Before you believe a column claiming that residential treatment is wonderful – read the “sequel”

A word of advice to those writing puff piece op-eds about the joys of residential treatment: You probably shouldn’t cite a for-profit company that was the subject of exposes concerning allegations of widespread abuse at one of its institutions – and abuse allegations plus a riot at another.

Clarinda Academy, the "flagship" institution run by Sequel Youth and Family Services
(Photo from Disability Rights Washington.)

Well, I suppose they deserve credit for chutzpah.

There’s a column in the Chronicle of Social Change about the joys of what is probably the single worst intervention in child welfare – residential treatment.  The column cites no actual evidence that residential treatment works – because there is none.  Even the former head of a trade association that includes such providers admitted that “we find it hard to demonstrate success.”

Instead the column gives us a single anecdote, and the usual boilerplate about how supposedly nothing else works for some children so we should spend a lot more money on these places, blah, blah, blah.

The column was coauthored by Susan Dreyfus, the current head of another trade association for residential treatment centers and other providers, and Elizabeth Carey, CEO of Starr Commonwealth, which runs – of course – residential treatment centers.

But here’s what sets the column apart:  The youth in that one anecdotal success story achieved his success, the column claims, “[w]ith the help and support of residential behavioral health treatment provided by Sequel Youth and Family Services …”  The author’s note at the end of the column explains that Carey’s RTC “partners with Sequel Youth and Family Services, a behavioral health provider across the nation.”

If you’re thinking “Sequel – that name rings a bell…”  it should. 

Sequel in the news

Sequel, a for-profit chain of residential treatment centers, has been in the news a lot lately – over allegations of widespread abuse at one institution, and a riot at another. They run the institution where, according to one resident, you can be punished for trying to wipe away a year.

It began when Disability Rights Washington issued a scathing report on what news accounts call Sequel’s “flagship institution,” Clarinda Academy in Iowa.  What DRW alleges is appalling.  There’s a summary, with a link to their full report, here.  Sequel denies the allegations in the report.

The DRW report got NBC Nightly News interested. Here’s whatthey found :

Then, Nightly News broadcast a follow-up story:

At another Sequel facility, Red Rock Canyon school in Utah, a SWAT team had to be called in, guns drawn, to quell a riot.  

The riot may have been just the tip of the iceberg.  Just yesterday, the very day the Chronicle pubished the op-ed praising Sequel, a story in the Salt Lake Tribune ran under this headline: “After a riot, increasing violence and now sex abuse allegations, Red Rock Canyon school will close.” (Sequel says they decided to close the school voluntarily.) UPDATE, JULY 15: Sequel is reportedly closing a second facility in Utah as well, though the company claims they may "repurpose" this one.

But even if no child ever was physically abused at a Sequel facility, even if had there never been even one riot, that still wouldn’t be enough to justify such places’ existence.  Even the executive director of the group that calls itself Children’s Rights (A group that is not exactly family-friendly) Sandy Santana, told NBC that children should not be institutionalized – period. Said Santana:

“A well-functioning system places kids in families and wraps around supports … to keep those kids in families.”

But hey, not all the news for Sequel is bad. Last year, Investigate West reported that “A private equity firm acquired a majority stake in Sequel last year, citing ‘tremendous continued growth opportunities.’” 

So, to review: On the one hand there is an overwhelming body of actual evidence that residential treatment doesn’t work, and there are far better alternatives – evidence summarized here.

On the other hand the head of a child welfare agency trade association, and the head of a residential treatment center that proudly partners with Sequel Youth and Family Services say they’re wonderful.

The mind-numbing mediocrity of Oregon’s child welfare leadership

Among the justifications offered up for shipping Oregon foster children to an allegedly abusive institution in Iowa: Oregon is a small state, so it doesn’t have the "best treatment services." 

Iowa is a smaller state.

First a quick review:

1. Disability Rights Washington issues a report alleging widespread abuse and prison-like conditions at Clarinda Academy an institution in Iowa to which Washington State sends foster children it doesn’t know what to do with. 

2. Washington State responds by promising to take the foster children for whom it has responsibility out of this allegedly awful place – and move them to other institutions.

3. Oregon Public Broadcasting reveals that Oregon also is shipping foster children to Clarinda.  

4. Oregon officials go all Sergeant Schultz in response.

They know nothing, nothing about any abuse of Oregon children. They say they’re confident that Clarinda never abuses children from Oregon, so those children are just going to have to stay there.

Defending the indefensible

Now, the latest turn of events:

In an op-ed column for the Statesman-Journal in Salem, the director of the Oregon Department of Human Services Child Welfare Division, Marilyn Jones, offers up a justification for this cruel, callous treatment of children that is mind-numbing in its mediocrity.  What makes Jones’ response to dispiriting is that it is so typical of the thinking – or lack of thinking – behind child welfare in America.

This isn’t the extremism of the take-the-child-and-run fanatics in child welfare, it’s just the plodding, everyday unthinking norm.

Jones’ column reads like it was written by one of those experimental computer programs that can churn out routine news stories Take one cliché from column A, another from column B.  So it’s worth going through it point-by-point, and then asking a couple of fundamental questions:

Jones begins with one of the old standbys: Things are so different now from when she started 20 years ago.  The children’s problems are just sooooo much more difficult now.

Well, I started writing about child welfare as a reporter more than 40 years ago.  And everyone in child welfare making excuses for their failures said exactly the same thing: The children we’re seeing “now,” (in the 1970s, that is), have problems that are sooooo much more difficult than they were back in the 1950s.   Such claims go back even further. The oldest claim I’ve found, so far, that the children’s problems are so much worse “now” was written when “now” was 1948.

Then Jones tells us that because of Oregon's size, it doesn't have the "best treatment services." Therefore, she says,

Oregon, like other states with small populations, needs to use out-of-state services.

Of course!  That explains why children are being shipped to Iowa – which has a smaller population than Oregon.

Then comes another classic:

We work through the juvenile court system, where a judge must sign an order to place children out of state.

That, of course, is the same rationalization used to justify taking away children needlessly in the first place.  But since neither children nor parents typically have effective legal counsel, the judge is hearing only the child welfare agency’s side of the story. And that’s why they’re far more likely to wield rubber-stamps than gavels. 

Then there’s this:

Since 1975 Oregon has followed the rules and procedures of the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children, uniform legislation adopted by all 50 states that mandates any placement must be approved and monitored through the compact.

But the ICPC does nothing to ensure that Oregon children, institutionalized in Iowa, are really safe. What the ICPC really does is formalize delay, incompetence and buck-passing.  It is among the impediments to a well-functioning child welfare system.  Everyone n child welfare knows this.  Well, everyone except, perhaps, a child welfare leader who also doesn’t seem to know that Oregon is bigger than Iowa.

But Jones isn’t done making excuses:

When a child is placed out of state, our staff participate by phone in ongoing treatment planning with the child.

And what better way to know if a child is being abused than by calling him or her on the phone, right?  It’s the perfect way to build trust!  And staff at an allegedly abusive institution would never think of standing nearby while the child is taking to the worker.

Jones continues:

They also can call the child and visit the facility to meet face to face and ask the child how they are doing.

Well of course they can. But do they?  And in terms of the information gleaned, what is the difference between this kind of visit from someone parachuting in from a thousand miles away and when Red Cross workers would visit POW camps where prisoners would assure them that, really, truly, they were being treated just fine.

And finally:

 We contract with independent, third-party professionals to monitor the child’s well-being and conduct private, in-person meetings every 30 days.

So a caseworker who has no stake in this child has to schlep out to Clarinda and talk to the child and then report back to some other caseworker in Oregon who probably has little or no idea who the child is. Yep, that’s reassuring.

Recalling what DRW found

But most important: In spite of all these supposed safeguards, Disability Rights Washington which has no vested interest, still found what it says is widespread abuse.  And they found problems far beyond overt acts of abuse. For every child allegedly abused, many more were subject to what DRW alleges is a demeaning, dehumanizing culture of everyday life at Clarinda – including even a rule against singing.  As I noted in a previous post:

● The no-singing rule is one example of the prison-like rigidity to every aspect of daily life.  Others include having to move from place to place lined up single file, being barred from talking to the opposite gender, almost never being allowed off the facility grounds and severe restrictions on phone calls to friends and families.  Some dorms add on restrictions such as no leaning on walls, no talking during meals, no walking on grass, and no going to the bathroom without permission.

● There is a coercive, almost Orwellian system of exploiting peer pressure to keep the young people in line, complete with “hundreds, if not thousands” of unwritten “norms” the youth have to follow.  (Clarinda officials told DRW their system was modeled on an institution in Pennsylvania, Glen Mills. This is not exactly reassuring considering that just last week, the Philadelphia Inquirer concluded that “Serious violence is both an everyday occurrence and an open secret at Glen Mills, and has been for decades.”)

● When peer pressure wasn’t enough, DRW found that Clarinda misused and overused painful physical “restraints.”  DRW reports that every student they spoke to “reported that restraints they experienced were physically painful and frequently resulted in back, shoulder, and neck pain for several days or weeks.”

Yet Marilyn Jones apparently wants us to believe that if a child says “No, wait, I’m from Oregon!” this doesn’t happen.

DHS: Oregon’s most neglectful parent

Imagine what would happen if, say, independent inspectors issued a similar report about, say, a summer camp, and a parent said: “I don’t care what this report claims, I trust the camp director.” Parents have been charged with neglect for far less.

But the worst of the rationalizations is the claim that institutionalization is necessary at all.  It isn’t.  Oregon children are being shipped to out-of-state institutions because Oregon takes away too many children. Period.  Get the children who don’t need to be in foster care back home and there will be plenty of room in good, safe foster homes for the children who really need them.  Provide intensive wraparound services to the children and the foster families, and there will be no need to institutionalize those children.

I’m sure that all those years ago, (back when the children’s problems were sooooo much easier) Marilyn Jones went into child welfare work for the right reasons. I’m sure she’s in it for the right reasons today.  But that’s not enough.

I hope everyone in Oregon will read the full DRW report. Then read Jones’ op-ed. And then ask two questions: 1. Is Clarinda really an example of the "best treatment services"?  2. Is Marilyn Jones really the best person Oregon could find to determine the fate of the state’s most vulnerable children?

Catching up slowly: The Des Moines Register finally notices the problems at an Iowa RTC

Even a thin story is better than none.  Unfortuinately, that’s what Iowans got.

Clarinda Academy (Photo from Disability Rights Washington)

Last month, after Disability Rights Washington (DRW) released a scathing report about a residential treatment center in Iowa, to which many Washington State children were sent, I wrote: 

The story was not “broken” by any big media organization in Washington State.  And it was not broken by any news organization in Iowa, even though the institution where all these abuses took place – Clarinda Academy - is in Iowa.  Indeed, in Iowa, coverage of this prison-like facility for children who often have committed no crime appears to have been confined largely to reporting the scores of games played by Clarinda’s sports teams.  (And no, the collapse of the newspaper industry is no excuse. That started around 2006. Clarinda opened in 1992.) …

After DRW did the actual reporting, Washington State’s largest newspaper, The Seattle Times was reduced to writing a story based entirely on DRW’s findings.  And Iowa’s largest newspaper, the Des Moines Register, was reduced to reprinting the Seattle Times story.

Now the Register has begun to catch up; slowly. But the story in the Register this week does little more than regurgitate police reports and give enormous amounts of space to statements from an executive from Sequel, the for-profit chain that runs Clarinda.  The story includes no interviews with current or former residents.  And it gives readers no way to understand the oppressive climate of day-to-day life at Clarinda that DRW found.

If anything, the Register further dehumanizes Clarinda residents by suggesting they’re all delinquents – the DRW report makes clear that’s not true – and citing one former resident accused of a recent murder.

But the story does serve one useful purpose. If you first read the full DRW report – and, in effect, hear the voices of those forced to live there, and you get a feel for the day-to-day oppressiveness of the place, then you will wonder about the willful blindness it take for Iowa authorities to do nothing.  That blindness allowed the Sequel executive to gloat that “In September, the state of Iowa completed their on-site audit at Clarinda, which noted no deficiencies and renewed our full licensure status."

Read the DRW report and you might also be more concerned about this revelation, buried at the end of the Register story:

After the eight boys ran away this year, inspectors determined that the teens who fled were separated from others for weeks after they were found. 

Those students were supposed to have their status reviewed every three days, but [A state inspector] found that after he began an investigation in May, staffers falsified student supervision plans and forged students' signatures.  The facility was given a provisional license afterward, but [the inspector] recommended its full license be restored.

Of course, even more than Washington State, Iowa has a strong incentive to ignore problems in group homes and institutions – when you take away children at the ninth highest rate in the country, as Iowa does – a rate more than double the national average - you’re always begging for beds. And beggars can’t be choosers.

So it’s no wonder that, the Register reports,

Gov. Kim Reynolds has said little about Washington State’s probe into the treatment of youth at Clarinda and has taken no steps to remove any Iowa children from the facility.

Of course not. There’s no public pressure on her to do anything. 

See these young people as just names on police reports – or worse – and no one cares.  See them as human beings – as DRW did – and perhaps someone will
.

The failure of residential treatment: An alternative weekly in Washington State asks the questions bigger media won’t

● The questions arise through the story of a 15-year-old boy who walked more than 100 miles in the middle of a Pacific Northwest winter to escape “residential treatment” – and return to his mother - where he is doing well.

 ● A county court commissioner put it best: "Until you can show me that those sorts of institutions work, why would we build another one?"

 

It's a long way from Spokane, Washington to Libby, Montana. 
But one 15-year-old boy walked most of the way - in the middle of winter -
in order to escape "residential treatment" and return to his mother.

SECOND OF TWO PARTS

Read the full story from the Spokane alternative weekly Inlander here.

In a previous post to this blog, I wrote about how Washington State’s practice of stashing away foster children in out-of-state institutions, including one where alleged verbal and physical abuse of the residents was exposed in a comprehensive report not by a big news organization but by an advocacy group, Disability Rights Washington.

But one reporter, Wilson Criscione of the Spokane-area alternative weekly Inlander, has done outstanding reporting on this issue; journalism that puts its larger counterparts to shame.  In fact, DRW first found out about Washington State’s out-of-sight-out-of-mind-we-don’t-care-we-don’t-have-to approach to these children thanks to a 2017 story by Criscione exposing problems at an in-state institution, the Excelsior Youth Center.

(And if you think “we-don’t-care-we-don’t-have-to” is a little harsh, check out the full DRW report, including the story of the Washington State caseworker who responded to an institutionalized out-of-state child’s plea to talk to him or her on the phone by replying: “my work phone is not working at the moment.”)

It was probably this paragraph in the Inlander story that prompted DRW to begin asking questions:

For some kids at Excelsior, their behavior only gets worse, and officials take the extreme step of shipping them out of state.

But the Inlander story does much more than reveal the way Washington State throws away foster youth.  It includes the views of those who challenge the entire “master narrative” crafted by the Washington State child welfare agency and the state’s major media: that there are some children for whom residential treatment is the only alternative, and that only children with the most severe problems are institutionalized.

It does all this by telling the story of Timothy Moore, a 15-year-old who escaped being shipped out of state by running away – back to the mother who never should have had to give him up in the first place.  It also tells the larger story of the failure of institutionalization in general and in Washington State in particular.

The story of Tim Moore

Tim Moore was born in Montana. He was  never beaten or tortured or starved by his mother, Lynnette Haines. Haines’ only crime was to, herself, be a victim of severe beatings by a man from whom she could not get away.  No, Montana did not take Tim away because of that.  But apparently no one helped her either. That left her no choice: At the end of 2013, in the hope it would stop him from getting hurt, Haines sent Tim to live with relatives in Washington State. He was 12-years-old.

But Tim says those relatives beat him with spoons, whipped him with barbed wire – and worse. (The relatives deny it.)

After Tim told a school counselor about being abused, Washington State caseworkers could have searched for Tim’s mother and pressed Montana authorities to provide the help she needed to escape an abusive boyfriend (if she had not escaped already).  Instead they put him in a foster home with strangers. 

But they don’t seem to have done much to help Tim, or the foster parents. Inlander reports that Tim was expelled from school “and therefore expelled from the home.”  A placement with an older sister didn’t work out.  But instead of thinking: Let’s provide Wraparound services to Tim and his sister so they can stay together, caseworkers decided that if they just institutionalized him at Excelsior the “more therapeutic setting” might make him well enough to live with his sister again.

At the institution, everything gets worse

But at Excelsior, everything got worse. Tim felt unsafe, and he felt no one cared about him so he started running away. He committed crimes to survive on the streets.  It happened with a lot of residents, Tim told Inlander. “They’re pretty much turning into criminals on the streets, because Excelsior’s not a good place for kids.”

Tim was jailed. When he was released, Excelsior – whose whole reason for being is supposedly to take in the children with the most severe problems – refused to take the 15-year-old back.  In other words, they were engaging in a common industry practice known as “creaming” – as in skimming the cream.  And unlike some states, which have what are called “no reject, no eject” requirements in their contracts with providers, Washington State apparently allows this.

In this case, Excelsior’s exercise in creaming may have been the best thing that ever happened to Tim.  He was told he’d be sent to Iowa – probably to the place exposed in the DRW report. Instead he ran away. He found out his mother was living 160 miles away, in Libby, Montana. 

So he went home. He jumped out of a caseworker’s car and ran away.  He asked strangers for directions.  He hitchhiked part of the way, but mostly he walked, from Spokane, across the Idaho Panhandle, to Montana, in the middle of winter. He told Inlander he didn’t eat or sleep for three days. He drank water from gas station restroom faucets.

Three-and-a-half days later, Criscione writes,

he showed up on the doorstep of his mother's trailer at 3 am, in the rain, with holes in his shoes, blisters on his feet and tears running down his face.

And how did all that work out?  As of April, 2017, when the Inlander story was published:

Tim, now 16, lives about as normal a life as he could ask for with his mom in Montana. She bakes cookies when he gets home from school as his little brother plays with Play-Doh. In school, Haines says he's getting A's and B's, and he even corrected his math teacher in front of the class. He has sleepovers with friends, plays sports, and draws pictures that are hung on the fridge. When his mom hears him curse, she warns him about his language. He rolls his eyes and obeys.

One last attempt at state-sanctioned sabotage

But Washington State made one last attempt to sabotage all this.

Incredibly, the state still wanted to institutionalize Tim in Iowa.  Why? Because Haines had a “history” of “exposing” her children to domestic violence.

Of all the reasons to break up a family, witnessing domestic violence is among the very worst – for the children.  As one expert put it, for a child, tearing her or him from a parent whose only crime is to be a domestic violence victim is “tantamount to pouring salt into an open wound.”  That’s why in one state, New York, it’s illegal, thanks to a class-action lawsuit. (NCCPR’s Vice President was co-counsel for plaintiffs.)

The solution in cases such as Tim’s is to remove the abuser.  No one helped Haines do that – but by the time Tim found his way back to her, she’d done it herself.

So, as Criscone writes:

[Juvenile Court Commissioner] Rachelle Anderson, presiding over the case, had to choose. Either Tim would be placed in Iowa, as the state recommended, or he'd be allowed to stay with his mom, where he was already doing well in school, did everything his mother asked, and had counseling appointments scheduled.

Fortunately she made the right choice.

All of which prompted Tim’s lawyer, Katie Maucione, to ask the obvious question.

"If a kid like Tim needs a … placement like Excelsior to be successful," she told Criscione,  "then how do we explain his successful and sudden streamlining right back into society?"

The failure of residential treatment

In fact, nobody needs a placement like Excelsior to be successful.  On the contrary, the evidence is overwhelming that such placement does no good and often reduces the chances of success.  Tim’s story offers a classic example of the failure of residential treatment – and why the excuses for continuing to use it don’t stand up for scrutiny.

The director of field operations for the Washington State Department of Health and Human Services at the time, Connie Lambert-Eckel told Inlander that “Excelsior is unique because of its location, its history and the nature of its facility in taking some of the most difficult-to-serve kids in the state.” (Lambert-Eckel has since been promoted.)

But Tim wasn’t really “difficult” until after he had experienced Excelsior. And he stopped being “difficult” as soon as he made his way back to his own mother.  And remember, Excelsior had actually kicked Tim out for supposedly being too difficult. 

So what Lambert-Eckel really is saying is: Excelsior is an easy place to dump kids.

And apparently the dumping can start early.  Inlander notes that that “a 10-year-old girl snuck out of Excelsior and was allegedly raped — twice — by a 13-year-old boy.”  Yes, Washington State is institutionalizing ten year olds.

Yet Lambert-Eckel’s only solution is to build more dumping grounds.  The child welfare agency wants more money, so it can pay the institutions even more than the over $90,000 per year per child that they get now. 

In the year since the Inlander story was published, the state legislature rearranged some deck chairs on its child welfare Titanic and created a separate agency for child welfare.

But in response to the DRW report the new agency offered only the same old same old: We want to pay “providers” more money so we can keep on institutionalizing children, but do it all in-state.

And what kind of results does this $90,000+ per year per child produce?

Turning victims into criminals

From the Inlander story:

Michelle Ressa, a Spokane County court commissioner, suggests that group homes are more likely to call police for something that in a family setting would result in, for instance, a child being grounded. "I have seen examples of kids throwing food, and police being called," Ressa says. "I don't think that would happen with Mom and Dad. … "I haven't seen that what's happening at Excelsior is working for the majority of kids," Ressa says.

It’s not just Excelsior:

Local public defenders who represent these kids say they consistently notice their client's criminal history starting or getting worse once placed in a group home. Mike Elston, a Spokane County public defender, says he has four clients who are group home residents, and together, 90 percent of their pending charges come from incidents against the group home or its employees. For those clients, about half of their criminal history prior to those charges came from group homes.

And it’s not just Washington State.  Karen de Sa of the San Francisco Chronicle found the same thing happening at “shelters” in California.

In the Inlander story, one a public defender cut to the heart of the matter:

Brooke Foley, a Spokane County public defender representing juveniles, says the problem is that kids are put in these group homes, especially Excelsior, in the first place. "I think it's borderline negligence for the state to put them there, when they know this is happening," Foley says.

And how does the director of Excelsior explain the dismal results? It’s all the fault of the kids – or their parents – or maybe their foster parents; anyone but us.  As he explained to Inlander:

Whether or not it happens when they lived with you, or they lived with me, doesn't make you or me the reason they're making negative behavior choices Their choices are a result, again, from their disabilities. Their choices, again, are from their abuse and neglect histories. Their choices, again, are from the learned environment, which was not what we would call orthodox.

But even if that were true, the reason the state is paying places like Excelsior more than $90,000 per year per child is so they’ll actually fix those problems.

Or as Michelle Ressa told Inlander:

Until you can show me that those sorts of institutions work, why would we build another one?

Washington State threw away foster children in an out-of-state institution where, one youth says, you can be punished for trying to wipe away a tear

Clarinda Academy in Iowa, where, according to Disability Rights
Washington, Washington State foster children were verbally and
physically abused.  The big newspapers in both states never noticed.
(Photo from Disability Rights Washington) 

FIRST OF TWO PARTS (Read Part Two here)

KEY POINTS

● It went on for years while major media in two states were asleep.  It took an alt-weekly in Spokane and an advocacy group to raise the alarm.

● The advocacy group found that Washington State caseworkers knew what was happening – and did nothing.  One refused to even call a child pleading to talk because “my work phone is not working at the moment.”

● They found that Washington State may be violating state law, at least two federal laws, and the United States Constitution.

● The state’s child welfare agency’s clueless response: Spend more to stash children in in-state institutions.

Here’s what Washington State considers the best way to “treat” children who have been taken from their parents and are said to have behavior problems.

● Ship them more than a thousand miles from home.

● Isolate them in an institution run like a prison.

● Subject them to verbal and physical abuse.

Almost as bad as what Washington State has been doing to these children is the state’s response when the abuses were exposed: We’ll stop institutionalizing the children out-of-state – by spending more money to entice “providers” to institutionalize them in-state!

The state’s child protective services agency – and almost all of the media who finally caught up with the story -  missed the point: The problem isn’t that one particular out-of-state institution is abusive – the problem is that institutionalization is inherently abusive – and unnecessary.

The evidence is overwhelming that residential treatment is a failure  (You can read all about that evidence here).  The claims that there are some children for whom nothing else works don’t hold up to scrutiny.  On the contrary, residential treatment “works” only for child welfare agencies – they can stash the children out-of-sight and out-of-mind.

Indeed, through an unusual chain of events, the exposure of what was being done to children at an out-of-state institution has its roots in a newspaper expose of failings at a similar institution right in Washington State.  But that expose didn’t come from one of the big players in Washington State journalism – it came from Inlander, a Spokane-area alternative weekly, and reporter Wilson Criscione.

What really works

What actually works for children is Wrapraround – which brings all the help a child needs directly into the child’s own home or a foster home.  This video provides an example of how it works:

But of course, all this was lost on Washington State media – except for Inlander. Instead, Washington State media accepted the state’s promises at face value and blamed the shipping of Washington State foster youth all over the country on what one online news site called “Washington’s long-festering and desperate shortage of foster homes and group homes for youth with behavioral and mental health challenges.”

Wow. Long-festering and desperate.

But that is bull.  Like so many other states, Washington State doesn’t have too few foster parents, Washington State has too many foster children.

While not as bad as, say, neighboring Oregon, Washington State still takes away children at a rate 17 percent above the national average. The rate of removal in Washington State is more than 60 percent above states that are, relatively speaking, national models for keeping children safe by emphasizing safe, proven alternatives to tearing apart families in the first place.

How we know about the abuses

The reason we know about what is being done to children shipped to that jail-like institution has nothing to do with media in Washington State (again except for Inlander as I’ll explain in part two of this post).

The story was not “broken” by any big media organization in Washington State.  And it was not broken by any news organization in Iowa, even though the institution where all these abuses took place – Clarinda Academy - is in Iowa.  Indeed, in Iowa, coverage of this prison-like facility for children who often have committed no crime appears to have been confined largely to reporting the scores of games played by Clarinda’s sports teams.  (And no, the collapse of the newspaper industry is no excuse. That started around 2006. Clarinda opened in 1992.)

So we found out what Washington State has been doing to these children thanks to an advocacy group, Disability Rights Washington (DRW).  Federal law requires states to designate agencies such as DRW to serve as watchdogs for people with disabilities. And they got interested thanks to a story in Inlander.

After DRW did the actdual reporting, Washington State’s largest newspaper, The Seattle Times was reduced to writing a story based entirely on DRW’s findings.  And Iowa’s largest newspaper, the Des Moines Register, was reduced to reprinting the Seattle Times story. [UPDATE, November 27, 2018: The Register has now caught up, though the story is fairly thin, with none of the power of DRWs report.]

It was DRW that actually sent investigators to Iowa to find out what was happening to the Washington State children at Clarinda Academy, part of a for-profit chain called Sequel. Among the findings in their comprehensive report:

● Youths were lured into “voluntarily” going to Clarinda by false claims about the place. One foster youth who loves music was told there was a choir – and a swimming pool.  But there was no pool.  And there was no choir. In fact, she wound up in a dorm where young people were not even allowed to sing.

● The no-singing rule is one example of the prison-like rigidity to every aspect of daily life.  Others include having to move from place to place lined up single file, being barred from talking to the opposite gender, almost never being allowed off the facility grounds and severe restrictions on phone calls to friends and families.  Some dorms add on restrictions such as no leaning on walls, no talking during meals, no walking on grass, and no going to the bathroom without permission.

● There is a coercive, almost Orwellian system of exploiting peer pressure to keep the young people in line, complete with “hundreds, if not thousands” of unwritten “norms” the youth have to follow.  (Clarinda officials told DRW their system was modeled on an institution in Pennsylvania, Glen Mills. But even DRW may not know that Glen Mills itself has been the subject of controversy over its discipline practices).

● When peer pressure wasn’t enough, DRW found that Clarinda misused and overused painful physical “restraints”  DRW reports that every student they spoke to “reported that restraints they experienced were physically painful and frequently resulted in back, shoulder, and neck pain for several days or weeks.” 

Restraints were used at Clarinda when residents dared to move or clench their hands during a verbal intervention.  Restraints were used on a student because the student scratched his or her leg.  At Clarinda, one foster youth told Inlander, you can even endure physical restraint if you “raise your hand to wipe a tear.”

● One reason Clarinda could do this is that Iowa’s laws limiting the use of restraints on children are far more lax than those in Washington State. (Perhaps Iowa media should find out why that’s the case.)  Clarinda residents repeatedly described methods of restraint that are illegal in Washington State but perfectly o.k. in Iowa. 

From the Disability Rights Washington report on Clarinda Academy

● To the extent that there may be a problem with past criminal behavior, the problem may rest more with the staff than the residents.  According to DRW “over a third of the twenty-six staff who had participated in restraining Washington youth had convictions for criminal driving offenses or illegal use of alcohol and controlled substances.”

The report also found that the Washington State caseworkers for these Washington State children knew about it – and apparently took no action. 

No Washington State child at Clarinda was visited by her or his Washington State caseworker.  They contract with Iowa workers instead.  According to the DRW report:

Despite numerous statements that Clarinda Academy uses restraints “all the time” as a “consequence” for breaking the rules, “to be on safe side,” or even “for no reason,” Children’s Administration case notes do not document any follow up by Washington social workers to talk with or visit the youth who had reported abusive restraints. DRW found no other evidence that reports by contracted social workers resulted in any action by Washington State to determine whether Clarinda Academy improperly uses restraints in violation of Washington’s own standards …

(Now that the DRW report is public, the state child welfare agency finally is making such visits.)

One telling example of caseworker callousness: When a Washington State caseworker was specifically asked in an email to please call a Clarinda student who  “is having a hard time with restraints and wants to talk about it” the worker replied: “Unfotunately, my work phone is not working at the moment.”

DRW summed it all up this way:

The documentation DRW obtained demonstrates that Washington and Clarinda Academy are both failing to protect against the use of restraints for coercion or punishment for not following expectations. The Academy’s vague policy, generic crisis plans, inconsistent training, and tolerance for various staff misconduct - including tolerance for inappropriate restraints - create a fertile breeding ground for improper practices that would violate both Iowa and Washington rules. 

Making trauma worse

An expert who reviewed the records for DRW, Dr. Gauri Goel, found that being warehoused at Clarinda may have worsened whatever problems the youths had to begin with.  Their treatment at Clarinda “can be potentially harmful to the child over time … the treatment they are receiving is likely to be ineffective and potentially counterproductive in attending to their trauma-related needs.”

The problems are further compounded by being sent so far from home.  “They are being distanced from those who may be able to provide them with a sense of safety and security both within the here-and-now and as potential future caretakers,” Dr. Goel said.

DRW argues that what Washington State does to these children may violate Washington State law, at least two federal laws, the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and the U.S. Constitution.

Now that DRW has exposed what should have been exposed by big news organizations,  Washington State has offered up a depressingly predictable response.

Now, suddenly the agency realizes it really should send caseworkers to meet with the children it’s essentially thrown away out of state.  They’re promising to get all the children “into other situations” by the end of January.

But “other” doesn’t necessarily mean better.  Remember that foster youth who was lured to Clarinda by false promises of a pool and a choir? She’s still institutionalized, but now she’s even farther away in South Carolina.  Perhaps saddest of all, she’s been persuaded that somehow this was her fault and she has to plead with the very people who did this to her.  So, Inlander reports,

"They think I'm going to go back and be a monster in Washington," she says. "All I struggled with was self-harm."

She says she's overcome that and is not letting that define her anymore. She says all she wants to do is graduate school, go to college and help homeless people. She herself wants to be home.

"I want to be there. I can't spend another Christmas Day at placement," she says. "I just can't."

But blaming the victims is Washington State’s entire rationale. 

So the state says the children placed out of state usually have “complex behavioral health challenges that require 24-hour care not feasible in individual foster homes or have other challenging therapeutic needs.”

Again, that’s 100 percent Grade A bull----.  When these children really need to be out of their own homes, family foster homes can work – provided the foster parents are given the intensive help they need – 24 hours a day if necessary.  That’s how Wraparound works.

And if you get the children who don’t need to be in foster care back into their own homes, there will be plenty of room in good, safe foster homes for the children who really need to be taken away, provided the state gives the foster parents the intensive support they may need.

But instead of bolstering Wraparound the state proposes to increase pay rates to get more providers to be willing to institutionalize children in Washington State.  (They already pay more than $90,000 per year per child.)

But institutions do not become magically better because they’re in Washington State.  Granted, the rules on restraints are better than those in Iowa, but given how lackadaisical the child welfare agency seems to be, it’s hard to believe much is done to enforce even that. And better rules on restraints doesn’t alter the fact that residential treatment doesn’t work and often does harm.

Indeed, the entire chain of events leading to DRW’s expose actually began with a cover story in Inlander – and much of that story focused on serious problems at a residential treatment center right in Washington State.

That story in part two.