In Iowa, one more family finds out what it’s like to be on the wrong end of family policing

 

In Iowa the family police agency has grown since it used this logo.
Now it's the Department of Health and Human Services

“It really does change your whole perspective when a government body can accuse you of something you haven’t done, and they can remove your children.” -- Emily Donlin                                                               

Impoverished parents, especially impoverished Black and Native American parents already have that perspective.  For them, intervention by the family police is, literally, the norm.  

But Emily and Michael Donlin of Monroe County, Iowa, have discovered that it can happen to white middle-class parents like themselves, too.  Because here’s the deal with the family police: Anything that makes you different from some kind of stereotypical 1950s “norm” for a parent makes you a suspect.  

For the Donlins, their nightmare at the hands of the family police, known in Iowa as the Department of Health and Human Services, consisted of eight months of hypersurveillance and an attempt to take away their young children.  It may well have begun because their second child was born just a little too soon – and definitely in the wrong state. 

As the Des Moines Register explains, the baby was born healthy, but so quickly there wasn’t time to get to a hospital first.  In addition, Emily takes a “holistic approach” to her family’s health that includes “declining certain medical interventions during her pregnancies and declining to vaccinate her sons.” Emily says that same same holistic approach prompts her to avoid any drugs of any kind. She says she doesn’t even take ibuprofen for headaches. 

It all happened in Iowa, among the states most fanatical about tearing apart families.  Their rate of child removal is the 12^th highest in America – more than 80% above the national average.  Of course, it’s even worse if you’re Black or Native American.  In Iowa, those children are taken at rates more than double their rates in the state child population. 

All this explains why those other decisions concerning medical care, and the unintended home birth may well have triggered a “risk assessment,” based on secret criteria, which led the hospital to test the blood in the baby’s umbilical cord for drugs.  State guidelines say hospitals are not supposed to test mothers without their consent, but they can go right ahead and do it to the babies, making the guidelines effectively meaningless. 

The test came back positive for cocaine.  The test could have been a false positive. It could have been switched with another sample by mistake.  But based on that one test and nothing else the hospital reported the parents as child abusers.  And based on that test one and nothing else – no investigation, not so much as a word to the family or anyone they knew -- Iowa family police declared the allegation “founded.” 

The Donlins asked the hospital to retest the sample.  The hospital refused.  Once the case was “founded” Emily was ordered to take one additional drug test after another; seven in all.  All came back negative.  None of it mattered. 

After six months of this surveillance and orders to jump through hoop after hoop, the Donlins had had enough. They dared to stop cooperating with Iowa’s family police.  The family police retaliated – against the children; the infant and his two-year-old brother.  They hauled the family into court and threatened to throw the children into foster care. 

Remember, for six months after the allegation was “founded,” the family was living safely together. 
The only thing that had changed was their decision to stop saying "How high?" when the family police said “Jump.” (Even this is better than what likely would have happened to a Black or Native American family.  Given Iowa’s track record, odds are a child in such a family under identical circumstances  wouldn’t have been allowed to go home with his parents right from the start.)

The children caught a break: The case was so weak even the “guardian ad litem” assigned to advocate for children’s “best interests” thought the family police should just leave the Donlins alone.  A judge agreed. 

But they’re still “guilty” 

But in the eyes of the family police, they’re still guilty.  So Emily Donlin remains on Iowa’s central registry of supposed child abusers.  As in almost every state, Iowa caseworkers can do that entirely on their own, there’s no hearing beforehand.  The family police put you there and, if you’re lucky, you may be able to fight your way out again someday.  That’s difficult under any circumstances, even more so if you can’t afford a lawyer. 

Family police apologists offered all the usual excuses – including the Orwellian claim that random nonconsensual drug testing is just a way to help families like the Donlins.  The medical director of another Des Moines hospital explained how this kind of testing 

“gives a great layer of support to the mother, and it also gives a great layer of support to the baby when they’re born.” 

Because nothing makes a child more supported than bringing the enormous stress of a family police investigation down on his parents, right?  For some reason, the Donlins see it differently: 

As Michael Donlin told the Register: 

“The sad part is that these doctors don’t realize that even if the kids aren’t taken away, even if the parents are innocent, how it can mess up an entire family.  They have no understanding of what it does when somebody comes to your door unannounced with the threat of taking away your kids.”

Said Emily: 

“It changes your whole worldview because you believe you can trust these parties. We trusted that they were going to do what’s right, and that they would see what’s actually going on and that we’re not doing drugs.  But we quickly realized that we actually can’t trust them.” 

And, of course, the family police apologists invoked the Big Lie of American child welfare – the false claim that inflicting this kind of trauma on families is part of a “balancing act between supporting families who might be struggling while ensuring the safety of children.” 

But the Donlins weren’t “struggling” until the family police intervened.  And when families really are struggling, they need a family police investigation about as much as a young Black man needs to be repeatedly stopped and frisked on the street. 

How the family police hurt everyone 

Now, consider how the family policing mindset hurt everyone in this case. 

● The family was put under enormous needless stress – that can’t be good for the children. 

● Even had the drug test been valid, as family advocate Joyce McMillan says: “a drug test is not a parenting test.”  In fact, a major study found that even when children really are born with cocaine in their systems, such children still do better in their own homes than when placed in foster care. 

● How might a family like this handle medical care during a future pregnancy?  Will they be comfortable knowing that everyone they turn to for prenatal care is a “mandatory reporter” of suspected child abuse – and if one of those mandatory reporters turns them in, the family police will already see that a parent is on the state’s central registry?  If the birth happens to take place at home, will they be willing to go to a hospital at all?  

We know the answers: Mandatory reporting laws and nonconsensual drug testing drive families away from medical care.  That is the real danger to children. 

As for ensuring the safety of children: In addition to the enormous emotional trauma, foster care is simply not safe.  One independent study after another finds abuse in one-quarter to one-third of family foster homes, and the rate of abuse in group homes and institutions is even worse.  In Iowa, the dismal state of the system and its rush to needlessly investigate families were documented by the state’s own consultants. 

● Even that is not the end of it: All the time money and effort wasted surveilling this family and others like it, making them jump through hoops and hauling them into court was, in effect, stolen from finding some other child we may never know who is in real danger.  So Iowa’s approach in this case, and so many others, makes all children less safe. 

In this case, if not for an unusually wise recommendation from one guardian ad litem, two very young children would have been taken from a safe home only to be put at serious risk of abuse in Iowa’s dismal system of foster care.

Some good, bad and ugly in new federal “child welfare” data

The federal government has released state-by-state data for the number of children taken from their parents in FFY 2021 (yes, they always run about a year late).  And NCCPR has updated our rate-of-removal index. 

The big national takeaway is that these data – once again – refute the racist myth about COVID-19 and “child welfare.”  You remember, right?  All those dire predictions that when overwhelmingly middle-class, disproportionately white “mandated reporters” no longer had their  “eyes” constantly on children who are neither, those children’s parents would unleash upon them a “pandemic of child abuse.”  

Notwithstanding research showing that didn’t happen, the myth morphed in 2021 into this: As soon as schools reopened and overwhelmingly middle-class, disproportionately white “mandated reporters” once again had their “eyes” constantly on children who are neither, a vast amount of hidden child abuse would be revealed and entries into foster care would surge. 

The new data provide even more evidence that this didn’t happen.  Nationwide, entries into foster care declined by five percent.  That’s because, of course, there was no hidden pandemic of child abuse; on the contrary, government cash assistance and mutual aid efforts reduced poverty so there was less poverty to confuse with neglect. 

Some outliers 

But some states, notably states that always have been fanatical about tearing apart families, didn’t get the message. 

Missouri.  This is a state where the head of the family policing agency, known as the Children’s Division, effectively admitted massively violating federal law by failing to make “reasonable efforts” to keep families together.  The failure shows.  The number of children torn from their parents in Missouri increased by five percent.  In 2021 Missouri tore apart families at nearly double the national average and the 10th highest rate in the country – even when rates of child poverty are factored in. 

Kansas.  Even Missouri looks good compared to Kansas.  In Kansas, entries into foster care also increased by five percent – but Kansas was worse than Missouri to begin with.  Kansas tears apart families at the seventh highest rate in America, more than double the national average.  And that may be an underestimate, because of how that state uses a loophole in federal reporting requirements (or simply violates those requirements) to avoid reporting many short-term placements. 

Iowa. This state shows what happens when those masters of “health terrorism” at Prevent Child Abuse America dominate the debate.  PCAA’s Iowa chapter has been the “Godsource” for journalists in that state for decades.  (You can read about Prevent Child Abuse Iowa’s recent behavior in NCCPR’s publication on reputation laundering in “child welfare.”) So it’s no wonder Iowa tears apart families at a rate nearly as high as Missouri – and the number of children torn from their families soared by 11%. 

And, by the way, all three states have records of racial disparity as bad or worse than the national average.  

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.

Another major failure of Iowa foster care

Among the many tragedies that await many children once they are torn from everyone they know and love and forced into foster care is the prospect of being needlessly doped up on potent, sometimes dangerous psychiatric medications.

It is a frequent topic of newspaper exposes, including this one from reporter Karen de Sa when she was at the San Jose Mercury News.  Indeed, when the Trump Administration started tearing apart families at the Mexican border, it was among the first of many abuses to be exposed.

That’s because it’s inevitable.  Most of the people who control these children’s lives have no real stake in them. Many are well meaning and genuinely want to help the children. But they don’t love those children.  So it’s a lot easier to deal with their trauma by rushing to the prescription pad.

It should be no surprise that one of the states that is most callous in its use of foster care to destroy families now is revealed as among those most likely to misuse and overuse psychiatric medication on the children they tear from their homes.

And it should be no surprise that this same state does a horrible job of policing how it dispenses these meds.

That state is Iowa.

Iowa has a long ugly history of child welfare failure. Year after year Iowa is one of the states most likely to resort to a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare. 

And now, a report from the Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General shows that Iowa is among the five states most likely to use psychiatric medication on foster children.

Using a random sample of cases involving children in foster care during the six months ending March 31, 2015, the report examined the five states at the top of this dismal list. It looked at how their regulations for dispensing these medications compared with national model standards and how each state complied with its own regulations.

The other states examined are Maine, New Hampshire, North Dakota and Virginia.

The report found that none of the states has controls on the use of these medications that meets national model standards.  And none of the states does well at living up to the minimal standards it does have.

But the Iowa results are particularly dismal.  Among them:

● In 72 percent of the cases examined, there was nothing in the case file to indicate the caseworker had documented whether the medication was meeting the child’s needs.

● In 83 percent of the cases examined, there was no evidence that caseworkers even asked the foster parents if the medications were working.

● In 84 percent there was no documentation of why the child was being medicated (which may help explain the other two findings).

The report suggests various bureaucratic solutions – all of which miss the point.  As the report itself pointed out:

Unlike children from intact families children in foster care often do not have a consistent interested party to coordinate treatment planning or to provide continuous oversight of their mental health treatment.

That’s bureaucratese for: Foster children don’t have someone who loves them watching out for them – because often, those are the very people from whom they’ve been taken.

This is a lesson we should have learned by now from Florida which, when the late George Sheldon was running the child welfare agency, was particularly aggressive in trying to reduce the overuse of meds. As they dove deep into the data they found something fascinating: When children were placed in kinship foster care, that is, with their own relatives, they were far less likely to be placed on psychiatric meds than they were when placed with strangers or in institutions.

Drugging is one more way foster care endangers large numbers of children it is intended to help – and it is one more example of why the only way to “fix” foster care is to have less of it – especially in states like Iowa.

Alabama child welfare reforms hold lessons for everyone - but especially, at the moment, Oregon, Iowa and Indiana

The Arizona Daily Star is in the middle of publishing the results from a year-long investigation into how to fix the child welfare system in that state.  As I’ve noted before, the answers are relevant to every state.  Right at the moment, the answers may be especially relevant for three states (besides Arizona, of course): Oregon, Iowa, and Indiana.

For part two in the series, the Star spent a lot of time on the reforms that have turned one of the last   

places most people might expect - Alabama - into, relatively speaking, a national model. (See especially the first three stories.)

The Star isn’t the first newspaper outside Alabama to take a close look at the Alabama reforms.  The first that I know of was the Springfield (Missouri) News-Leader. They did outstanding work in 2003 – but, unfortunately, like most Gannett papers, when they switched to a common website format they lost or hid their older stories so they’re no longer available online.

But a New York Times examination of those reforms is still available.

Now the Star stories bring things up to date.

It started with a lawsuit

The reforms began with a lawsuit brought by the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law and the Alabama Disabilities Advocacy Program.  (The Bazelon Center’s Legal Director, Ira Burnim, also is a member of NCCPR’s volunteer Board of Directors.)  The Star stories show that, even though the system is no longer under court supervision, and though there has been some backsliding, the reforms remain in place. And, precisely because Alabama is a leader in family preservation, it’s also a leader in keeping children safe.

The stories are especially relevant to Oregon, Indiana and Iowa for several reasons:

● Oregon has been an extreme outlier for decades when it comes to taking away children. Iowa is a more extreme outlier. Indiana is an even more extreme outlier.

● Oregon remains deep in denial about the harm that does to children. Iowa is in even deeper denial. Indiana remains to be seen.

Perhaps most important for Indiana and Iowa:

● The Alabama lawsuit actually was welcomed by the leader of that state’s child welfare agency at the time, Paul Vincent. Vincent’s leadership was crucial to getting the reform effort underway and keeping it on the right track.  He’s got one of the best track records in the field.

Now Vincent runs the Child Welfare Policy and Practice Group, which helps other states and localities fix their child welfare systems. Two of the states CWG is working with right now are Iowa and Indiana.  They’ve already had some things to say about Iowa - and it's high rate of taking away children.  And they’ve already zeroed in on Indiana’s high rate of removal as one of the key “challenges” facing the system there.

Perhaps most important for Oregon:

● Oregon was, at one point, the state most likely to follow Alabama’s lead.  A lawsuit settlement in the 1990s called on Oregon to institute similar reforms. But unlike the Alabama suit, there was no real enforcement mechanism, no independent court-appointed monitor. And, unlike in Alabama, the child welfare agency in Oregon was not receptive to change.

As usual, the Oregon Department of Human Services proved to be the place where child welfare reform goes to die.  (Another NCCPR Board Member, clinical Psychologist Marty Beyer, who worked on the Alabama effort also was involved in the attempt to fix child welfare in Oregon. She discusses it in the epilogue to this story from the Salem Statesman Journal and Oregon Public Broadcasting.)

Spending smarter beats just spending more

The Alabama reforms also teach us something else. You can’t fix a child welfare system just by throwing money – or caseworkers – at it.

Yes, as a result of the lawsuit, Alabama spent more – but it also spent smarter.  Here’s how the Star explains it:

Child welfare leaders spread the word, through community meetings, that the state was shifting contracting dollars away from expensive services like group homes and residential treatment centers, in favor of less costly and more effective programs like therapeutic foster care and in-home services. 

         Providers had a choice: Evolve or risk going out of business.

In other words, while the Indiana child welfare agency was cozying up to private providers, Alabama was standing up to them.

As of 2014, the most recent year for which data are available, Alabama was spending on child welfare at one of the lowest rates in the country, while Oregon, Indiana and Iowa all were  spending at among the highest.

That doesn’t mean the answer is to cut spending. On the contrary, Alabama is good, compared to most of the rest of the country, but it could be better if it were willing to spend more.  But at least Alabama spends smart.

Oregon, Indiana and Iowa spend dumb, throwing away money on needless foster care and institutionalization – “services” that are both worse for children and more expensive than safe, proven alternatives to foster care.

As I’ve said many times before, I’m a tax-and-spend liberal and proud of it. But anyone who says the answer to these states’ child welfare problems is just to spend more is ignoring reality.

Instead, let’s imagine for a moment what kind of child welfare system you would get if you combined the amount that Oregon or Indiana or Iowa spends with Alabama’s priorities for how to spend it.

You’d probably get the best child welfare system in America.

A devastating report on Iowa child welfare – from the state’s own consultants

Reports issued by consultants tend to be diplomatic documents. One has to use genteel language when criticizing the people who hired you in the first place.

Nevertheless, there’s no mistaking the message from a recent report by the highly respected Child Welfare Policy and Practice Group concerning child welfare in Iowa.  The report found that recent policy changes made by the state Department of Human Services in the wake of high-profile tragedies have made things worse.

And things weren’t good to begin with.

Iowa has long been an extreme outlier, tearing apart families at one of the highest rates in America.  Then, over a little more than a year, four high-profile cases of vicious, sometimes fatal abuse of children “known to the system” made headlines.

Given that, in every one of these cases, the alleged perpetrators were foster parents who had adopted the children they allegedly abused, one might think this might finally lead to reforms aimed at curbing needless removal.

But that underestimates the capacity of child welfare systems – and often, sadly, the press and the public -- for double standards.  Had there been four separate cases of horrific abuse by birth parents making the front page of newspapers in a relatively small state day after day we all know that everyone would be scapegoating efforts to keep families together and demanding that we take away more children.

Yet even in the wake of what newspapers would normally call a “spate” of child abuse tragedies involving foster and adoptive parents, there is no media outcry demanding that Iowa curb its obscene rate of tearing apart families.  (In fact, I don’t think policy in either direction should be based on horror stories – Iowa should curb its obscene rate of removal not because of horror stories, but because of the data on how harmful such removal is to children.)

DHS moves full-speed backwards

But DHS has done nothing to curb needless removal. On the contrary, even though the abuse occurred in foster care, DHS has made changes that actually increase the likelihood that even more children will be funneled into the very system where these children were tortured.

Sadly that is not unusual. As I first noted long ago, foster-care panics – huge spikes in removals of children from their homes in the wake of horror stories – almost never work in reverse.

So, the consultants tell us, Iowa curbed screening of reports alleging child abuse and neglect.  The proportion accepted for investigation soared from 50 percent to 65 percent.  And of the reports accepted, the proportion diverted to a more family friendly approach known as “differential response” was reduced.  That happened even though 25 separate studies have found that differential response is safe – and the Child Welfare Group found that Iowa’s differential response program “was working as intended and that outcomes overall were positive.”

Again the response is unsurprising. When the first of the horror story cases made headlines, supporters of Iowa’s take-the-child-and-run approach rushed to scapegoat differential response  -even though there was no evidence that the case in question ever involved the use of differential response.

The result of all this is a 43 percent increase in the number of families subjected to a child abuse investigation in Iowa.

Here’s what the consultants have to say about it:

These policy measures, the broadening of intake and the lowering of screen‐out rates, are familiar; they follow a pattern often taken by states in the wake of child fatalities or other high profile cases in well intentioned attempts to ensure children’s safety. They have, however, in the reviewers’ experience, seldom if ever had the intended effect. Such actions can, in fact, serve to place more children at risk by adding to workload requirements that are frequently already overwhelming and broadening the scope of intervention far beyond the expertise or experience of child welfare personnel.  

One fact that is frequently lost in child welfare reform efforts is that child protection intervention can, if too broadly targeted or poorly executed, cause great harm, inflicting trauma on children and families that has far worse effects than the maltreatment it is intended to prevent in all except the minority of particularly egregious incidents.

Other key findings

That was only the beginning. As I read the report, a theme emerging over and over is that almost everything that exists to help families and children on paper in Iowa doesn’t function that way in real life.

● On paper, Iowa embraces the concept of family team meetings, in which everyone important in a child’s life gets together to work out a plan to keep the child safe. In practice, extended family, friends and others often are left out, and the agency presents a “cookie cutter” service plan instead of something geared to what the family really needs. In other words, DHS does exactly what DHS would have done had there been no family team meeting.

● Although people interviewed by the consultants claimed that a wide array of services are available to families, as I read the consultants’ report, the services appear to be skewed heavily toward providing the kinds of help that make the helpers feel good – endless “counseling” and “parent education” instead of the help families need, which often involves concrete help with things like housing, child care and other supports to ameliorate the worst effects of poverty.

Indeed some of those consulted by the consultants said that the workers who are supposed to support families actually do little more than monitor them. Others said the people who do these jobs are not well-qualified to do much else.

● DHS misuses and overuses the worst form of “care” – parking children in shelters.  One youth told the consultants: “No healing takes place in shelter care.”

●Foster parent complaints included “disrespectful treatment when, as often happens, they are subjects of unwarranted maltreatment reports.” In fact, the overwhelming majority of all maltreatment reports are unwarranted, regardless of who is accused. But I highlight this common complaint here because, just once, I’d like to hear an Iowa foster parent say: “The agency really needs us. If this is how they treat us, imagine how they treat the birth parents!”

● Both parents and children rarely saw their own lawyers at any time except at court hearings. The consultants were too polite to say that that means, so I will: It means neither parents nor children typically get anything approaching adequate legal representation.  It means everyone has to rely on DHS’ version of the facts. And that means DHS almost always gets whatever it wants.

● The lawyers don’t seem to be the only ones who are out of touch.  Consider one of the report’s top priority recommendations:

Review requirements for having face‐to‐face contacts with parents and other caregivers and for coordination between case managers and [caseworkers who work with families] to ensure that there is appropriate emphasis on having immediate, frequent, and purposeful contacts with parents, particularly parents of children in out of home care, to develop and implement a plan to achieve reunification or other timely permanency outside of foster care. Strongly consider requiring regular face‐to‐face contact with parents in their places of residence.  [Emphasis added.]

Now, let’s stop and think about that last sentence for a moment. 

What kind of child welfare agency is so backwards, so utterly out-of-touch with best practice - or even minimally adequate practice - that it needs outside consultants to tell it that workers who work with families actually ought to make regular face-to-face contact with those families in their own homes?

The one that has been destroying the lives of children in Iowa for decades.

NCCPR in Youth Today: Abuse in foster care: Research vs. the child welfare system's alternative facts

Suppose, hypothetically, you could gather in one room 333 former foster children. Now, suppose you asked how many of them had been abused while in foster care. Does anyone seriously believe that only one of those 333 former foster children would raise her or his hand?

Both common sense and an overwhelming mass of evidence says: Of course not.

But, apparently, Wendy Rickman wants us to believe it. That’s frightening, because Rickman is a high-ranking official in a state child welfare agency. She runs the division of adult, children and family services for the Iowa Department of Human Services (DHS).

Read the full column in Youth Today

Four years trapped in foster care – because Iowa DHS didn’t like Mom’s housing (and other horrors of Iowa child welfare)

Nothing better sums up the state of Iowa child welfare than one sentence buried amid the 2,500 words of a Des Moines Register story Sunday:  A child is trapped in foster care for four years because her mother “only had an efficiency apartment.”

In a classic example of the vicious, lets-bash-those-“bad-parents”-no-matter-how-much-we-hurt-kids-in-the-process mentality that permeates the Iowa system, the state Department of Human Services punished a child for four years because Mom couldn’t afford a one-bedroom apartment.

And it’s hard to imagine anything that better explains the fact that Iowa actually spends a lot on child welfare, but gets horrific results than the fact that helping Mom pay for that one bedroom apartment would have cost vastly less than four years of foster care.

Sadly, this is not unusual.  Nationwide, 30 percent of America’s foster children could be home right now if their parents had adequate housing. In Iowa, which takes away children at one of the highest rates in the nation, the proportion almost certainly is even higher.

Reading between the lines

There are other messages between the lines in the Register story, almost all of them dismal.

● Iowa is almost certainly in the midst of a foster-care panic, a sharp, sudden surge in children torn needlessly from everyone they know and love.  That often happens when child abuse deaths are in the news, as they are now in Iowa. The fact that, in this case, the children who died were children who had been adopted by their foster parents doesn’t matter. 

According to the tortured logic of Iowa DHS, when two children placed in foster care die in their adoptive homes (and a third suffers horrific abuse before escaping) the solution is to place more children in foster care.

● The Register story implies that the panic is inevitable – after all, more people are reporting alleged abuse and “more children are being found to be abused” so it stands to reason there are more children who need to be taken, right?

Wrong.

For starters, this leaves out the fact that, even before any current panic, Iowa has been tearing apart families at a vastly higher rate than most of the nation (more on that below). But also, when high-profile cases are in the news, and anyone and everyone is being urged to report anything and everything, what you get is a massive increase in false reports, usually by well-meaning people who suddenly decide that, say, a neighbor’s behavior just might be suspicious.

Child welfare agencies with strong leadership don’t give in to this.

That’s the lesson from Pennsylvania, where individual counties run child welfare.

When that state experienced a similar surge in reports after the sex abuse scandal involving Jerry Sandusky (who, by the way, was a foster parent), the system in Philadelphia (the Iowa of big cities – it’s long taken children at a rate far above the rate in most major metropolitan areas) did indeed see an increase in removals.  But Pittsburgh and surrounding Allegheny County did not – because the reformer who has run that system for decades understood that most of the new reports were false – and he refused to tolerate a foster-care panic.

Iowa is an extreme outlier

● Foster-care panics cause enormous harm to children in any state.  They are worse, of course,  in a state that starts out tearing apart families at one of the highest rates in the nation.  The Register mentioned in passing that Iowa removes children from their homes “at a higher rate than most other states…” but that’s an understatement.  Iowa is an extreme outlier.

● The Register story claims that some groups want to keep more children “found in risky situations” with their parents or relatives. That’s true.  But we don’t just want to do that and go away.  We support safe, proven alternatives that remove the risk instead of the child.

Foster care, on the other hand, with its high rate of abuse and enormous inherent emotional trauma is most definitely a “risky situation.”  In fact, for the overwhelming majority of children the overwhelming majority of the time family preservation is the safer choice. (And, for the record, an efficiency apartment is not a “risky situation” to begin with.)

● The story also implies that the fact that there is far more abuse in foster care than suggested by Iowa’s official statistics is merely the claim of one former foster child.  On the contrary, it’s what we know from one major study after another.

Iowa makes way too much use of “shelters”

● Still another shocking fact about Iowa child welfare emerges from the story – with no apparent recognition of just how shocking it is: the extent to which Iowa relies on what is, by far, the worst option for children, institutionalizing them in “shelters.” 

The San Francisco Chronicle is only the latest in a long line of newspapers to expose the horrors of such places.  But more important, even when there is no actual physical abuse, the very existence of this sort of placement is barbaric – shelters are that harmful to children. That’s why states such as Alabama and New Jersey have sharply – and successfully - restricted their use.  (One small bit of good news: The Alabama child welfare leader who implemented the curbs on shelters and other successful reforms, is Paul Vincent, who’s been hired to assess the situation in Iowa.)

Much the same is true of “residential treatment” – another option that has been found harmful in study after study – and again, there are far better alternatives. Details here. (See especially the All Purpose Foster Care-Industrial Complex Excuse Checklist on Page 3, which has responses to all the nonsense one typically hears from shelter directors.)

● Almost everyone in child welfare pays lip service to “prevention.” You never hear anyone say “boy, if there’s one thing I hate it’s prevention!” But usually, it’s the wrong kind of “prevention.” There’s a very good chance that the mother who lived in that efficiency apartment was forced into “counseling” and “parent education.” That probably made it that much harder for her to search for what she really needed – better housing and the job necessary to afford better housing.

There is a difference between prevention that involves making the helpers feel good and actually providing what families need. There’s more discussion of this here.

● Even worse, the new director of the Iowa Department of Human Services, Jerry Foxhoven, says he won’t even bother trying to get the federal government to change financial incentives that encourage foster care and discourage better alternatives.  In fact, Foxhoven can barely manage even the usual lip service. From the story:

Foxhoven says he does believe in the concept that "it's a lot easier for everybody to buy smoke alarms than fire trucks." But, he added, "you still need fire trucks."

Unfortunately, in child welfare, the “fire trucks” too often are like the kind in the science fiction novel Fahrenheit 451.

Turning adoptive parents into second-class parents

● Democrats in the legislature aren’t helping. They, too, are ignoring the elephant in the room – Iowa’s obscene rate-of-removal, focusing instead on scapegoating foster parents who happen to be homeschoolers and demanding “medical check-ups” for every child in foster care and every child receiving an adoption subsidy.

Of course there already are requirements that foster children get medical check-ups.

When it comes to adoptive families, what the Democrats really want is another chance for  government to spy on families.

The time to make sure an adoptive placement is safe is before it happens.  Something that could be done fairly easily were Iowa not rushing to tear apart families, creasing pressure for quick-and-dirty slipshod adoptive placements.

The whole point of adoption is that the adoptive parent is the child’s parent, period. When you make adoptive parents second-class parents, subject to any form of restriction or oversight that does not apply to every other parent you undermine the emotional security of the children – and providing that kind of security is the whole point of adoption. Otherwise, it’s just another word for foster care.

And why, by the way, should this extra government scrutiny be limited to adoptive parents who get subsidies, as Democrats propose?  Are they presumed to be worse parents than wealthy adoptive parents who don’t need such assistance? Or is it just that receiving a government benefit somehow is supposed to give the government extra leverage to invade family privacy. 

If that’s the case, then please feel free to do this – just as soon as you also pass a law requiring government audits of how we older Americans are spending our Social Security checks.

The bigger danger is in foster care

● And finally, the Register takes pains to point out that most children “known to the system” who are harmed are not foster children who were adopted by their foster parents.  That leaves the false implication that abuse in foster care is extremely rare and it’s birth parents who are the real danger.

But the reason a majority of children “known to the system” who are hurt are hurt in their own homes has nothing to do with comparative danger and everything to do with the immutable laws of mathematics: The majority of Iowa children who are abused are abused in their own homes because, despite the best efforts of the Iowa Department of Human Services, the majority of Iowa children still live in their own homes. Proportionately, there is every indication that foster care is more dangerous – for all sorts of reasons, including foster children abusing each other.

And even were it not so dangerous in terms of abuse and neglect, the trauma of placement itself is so great that two massive studies of more than 15,000 typical cases found that children left in their own homes typically fared better than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care.

None of this means no child ever should be taken from her or his parents.  But it means you’d better be damn sure that the child really is in so much danger at home that foster care is a less harmful alternative. 

For starters, Iowa DHS could stop taking away children when they deem a parent’s apartment too small.