Latest foster care monitor’s report: Up to 2,400 child "casualties" in Michigan’s war against grandparents

REPORT PORTRAYS AN AGENCY IN CHAOS, UNABLE TO DO BASIC MATH, LET ALONE PROTECT CHILDERN

UPDATE: 4:40PM: DEAL AVERTS MOVE FOR RECEIVERSHIP
Not that I'd ever say "I told you so," but that legal two-by-four did indeed get the Gov.-elect's attention, and there won't be a request for a federal takeover after all.


UPDATE, 2:28PM: CR SEEKS RECEIVERSHIP

The Detroit News reports that the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children’s Rights will seek “a federal takeover” of Michigan’s child welfare system, and ask the court to name a “receiver” to run it.

This is the kind of remedy you use for the worst of the worst – like Washington D.C. a decade ago.  Leaving aside the fact that CR actually helped create this mess, there certainly are grounds for a receivership. But this probably is just a political tactic – a legal two-by-four with which to hit the new governor over the head to get his attention.

Throughout this post, the page number in the monitor’s report that discusses the finding is noted in brackets.  The full report is available here.

Anywhere from 1,500 to 2,400 Michigan foster children have been expelled from the homes of loving grandparents and other relatives since the Michigan Department of Human Services signed a disastrous consent decree with the group that so arrogantly calls itself “Children’s Rights” (CR).  That’s one of the revelations in the latest report of the independent monitor overseeing the consent decree [p. 95].

The report is the most damning, most scathing, I have ever read about any jurisdiction.  It shows that an ill-conceived consent decree, doomed to failure from day one, has failed miserably.

The report portrays a system worse than Connecticut, worse than Georgia, worse than Washington State, worse than New Jersey when it was at its worst, to name just four systems operating under consent decrees.  It’s even worse than Washington D.C. in recent years. (I haven’t read the reports from back when D.C. got so bad it was actually placed in federal receivership, but I’ll bet they’re a lot like this one).

MONITOR URGES THE NEW GOVERNOR TO CLEAN HOUSE

In a remarkable statement for this kind of report, the monitor gives what amounts to the ultimate vote of no-confidence in the people running DHS.  He appears to be advising Michigan’s governor-elect, Rick Snyder, to do a total housecleaning, seeming to suggest he replace not only the ineffectual (at best) DHS Director, Ismael Ahmed, but his entire child welfare leadership team.

In carefully chosen words, at the bottom of Page 33, the report states that:

With the election of a new Governor, Michigan has an opportunity to build a high-level leadership team that can coordinate the work of this reform effectively and improve the partnerships within DHS and between DHS and the many private agencies that serve children and families in Michigan.’

One can only imagine how the “Wikileaks version” would read.

The monitoring report doesn’t name names, but clearly the buck stops with Ahmed and with Kathryne O’Grady who heads DHS’ Children’s Services Administration, (which was created as a requirement of the consent decree because CR loves nothing more than creating more boxes on tables of organization, and doesn’t understand that leadership is more important than flow charts).  And it doesn’t sound like the monitor wants the firings to stop there.

DHS needs a leadership team that will run the agency for the benefit of the children, instead of for the state’s powerful, entrenched private agencies that are paid for every day they hold children in foster care.

BUT NEW LEADERSHIP IS NOT ENOUGH

But even such firings won’t be enough.  It is urgent that Gov.-elect Snyder renegotiate the consent decree itself, to bring it into line with truly progressive decrees like the ones in Illinois and Alabama, which, as The New York Times reported in this story, now is a national model.  (The Alabama decree, crafted by the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law after they concluded CR Director Marcia Lowry’s approach doesn’t work very well, focuses on rebuilding the system to emphasize safe, proven approaches to keeping children in their own homes. Bazelon’s Legal Director is a member of NCCPR’s Board of Directors.)

Among the other findings:

● DHS is an agency so incompetent that, statistically speaking, it “misplaced” a thousand foster children.  The agency suddenly and mysteriously reported that there actually are a thousand more children in Michigan foster care than it had reported previously for the same time periods [p.5].

● The figure would be even higher but for the fact that DHS is keeping the number artificially low through what amounts to mass youth abandonment.  The agency is expelling young people at age 18 even when they have no permanent homes – breaking a promise “to keep those cases open longer to provide supportive services” [p. 6].  (This is why NCCPR always warns reporters to focus on entries into care, the number of children taken away over the course of a year, instead of just on the number of children in care on any given day, a figure that can be manipulated in exactly the way DHS has done).

● The statistically “misplaced” foster children were discovered after the monitoring team “noticed a problem using basic addition and subtraction” [p.52], skills one would have hoped  DHS itself had mastered and could have applied before submitting bad data to the monitor. According to the report, “it is deeply troubling that DHS leadership submitted incomplete information to the court” [p.51]. Or, to put it less diplomatically, DHS is an agency so incompetent it needs to be reminded that two plus two equals four.  (And that is giving the agency the benefit of the doubt; it assumes the undercounting of 1,000 foster children was merely incompetent and not deliberate.)

● Even where there may have been actual improvement, as in the percentage of children trapped in institutions, it’s impossible to be sure because DHS’ innumeracy makes it impossible to establish a “baseline” [p.3].

● DHS failed to provide even the minimum increase in services for prevention and family preservation required under the decree.  That means overall, those services have been cut, since, as we explain in our reports on Michigan child welfare, DHS slashed these programs in part to fund rate increases for residential treatment centers and in part to fund a foster care worker/child abuse investigator hiring binge – which it saw as necessary to meet the consent decree requirements to lower caseloads.  (In fact, this also could have been done, in part, by taking fewer children needlessly) [pp. 38, 39].

● This means DHS continues to be in violation of the decree, as noted in the previous report from the monitor.  That report found that, instead of increasing this funding, DHS simply was diverting the money from other prevention and family preservation programs.

● DHS failed even to ask the legislature for enough money to implement all the requirements in the consent decree – even though DHS is legally required to do so by the decree itself.  And DHS went further, actually urging the legislature to cut funds for family preservation [p. 38].

● DHS has become obsessed with rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.  Granted, CR started it – there’s nothing they love more – but, as the report noted, “in every monitoring period to date, DHS has reorganized its child welfare leadership structure” [p. 32], so it’s no wonder communication within DHS and between DHS and private agencies has deteriorated.

According to the report, “There is a palpable sense of disappointment with the reform effort across the system, which has only grown over time” [p.6].  But there shouldn’t be.  There’s no reason to be disappointed in an agreement that was doomed to fail from day one.  Saddened, and very, very angry, yes – but not “disappointed.”

CR MUST SHARE THE BLAME

Partly that’s because of DHS’ dreadful senior management team.  But DHS alone isn’t at fault.  CR must share the blame for forcing down the agency’s throat a hyperbureaucratic consent decree that diverted resources from where they were needed most, keeping children out of the system in the first place, and into practices that actually do harm, like the war against grandparents.

Study after study has found that placing children with relatives, called kinship care, is more stable, better for children’s well-being and, most important, safer than what should properly be called “stranger care.”

In a system that, 20 years ago, actually was a child welfare leader, kinship care was one of the very few remaining Michigan success stories, with the state placing a higher proportion of children with relatives than the national average.

But thanks to CR’s bureaucratic obsessions, that achievement is eroding.  The percentage of Michigan foster children placed with relatives is down from 35 percent in October 2006 (according to previous figures submitted by DHS to the federal government), to 32 percent in March, 2010 [p.31].

And as noted at the start of this post, figures in the latest report add up to nearly 1,500 children expelled from the homes of relatives because of the licensing issue.  The previous monitoring report put this figure at about 1,800.  It’s not clear if some or all of these 1,500 are in addition to the 1,800, or if this simply is a revised count.  My best guess is it’s some of each, and the real total since the consent decree took effect might be about 2,400.

Nor do we know what happened to the children.  In some cases, they may have gone home to their own parents.  In others there may have been good reason to move them.  But it’s likely that in many of these cases, DHS inflicted the enormous trauma of another separation from family and another change in placement – into the homes of total strangers - on innocent children, just to satisfy the bureaucratic obsessions of Marcia Lowry and her colleagues at CR.

CR does not even pretend that this is about safety.  The licensing requirements, based on the assumption that foster care will be provided by middle-class strangers, are filled with minutiae not needed to keep children healthy and safe.  Rather this is about money.  The federal government won’t help reimburse the cost of foster care unless the home is licensed.

That also means licensing can provide genuine benefits for the relatives – entitling them to the same level of monthly reimbursement as strangers.  So it makes perfect sense to encourage grandparents to seek licensing and help them meet the requirements.  What makes no sense is taking away the grandchildren over it.

AN ARMY OF INSPECTORS TO WAGE WAR AGAINST GRANDPARENTS

And the harm doesn’t stop there. In order to get all these grandparents licensed – or expel the grandchildren from their homes – DHS had to create one more mini-bureaucracy, a whole bunch of newly-minted “licensing specialists” who could be doing genuinely useful work instead.

To the extent that there is any good news, it’s that the army doesn’t seem to be led very well.  Call it the upside of incompetence: the whole licensing process is way behind schedule.

Unfortunately, the DHS disaster, it doesn’t end here.  There’s the failure to implement controls on admissions to residential treatment centers, the failure to get a grip on abuse in substitute care and so on.  There may even be cases in which children enter and leave Michigan foster care but the case never is reported as an entry at all.

The Michigan horror show never seems to end.

Tomorrow: More on the DHS data disaster

Michigan DHS goes soft on child abuse (when it’s in foster care)

THE AGENCY TAKES A KEYSTONE KOPS APPROACH TO POLICING ABUSE IN INSTITUTIONS

One of the more alarming sections of the report by the independent monitor of the Michigan child welfare consent decree is the section on abuse in foster care, especially abuse in the institutions so beloved by Michigan Department of Human Services (DHS) Director Ismael Ahmed and his "leadership" team.

When it comes to how many foster children are being abused in Michigan and who is abusing them, DHS doesn't know, and doesn't seem to care. DHS uses what can best be described as a Keystone Kops approach to policing maltreatment in substitute care.

The consent decree DHS signed includes a series of commitments to change that. The report found that, time and time again, DHS failed to keep those commitments.

According to the monitor's report:

By the end of Period Two, DHS still did not know the extent of abuse or neglect in care in Michigan and had fallen behind in delivering on its commitments in the Agreement to define and address this critical issue.

UNDERCOUNTING ABUSE IN FOSTER CARE

There are a couple of reasons for this. First, the DHS computer system doesn't include some categories of abuse in substitute care – so for years, DHS has been blithely underreporting the real figure. In addition, although DHS can determine that a particular child was abused, apparently the database that tells them that is not linked to the database that tells them which of these children are in substitute care. Brilliant.

The problem is even worse when it comes to investigating abuse in institutions. While child protective services (CPS) investigates abuse in foster homes, when the abuse is in institutions it's investigated by the Bureau of Child and Adult Licensing (BCAL). Leaving aside the question of whether licensing inspectors even know how to investigate child abuse, DHS does not actually allow BCAL inspectors to make a determination. Rather, BCAL is supposed to forward its findings to CPS – which is supposed to make the actual decision (apparently based solely on the paperwork). The trouble is, DHS couldn't prove to the monitor that the information from BCAL even was passed on to CPS.

And it gets worse. According to the monitor's report:

A review of a sample of BCAL special investigation reports raised serious concerns about the treatment of youth in some placements with the responses focused almost exclusively on institutional remedies – examples include: the firing of a staff person, the need for additional training, or flaws in personnel screening practices or staff coverage ratios - with little reference to the needs of the child or children involved. [Emphasis added.]

RESTRAINTS AND SECLUSION

Then there's the vital issue of the misuse and overuse of "restraints" and "seclusion" – nice euphemisms for solitary confinement and God knows what else.

The settlement requires that DHS ensure that the institutions report every use of seclusion and restraint to a "Quality Assurance" unit. But DHS didn't do it, and hasn't even tried to do it. DHS hasn't even started gathering information. According to the monitor's report:

This is particularly concerning because the monitoring team's review of BCAL special investigations identified multiple issues with restraints, many of which identified the need for improved restraint training and adherence to policy.

The consent decree also includes a requirement that DHS consider how often an institution abuses the children confined there when deciding whether to renew the institution's license. Yes, I'm serious. It took a consent decree to force DHS even to consider this.

But DHS broke its word. According to the report:

The monitoring team … read a sample of the available re-licensing reports from Period Two. The monitoring team found no documentation in any of those reports that DHS had, as DHS committed it would in the Agreement, taken into "due consideration" the history (or absence of history) of any substantiations [of maltreatment] or corporal punishment that occurred at any of those facilities or contract agencies. … There appears to be no place on the standard re-licensure reporting form for the necessary and critical consideration of the history of maltreatment and corporal punishment.

DHS also promised to implement a "two-strikes-you're-out" policy against institutions that covered up abuse by failing to report it to DHS. But DHS didn't to that either.

SPECIAL INVESTIGATION UNITS

And finally, there is the matter of creating special "Maltreatment in Care Investigation Units," starting in the state's five largest counties. In a press release issued the day before the monitor's report came out, DHS bragged about getting these units off the ground. DHS neglected to mention that they botched the planning and screwed up the implementation of these units. Again, from the report:

When the plan was provided to the monitoring team, it incorporated poor data that severely undercounted allegations of maltreatment in care. In relying on this data, DHS allocated too few staff to these units. The plan lacked information on training; analysis of the challenges inherent in investigations in institutional settings; clarity about reporting lines; and information on tracking, especially with regard to corrective action plans.

(Other than that, however, it was just fine.)

All of this can be found in the monitor's report on pages 61 through 67. Reading through it, it's hard to escape the impression that top management at DHS is more interested in protecting their friends who run private agencies than in protecting children.

Foster care in Michigan: The DHS horror show

MONITOR'S REPORT MAKES CLEAR CUTS IN PREVENTION AND FAMILY PRESERVATION WERE ILLEGAL – AND DHS MAY HAVE LIED TO THE LEGISLATURE

When the first report of the independent monitor overseeing Michigan's child welfare consent decree was released six months ago, I wrote that "No Hollywood studio is ever going to buy the rights" to such a report.

But if such a studio were to try to make a movie based on the findings of the monitor's second report, released Tuesday, I know the genre in which it would fit: horror film.

The expulsion of hundreds of children from the homes of loving relatives in order to satisfy the licensing obsession of the group that so arrogantly calls itself "Children's Rights," described in previous posts, is only the worst of it. There's much more.

Indeed, the cruelty of what the Michigan Department of Human Services is doing to the state's vulnerable children is matched only by the agency's cynicism in violating the consent decree. This is particularly clear when it comes to the already minimal provisions in the decree involving services to keep families together.

The section of the monitor's report on prevention and family preservation describes a litany of deceit and broken promises.

●The settlement required DHS to conduct a "needs assessment" and then provide $4 million in additional funds for those needs. The promise was broken.

●The settlement required DHS at least to fight for children by seeking the funding it needed from the legislature. But DHS Director Ismael Ahmed and his staff refused even to ask the legislature for the money. The promise was broken.

●The report raises the question of whether DHS lied to the Michigan Legislature. DHS claimed it did not need certain funds to comply with the consent decree, when there was overwhelming evidence that it did.

These were not just promises like the kind one makes in a political campaign. These are legally-binding commitments. The report makes clear that DHS has violated the consent decree. That means DHS has broken the law.

Unfortunately, since these broken promises involve prevention and family preservation, the group that brought the lawsuit, the group that so arrogantly calls itself "Children's Rights," doesn't seem to care. In Connecticut, when a prevention program that includes middle-class families was threatened, CR rushed into court to try to save it – and told us so over and over again in press release after press release. But in Michigan, where the cuts affect only the usual child welfare agency clientele – overwhelmingly poor people - CR has sat on its hands. Now, at last, some lawyers from the group are going to sit down and talk things over with DHS for 30 days.

Big deal.

DETAILS FROM THE MONITOR'S REPORT

Here's how the monitor's report explains what happened. (Wherever a section is in bold, the emphasis has been added by NCCPR.) According to the report:

The Agreement includes a set of necessary commitments to improve the Michigan child welfare system for children and families, many requiring additional investment.

But DHS decided it would rather spend additional funds on hiring more foster care workers and lavishing rate increases on the state's powerful private providers of institutional "care." So, even with children's futures, and possibly their lives, at stake, DHS played cynical shell games with state money.

The monitor's report notes that when the Governor ordered DHS to slash its budget, DHS chose to cut prevention and family preservation. According to the monitor:

Some of these eliminated services are identical to those that both DHS and Michigan State University have identified, as part of needs assessments in the Agreement … as critical – but scarce – for children and families involved with Michigan's child welfare system.

The State Budget Office and DHS did not ask the Legislature for funds to prevent these cuts in services to children and families involved with the child welfare system. These cuts are not consistent with DHS' pledge to build "additional services and placements" in the Agreement…

Moreover, DHS committed in the Agreement that it would, at a minimum, request of the Michigan Legislature "state funds and any federal/special fund authorization sufficient to effect the provisions and outcome measures set forth in this Agreement in connection with any budget, funding, or allocation request to the executive or legislative branches of State government." However, during Period Two, DHS and the State Budget Office did not advance to the Michigan Legislature a request for funds or spending authorization to fully replace the significant cuts in services to children and families that the administration implemented in FY2009 or to fully fund the commitments in the Agreement.

In June 2009, the State Budget Director submitted to the Michigan Legislature a revised FY2010 funding recommendation for DHS that eliminated slightly more than $20 million and 197 child welfare staff positions originally requested to implement the Agreement. DHS indicated these positions were no longer necessary to satisfy its commitments in the Agreement due to reductions in the overall caseload managed by DHS. However … DHS did not meet several of its caseload commitments in Period Two, standards which are only the starting point in a multi-year process of reducing caseloads from excessive to appropriate levels.

As for the "needs assessment," it led the monitor to call for spending $1.5 million more on housing for children aging out of foster care, $1.5 million to support youth "stepping down" from residential care, and $1 million in new family preservation services. And how did DHS "comply" with its legal duty? According to the monitor:

DHS advised the monitoring team that it will divert $4 million in existing family preservation funds, beginning in Period Three, to fund this expansion. Although DHS is not responsible for implementing this expansion of services until Period Three, the monitoring team observes that a diversion of pre-existing resources to fund services is not consistent with the Agreement or the underlying Needs Assessment, and will closely assess funding sources for additional services in future periods.

I'll bet Ahmed and his pals in the private agencies were really proud of that one.

NEXT WEEK: DHS HAS NO IDEA HOW MUCH ABUSE GOES ON AT RESIDENTIAL TREATMENT CENTERS – AND DOESN'T SEEM VERY INTERESTED IN FINDING OUT

Foster care, family preservation and financial incentives: The waiver that’s STILL saving Florida

A previous post to this Blog discusses the latest report from the Florida Child Abuse Death Review Committee. The post notes that even this group has come to see how a pilot project for "differential response," which involves increasing screening of reports to the state's child abuse hotline, has made children safer.

But there's another new report out about Florida which tells far more about how children are faring. It's the latest independent evaluation of Florida's "Child First" waiver. As is discussed in detail in this previous post, the waiver allows Florida to take more than $140 million in federal money that, in other states, can be spent only on foster care and use it for safe, proven alternatives as well. The waiver played a key role in turning around what was once one of the nation's worst child welfare systems, a transformation that caught the attention of The New York Times.

Like the previous evaluation, the latest concludes that, as the waiver has helped Florida reduce entries into foster care, children have gotten safer.

But while child welfare continues to change for the better in Florida, there's been no improvement in the politics, in the state or nationally. Nationally, the odds that other states will get the same chance to do what Florida did remain slim, because the nation's foster care-industrial complex, the powerful private child welfare agencies paid for every day they hold children in foster care, remains opposed. They are led by the trade association for such groups, and public agencies as well, the group with the Orwellian name, Child Welfare League of America. Details are in our previous post about the Florida waiver.

And in Florida, progress is hampered by the desire of some pols to play to their right-wing base, as illustrated by the case of Rifqa Bary, and the state's cruel – and stupid – refusal to let potential parents adopt if they are gay.

The report on the waiver also is one more reminder to people in Michigan of the kind of dismal leadership that has characterized their child welfare agency for so long. Michigan initially accepted the same waiver as Florida, then chickened out at the last minute. That happened on the watch of the former head of the state Department of Human Services, Marianne Udow. She had the right principles, but lacked the courage to back them up. Her successor, Ismael Ahmed, hasn't shown that he even has the principles. His behavior suggests that he believes his job is to pander to the state's powerful private agencies – the "permanent government" of Michigan child welfare.

So while the waiver helped Florida cushion the blow of recession, in Michigan, as is discussed in detail in our reports on Michigan child welfare, Ahmed imposed slash-and-burn budget cuts to prevention and family preservation in order to fund rate increases for largely worthless residential treatment centers and a foster care worker hiring binge.

Cutting family preservation to fund foster care: Michigan children abandoned again?

    The group that so arrogantly calls itself Children's Rights was doing what it does best last week – promoting itself. They put out a press release and trumpeted the news all over Twitter. The message: Look how wonderful we are. There's a state that's cutting a vitally-important program to keep children out of foster care. But we have a consent decree in that state – so we're marching into court to stop them!

    The state was Connecticut.

    But CR also has a consent decree in Michigan. And under the "leadership" of Michigan Department of Human Services Director Ismael Ahmed, that state is cutting not one but a great many programs with proven track records for safely saving children from the anguish of needless foster care. As noted previously on this Blog, the independent court monitor for the consent decree says the cuts may violate the decree. Yet CR has not gone to court to stop these cuts. They've put out no press release. There hasn't even been a tweet.

    Why the difference?

    Perhaps it has something to do with which children are affected. The cut in Connecticut affected a program to help families who would have had to surrender their children to foster care in order to obtain mental health care for them. This is a huge problem nationwide, brought into stark relief by the Nebraska "safe haven" debacle. The proposed cut in Connecticut is, indeed, despicable. But these kinds of cases also are among the few times the long arm of child protective services reaches into the middle class.

    Or perhaps it has to do with where the money that is being cut is going. In Connecticut, it's just going to close a budget gap. In Michigan, some of the money is going to help fund CR's own settlement – in particular a foster care caseworker hiring binge. It's also going to help fund rate increases for agencies that institutionalize children.

    So perhaps it's just a matter of priorities.   

   

The frontline rebellion that saved kinship care in Michigan

So apparently it was quite a love fest between the group that so arrogantly calls itself "Children's Rights" (CR) and the Michigan Department of Human Services (DHS) in federal court yesterday. Not surprising. When a group that doesn't care about keeping families together sues an agency that doesn't care about keeping families together, and they wind up with a settlement that boosts funds for foster care and institutions at the expense of prevention and family preservation - what's not to love, right?

But if the judge really believes the progress is "truly laudatory and exceptional" I have to believe – or at least hope – she hasn't actually read the report of the court monitor overseeing the decree.

In yesterday's post to this Blog, I noted the biggest revelation in the report: the fact that DHS Director Ismael Ahmed's budget cuts in prevention and family preservation may be illegal.

But there are other revelations buried in the 95-page document. Among them is one concerning how CR and DHS were stopped from crippling kinship care in Michigan.

I'll discuss that at the end of this post. First, NCCPR's take on the key points raised in the report.

Though there are exceptions, in general, the monitor's report reveals largely pathetic compliance with a largely pathetic consent decree.

KEY POINTS IN THE MONITOR'S REPORT:

The rebellion that saved kinship care is one indication that the people on the frontlines are outthinking both CR and DHS. But there are others:

--Despite the pressure to "take the child and run" entries into foster care declined during the monitoring period – a period that happens to coincide with the height of NCCPR's activity in Michigan. I am proud of the role NCCPR played in dampening pressure for needless removal and reinforcing the best instincts of the state's best frontline workers.

--As noted in yesterday's post to this Blog, DHS is ahead of schedule in reunifying families where children have been trapped in foster care more than a year (even as private agencies, paid for every day they hold these children in foster care, fall behind.) But also, as noted previously, the budget cuts jeopardize the success of the reunifications.

--In contrast, DHS is behind in helping another group – legal orphans created by the state's mad rush to terminate parental rights. In part that's because it appears DHS and CR are pushing only one answer for these children: Adoption. Since it is likely that, in many of these cases, parental rights never should have been terminated, and since it is common for these children, once they reach 18 and are free of the system, to head right back to their birth parents, DHS instead should be focusing on seeing whether there are more cases in which parental rights should be restored and efforts at reunification revived.

--Another key barrier to adoption is institutionalization. Almost all foster children are adopted by their extended family or foster parents. Institutionalizing children denies them their best shot at adoption. Since Ismael Ahmed is apparently in love with institutional care, it's no wonder getting children adopted remains a problem.

PATHETIC COMPLIANCE, PATHETIC DECREE

The progress on reunification is one of the very few areas of substantive progress noted in the monitor's report. Most of the areas in which goals were achieved were bureaucratic.

If the requirement involved shifting job titles and moving around boxes on a table of organization, DHS generally succeeded. When it involved actually improving outcomes for children, DHS generally failed. In other words, DHS is good at rearranging the deck chairs, bad at bailing out the boat.

So, for example, DHS managed to reorganize itself and create that separate child welfare division that CR craves, even though there is no evidence that agencies that have such divisions work better - or worse – than agencies that don't.

But DHS failed to keep much more important commitments.

--DHS failed to make sure that foster children are covered by Medicaid.

--DHS failed to make sure that children aging out of foster care have health insurance.

--DHS failed to keep its promise to spend more on mental health services for foster children.

--DHS failed to refer all children aging out of foster care for housing assistance.

And perhaps most tragic:

--DHS failed to make sure children who are not delinquent are not placed in juvenile detention. As the monitor's report noted, there is widespread consensus that "a single day in jail or detention changes a child's life forever" – and not for the better.

When it comes to other provisions of the consent decree that really might do some good – DHS failed to meet its deadline and CR obligingly extended that deadline:

--Limits on institutionalizing children: Delayed. (No surprise that the always institution-friendly Ismael Ahmed isn't going to rush to put limits on warehousing children in institutions run by the state's powerful private agencies.)

--Development of treatment foster homes (a key alternative to institutionalization): Delayed.

--Performance-based contracting, in which private agencies actually would be held accountable for helping children, instead of just raking in per diems by keeping them in foster care as long as possible: Delayed.

--Reviewing policies concerning the use of potent psychiatric medications on foster children: Delayed.

--Limits on out-of-county placements: Delayed

OTHER FINDINGS

--As it began to come to terms with its dreadful data gathering capacity and started actually learning about the children it's supposed to care for, DHS found far more children in particularly vulnerable groups – such as children remaining in foster homes where abuse was alleged and children languishing in institutions – than the agency expected.

That, in turn, is delaying efforts to give these cases special review, which means, of course, these children will be warehoused in institutions or trapped in potentially abusive foster homes even longer.

--There are some potentially disturbing data concerning deaths in foster care. I have long cautioned about drawing inferences about overall system performance based on fatalities, but since they remain the measure of choice for media, the information in the report about such deaths deserves further scrutiny.

The data show that from March 31, 2005 through March 31 2009, 88 Michigan children died in foster care. In many cases, the deaths may be due to illness or other factors for which the system is not at fault. But in 51 cases, there were suspicions of abuse or neglect in connection with these deaths. In ten cases the suspicions were substantiated. But abuse in foster care always is underestimated when the state is, in effect, investigating itself, and the monitor's report found that some of the investigations were disturbingly superficial. And there is no systematic process for investigating these deaths.

THE FRONTLINE REBELLION

The original consent decree had an idiotic clause requiring all kinship care homes to be formally licensed, including homes where grandparents and other relatives had been safely and lovingly caring for children for years. Unless a grandparent either could obtain a hard-to-get waiver or comply with ten single-spaced pages of requirements, many of them unrelated to health and safety, their grandchildren would be expelled from their homes. As I noted at the time, the home in which President Obama was raised by his grandmother could not have qualified for licensure under these regulations.

Intense pressure by NCCPR and other advocates ultimately forced DHS and CR to back down. But the monitor's report reveals something else that was going on as well – what amounts to a rebellion by dedicated frontline workers who either were too appalled by the policy to enforce it, or simply couldn't believe DHS and CR really wanted them to do something so stupid.

According to the monitor's report, the rebellion began after DHS issued a memo, called an "L-Letter," instituting the draconian new policy called for by the consent decree. The letter ordered all homes to be licensed and ordered the removal of children from homes that could not or would not be licensed. According to the monitor's report:

The reaction was immediate. Concerned judges, advocates, and field staff thought this new L-Letter presaged a retreat from the State's longstanding commitment to relative care. Judges also saw a handful of examples of families who were being told children long in their care would be removed if the families did not cooperate with licensure. The majority of staff in the field waited and held off on moving children, asking for clarification about the policy. Staff continued to place children coming into care with kin… [emphasis added.]

The waiting paid off. In March, 2009, in the wake of pressure from NCCPR and others, DHS issued a revised L-Letter backing off from the mandatory licensure policy. As the monitor reports:

After the issuance of the revised L‐Letter and outreach by [DHS child welfare division] leadership, word spread quickly that mandatory removal of children was not DHS’ policy, and managers and judges were able to reinforce that it was not necessary to remove children from safe relative homes because of licensing challenges.

Thanks to the efforts of NCCPR and other outside advocates, and the dedication of so many frontline staff, there was no reduction in the proportion of children placed with relatives.

But the monitor appears to feel the steps taken so far are not enough to ensure that this record continues. He goes on to send his own message to the frontlines, explaining to caseworkers that they don't have to limit the number of waivers from licensing requirements to ten percent.

The monitor's report also makes clear that the original attempt to force all kinship care parents into licensure had little if anything to do with safety – it was, and is, strictly about money. Even a CR press release admits as much.

The licensing requirement was designed to allow DHS to get federal aid for the placements and then use that aid to provide grandparents with payments equal to those paid to strangers (which is, in fact required by federal law, if relatives are licensed).

That's a commendable goal. But the fact that it didn't occur to CR that impoverished grandparents might not be able to meet ten pages of hypertechnical licensing requirements – or simply might be too suspicious of DHS to want to go through the process – illustrates perfectly the bureaucratic mindset that dominates CR; the notion that real human beings are like boxes on an organization table, to be moved around and manipulated at will in order to create the best looking human flow chart imaginable.

In CR's hyper-bureaucratic mind, anything that looks good on paper must work in real life. It's a perfect example of why the people at CR are like the people you least want to see when you finally make it to the front of the line at the DMV.

Court Monitor: Michigan budget cuts may be illegal

SO WHY DIDN'T CR NOTICE?

No Hollywood studio is ever going to buy the rights to the report of an independent court monitor overseeing a child welfare system lawsuit settlement. And if you want to find the real news, you have to go past the executive summary.

Because the bombshell in the first report of the monitor overseeing the court decree governing child welfare in Michigan is buried in some genteel language at the top of page 34: Remember those slash and burn budget cuts in prevention and family preservation imposed by the head of the state's Department of Human Services, Ismael Ahmed, - even as he lavished rate increases on agencies that institutionalize children? According to the independent monitor, the cuts may well be illegal. They may violate the consent decree. As is discussed below, these cuts also are setting up some newly-reunified families to fail.

That leads to one crucial question: Why couldn't the group that brought the lawsuit, the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children's Rights (CR) – figure that out? And why aren't they doing something about it – the way plaintiffs in a similar lawsuit in Illinois did in a similar situation earlier this year?

NCCPR first raised these questions when the budget cuts first were revealed months ago. We've come back to the theme repeatedly since then, as a search of this blog for posts mentioning Michigan will make clear. But CR remained silent. They didn't go to court, they didn't even protest. After we pointed out their silence, months ago, they hinted at action in a "tweet" on Twitter, but they didn't deliver. Now, months later, they offer some tepid comments in a press release.

Why? You'd have to ask them. But if you wanted to craft a lawsuit, a settlement, and a post-settlement enforcement strategy designed to thwart efforts to keep families together and promote the taking of children from impoverished families for adoptive placement with middle-class strangers, it would be hard to top the approach that CR has taken.

So CR sits idly by while prevention and family preservation are eviscerated in order to fund a hiring binge of child abuse investigators and foster care workers – and to promote the only form of permanence CR really seems to support: Adoption.

To the extent that this has failed, and to the extent that there has been any real progress in Michigan, (and the report shows there has been a little progress) it is because outside advocates, like NCCPR, have raised hell about CR's approach and problems in the settlement – and, it turns out, because of what amounts to a rebellion among frontline caseworkers. (More on that tomorrow).

CR waited for the monitor to point out what any lawyers who really cared about the best interests of children would have been shouting about from the start: "Early analysis suggests that … service cuts are not consistent with the Settlement Agreement commitments to increase investments in services" [p. 34]. The settlement agreement is legally binding on the state.

The monitor's report also notes that "some of these eliminated services are identical to those identified by DHS in its permanency backlog gap analysis and by Michigan State University in the Needs Assessment as being already scarce for children and families involved with the child welfare system" [p. 33]. Those two documents also are legally required by the settlement.

Didn't CR notice this? Or did they simply not care because they were getting more money for foster care and child abuse investigations, at the expense of prevention and family preservation?

In Illinois, when similar slash-and-burn budget cuts threatened a longstanding consent decree, the plaintiffs in that suit – the Illinois Branch of the ACLU – didn't sit around waiting for a monitor's report. They went straight to court – and got the cuts stopped. Of course, that may have something to do with the fact that the Illinois settlement emphasizes working to keep families together – turning that state into, relatively speaking, a model of child welfare success.

In contrast, I haven't even seen CR speak out against the Michigan cuts, until its tepid press release today, much less use its enormous legal clout to fight them.

Setting up families to fail

The budget cuts also threaten one of the few substantive successes in Michigan reported by the monitor: The state is ahead of schedule in reunifying children in a "backlog cohort" – child welfare-speak for a great big group of children who have been trapped in foster care more than a year even though the goal is reunification. (Not surprisingly, most of this progress was made in cases where DHS directly supervises the case. The state's powerful private agencies, which are paid for every day they hold a child in foster care, are behind schedule in reunifications).

But successful reunification depends on ongoing help to the family after it's back together. Ismael Ahmed's budget cuts threaten those very services, increasing the likelihood that the children will come back into foster care.

Of course, if that happens, Ahmed's buddies at the private agencies can then scapegoat the reunification instead of the failure to support that reunification. They'll say "See? We shouldn't be reunifying these families? Let's just go back to rushing to terminate parental rights and pushing adoption-at-all-costs."

A win-win for Ahmed and his friends, a lose-lose for children.

Tomorrow: The frontline rebellion that helped save kinship care in Michigan

The Michigan “Needs Assessment”: A rebuke to DHS and CR

As the previous post to this Blog explains, a requirement of the consent decree between the Michigan Department of Human Services and the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children's Rights (CR) is a "Needs Assessment." As the name suggests this means lots of people spending lots of time creating one more document telling us what we already know: Michigan should be doing far more to keep families together.

The settlement calls for spending $4 million on needs found by the Needs Assessment. But in a true masterstroke of legal strategy, CR managed to forget to include anything in its settlement that would stop DHS from cutting ten times more than they now are required to add. Brilliant. So What DHS giveth with one hand, DHS taketh ten-fold with the other.

As for what the document actually tells us:

The Needs Assessment is a 221-page rebuke of the shortsighted approach of both DHS and CR.

Everything the assessment says Michigan's vulnerable children need more of, DHS is providing less of. The list of what Michigan's vulnerable children need and the list of children's services budget cuts are nearly identical.

And that is not because of the state budget crisis. The biggest fraud in Michigan right now is the notion that the cuts in safe proven programs to keep families together are needed to balance the budget. On the contrary, the money saved from these cuts is going into more money for institutionalization and a wasteful hiring binge.

For that, the blame rests both with Ismael Ahmed's apparent obsession with giving private agencies that warehouse children in "residential treatment" whatever they want (that's why he's so beloved by these agencies) and with CR, which allowed that giant loophole in the settlement mentioned above.

Though the spirit of the settlement and its legally binding guiding principles (not to mention common sense) make clear that DHS was not supposed to fund the settlement by cutting other help to vulnerable children, the settlement has no explicit provision saying this. So DHS has plowed through that loophole. DHS is using slash-and-burn budget cuts for prevention and family preservation to finance rate increases for residential treatment and a foster care worker hiring binge.

And the hiring binge is not actually required by the settlement. The settlement requires a reduction in caseloads – it doesn't say this has to be done by hiring child abuse investigators and foster care workers. Caseloads would be far more likely to go down if DHS put more money into the very programs it now is cutting. As it stands now, all those new workers are likely to chase down all the new cases of children needlessly removed from their homes because of the budget cuts, leaving Michigan with the same lousy system only bigger.

And I'm not the only one saying this. Look at what the Needs Assessment itself says about how to reduce caseloads (Page 23):

The settlement agreement assumes that Michigan's system reform efforts … will decrease the number of children entering the foster care system. The reduced entries will result from improvements in intake services, prevention services and in-home preservation services. These efforts will also decrease the caseload ratio for public and private agency workers, permitting MDHS to reduce caseloads to the specified levels." [Emphasis added].

The most important part of the Needs Assessment

What may be most important about the needs assessment is what's *not* in its recommendations:

●There is no call for more "residential treatment" or other institutional care of children.

●There is no call for big rate increases for providers of institutional care.

On the contrary, the Needs Assessment specifically cites the harm of institutionalization (Page 69) and examples of better alternatives (Pages 114, 115) – in other words, exactly what NCCPR said in our second report on Michigan child welfare.

●There is no call for a giant hiring binge of child abuse investigators and foster care workers.

So why is DHS spending more money on all of these things while cutting the very programs the Needs Assessment says are really needed?

Are caseloads really excessive?

●A key premise of the hiring binge is that it's needed to lower excessive caseloads. But the chart on Page 56 shows that caseloads actually are surprisingly reasonable. These numbers would be suspect if they came from management; but they're estimates from a survey of caseworkers themselves. So that raises further questions about cutting prevention to hire more investigators and foster care workers.

Other Key Findings

●A repeated theme is the urgent need for concrete services, particularly transportation and housing assistance, yet these services are among those least available. (Pages 14, 15, 21, 78, 84, 111, chart p. 113). The Assessment states flat out that time in placement often is extended needlessly for lack of this kind of help. (Page 14.)

●The unappreciated shining star of Michigan child welfare, the Families First Intensive Family Preservation Services program, is praised repeatedly in almost every section of the needs assessment – seen as enormously beneficial not only for preventing separation of families in the first place but also for making reunification work and for preserving adoptive families. (Pages 10, 44, 82, other references.) Yet this program is being cut yet again by Ismael Ahmed.

●On Page 41, the Needs Assessment lists seven vital programs for keeping families together. Most, if not all, have been cut repeatedly in the past and are or will be cut again in the two rounds of slash-and-burn budget cuts inflicted by Ahmed and Gov. Jennifer Granholm.

●The Assessment devotes two-thirds of a page to listing all the things wrong with the settlement's former demand that all grandparents and other relatives providing kinship care be formally licensed (Page 86). And then, on Page 90, it says that unlicensed homes are absolutely essential in order to have enough places for children. Fortunately, partly as a result of pressure from NCCPR, CR and DHS backed off from their war against grandparents and changed that part of the settlement. But NCCPR and many others saw these problems right from the start – why didn't CR and DHS?

●Page 75: Most families can't get the services they need.

●Page 41: Workers admit to resorting to foster care in cases where children could remain home if the right kinds of help were available.

●Page 116: There is a significant need for inpatient drug treatment programs in which parents can live with their children.

●Page 62: The Needs Assessment notes what NCCPR reported in March: There are enormous, and disturbing, variations in rates of child removal in different Michigan counties.

●Page 54: In the one focus group for birth parents, in Ingham County, which has one of the highest rates of removal in the state, every birth parent, no matter what the actual circumstances of her or his case, said he or she was asked to agree to termination of parental rights; an outrageous indication that the "Binsfeld mentality" – a legacy of a former lieutenant governor who trampled over the state's impoverished families in the name of adoption-at-all-costs (discussed in detail in NCCPR's first report on Michigan child welfare) - still is alive and well in Michigan.

●None of the birth parents said they were involved in developing and implementing the "case plan" explaining what hoops they would have to jump through to get their children back.

●Page 55: All of the birth parents said their case records contained inaccuracies.

Michigan update: Three tiny drops in a very large bucket

I know that after 33 years following child welfare, nothing should shock me – least of all cynicism and opportunism from the group that so arrogantly calls itself "Children's Rights" (CR) – but the level of hypocrisy in the press release they just put out here: http://bit.ly/JdPlq is appalling.

If the cynicism isn't bad enough, how about the fact that they apparently think every Michigan advocate and every journalist following child welfare in the state is an idiot.

They've put out a press release bragging about the fact that, due to their lawsuit settlement, the state is going to have to spend all of $4 million more on programs to help families. (Actually, even that figure is high, some of the money will go to other programs that are worthy but don't involve family preservation.)

That is about one-tenth the amount that Michigan DHR director Ismael Ahmed cut from similar spending just in the emergency budget cuts for the current fiscal year. (He's proposed another round of cuts – just as bad – for next year. Details on the cuts are in this previous post.) Did CR think no one in Michigan would notice that the "new" spending is only one tenth of the cuts?

The cuts are not being used to close the state's budget deficit. Rather the cuts are being used to finance rate increases for residential treatment providers, and to pay for a foster care worker /child abuse investigator hiring binge that is entirely unnecessary. (There are much better ways to cut caseloads).

And CR enabled those very cuts, because its settlement includes no provision barring Michigan from cutting prevention and family preservation programs in order to pay for the settlement.

A little background:

●The settlement called for a "Needs Assessment."

●Over and over again, the Needs Assessment stresses the urgent need to spend more on family preservation.

●The Needs Assessment, a comprehensive 225 page document, did not say there was any need for rate increases for residential treatment centers and other institutions. And it did not call for massive increases in child abuse investigator / foster care caseworker hiring. (In fact, on page 56, there is a chart that raises questions about whether caseloads really are excessive.)

●The settlement requires DHS to spend only $4 million on some of all of the needs that have been assessed as genuinely needed.

●The independent court monitor has recommended three categories of spending for this $4 million.

The process will be repeated next year.

But compared to what Ahmed already has cut and plans to cut next year, we're talking about three tiny drops in a very large bucket.

“Children’s rights”: All tweet, no action?

The group that so arrogantly calls itself "Children's Rights" (CR) has taken to sending out "tweets" on Twitter that portray the organization as actually interested in keeping families together – something that is very much at odds with the group's record in many parts of the country. In the process, the organization's double standards are showing. And now they've made a promise on which they have yet to deliver.

It started July 1, when CR praised the Illinois Branch of the ACLU – which has a much more progressive consent decree than anything CR ever would come up with – for going to court to prevent draconian budget cuts to that state's child welfare programs. CR tweeted:

"Just saw that our friends at @aclu have convinced a judge to order Illinois not to cut critical child welfare services!"

The next day CR bragged about doing something similar itself – in Connecticut:

"Just posted more details about our efforts to save a vital pre-foster-care program in Connecticut on the CR Blog"

But of course this raised one obvious question: What about Michigan? There, Gov. Jennifer Granholm and the director of the state's Department of Human Services, Ismael Ahmed, have initiated two rounds of slash-and-burn budget cuts, one proposed for next year, the other already in effect.

That's not because of the state's budget crisis. Rather, they're using the savings to fund big rate increases for powerful private agencies that institutionalize children, and to fund a child abuse investigator / foster care caseworker hiring binge – apparently the only option they could think of to meet the terms of CR's own Michigan lawsuit settlement.

In fact, all that hiring is not required to meet the settlement terms – the settlement calls for reducing caseloads, by and large it doesn't say how to do it. So Michigan could, in fact, reduce foster care caseloads by spending more on safe, proven programs to keep children out of foster care. But that is beyond the imagination of DHS or CR.

Even worse, CR neglected to include a "maintenance of effort" provision in its settlement. In other words, though the cuts clearly violate the spirit of the settlement and the statement of principles in the settlement, there is no explicit prohibition barring Michigan from funding the settlement by cutting other programs to help the same children. So Michigan went about slashing prevention and family preservation to fund increases in foster care and institutionalization – an apt reflection of both DHS' and CR's real priorities.

But with CR starting to claim it cares about family preservation in other states, we wondered…

NCCPR is on Twitter. So CR's professed interest in family preservation prompted us to tweet back:

"Group calling itself Children's Rights fights child welfare cuts in CT, but what about Michigan?"

In a two-tweet response to our pressure, CR replied:

"And we're really not happy to see Michigan -- where we're involved in a massive reform effort -- cutting prevention"

"We'll have more on the Michigan situation in the coming days/weeks. Stay tuned..."

Nearly three weeks later: Nothing.

No marching back into court to help Michigan children the way CR claims to be helping Connecticut children. No news conferences from the oh-so-PR-savvy CR in Detroit and Lansing denouncing budget cuts. Not even a press release expressing outrage.

In fact, as far as I can tell there hasn't been a peep – or a tweet – from CR.

This isn't the only time CR has failed to tweet and deliver.

Another tweet led readers to this excellent op ed column by Prof. Vivek Sankaran of the University of Michigan Law School, concerning the appalling lack of adequate defense counsel for birth families. CR tweeted:

"shameful: Michigan family torn apart as a parent is denied access to legal representation."

Nice of them to say. But what about action? What's really shameful is the fact that the Michigan settlement doesn't have a word about improving legal representation for families caught in the child protective services web. As far as I know, neither does any CR settlement.

So once again CR is making its priorities clear.

As for CR's suggestion they actually might try to do something about the Michigan cuts: It's not as if there's a lot of time. The first round of budget cuts already has taken effect. So isn't it time for CR to show it's more than all tweet, no action?

UPDATED JULY 2: Michigan and Illinois: The difference is leadership

An excellent story in The Detroit News Tuesday about cuts to youth services in Michigan includes this excuse from a spokesman for Michigan State Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop:

"I don't know where we're going to get the money," said Matt Marsden, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop. "It's not for not wanting to. It's just a matter of trying to reduce the budget enough to pay for it."
But that's, um, nonsense (there's a better word, but I try to maintain the same standards as a "family newspaper" on this blog). It's nonsense when it comes from Bishop, just as it is nonsense when it comes from the Governor's office.

In another excellent story, from Interlochen Public Radio, about the end of Michigan's Family Group Decision Making program, the head of the DHS office in Grand Traverse County (long one of the state's most regressive) says much the same thing.

But while some things are being cut to close a big budget deficit, that's not the reason for the cuts in prevention and family preservation. As is documented in detail in NCCPR's reports on Michigan child welfare, those cuts are being made to finance big rate increases for the powerful private agencies that institutionalize children - almost always needlessly – in Michigan. And the cuts are going to finance a child abuse investigator/foster care worker hiring binge most of which is not, in fact, required by Michigan's class action lawsuit settlement.

The settlement between Michigan and the group that so arrogantly calls itself "Children's Rights," says caseloads need to be lower – but that's far more likely to happen if you spend more on prevention and family preservation programs that keep children out of the foster care system. As it stands now, odds are the new workers are going to be investigating all the new cases that result from the budget cuts, and shoving a lot more children into foster care, leaving Michigan with the same lousy system only bigger.

Illinois also operates under a class-action settlement, and Illinois also faced draconian cuts in child welfare services. But the ACLU of Illinois, which brought that lawsuit, went back to court and won an order from a federal judge barring implementation of what have been called "doomsday" budget cuts. The head of the Illinois child welfare agency himself testified about the harm the cuts would do.

Compare that to Michigan where DHS director Ismael Ahmed is swinging the ax himself, and, as far as I can tell, CR has neither gone to court nor used its high powered PR machine to even speak out against the cuts. UPDATE, JULY 2: CR Just announced it is fighting similar cuts in Connecticut. So why the silence about Michigan?

What a difference leadership makes.

And speaking of leadership: The Michigan cuts certainly don't say much for the effectiveness of the state's giant Child Welfare Improvement Task Force and its get-along-go-along-let's-all-sing-kumbaya-with-Ismael-Ahmed approach to advocacy.

Perhaps if they'd been a little more, oh, I don't know – "inflammatory"?

A Task Force co-chair tells foster children: Just keep on waiting

After NCCPR released its first report on Michigan child welfare, some people complained about the report's "tone." It was too angry, they said. The language was "inflammatory."

I make no apologies for that. But when I went to Michigan to release our second report on Michigan child welfare, I did tell some of the journalists I met with the reason for that tone and that language. It's the same story I often tell when speaking to groups of professionals in the child welfare field; a story I started telling after the most brilliant advocate I know in any field told me: "You've got to tell them why you're so angry."

And, as it happens, thanks to a smug comment by one C. Patrick Babcock, co-chair of the Michigan Child Welfare Improvement Task Force, in The Detroit News today, the story now has a postscript of sorts:

For most of my professional life, I was either a journalist or a professor of journalism. I covered my first child welfare story in 1976, while I was still a journalism student.

I interviewed a college student who was, at the time, 21. By the time she was nine years old, she had been in nine different foster homes. She told me she survived by keeping the rage inside, "unlike my five brothers who've been in every jail in New York State."

This is some more of what she said:

When you spend your life going from place to place and knowing you're not going to be in any place for very long, you learn not to reach out, not to care, not to feel.

My bitterness is not that I went through what I did, my bitterness is that I don't think it should have had to happen. There was no reason why my family's life should have been destroyed.

After speaking to this woman for two-and-a-half hours, I reached a couple of conclusions:

-- First, I was very glad I'd chosen journalism as a career.

-- Second, I knew I would keep coming back to the story.

As I did keep coming back to the story, I kept finding that the facts on the ground were not matching what the most widely-quoted so-called "experts" were saying. When the dichotomy became too much to bear, I wrote a book on the topic, Wounded Innocents. Ultimately, that led me into advocacy.

As I said, that interview with a former foster child was in 1976. Sixteen years later, I was working in that same city, and I took part in a panel discussion of foster care. Also on the panel was a representative of one of those big, "respected" private agencies with blue-chip boards of directors that lives on per diem payments for keeping children in foster care – a major player in that region's "foster care-industrial complex." He was going on, as they always do, about how supposedly children are taken from their families only as a last resort, and never for even a day longer than necessary.

But, he said, maybe after another generation, they would consider changing the financial incentives under which they operate.

After another generation.

Nothing that had happened to that young woman, that former foster child, and all who came after really mattered to him at all.

Why am I angry?

Because now it's another 17 years, and if anything, it's even more likely that children will suffer as that former foster child did – especially in states like Michigan.

All of which brings me to Mr. Babcock. From 1987 to 1991, he ran the Michigan Department of Social Services. (That's what the agency was called before it was renamed the Family Independence Agency, which is what it was called before it was renamed the Department of Human Services.) Judging by the agency's record at that time, apparently, he did a good job. But that was a long time ago.

Much more recently, Babcock co-chaired the giant Task Force that studied Michigan child welfare at the behest of DHS director Ismael Ahmed. For months, Ahmed pretended he would care about what the task force recommended. But when the Task Force said spend more on prevention and family preservation and work to stop taking away so many children, Ahmed promptly rushed out and did the opposite.

No problem, says Babcock. Asked by The Detroit News about the fact that Ahmed seemed to be moving in the opposite direction from what his Task Force recommended, Babcock replied: "We always knew it would be a long-term process."

In other words: After another generation…

NCCPR’s second Michigan report is now available online

Our second comprehensive report on Michigan child welfare, and all of our other Michigan publications, are available here.

Another award finalist, another slap at Michigan

It's not that the judges of the prestigious Innovations in American Government awards at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government were thinking: "Lets really send a message to the regressive child welfare leadership in Michigan that they're getting it all wrong," - it just happened to work out that way. Two of the sixteen finalists for the awards, and two of three in the child welfare category, are a direct repudiation of the Michigan approach, with its heavy reliance on the worst form of care, institutionalization.

As such, the naming of these finalists is a humiliating rebuke to Ismael Ahmed, the current director of Michigan's Department of Human Services and someone who, if his budget is any indication, seems to view his job as giving the institutional care providers – Michigan's foster care-industrial complex – pretty much whatever they want. (The award nominations don't exactly make Ahmed's boss, Gov. Jennifer Granholm, look too good either.)

On Friday, I discussed the nomination of the reformed child welfare system in Maine – which was transformed largely by the director of their child welfare agency James Beougher, who was recruited from Michigan when his efforts to do the same were thwarted.

Another finalist is Wraparound Milwaukee, a program that has cut institutional placements in that community by 90 percent. Wraparound Milwaukee is the living, breathing refutation of every argument made by Michigan's foster care-industrial complex; it is the proof that all the claims that there is no alternative but to institutionalize so many children are nonsense. That's why Wraparound Milwaukee is one of the programs featured in NCCPR's second report on Michigan child welfare, called Tapeworm in the System, which will be released in Lansing this week.

The story of this program was told best by the Westchester Journal News, which has done some of the nation's best reporting on this topic. That's because, for historical reasons, Westchester County, New York, may be the residential treatment capital of America. So the newspaper sent two reporters to Milwaukee. Here's what they found:

[Wraparound] cut the number of Milwaukee children in RTCs by 90 percent, dramatically shortened their stays, reunited hundreds of families, reduced the incidence of crime and saved millions of dollars in treatment costs. It became a national model for treating emotionally disturbed children, offering a more effective and economical means of helping youngsters without the traditional reliance on costly and controversial institutions. …

"Wraparound Milwaukee demonstrates that the seemingly impossible can be made possible: Children's care can be seamlessly integrated. The services given to children not only work, in terms of better clinical results, reduced delinquency, and fewer hospitalizations, but the services are also cost-effective," the President's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health said in October. "Imagine the nationwide impact on our juvenile justice system if this program were implemented in every community."

"Residential treatment has had the luxury of basically being the sole tool out there for a very high-risk population, and they've convinced people that the only way to be safe is to have them locked up," said Stephen Gilbertson, clinical program coordinator for Wraparound Milwaukee. "We've shown that's simply not true. We've taken extremely high-risk kids and shown they can live successfully in the community."

Institutions have long argued that their role is crucial because most of the children have no stable homes. But Wraparound advocates say institutions have been too quick to write off families; Wraparound seeks out families and finds ways to make them work.

Of course, Milwaukee's institutions didn't simply accept all this. On the contrary, they fought it every step of the way.

"I remember meeting with groups of people and folks saying, 'Let's get some reports out that show they (Wraparound) are going to start hurting kids now,'" said Cathy Connolly, president of St. Charles Youth & Family Services, which operates Milwaukee's largest institution. "Well, nobody could ever bring the reports to the meetings, 'cause there were none that existed that said we were doing anything all that great. We didn't really have any solid anything that demonstrated we were able to fix kids."

Connolly and her colleagues lobbied fiercely for the status quo. She was remarkably candid about the reason:

"There were a couple big fears. … The first was, 'How are we going to financially sustain ourselves?' "

Eventually, however, Connolly's agency embraced the new approach:

"I think, looking back on it now, what we're doing for kids today is far more helpful."

Meanwhile, as noted previously on this Blog, Ismael Ahmed is slashing funding for prevention and family preservation, and proposing big rate increases for institutions.

I wonder if there is an award for resisting innovation in American government?

An award nomination for Maine, a slap in the face for Michigan

Six years ago, the child welfare system in the state of Maine was in a state of chaos. Things were so bad that the PBS series Frontline actually used the Maine system as a microcosm for everything wrong with child welfare.

Today the system has improved so much that it is a finalist for a prestigious Innovations in American Government award from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. The transformation in Maine is among only 16 finalists out of more than 600 entries.

The state has dramatically reduced the number of children taken from their parents and significantly increased the proportion of those taken who are placed with relatives. But perhaps their most remarkable achievement is cutting by two-thirds the number of children trapped in the worst form of care of all, institutionalization. It's all been done without compromising safety, earning the support of the state's independent child welfare ombudsman.

A lot of people deserve credit for the transformation, but none more than the director of Maine's child welfare agency, James Beougher.

Oh, wait. Actually there are some others who deserve to share the credit: The collection of regressive, obstructionist private agencies in Michigan who, year after year, block every attempt at meaningful reform in that state. These enormously powerful agencies constitute the state's foster care-industrial complex, or, to use a term first coined by legendary newspaper columnist Jack Newfield – the "permanent government" of Michigan child welfare. The agencies in the foster care-industrial complex are paid for every day they warehouse children in their institutions. Nothing is more important to these agencies than keeping those per diems rolling in. Oh they won't admit that, not even to themselves. They've got an elaborate set of rationalizations for their hugely expensive largely worthless institutions, and they've suckered a fair number of people, apparently including Michigan Department of Human Services Director Ismael Ahmed, into believing them.

Jim Beougher used to work in Michigan. He'd successfully reduced institutional placements in several counties. But when he tried to do it statewide as director of child and family services for Michigan DHS, he was thwarted by the intractable politics of Michigan child welfare. But while Michigan didn't want change, Maine, and in particular, Maine's governor, John Baldacci, did. So the Baldacci Administration brought Beougher to Maine, where he led that state's reform effort.

Beougher is not alone. In NCCPR's first report on Michigan child welfare, there is a section called The Michigan Child Welfare Brain Drain, which tells the stories of other Michigan child welfare leaders who brought reform to other places after being thwarted in Michigan.

Not that it's been easy in Maine. There's a foster care-industrial complex in Maine, too. But with the strong backing of the governor, and with the state's major newspapers unwilling to take the claims of the private agencies at face value, the reform effort has survived attempts to beat it back.

So the vulnerable children of Maine owe quite a debt of gratitude to the private child welfare agencies of Michigan. The vulnerable children of Michigan could be forgiven for not feeling quite as grateful.

But the story doesn't end there. Another of the finalists for the Innovations in American Government Awards also is, in effect, a direct slap in the face to the regressive Michigan way of doing business in child welfare. That story Monday.

Spitting in the face of your own “Task Force”

It's one thing to ignore your own Obligatory Blue Ribbon Commission, as I've come to call the groups that are appointed whenever a child welfare agency wants to duck responsibility for its failings. It's another to practically spit in the faces of the people who served on it.

You'd think Ismael Ahmed, director of the Michigan Department of Human Services, at least would have waited a decent interval before helping his boss the governor slash at least $19.8 million from funds for child abuse prevention, family preservation and basic help to ameliorate the worst effects of poverty. Depending on how you count things like cuts in day care, employment training and public assistance, the figure could be as high as $40 million or more. There even are cuts of at least $1.2 million for adoption support services and help for young people who've been failed their entire lives by DHS and now are "aging out" of foster care. (Voices for Michigan's Children has a breakdown of the cuts here.)

Many of these programs repeatedly have been cut back in past years; indeed the state of Michigan largely bailed out of funding prevention and family preservation years ago. As is discussed in detail in our report on Michigan child welfare and previously on this Blog they are funded largely on the backs of poor people themselves, using surplus funds from the federal Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program.

The new cuts come in the form of an Executive Order issued by the governor to close a deficit for the current fiscal year. They come on top of at least $38 million in cuts proposed for next year, discussed in a previous post to this Blog. In each case, the Governor couldn't have thought it all up all by herself.

None of these cuts really is required by Michigan's budget crisis. All these cuts could be avoided simply by not giving two big rate increases next year to providers of largely-worthless "residential treatment" – the worst form of "care" for foster children, and by using the great gobs of money going to hire more child abuse investigators and foster care workers to fund prevention and family preservation instead.

You can get a small but revealing sense of the contempt the people at DHS feel for these programs by the fact that they can't even get all of the names right. Family Group Decision Making, a key component of real reform, is referred to in the Executive Order as "Family group discussion making."

This is, of course, precisely the opposite of what Ahmed's own "Child Welfare Improvement Task Force" recommended.

But it's the same pattern as next year's proposed budget: Anything that might provide permanence or security for vulnerable children takes a hit – while the big, powerful private providers do just fine.

I don't know what's worse – Ahmed's hypocrisy or the providers' obscene priorities.

UPDATED, MARCH 22: How much damage can “Children’s Rights” do in just one state?

There is a brief update at the end of this post.
A group called Michigan's Children just put out an analysis of Gov. Jennifer Granholm's proposals for spending on human services. But here's the bottom line: Big cuts in prevention – at least $38 million – to help finance a big increase in spending on foster care and institutionalization.

That includes not only cuts in programs specifically aimed at family support and child abuse prevention, (much of it, as noted in NCCPR's Michigan report last month, actually funded by TANF surplus money that's supposed to help poor people become self-sufficient) but also cuts in concrete help for impoverished families, such as eliminating a planned raise in pathetically-low welfare payments and eliminating a raise in rates for day care providers.

The $38 million figure does not include de facto cuts in a slew of other programs, at least one of them a national model, which are being level funded in the face of increasing need – the same programs cited in NCCPR's Michigan Report in the section called "The coming TANF train wreck."

The whole thing is nuts.

Michigan's settlement with the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children's Rights requires lowering caseloads. The Michigan Department of Human Services has responded in the typical bureaucratic way - assuming the only way to do this is to hire more workers (as opposed to, say, increasing prevention and taking fewer children). So now the new workers will be hired by cutting prevention money – and that almost guarantees more cases. So all Michigan gets is the same lousy system only bigger.

Brilliant.

Worse, while rates for people who provide day care so single parents can work will be cut, rates for expensive, largely worthless residential treatment centers will be increased.

The two people most responsible for these absurd priorities are Marcia Lowry and Ismael Ahmed.

Marcia runs the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children's Rights – a group that long ago abandoned any reform effort that involved working to keep families together and instead claims it can "fix" foster care. She negotiated a settlement that allows Michigan to bleed prevention to fund more and more foster care. So instead of a repaired system, you just get a bigger one.

Ahmed runs Michigan's Department of Human Services. He replaced Marianne Udow who was the first DHS leader in more than a decade who actually understood child welfare – which made her a threat to the state's "foster care-industrial complex," it's network of powerful private agencies paid for every day they hold children in foster care. Ahmed is probably a good guy – but he's clueless - a pushover for anything the private agencies ask for. So it's no wonder they're practically swooning over Ahmed – and the settlement.

One of the leaders of the "foster care-industrial complex," Jim Paparella, Executive Director of Child & Family Services, Capital Area, and one of the most regressive voices in Michigan child welfare, (his exercise in "truthiness" on behalf of one of those awful parking place "shelters" was discussed in an earlier post to this Blog) sure sounded like a man in love when he wrote this in an October, 2008 op ed in the Lansing State Journal:

The settlement resulted from many long months of hard work and was accelerated by newly appointed DHS officials who came aboard last fall. Refreshing from the perspective of private nonprofit agencies in Michigan is the crystal clear vision, direction, and open-mindedness demonstrated by the new leadership. Over the past year, a strong sense of mutual respect and trust has been cultivated between the public and private services sectors, providing the sound foundation that will be needed to implement the major reforms called for in the settlement.

What Paparella really is saying is: Marianne Udow wouldn't give us whatever we wanted – Ismael Ahmed will. And sure enough, even as prevention is cut, Ahmed comes through with more money for institutions. At the same time, the proposed budget includes a cut in Family Group Decision Making, a program similar to a key component of the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Family to Family program – a program Ahmed already has curbed and which many of the private agencies hate. (The Casey Foundation is a longtime funder of NCCPR.)

In addition to the increases in funding for foster care and institutionalization, funding for adoption also is going up. That's not a bad thing in itself – adoption is a vital part of any good child welfare system. And there is nothing wrong with helping adoptive parents with the costs of adoption, even without a means test. But in past years, poor people in Michigan actually have been forced to, in effect, subsidize adoptions by middle-class families, since $41 million in adoption subsidy money came from TANF – money meant to be used to help poor people become self-sufficient. The Michigan's Children analysis doesn't say if this still is going on, but odds are that's unchanged.

So forget the huge report soon to emerge from the giant "Task Force" Ahmed named – the one that will be packed with platitudes about prevention. (I wonder if it will say that "children are our future"?) And don't believe the canned op ed pieces that will be written for task force members to fill in some blanks and pass off as their own in their local newspapers. (According to a power point presentation on the Task Force website a committee is preparing the "template.") The real story is in the budget. And the real story is ugly.

I first took a look at the budget analysis after reading an op ed by Jack Kresnak, a former Detroit Free Press reporter who now runs Michigan's Children. He called for an increase the tax on beer to avoid the budget cuts. At first I thought that was a good idea – after all, I'm a tax-and-spend liberal and proud of it. But looking at where Ismael Ahmed and Marcia Lowry have persuaded the Governor to increase spending makes it clear that any new money supposedly for prevention would only be used to free up more existing funds for more foster care and more money to institutionalize children. There's no point in raising taxes just for the same lousy system only bigger.

By the way, there are people who have complained that posts like these, and NCCPR's Michigan Report are too "inflammatory." (Hard to believe, I know.) I can live with that. There are a lot of good people at DHS and even the private agencies, where they've persuaded themselves that their largely worthless institutions aren't largely worthless. But that doesn't change the fact that, for decades, DHS and the private agencies have been hurting the children they're supposed to help. Isn't it time to light a fire under them?

UPDATE, MARCH 22: The New York Times Florida Newspapers have a story about a guy named Don Winstead, the man picked by that state’s Governor to oversee how Florida will use its federal stimulus money.  According to the story, Winstead has been “praised for helping the state land a federal waiver for foster care that earned the state extra money and more flexibility on where the money was spent.”

            That is, of course, the same waiver that Michigan first accepted, and then turned down at the last minute.  You would think Winstead’s counterpart in Michigan - whoever it was who made that idiotic decision to turn down the waiver - at least would have the decency to own up to it.

            And one would hope the Task Force would demand answers about the waiver and include them in its own report.  But don’t bet on it.  The Task Force, which meets again tomorrow, doesn’t seem interested in lighting a fire under anyone.