case “review.”  Of all the cases of children forced into Massachusetts foster care in 2021, 63% did not even involve an allegation of substance use.  And not every case of substance use endangers children – just ask all the parents in “pot smoking mom” Facebook groups.  

And here’s a news flash: It’s a lawyer’s job to be aggressive on behalf of her or his client.  But that doesn’t mean they get to decide what happens, and, indeed, the deck is stacked against lawyers for families at every turn.  Only when all sides have aggressive advocacy can judges get the information they need to make the right decisions. 

And then Mossaides says: 

“What I don't want is, it's just going to get more adversarial.” 

Actually that’s exactly what the system needs.  The non-adversarial approach dates back to the first juvenile court in 1899.  Then, juveniles accused of crime were denied all rights because supposedly everyone was just there to help them.  The U.S. Supreme Court put an end to that, at least in theory, in 1967 with its landmark decision In re: Gault.  As Justice Abe Fortas wrote: 

“[A] child receives the worst of both worlds:…he gets neither the protections accorded to adults nor the solicitous care and regenerative treatment postulated for children. … Under our Constitution, the condition of being a boy does not justify a kangaroo court." 

Unfortunately, much of child welfare operates with a pre-Gault mentality.  That boils down to: Just let us at DCF exercise our untrammeled power – after all, we’re only there to “help.” So families should bow and scrape, and jump through all the pointless hoops we set up for them.  They should beg forgiveness for their sins and, if we deign to return the children, thank us profusely for our benevolence. 

This is the world Mossaides is desperate to maintain – or make worse, since she seems to think DCF doesn’t tear apart enough families.  She is so desperate that not only does she want to undermine legal representation for parents she even wants to undermine it for children. 

But wait, there’s more. Mossaides then claims that she’s the one who doesn’t want more kids taken away and it’s those awful lawyers with their “adversarial” mindset that might cause more removals: 

“And what will happen is less cooperation, less willingness of a family to work with the department, which will inevitably lead to more children coming into custody.” 

Except it hasn’t.  As noted earlier, the New York City model significantly reduced foster care.  The program on which the Family Preservation Project is based, the Detroit Center for Family Advocacy handled hundreds of cases before it had to close because it couldn’t get funding.  None of the children in those cases had to be placed in foster care. 

And, as NEPM points out “At the Springfield location, out of 50 clients so far, all but one has kept custody of their children.” 

And yet, Maria Mossaides apparently wants us to believe that she is just trying to keep kids out of foster care while high-quality family defense will result in more children taken away.  

Persecuting survivors of domestic violence 

The two cases profiled in the NEPM story also illustrate another tragedy Mossaides seems keen to perpetuate: the persecution of mothers who are survivors of domestic violence. 

In Cara’s case, she had sought help from a domestic violence organization – and they’re the ones who called DCF.  I hope that’s only because they felt that, as mandated reporters, they had to.  

These cases can be among the most tragic – because the emotional trauma of child removal is actually worse for a child when the child is being taken because the mother “allowed” him to “witness domestic violence.”  One expert said taking a child in such circumstances is “tantamount to pouring salt into an open wound.”  

Yet when proposals were made to the mandatory reporter commission to exempt people who help domestic violence victims from mandatory reporting, Mossaides opposed them.  Her approach to this issue can be boiled down to “Please pass the salt.” 

Fortunately, in both Cara’s case and the other discussed in the story, the Family Preservation Project kept the children with their mothers. 

But the project is small.  Even when there are four more of them, they can deal with only a small fraction of the families into which DCF intrudes every year.  So the Massachusetts Legislature needs to step in and provide the funding to make this kind of representation possible in every case.  And, by the way, because foster care is so expensive, and because in many cases the federal government will reimburse half the cost, the program is likely to be cost-neutral or even save the state some money.  

But step one is to stop being fooled by Maria Mossaides. 

Mossaides consistently ignores research and best practice in favor of what she “sees.”  But she sees only what she wants to see. 

The children of Massachusetts will be a whole lot safer when, at long last, politicians catch on and say to Maria Mossaides: We don’t give a damn what you “see” – because you are willfully blind. 

* -- Under concurrent planning, people who desperately want to adopt a child – and the child welfare agencies that desperately want those people to adopt -- are told, in effect: “Now remember, your first goal is to work with the birth parents and do everything you can to help them get the child back – but if, by some chance, you fail at this then you get what you really want – someone else’s child for your very own.” 

One parent in New Jersey was honest enough to tell The New York Times what she called “the mantra” of parents in this kind of program, which is: “I’m on the next plane to South America if they think they’re getting this baby back.” 

Meanwhile, the caseworkers are supposed to work equally hard to get the child adopted by people they like and can identify with – typically middle-class foster parents - as they do to try to reunite the child with people they often can’t stand, overwhelmingly poor disproportionately minority birth parents.

 

Court stops Mass. family police from crushing minimal due process rights for families

The Massachusetts Department of Children and Families found that their determinations of “child abuse” and “neglect” were being overturned after a hearing half the time. Guess what they did: 

A. Realized their process for labeling people child abusers was rife with error and fixed it.

B. Invented a way to evade the hearings.

(After a court saw through DCF’s ploy, the agency started providing the hearings).

Every state has some version of a “central register” of people accused of child abuse or neglect.  The process and the consequences vary from state to state, but they have one thing in common: It is extremely easy to be put on these registers and extremely difficult to get off again.  They amount to state databases of rumor and innuendo. 

In almost every state, getting on the register requires only that a caseworker check a box on a form stating it is slightly more likely than not that you are a child abuser – or simply slightly more likely than not that you are guilty of “neglect,” a label that can be slapped on almost anyone who is poor, if a caseworker is so inclined.  In some states, including Massachusetts, the standard is even lower. 

Sometimes a supervisor has to check the box, too.  That’s it.  There’s no independent factfinding beforehand, no chance to present a defense, no neutral arbiter evaluating all sides. The caseworker’s word is law.  Once on the register, you have to fight your way out.  The process varies from state to state, but again, there’s one thing in common: If you can’t afford a lawyer you’re unlikely to get one.  It’s you, on your own, vs. the entire family police bureaucracy.  And since overwhelmingly the people labeled “child abusers” are poor, well … 

All this does enormous harm to children.  A listing on a central register can be a barrier to a huge number of jobs – often the very jobs most likely to be open to poor people. So the listing drives them further into poverty, harming their children and, of course, making it more likely that the poverty will be confused with neglect. 

And the listing increases the odds that, even if the children weren’t thrown into foster care this time, it will happen if the family is reported again – because the listing raises suspicions, whether it’s the guess of a human caseworker or a computer algorithm raising a family’s “risk score.” 

In spite of the way the deck is stacked, a stunning number of people who fight these determinations win. 

So in Massachusetts, where you can seek an administrative hearing to fight your way out, even though the burden of proof is on you to show you are innocent, families win about half the time.  

One might hope that a record like that might give a family police agency second thoughts; that they might think: Hey, wait a minute, if as soon as a neutral arbiter looks at this, despite the way we’ve stacked the deck, the arbiters say we’re wrong half the time maybe that means we’re wrong half the time and we need to fix this. 

As far as I know, that’s never happened.  Not in Massachusetts and not in other states where the rate at which these findings are overturned on appeal can be even higher. 

But only Massachusetts DCF came up with this oh-so-clever little workaround: make up an entire new category out of whole cloth, make it slightly less harmful than the really bad category  and unilaterally deny families fair hearings!  

Until 2015, DCF had two boxes a worker could check: “supported” and “unsupported.”  An unsupported finding did not lead to a listing in the central register and other adverse consequences, a supported finding did. 

But then, faced with all those supported findings being overturned on appeal, DCF suddenly decreed
the existence of a third category: “substantiated concern.”  There’s supposed to be a formal rulemaking process, complete with public comment, before a Massachusetts agency does something like that; but hey, they’re the family police – rules are for other people, right?  They just pulled this new category out of their – uh, imagination.  Only after the lawsuit described below, did DCF go through the rulemaking process (which was, of course, a foregone conclusion since they already had the rule). 

Here’s what made this new category so dangerous: 

DCF unilaterally decided that victims of “substantiated concern” findings are not entitled to fair hearings.  Instead, they can write to DCF itself and ask them to please reconsider. 

So-called “substantiated concern” determinations don’t result in a listing in the central registry – but they still go into DCF’s internal database.  That means they can still be used, by humans or computers, to ratchet up suspicion if there’s another report, increasing the risk of needless foster care placement.  The new category means DCF can stay in the family’s life for months or more, placing them under constant onerous, stressful surveillance. 

The new category also imposes limits on whether someone so listed can become a foster parent.  That’s what happened to a mother known in court documents as Jane Doe.  She sought to appeal the “substantiated concern” finding and was told that wasn’t allowed.  So she used the only appeal mechanism open to her – writing to DCF – and lost. 

Then she sued.  And won. 

As Superior Court Justice Katie Rayburn wrote in her ruling: 

[M]ore than half* of the DCF’s initial “supported” determinations were wrong.  There is no obvious reason that the DCF’s determinations of “substantiated concern” would be any more accurate than its “supported” determinations.  As such, there is a great risk that DCF will make “substantiated concern” determinations which would be more likely than not to be overturned on a quasi-judicial appeal proceedings. 

In fact, the odds of injustice may be even greater with this category, as a story in Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly explained, citing Susan Elsen of the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute. MLRI and the firm of Brown, Rudnick represented Jane Doe.  From the story: 

By its nature, the “substantiated concern” finding is designed for cases in which there is a low risk of harm to a child, making it that much more important to provide parents a means to challenge DCF’s initial findings, Elsen says. 

DCF’s intervention is not “benign,” Elsen notes. … “Once DCF intervenes, the family lives in fear that their child will be taken from them.”… 

Elsen expects that families facing “substantiated concern” determinations may be even more successful in fair hearings, given that it is an even vaguer standard requiring less evidence and thus less likely to withstand a “competent, careful administrative review.” 

And Elsen raised another vital issue: 

From the beginning, Elsen says, one concern was that the creation of the “substantiated concern” category would only perpetuate racial bias in the child welfare system. 

Statewide, Black and Latinx families are reported to DCF more than three times as much as white families, according to Elsen, while in the Boston area, the numbers are even starker, with Latinx families and Black families reported at more than six and nine times the rate of white families, respectively. 

DCF is now providing administrative hearings for those who appeal “substantiated concern” determinations.  But what about the thousands of families slapped with this label since 2015?** (There were 7,929 such determinations in 2021 alone.) 

And who is going to stop DCF from running amok like this the next time it comes up with a similarly brilliant idea? 

*-The “More than half” statement is based on 2020 figures, when DCF was reversed 54% of the time. The Boston Globe reports that in 2022, DCF did better – they were reversed only 48% of the time. 

** - News accounts make clear that the category took effect in 2015, though it’s not clear if all of the harm dates back that far.  The Globe story says the designation was “revised” in 2020.

NCCPR in Florida Today on what the Miami Herald’s foster-care panic is doing to children

Think of it as the Cliffs Notes version.

From the column: 

Year after year, the number of deaths of children “known to the system” remains constant. Some years it goes up a little, some years it goes down a little. 

So all those children needlessly separated; all those taken from homes that were safe or could have been made safe with the right kinds of help only to be abused in foster care, suffered for nothing. They were victims of a “foster-care panic” — a sharp, sudden increase in removals of children from their homes that often follows high-profile child abuse deaths — especially when that coverage goes out of its way to scapegoat family preservation. 

Read the full column here.

A Florida county sheriff says a private agency warehoused children in conditions so horrible he’s launching a criminal investigation. But guess who took away the kids in the first place.

Hint: It’s the county that tears apart families at one of the highest rates in the state, and yet has one of the worst records in the state on a key measure of child safety.

 

Bob Gualtieri, the sheriff of Pinellas County, Florida (metropolitan St. Petersburg) is really upset.  It seems he’s noticed something we’ve been pointing out on our Florida blog for years:  Eckerd Connects, the longtime “lead agency” responsible for what happens to foster children after they’re torn from their homes in Pinellas and neighboring Pasco and Hillsborough Counties, has been doing a terrible job. (Not for much longer, though.  Either the state Department of Children and Families fired Eckerd or Eckerd quit, depending on who is telling the story.) 

But, back to the sheriff, who says Eckerd did such a lousy job that he's launching a criminal investigation: 

“The conditions in which these children have been living at Eckerd’s offices, frankly, is disgusting and deplorable," Gualtieri said. And he’s not about to accept any excuses either!  “You don’t whine about it,” he says. “You fix it and if you can’t do it you go to the state and you say, ‘hey look, this isn’t working and here’s why,’ … But you still do your job, and you don’t expose kids to danger while you’re trying to fix it. You figure out a way to make it happen." 

You tell ‘em, Sheriff! But there’s just one problem.  Bad as Eckerd is – and yes, they are awful, and yes there’s no excuse for it – the single biggest source of the problem in Pinellas County is – the office of the Pinellas County Sheriff.  Gualtieri runs what may be the most extreme, most fanatical family destruction agency in Florida.

It’s Sheriff Gualtieri and his deputies who are, in effect, dumping all those Pinellas County children onto Eckerd’s doorstep in the first place.  No, it’s not because they want to hurt kids.  On the contrary, I’m sure they sincerely believe they’re helping.  But they can’t break out of the take-the-child-and-run mentality that plagues Florida child welfare, especially in their part of the state. 

When the Sheriff runs child protective services 

In most parts of Florida, the initial decision to tear a child from everyone s/he knows and loves is made by workers for the state Department of Children and Families.  But in a handful of counties, sheriff’s offices have that job.  Those counties tend to be concentrated in the Tampa Bay area, including Pinellas, Pasco, Hillsborough and Manatee. 

The people who pushed the change, about 20 years ago were hoping for just this result – they wanted sheriffs to tear apart more families, and the assumption was that hard-nosed cops would be even more fanatical about it than caseworkers. 

It looks like they were at least partly right.   Some counties where DCF still runs initial investigations take away appallingly large numbers of children.  Conversely, in Broward County, the Sheriff’s office has shown commendable restraint, taking proportionately fewer children than most counties where DCF still is in charge.  But in the other counties where sheriffs are in charge, the take-the-child-and-run crowd has gotten what it wanted – especially in Pinellas. 

Compare Pinellas to other large counties where sheriff’s deputies take away children – and note that all of these figures factor in rates of child poverty in each county: 

A child in Pinellas County is 33 percent more likely to be taken from her or his parents than a child in neighboring Pasco County.  That Pinellas County child is 60 percent more likely to be taken than a child in Manatee County, twice as likely to be taken as a child in Hillsborough County, nearly two-and-a-half times more likely to be taken away than the state average – and more than four times more likely to be taken away than a child in Broward County which, again, is another place where the sheriff’s office does the taking. 

In fact, were Pinellas County, Florida, a state, its rate of removal would be the seventh highest in the entire nation.

 

NCCPR calculates rates of removal by comparing Florida DCF data for entries into care for the year ending Sept. 30, 2021 (the most recent time period available) to a Census Bureau estimate of the number of children living in poverty in each county.  We believe this approach is fairer than simply comparing entries to the total child population, But, for the record: If you divide entries by total child population the relative position of these counties remains the same – Pinellas still is the most extreme outlier, and the rate of removal in Broward still is lowest.

Child removal ≠ child safety 

Ah, but if we’re taking away all those kids, we must be making them safer, the sheriff might say,  since the mantra in Florida for decades, with only a brief exception, has been to falsely equate child removal with child safety.  I can imagine Sheriff Gualtieri responding to these figures by taking perverse pride in how his officers supposedly “err on the side of the child” and put child safety ahead of family preservation. 

This, of course, ignores the enormous trauma to children caused by needless removal – even when the placements are good.  Recall what happened at the Mexican border and you get the idea.  How is that “erring on the side of child”?  The trauma is, of course, compounded when, according to the very people taking away the children, the placements are “disgusting and deplorable.”  How is that erring on the side of the child? 

But also, the more you overload systems with false reports trivial cases and needless foster care, the less likely you are to have time to find the relatively few children in real danger.  Instead of erring on the side of the child, the Sheriff’s approach makes all Pinellas County children less safe. 

Check out the data. 

The standard measure of child safety is this: Of all the children caseworkers or sheriff’s deputies deem to have been abused or neglected, what percent are abused or neglected again in the next 12 months? 

Here are the most recent available results for those same counties: 

Broward:                      5.28%

State average:             6.79%

Manatee:                      6.51%

Hillsborough:                7.07%

Pasco:                          7.27%

Pinellas:                   10.37% 

In fact, there are only six counties in the entire state, all much smaller than Pinellas, that do worse.  And note that the county with the lowest rate of removal, Broward, had the best safety record.  Bottom line: Pinellas County Sheriff’s deputies are taking away far too many children needlessly and missing more cases of real abuse and neglect than counties that show more restraint.  How is that erring on the side of the child? 

“As bad or worse” 

Still another measure of what happens to children can be found in Sherriff Gualtieri’s own statement.  He said that, under the care and supervision of Eckerd, “The conditions are as bad or worse than the living conditions from which the children were removed.” 

Which begs the question: If you know they’re going to be as bad or worse off, why are you taking them away in the first place? 

The statement about “as bad or worse” is misleading in one way, though: It plays to public stereotypes about families caught in the system.  It conjures up images of horror story cases that are very serious, very real, and very, very rare.  Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with neglect. 

Of course, Sheriff Gualtieri might reply: Well sure, a lot of times the problem is housing, but the housing was dangerous so what do you expect us to do about it?  We’re not a housing agency.  Or: We can’t very well provide childcare subsidies so children aren’t taken on “lack of supervision” charges, can we? 

Why not?  As the Sheriff himself put it: 

“You don’t whine about it. … You figure out a way to make it happen."

 So why can’t the Pinellas County Sheriff’s office take some of its budget and use it for emergency cash assistance, and rent subsidies, and housing repairs, and childcare subsidies.  Or at least follow the example of this police officer in Kansas City, Missouri. 

And where the issue is substance use that genuinely endangers children, how about using some of that budget to set up innovative home-based drug treatment programs – again, because it’s better for the children. 

The extent of wrongful removal 

We know how bad the problem of wrongful removal is nationally thanks to the mass of studies showing that, in typical cases, children left in their own homes do better even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care.  We know how bad it is in Florida thanks to excellent stories like this from USA Today Network Florida reporters. 

And we know how bad it is in the counties where Eckerd has been the lead agency thanks to the report of a “peer review team” DCF itself sent to Hillsborough County (metropolitan Tampa) in 2018. As we wrote at the time: 

The peer review found that workers in Hillsborough County are so terrified of having one of their cases land them on the front page after a tragedy that they were illegally taking large numbers of children needlessly. According to the report: 

Professionals in the system of care are often unnecessarily risk adverse due to the fear of child fatalities and media consequences. … [E]xtreme caution and risk aversion responses do not guarantee that tragic results will be avoided, and can cause unnecessary trauma to children. 

Indeed, as WFLA-TV documented in this tragic case, it can cause a child to die in foster care after being taken from a mother because that mother is poor. 

What “risk averse” really means is that child welfare investigators, supervisors and officials are increasing the risk to children in order to decrease the risk to themselves. 

The report found that investigators in Hillsborough County rush to remove children “without sufficient exploration, consideration, or conversation around reasonable efforts to prevent removal …” 

Yes, but that’s Hillsborough, not Pinellas.  True.  But as noted earlier the rate of removal in Pinellas is double the rate in Hillsborough.  So either Pinellas County Florida is a cesspool of depravity and parents in, say, St. Petersburg really are twice as likely to abuse their children as parents in Tampa and four times as likely to abuse their children as parents in Fort Lauderdale – or Pinellas County is taking away a whole lot of children who could have remained safely in their own homes. 

It’s reasonable to bet it’s the latter, especially since Pinellas is the home county of the Tampa Bay Times, which has done everything it can to encourage the rush to tear apart families. 

Don’t pass the buck to the courts 

Typically, when confronted with high rates of removal, agencies will pass the buck to the courts.  We don’t take children, they say, the courts have to approve everything we do.  Somehow, they always manage to say this with a straight face. 

In fact, in Florida, as in every state, the child protective services agency, in this case, the sheriff’s office, has the power to remove children on the spot, entirely on their own authority.  The family has to then fight to get them back.  And it’s hardly a fair fight.  Since the families are almost always are poor, they almost always have to rely on an overwhelmed public defender who may have met them for the first time in a hallway five minutes before the hearing.  

Presiding is a judge who knows that if he sends the child home and something goes wrong his career is over (especially in Pinellas County where he’d have to face the wrath of the Tampa Bay Times with its fanatical devotion to tearing apart families).  Leave the children to the tender mercies of Eckerd Connects and the children may suffer terribly, but the judge is safe. 

Over in Louisiana, a judge was commendably honest about this.  In a decision ordering the return home of a child he never should have ordered taken away, the judge wrote: 

“The [Children’s] Code has created a system in which a judge must make a decision about probable cause based on factual and medical evidence without the benefit of a hearing, review of evidence, or any of the fact-finding tools which are obligatory in every other proceeding under the Anglo-American legal system ... This is a system which borders on a sham.” 

And, of course, arguing that judges said it was OK still doesn’t explain why Pinellas deputies believe they need to bring these cases in the first place at a vastly higher rate than their fellow deputies in neighboring counties. 

None of this should let Eckerd off the hook 

The fact that Sheriff Gualtieri and his counterparts in Pasco and Hillsborough Counties kept dumping kids on Eckerd’s doorstep doesn’t mean Eckerd had to tolerate it.  Had they spoken out loudly and clearly about wrongful removal right from the beginning, they could have curbed it.  As the “lead agency” for the region, Eckerd had the most influence in the system. Eckerd could have educated deputies about the harm of needless removal and pressed Gualtieri and his counterparts not to take so many children needlessly. They also could have pressed the courts to return children they thought the sheriff’s deputies had removed needlessly. 

Instead, from all appearances, they welcomed all those removals for years.  

We predicted Eckerd would fail as soon as they brought in as its director of community-based care Chris Card, who has his own demonstrated devotion to the take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare.  And sure enough, he immediately lived down to his reputation.  

What the Sheriff got right 

On two points, Sheriff Gualtieri is right.  It would be wrong to target low-level Eckerd employees and make them scapegoats; to his credit he has pledged not to do this.  And there should be an investigation of Eckerd.  

But, good intentions notwithstanding, Sheriff Gualtieri shouldn’t be the one doing it.

Child welfare in Massachusetts: NCCPR releases in-depth analysis of Mass. Mandated Reporter Commission report

Job One now falls to the Massachusetts Legislature.

Regular readers of this Blog know that we’ve been following closely the work of a commission named by the Massachusetts Legislature to study the state’s mandatory child abuse reporting law.  The Commission released its final report on June 30. 

Today we release our in-depth analysis of that report.  Our analysis, called Failing Job One, is available here. The analysis summarizes our overview of the failure of mandatory reporting and our overview of how the Commission was manipulated, something discussed in detail in our previous posts.  We then go on to examine the report page-by-page. 

Though the analysis is specific to the deliberations of a Massachusetts commission, much of it is relevant in every state, since every state has a mandated reporter law with failings similar to, or, in some cases, even worse than the one in Massachusetts. 

The title of the report is derived from something said by a member of the Commission itself, Middlesex County District Attorney Marian Ryan.  Like many Commission members, Ryan was stunned when, after more than a year, the Commission held public hearings and almost every witness opposed the Commission’s draft recommendations.   

That came as a surprise because the Commission chair, the state’s “Child Advocate,” Maria Mossaides, and her allies at the state Department of Children and Families had, in effect, kept the commission in a bubble, staging carefully orchestrated presentations that told the Commission only what Mossaides and DCF wanted them to hear. 

So at the first Commission meeting after hearing from the public Ryan said: 

I spent a lot of years thinking that [mandated reporting] gets us to a better place; I’m disheartened to hear maybe it really doesn’t – and even if it does, perception is reality.  A lot of well-credentialed, well-meaning experts think this doesn’t work. … I was taken aback to hear so much of that conversation. [Finding out if they’re right] should be Job One. 

The Commission wasn’t able to do Job One. Mossaides, and her allies in DCF prevented it.  

Therefore, as we note in the conclusion of our analysis, doing Job One now is the responsibility of the Massachusetts Legislature: 

Unfortunately, most legislators right now are where the dissenting commissioners were before the public hearing – finding it incomprehensible that expanding mandatory reporting is even controversial, much less that it should be curbed or abolished.  In addition to skewing the final report, Mossaides has bragged about her regular meetings with key lawmakers – so she’s had months and months to spin all this without the rest of us even knowing what she’s been saying. 

Maria Mossaides and her allies prevented the Commission from doing “Job One” – taking an in-depth, open-minded look into whether all those scholars, advocates and people with lived experience, and all those researchers who have questioned mandatory reporting for decades, are right.  The Legislature needs to do that job. 

Oops, they’re doing it again 

There’s one more reason why a close examination of the behavior and tactics of Mossaides and DCF is useful: They’re at it again.  Mossaides and DCF Commissioner Linda Spears co-chair a “Data Work Group” studying the gathering and presentation of data about Massachusetts child welfare. 

They have been laboring to whitewash – in every sense of the term – the facts about racial bias in Massachusetts child welfare.  To the extent that there is any bias at all, they argue, it’s almost all because of what happens at the “front door” – that is, because of the people who file reports alleging child abuse – you know, people like mandated reporters.  

Yes, that’s right. After spending nearly two years trying to open the “front door” as wide as possible, Mossaides and DCF now are claiming that any racial bias is due to what happens at the front door – and, they say, they have no control over that! 

READ OUR FULL ANALYSIS HERE.