How to NOT fix abuse in group homes and institutions in 8 easy steps. Lessons from Massachusetts and elsewhere

Steps already completed are checked: 

_x_Take away children at a rate far higher than the national average, creating an artificial “shortage” of foster homes. 

_x_Due to “shortage,” use group homes and institutions, the worst form of “care,” at a rate that’s also well above the national average, creating conditions for rampant abuse of children in group homes. 

_x_Newspaper does an excellent job exposing rampant abuse of children in group homes but does not mention the high rate of removal. 

_x_People most responsible for, over decades, creating the climate of fear and demonization of families leading to the state’s high rate of removal, are quoted extensively condemning the abuse, while taking no responsibility for creating those conditions. 

__Lawmakers express shock and outrage and promise sweeping reforms and/or hearings (all duly noted in the traditional follow-up story). 

__Reforms consist entirely of increasing inspections, and screening and training, the same promises made the last time this sort of abuse was exposed, and the time before, and the time before that. This time, they might throw in closing the “age of consent” loophole. 

__Attention fades, and the state continues to take away children at a rate well above the national average. The new training, screening and inspections change nothing. 

__The entire cycle repeats. 

That’s the Massachusetts version. Something remarkably similar is playing out in Alaska.

 Of course, there is one way to break this cycle …

NCCPR in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette: A better approach for state child care

If you really want to fix a child welfare system, the solution is simple: Listen to your gut instinct – and do the opposite. 

Gut instinct says: Another child has died in a case where the file had more “red flags” than a Soviet May Day parade. So, it must be because the Massachusetts Department of Children & Families is fanatically devoted to preserving families and we need to rush to take away even more children. 

The data, and a massive new study, tell a different story and suggest the need for a different solution. … 

Read the full column in the Telegram & Gazette

Justice by geography, and more evidence that mandatory reporting backfires: Notes about Missouri and Massachusetts.

Photo by Tori Rector

Missouri: Justice by geography 

The story, from a Springfield, Missouri, television station is typical fearmongering, parroting the discredited, and yes, racist line about COVID-19 and child abuse.  It begins: 

Child experts [sic] feared it at the start of the pandemic. Greene County has seen staggering numbers of kids going into foster care. Experts say there is a range of issues and there are signs of abuse everyone should know. 

But later in the story we learn this: 

The Missouri Children’s Division reports a very small jump in the number of children who entered foster care in 2020, less than a half of a percent. … Greene County had a 44% increase. 

So, is Greene County a cesspool of depravity with vastly more child abuse than the rest of the state?  Has COVID-19 mysteriously set off a pandemic of child abuse in Springfield while somehow skipping over St. Louis, Kansas City and Joplin? Seems unlikely. 

Rather it’s a continuation of a disturbing pattern.  

Way back in 2003, when NCCPR released its report on Missouri child welfare, we noted that Greene County was an extreme outlier, with the proportion of children in foster care nearly double the state average, even though the child poverty rate was actually below the state average.  We focused on Greene County in part because that’s where a little boy named Dominic James was taken needlessly from his parents, only to die in foster care. 

What the story from that Springfield television station really illustrates is what Judge Darrell Missey termed “justice by geography,” when he was a Juvenile Court Judge in Jefferson County.  And a major reason is the existence of the Juvenile Office, the fifth wheel of the Missouri family policing system, which corrupts the very nature of juvenile court in Missouri. 

In his outstanding 2013 law review article on why the Juvenile Office does so much harm (and, by the way, also is unconstitutional), Prof. Josh Gupta Kagan quotes Judge Missey at length – an essay within an essay – on pp. 37 and 38.  I hope everyone will read it, especially in Missouri: I will highlight just one sentence, in which Judge Missey describes what he saw before becoming a judge: 

In ten years of practicing in that Court, I never saw the Juvenile Office lose a case, hearing, motion, or even an objection. 

There are two possible lessons here. One is: The Juvenile Office has achieved perfection!  Just eliminate the judges and everyone else altogether and let them do what they want.  

There is, however, another possible conclusion … 

Massachusetts: More evidence that mandatory reporting backfires

 I have written before about the failure of mandatory child abuse reporting laws. I’ve cited research showing that they deter families from seeking help and so overload the system with false reports that workers have less time to find children in real danger. 

At a hearing of a commission “studying” the issue in Massachusetts (they’re not really studying mandatory reporting, mostly they’re looking for excuses to expand it) Dr. Mical Raz, who literally wrote the book on this topic, pointed out a new study, which includes this: 

Whereas most policy or practice changes [by legislatures or family policing agencies] resulted in increased reports, most changes served to decrease the number of substantiations. 

In some cases that is to be expected.  For example, in most states all that it takes to “substantiate” an allegation of abuse or, far more often, so-called “neglect,” is for a caseworker to check a box on a form saying s/he thinks it’s slightly more likely than not that the abuse or “neglect” occurred and was caused by the accused.  There is no impartial hearing of any kind beforehand. Caseworkers sometimes proclaim they base these decisions on “intuition” or “gut feeling” or, in Massachusetts “vibe.” 

When the standard of proof is raised slightly – though it’s still just a caseworker’s assessment – both reports and substantiation go down. 

But the researchers found something else they said was “unexpected” – though I can’t imagine why anyone who knows how the system really works would be surprised: 

Sixteen states (32%) made changes to the scope of maltreatment, such as adding new categories of maltreatment or requiring certain populations be referred or investigated; the most common change was to add infants born with positive drug screens. Broadening the scope of maltreatment was associated with increased reports (5%), as expected, providing empirical evidence that these policy changes do indeed widen the reach of child welfare involvement. However, broadening the scope was also associated with decreased substantiated reports, which was unexpected, given that these policy changes were also intended to expand the range of what defined substantiated maltreatment. It could be that broadening the scope of maltreatment may increase the number of reports for lower-risk families that are ultimately unsubstantiated. [Emphasis added.] 

Ya think?

Curbing The Cruelty: NCCPR testimony to Massachusetts Mandated Reporter commission

Mandated reporting of alleged child abuse and neglect is a failure.  One-time proponents have turned against the current system of massive mandated reporting, and study after study shows that it backfires – discouraging families from reaching out for help and overloading the system, making it harder to find children in real danger. 

Yet in Massachusetts, a commission on mandatory reporting appears to have limited its discussion to whether to expand mandatory reporting a little, or expand it a lot.  And even as other states consider narrowing their neglect laws to reduce the confusion of poverty with neglect, the commission is considering making that confusion easier.  All this in a state that already tears apart families – especially poor families of color – at a rate 60% above the national average. 

The commission’s myopia is a microcosm of the cycle of failure that has plagued Massachusetts child welfare for decades – a cycle that has made all of the state’s vulnerable children less safe.  

NCCPR’s written testimony to the commission is available here. 

NCCPR in CommonWealth Magazine on Mass. child welfare: Child safety and family preservation are not opposites

 IT’S NOT REALLY that hard to fix a child welfare system: just listen to your gut instinct – and do the opposite.

Gut instinct says: David Almond died a horrible death though he was well known to the Department of Children and Families and other agencies. So the solution must be to take away children more quickly and return them to their homes more slowly – if at all. 

Except, of course, that’s exactly what the state did after the deaths of Bella Bond and Jeremiah Oliver.  The high-profile tragedies set off a foster-care panic, a sharp sudden increase in the number of children torn from their families, in a state which has taken away children at rates well above the national average for decades. ... But Gov. Charlie Baker and his DCF director, Linda Spears, learned nothing from this cycle. ...

Read the full commentary here.

Some Massachusetts school districts (can you guess which ones?) used child abuse reports to harass families whose kids couldn’t get online for school. The state child welfare agency encourages it.

Excellent reporting by The Boston Globe shows how one district betrayed a mother who came forward seeking help. But that’s only the beginning.

 READ THE FULL GLOBE STORY HERE

             On the surface this excellent story by Bianca Vázquez Toness of the Boston Globe is about just one aspect of child welfare’s failed, racist response to COVID-19 – school districts calling in child abuse reports on poor families who couldn’t get their children online for classes. (It’s not the first such story; the online news site The City wrote about how New York City schools are doing it, too.)

             Were that all there was to the story it still would be an important contribution to understanding how child welfare is making everything worse for poor families trying to cope with the coronavirus.  But this story actually reveals much more: It reveals, once again, how racism is embedded in every American institution and it reveals how our massive child welfare surveillance state has backfired, adding immeasurably to the stress on poor families, driving them away from seeking voluntary help, and actually making it harder to find the relatively few children in real danger.

             Indeed, the Globe story serves as a perfect illustration of what Prof. Kelley Fong found in her groundbreaking scholarship about the child welfare system in Connecticut and Rhode Island.

             So let’s take a closer look. 

             The first point – about where, exactly, school districts are prone to harass families with child abuse reports because parents couldn’t get their kids to class online, will come as no surprise:

 The trend was most common in high-poverty, predominantly Black and Latino school districts in Worcester, Springfield, Haverhill, and Lynn; advocates and lawyers reported few, if any, cases from wealthier communities.

          Perhaps a little more surprising, and even more discouraging, is the role the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families is playing in this harassment: They’re encouraging it.           

School staff are required to notify DCF when they have “reasonable cause to believe” a child has been abused or neglected. Indeed, during the pandemic, the state explicitly reaffirmed to school districts that teachers should report parents if students were “repeatedly truant/missing from their school programming and attempts to provide resources have been ignored or refused.”

            Or maybe that’s not surprising for an agency which, year after year, tears apart families at a rate far above the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in. 

The story goes on to show us that this isn’t really new. COVID-19 has highlighted and worsened a pre-existing condition. And it shows us that the definition of “ignored or refused” depends a lot on the family’s race.  Again, from the story: 

Schools often read into situations involving children of color, imagining “something bad happening where there is nothing,” said Elizabeth McIntyre, attorney with the School to Prison Pipeline Intervention Project at Greater Boston Legal Services. One client she represented, a Black mother who worked as a hairdresser, was reported to DCF when she didn’t answer phone calls from the school when her child was having an emotional crisis. They called her three times within a 30-minute period, McIntyre said. “If she were a white parent who worked at a big law firm downtown ... the district would not file a [report].” 

Now, the COVID-19 crisis and school closings have given schools new ways to surveil and punish parents, said Leon Smith, executive director of Citizens for Juvenile Justice. That’s happening both through the close attention to online absenteeism and video conferencing that allows teachers to see inside a family’s home. 

Schools aren’t calling DCF “in the suburbs, where kids are blowing off their online schooling,” he said. “It’s happening in communities of color.” 

            But perhaps most important, the Globe story illustrates a key finding from Prof. Fong’s work: The system betrays families that seek help, and drives them away from that help. The Globe tells the story of an immigrant mother whose first language is Spanish: 

Her young son’s behavior became difficult after schools closed in March, the woman said, adding that the boy clearly missed the structure and routines. She reached out to school staff for advice. “I was desperate,” she said. “I just wanted some techniques.” The mother met with a school therapist on Zoom, and asked about how to handle her son’s outbursts. 

Although there was a language barrier — the meeting was held in English even though the mother struggles with the nuances of the language — she thought the conversation went well. “She seemed concerned and was very polite,” the mother said of the school therapist. “I felt trust.” 

So she was shocked a few days later to receive a call from DCF. Someone from the school had alleged “general neglect” based on “behaviors observed or disclosed during remote learning.” 

The timing of the call — just days after her call with the therapist — made her think it was the reason the school called DCF. She suspected that something she said during her meeting with the therapist was misunderstood. 

“Maybe it was my English,” she said. 

            So maybe encouraging helpers to be spies on poor families isn’t such a good idea after all.  Maybe it’s time to reconsider the whole child welfare surveillance state, with its emphasis on a failed system of mandatory reporting that, even as it drives families away from help, overloads agencies with false reports so they have less time to find children in real danger.  The surveillance state that Massachusetts DCF is encouraging, and all those school districts love, makes all children less safe.

NCCPR in Youth Today on a major court ruling in Massachusetts

The court ruling makes clear that the state's highest court is fed up with the way the state's child welfare agency ignores the legal requirement to make "reasonable efforts" to keep families together.

The ruling also provides a rare look at how a child welfare agency really functions. As usual, the picture is ugly.

Read the column here.

Shock and outrage as child welfare agency treats people like US the way they usually treat people like THEM

UPDATE, AUGUST 28: Now there's even MORE shock and outrage: WCVB-TV has done a third story about this case. They even asked the governor about it.  The station also reports that, according to the state Department of Children and Families "the social worker who initiated the investigation is no longer employed with the agency."

Amazing how much media and political response you get when something like this happens to middle-class white people.

           Massachusetts State Rep. Shaunna O’Connell is furious at the state child welfare agency, the Department of Children and Families. She is shocked - shocked! - about how DCF treated a family.

          According to the investigative unit of Boston  television station WCVB it all began with a report to the state child abuse hotline of small bruises on one of the children. Then, according to the story, “…young children were strip-searched and emotionally scarred by state investigators who showed up at their home late at night.” 

According to the investigative reporting unit of Boston

Mass. State Rep. Shaunna O'Connell

            The next morning, the father said, “my four-year-old asked my wife, ‘Is DCF going to take us forever?’”

            Said Rep. O’Connell: “You can’t just barge into someone’s house like that when clearly there’s not evidence for it, scare their kids, scare their family …” she said. “As a mom, I can’t imagine that happening to my kids.”

            Of course you say you can’t, Rep. O’Connell.  And of course you can’t either, outraged journalists. Because this was one of those incredibly rare cases in which the victimized parents were white, middle-class foster parents.  The original report alleging abuse was made by a caseworker who noticed the small bruises on a foster child.  The foster child was immediately moved to another home. The family’s birth children were stripsearched and traumatized.

            As for Rep. O’Connell’s claim that you can’t do things like this to families with no evidence, what she must have meant was, you can’t do this to white, middle class families without evidence. CPS agencies can and do behave this way in poor neighborhoods routinely.

            In fact it’s so routine that a searing account of how such agencies really work, just published in The New Yorker began this way:

 What should you do if child-protective services comes to your house? You will hear a knock on the door, often late at night. You don’t have to open it, but if you don’t the caseworker outside may come back with the police. The caseworker will tell you you’re being investigated for abusing or neglecting your children. She will tell you to wake them up and tell them to take clothes off so she can check their bodies for bruises and marks. [Emphasis added].

In Massachusetts, this kind of needless strip-searching has been routine for decades. Long ago, when I interviewed Massachusetts caseworkers for my book, Wounded Innocents, one of their complaints was pressure from higher-ups to keep expanding the number of cases for which stripsearches are required.  And it continues today. As Massachusetts attorney Andrew Hoffman told me.

I have had numerous cases involving allegations of physical abuse in which DCF demands that parents allow the removal of the child's clothing to view relevant body parts, under threat of legal action.  I have also had cases in which this occurred at day care or school, without the parent present, and DCF instructs the school personnel or daycare provider that it is necessary.

It could have been so much worse

The foster family is right to be outraged at what happened to their children. Rep. O'Connell is right to be outraged as well. But keep in mind that a late-night knock at the door and a stripsearch is about the least amount of harm a child protective services agency can do.  Had the allegation been sexual abuse, the children would have faced an exam far more intrusive than a stripsearch.  And, of course, the children were never, for even a moment, taken from the home.

The fact that even this much harm happened to this particular family is roughly the equivalent of a police car pulling up alongside a middle class white man walking down a suburban street, the officers getting out and then, for no particular reason, throwing the man up against the nearest white picket fence and frisking him.  I’ve never heard of that happening to a middle-class white guy - but if it does, it will cause the kind of outrage among the middle class and the politically-powerful that routine stop-and-frisk in poor communities does not.

And stop-and-frisk is an apt analogy for another reason: According to a recent study, a majority of Black children will be forced to endure a child abuse investigation before they turn 18. (The study did not break down the data by income level, so we can only imagine how common this kind of experience is for poor people of color.)  Oh, and in most of those cases there is no allegation of any bruise at all. It’s usually an allegation of neglect.

The reason Rep. O’Connell says she can’t imagine it happening to her kids is because, in fact, she finally can imagine it – because, on this very rare occasion, it actually happened to kids of the same status and the same color as her kids. When it happens day after day after day to poor families of color, lawmakers either never hear about it or choose to ignore it.

Unfortunately, with rare exceptions such as the New Yorker story, the New York Times story about foster care as the new “Jane Crow” and a few others, journalists ignore it, too.

In an interview with WCVB, the father whose children were stripsearched, John DeMalia, summed up his reaction this way: “Fear they were about to take my kids,” he told WCVB. The story continues:

  "You're opening your home to help these other children and now they're threatening to take away your own." That's why the family has decided to close their licensed foster home, a blow -- albeit a small one -- to a child welfare system that doesn’t have enough foster homes for the number of children in the system.

Or, as DeMalia put it:

 We can't help these children anymore because of what [DCF] put our kids through, my children have to come first and I can't expose them to this again.

 But there is one thing DeMalia didn’t say; or if he did, it never got into the story.  It’s something aggrieved foster parents almost never say.

While what the DeMalia family went through is rare, other problems, such as arbitrary treatment, lack of information, and general disrespect of foster parents are more common – even though child welfare systems urgently need good foster parents.  Occasionally, someone such as former foster parent Mary Callahan will draw the obvious conclusion.  But she’s the exception. Whenever I read stories about the legitimate grievances of foster parents, I keep waiting for just one of them to say something like this:

“I never used to believe the things birth parents told me about how they were treated. But they really need me, and if this is how they treat me, how are they treating birth parents?”

Reefer madness at the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families

According to a recent story in the Boston Globe, the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families (DCF) is upset over language in a referendum on the ballot next week that would legalize recreational use of marijuana.

The language in question would require DCF to have actual evidence that marijuana use by parents places their children at risk before taking those children away, putting the family under supervision or otherwise interfering with their lives.

The language is so mild that the state’s “Child Advocate” says it wouldn’t change current practice.  Even Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Bartholet is not upset by this language.  Bartholet is probably the nation’s most fanatical advocate of a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare; her own proposals would require the removal of millions of children from their homes nationwide.

But DCF is throwing a fit. 

Why the language is needed 

This New York Times story explains why the referendum language is needed. It describes how cases involving marijuana possession are misused to needlessly harass families and sometimes take away their children.  There’s also this story from the now-defunct Philadelphia City Paper. And this one from Fusion.  And this case from Ohio.

These stories provide chilling evidence in support of what NCCPR President Prof. Martin Guggenheim, told the Globe.  He said the referendum language

“would be a big step forward in equalizing the rights of rich and poor parents by eliminating what should be an irrelevant factor in prosecuting child welfare cases.”

 Guggenheim, a national expert on child welfare law, said child protection is supposed to be about protecting kids who have already been harmed or are at imminent risk of harm.

 Yet, he said, “Child protection statutes have been used for decades to control poor people and take away their kids, using marijuana use as pretense — where, on the other side of town, pot would be winked at.”

The harm to children

As is so often the case with agencies like DCF, their position on this part of the referendum flunks the balance-of-harms test.

Surely, by now, everyone in Massachusetts knows how dangerous the state’s foster care system is to children.  Even a lawsuit brought by the group that calls itself Children’s Rights, a group that is no friend of keeping families together, makes that clear. (Yes, the lawsuit was dismissed, but based on a narrow reading of the law, not on the facts of the suit and the condition of Massachusetts foster care.) 

Two huge MIT studies found that in typical cases children in foster care fare worse even than comparably maltreated children left in their own homes.  Several more studies find abuse in one quarter to one-third of foster homes.

And consider the finding from a study of a drug problem a lot more serious than pot smoking:

University of Florida researchers studied two groups of children born with cocaine in their systems; one group was placed in foster care, another with birth mothers able to care for them.  After six months, the babies were tested using all the usual measures of infant development: rolling over, sitting up, reaching out.  Consistently, the children placed with their birth mothers did better.  For the foster children, the separation from their mothers was more toxic than the cocaine.

Before exposing children to all that harm inherent in foster care placement and/or the stress of a child abuse investigation, the referendum language says only that DCF should have “clear, convincing and articulable evidence that the person’s actions related to marijuana have created an unreasonable danger to the safety of a minor child.”

That’s a balancing test that should be welcomed by any agency that really cares about the best interests of children.

Such a test is especially needed in Massachusetts.  For well over a decade, Massachusetts has taken away children at a rate well above the national average -- and that was even before a foster-care panic sent removals skyrocketing in 2015 and 2016. 

DCF’s arguments 

According to the Globe story, DCF maintains that any language anywhere that

could limit a social worker’s ability to consider any substances, including marijuana, as a factor for child custody [is] troubling, especially given the unprecedented spike in DCF cases fueled by the opioid epidemic,

And what, exactly, does smoking pot have to do with the opioid epidemic? Obviously, nothing. But DCF knows that any opportunity to squeeze in a reference to opioid abuse is a great way to stampede people into giving the agency all the power it wants while avoiding even minimal checks and balances.

It appears the Globe had to do a lot of searching to find anyone outside DCF who shares the agency’s view.  They found

Sanford N. Katz, a professor of law emeritus at Boston College Law School,[who] said he doesn’t think the child welfare paragraph in the ballot measure has “any place in the law.”

 “Let some action occur and let it go before a judge to decide whether the impact has been negative” he said. “It’s so case-by-case! For example, if you’re legally growing marijuana and the child has access to it, that may be sufficient for social service intervention.”

Right. The same way DCF regularly hauls away children in upscale Massachusetts towns like Newton and Brookline if the parents forget to lock the liquor cabinet.

As for the seductive argument that we should just look “case by case” and let the judge decide, that conjures  up images of carefully prepared expert social workers using their enormous skills and unlimited time to balance the harm of smoking (or growing) marijuana against the harm of removal.

That’s a fantasy. In fact, case-by-case is a euphemism for arbitrary, capricious, and cruel. It is a system in which overloaded undertrained workers are free to act on whim, prejudice and the profound racial and class bias that permeates the system.

The whole point of having laws at all is to protect against the arbitrary abuse of power. 

As for judges, they are far more prone to wield rubber-stamps than gavels.  And no wonder. Like caseworkers, judges know that if they leave a child in her or his own home and something goes wrong, their careers may well be over. Remove hundreds of children needlessly and, while the child may suffer terrible harm, the judge will be safe.  That’s why judges in New York City actually admitted, on the record, that they are so afraid of adverse news coverage that they regularly remove children from their homes even when they think the child welfare agency has not made a good enough case.

The real problem with the language in this referendum is that, for once, Bartholet may be right: It may not really change anything.

Child welfare in Wisconsin: Lame excuses for trying to divert funds from Milwaukee

Last month on this blog, I reported that the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families (DCF) is trying to misuse a federal waiver process to siphon child welfare funds from Milwaukee to the rest of the state.

Last week, the news website Urban Milwaukee followed up and reported on DCF’s excuse.  Fredi-Ellen Bove, a DCF division administrator, first tried to claim that “any savings realized by Milwaukee [through reducing foster care] would have reverted back to the federal government.”

That’s grossly misleading.  Savings revert to the federal government under the current system, in which states are reimbursed for every eligible child they place in foster care.  But a key advantage of a waiver is that you get to keep the savings from reducing needless foster care, as long as the funds are reinvested in child welfare.

Urban Milwaukee wasn’t suckered.  The website reports that when she is pressed on the matter …

Bove concedes the state made a choice to spend the money in a different way. “We reached the conclusion we don’t need waiver dollars to meet the needs in Milwaukee.” Bove says Milwaukee has a stronger support system than other counties, with 12 months of “post-reunification” care by counselors after a child’s case is over, while other counties lack this.

But this, too, is an evasion.  For starters, it was DCF’s own stupid decision to seek only a narrow waiver focused exclusively on post-reunification services. (The Wisconsin proposal and proposals from other states are available here.)  Second, the existence of this one program has not magically wiped out all of Milwaukee’s child welfare problems.

Indeed, it strains credulity to think that Milwaukee, where children are torn from their families at a rate significantly higher than many other cities and where the child poverty rate is more than 34 percent, really needs the money less than, say, Ozaukee County, where the child poverty rate is six percent.

But if Wisconsin DCF really believes the issue is spending waiver money most efficiently, that’s all the more reason for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to turn down Wisconsin’s waiver proposal entirely.

Thirteen states have applied for ten waivers.  Massachusetts, for example, is proposing to spend $20 million per year on its five-year waiver initiative.  Wisconsin, in contrast, proposes to use only $7.1 million in funds for its waiver, and the total doesn’t get that high until the fifth year.

Since the law only allows ten waivers per year for three years, surely the federal government owes it to American taxpayers to use those waivers to provide the most real benefit to the greatest number of children.  So it would be a huge waste of taxpayer money to waste a waiver on Wisconsin’s current proposal.

Fortunately, the federal government can issue ten more waivers in 2013 and another ten in 2014.  Wisconsin should go back to the drawing board and return with a comprehensive proposal to serve all children who otherwise might be placed in foster care or remain trapped there.

If Wisconsin DCF needs some help, the current proposals from Arkansas, Utah and Washington State are good models.  You can read about them in NCCPR’s Report Card on all of the publicly-available waiver proposals, on our website here.

The Mass. Foster care Mclawsuit: Did CR even read its own legal papers?

OK, it's a rhetorical question. Somebody must have read them before they were filed. But here's why I ask:

I often cite studies showing that, in typical cases, children left in their own homes typically do better than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care. Understandably, some people are skeptical. After all, the studies deal in numbers; and they just don't seem to jibe with gut instinct. If only there were some concrete examples.

Well, here's an example. Adam was taken from his mother "at a very young age" on a charge of "neglect" – there is no further description of what his mother allegedly failed to do. But we know that by age 16 Adam had been:

●Rushed into an adoption by a couple who brutally abused him.

●Separated from his siblings.

●Placed, at age 13 in a residential treatment center for sex offenders even though he was not a sex offender.

●Brutally beaten by a group of teenagers allegedly organized into a "fight club" by a staffer at the RTC.

●Repeatedly raped by another boy in the program. When he cried for help, Adam said, staff would turn up the volume of the television to drown out his cries.

Or how about the case of Seth?

He and his brothers were taken from their mother because their home was unsanitary, the mother had "mental health issues" and Seth allegedly had been left alone unsupervised when he was eight years old. (The length of time he was alone is not specified.) The children's mother was overwhelmed by the problems of three sons, all with learning disabilities. And Seth had been abused sexually, by a former boyfriend of the mother.

Instead of giving Seth's mother the help she needed to cope, Seth and his brothers were taken away. Seth immediately was institutionalized and the brothers were separated from each other. They're rarely allowed even to see each other. The child welfare agency moved quickly to terminate parental rights, but assigned Seth a goal of long term foster care. And that's all he's gotten, having been moved over and over from home to home.

And then there's Rakeem. He was taken from his parents "in large part due to educational neglect" – that's the allegation that the highly-respected Vera Institute of Justice says generally doesn't even belong in the child welfare system at all.

By now, Rakeem's education has suffered from at least as much neglect, probably more.

And that was just the beginning. He was separated from his siblings and rarely even gets to see them. From the moment of his removal he was treated like a criminal, placed in a foster home that was more like house arrest, then moved from placement to placement and ultimately institutionalized.

When the institution offered to provide transportation so Rakeem at least could have regular visits with his family the child welfare agency said no. Instead, they used visits as leverage, saying Rakeem couldn't have more until his "behavior" improved. Even the Child Welfare League of America says visits never should be used for reward and punishment. (And, as it happens, though not stated explicitly, it appears the cause of Rakeem's behavior problems was how much he missed his family.)

THE SOURCE FOR THE STORIES

So, where do all these stories of needless removal come from? Where did I read about all these cases in which taking away the children made their lives far worse? Where did I find all these examples that make clear why the studies keep showing that, in typical cases, children do better when left in their own homes?

They all come from the same place: Adam, Seth and Rakeem are "named plaintiffs" in the lawsuit filed yesterday against the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families by the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children's Rights.

These cases also help explain why Massachusetts takes away children at a rate nearly 50 percent above the national average.

(At the same time, another named plaintiff illustrates how, when you overload your system with children who don't belong in foster care, workers don't have time to make good decisions in any case: This child was the victim of severe physical abuse in her own home. There is no question removal was justified. And yes, that was the one case among the named plaintiffs in which DCF actually tried returning the child home.)

And yet, as usual with CR's lawsuits, the Complaint offers only deafening silence on the issue of wrongful removal. There is not one word about the problem of Massachusetts taking away children needlessly. Curbing such wrongful removal is nowhere listed among the demands for "relief" at the end of the Complaint. There is not one word suggesting that CR realizes that Adam, Seth and Rakeem probably could have remained safely in their own homes had their parents gotten the right kinds of help.

Similarly, in listing the causes for the high rate of abuse in Massachusetts foster care, the Complaint lists every possible cause except the obvious: When you take away too many children, you have no place to put them. That encourages lowering standards for foster parents, and willful blindness to abuse in foster care. Taking too many children also explains why, as the Complaint notes, DCF winds up doing things like placing an asthmatic foster child with smokers

Instead there is only the usual list of CR's obsessions and failed solutions: Hire lots more caseworkers, recruit more foster homes and, of course, give the foster parents a big pay raise. Such solutions will only siphon away scarce funds that should be used to help all the other Adams Seths and Rakeems in Massachusetts stay safely in their own homes.

OTHER CONTRADICTIONS

And that's not the only way the stories of the named plaintiffs contradict the rest of the lawsuit.

From the moment he was removed from his home Rakeem begged to be placed with his grandmother. He mentioned it over and over – until his grandmother died, at which point DCF wouldn't even let Rakeem attend her funeral.

Yet, as noted in yesterday's post to this Blog, even as CR complains that DCF isn't doing enough to place children with relatives, CR also is seeking to put further barriers in the way of kinship care placements, bringing its obsession with "licensing" – the one that's done so much harm in Michigan – to Massachusetts.

But then, cognitive dissonance is nothing new at CR.

At about the same time CR was pressuring Tennessee to repeal a law that would have slightly curbed entries into foster care, CR's Executive Director, Marcia Lowry was telling the Philadelphia Daily News:

"I've been doing this work for a long time and represented thousands and thousands of foster children, both in class-action lawsuits and individually, and I have almost never seen a child, boy or girl, who has been in foster care for any length of time who has not been sexually abused in some way, whether it is child-on-child or not."

Back in 2003, Marcia warned Congress that

"… Congress should realize that far too many states … when they do, for example, raise their adoption numbers, are doing so by including many clearly inadequate families … along with the genuinely committed, loving families who want to make a home for these children, just to 'succeed' by boosting their numbers."

But that hasn't stopped her from including adoption quotas in some of her lawsuits.

Maybe it can be their new slogan: "'Children's Rights': Unencumbered by logic since 1995."

Three more foster care lawsuits doomed to fail, three more bad child welfare systems likely to get worse

MASSACHUSETTS AND NEVADA SUITS IGNORE WRONGFUL REMOVAL; THE NEXT TARGET IS ALMOST CERTAINLY TEXAS

The group that so arrogantly calls itself "Children's Rights" has filed another one of its Mclawsuits against a state child welfare agency – this time in Massachusetts. And NCCPR's sources say that another such Mclawsuit, in Texas, is imminent.

Meanwhile a group which is unaffiliated with CR but has the same myopic outlook about how to fix child welfare systems, the National Center for Youth Law, has filed the same kind of suit in Nevada. (I've come to think of the California-based NCYL as "CR West")

All of these child welfare systems almost certainly are every bit as bad as CR and NCYL say they are. But at best, these suits are likely to drag on for years, perhaps decades with no real improvement (witness CR's suits in Washington DC and Connecticut and NCYL's in Washington State). At worst, they will make these child welfare systems worse, by diverting scarce resources from prevention and family preservation into more child abuse investigations and foster care.

Neither CR nor NCYL has learned from successes elsewhere – including their own.

The only class-action lawsuit settlements that really work are those that push child welfare systems to rebuild by emphasizing family preservation; or at least include such efforts as part of the reform effort. The consent decree that helped transform child welfare in Alabama, brought by the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, is the classic example. (The Legal Director of the Bazelon Center is a member of NCCPR's Board of Directors.) But CR's own settlements in New Jersey and New York City also illustrate this, and so does NCYL's settlement in Utah. In all three cases, individuals and organizations wiser than CR or NCYL helped them craft settlements better than anything they could come up with on their own.

But it seems neither organization has learned either from their failures or their successes.

Judging by CR's press release, the Massachusetts suit zeros in on the problems of abuse in foster care and moving foster children from foster home to foster home – enormously important issues that are at the heart of NCCPR's own advocacy. But the key cause of those problems is the simple fact that children in Massachusetts are taken from their families at a rate nearly 50 percent above the national average. That creates an artificial "shortage" of foster homes, so workers wind up moving children from home to home. And it creates an incentive to ignore abuse in foster care.

But CR, of course, ignores this issue. Worse, their track record in places like Michigan and Georgia suggests they will press for settlements that will allow the states to divert funds now used for prevention, family preservation and help to impoverished families, into more child abuse investigations and more foster care. That, of course, will make everything worse.

The wrongful removal problem in Nevada is even worse than in Massachusetts, with a rate of removal 70 percent above the national average. A comprehensive review of a random sample of cases by one of the nation's leading experts, University of Nevada-Las Vegas Social Work Professor Leroy Pelton, found widespread wrongful removal and confusion of poverty with "neglect." But NCYL ignores the issue.

CONTINUING THE WAR AGAINST GRANDPARENTS…

And both organizations appear determined to extend the war on grandparents that CR is waging in Michigan – which already has caused the expulsion of hundreds of children from the homes of grandparents and other relatives in that state.

Massachusetts already is more restrictive than Michigan about placing children with relatives when their homes are unlicensed. It can be done only when a court approves. But apparently, CR thinks even this is not restrictive enough, since their Complaint complains about these exceptions.

NCYL's suit is even worse. Nevada law explicitly allows placing children in unlicensed homes as long as basic health and safety standards are met. (A great deal of formal licensing typically involves standards geared to middle-class creature comforts.) NCYL argues that the standards under the Nevada law are, in fact, too low. But instead of looking for sensible middle ground, NCYL offers up a horror story or two and appears to demand that every impoverished grandparent meet precisely the standards used to license the homes of middle-class strangers.

There is special irony in this in light of a key issue raised in the NCYL suit: the misuse and overuse of psychiatric medication on foster children. Florida is closely examining this issue and may be doing more than any other state finally to come to grips with it. Florida's data show that the best protection against overmedicating foster children is – grandma. Foster children in kinship placements are far less likely to be prescribed psychiatric meds than those placed in what should properly be called "stranger care."

It's not hard to figure out why: Grandparents and other relatives are more likely to love these children, and so will tolerate more difficult behavior before demanding a prescription.

So now we have the spectacle of the National Center for Youth Law simultaneously identifying an extremely important problem – and undermining the best solution.

And God only knows what kind of chaos CR has in store for Texas.

… AND RATCHETING UP THE WAR AGAINST FAMILIES

Entirely on its own, Texas already came up with the dumb idea of diverting funds from prevention and family preservation into more child abuse investigators and foster care workers. The legislature tried it in 2005, and it failed miserably – just as NCCPR predicted it would in a report we issued on Texas child welfare that year. Now the Texas child welfare agency is trying to reverse years of escalating entries into foster care. That may well be what made Texas a target for CR.

Indeed, a recent "Executive Director's Report" from CR's Marcia Lowry, indicates that CR is about to escalate its war against impoverished families caught up in the child welfare system. Instead of simply ignoring the problem, CR is now threatening to attack states that have succeeded in reducing entries into care. They've already pressured the Tennessee legislature into repealing a law that would have put one very small brake on such removals.

And CR is threatening to make its own determination of which prevention and family preservation programs "work" and which do not. In fact, there is abundant evidence already available on this; and CR is almost certain to get any such effort wrong.

Lowry likes to say that she doesn't know how to fix poverty, but she knows how to fix foster care. In fact, the results of her lawsuits suggest she doesn't know how to fix either one – and her efforts sometimes make the poverty worse.

No one can stop CR from suing Texas of course. We can only urge that state, and Massachusetts and Nevada as well, to fight any proposed settlement that is not built around doing more, not less, and spending more, not less, to keep families together.

Perhaps then Texas won't be the latest state to see its children wronged by "Children's Rights."