Child welfare in New York City: “I am scared of ACS”

In January, 2006, NCCPR and several New York City advocates held a news conference in response to a foster-care panic – a sharp sudden surge in removals of children from their homes following a high-profile tragedy. In this case the panic followed the death of Nixzmary Brown.

At that news conference we distributed a written statement from a 14-year-old who had been wrongly removed from her home and placed in foster care by the city child welfare agency some years before by the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS). She wrote about being abused in foster care and about how the fear of being taken again never left her.

To protect her privacy the 14-year-old did not appear at the news conference, and her name was not used.

Sadly, more than a decade later, her statement is relevant again, so we reprint it here:

 “I am scared of ACS”

I am scared of ACS.  All the news reports of the deaths of kids scares me. 

My Mom is being investigated by ACS now because the Board of Ed can't keep track of our home school records.

I'm scared because no one cares that Mom and Dad are not abusing me and my brother.  Nobody cares the only abuse I got was in the foster homes they put me in.  ACS took me from my family and put me with people who told me and my brother my family didn't want us.  I knew they were lying.  I knew my Mom would get us back.  That’s what I held onto during night after night of sexual abuse.

The foster parents didn't feed me and my brother all the time.  One time my brother took a cookie out of the fridge because he was hungry.  The foster mother beat him with a shoe.  I yelled at her I was going to tell my Mom because we were going to have a visit with her the same day.  The foster mother grabbed the broom and as I tried to run she hit me on top of my head.  Blood ran down my face and covered my shirt.  She put me in the bed and put a towel on my head.  It kept bleeding.

She took the other two kids for their visit with their Mom.  Later that night the agency caseworker came and took me to the hospital.  We never went back to that foster home, thank God.   I still have a big mark on my head were my hair won't grow because of that.  Later I found out the other foster child told the caseworker what happened to me.  The foster mother had called and said she couldn't make the visit. 

My Mom never beat us, she just made us turn the TV off and read.  I got beat in the foster homes they put me in but no one cared. The foster parents told me I was ugly and stupid.  My Mom always told me I could be anything I wanted to be in life, all I had to do was try. 

I never wanted to talk about what happened to me in the four foster homes I was in because I was ashamed.  I didn't want people to know what happened to me.  I wanted to write a story so everyone could understand there are kids who are scared of ACS.  ACS was not a savior to me.  I hate them so much but my Mom tells me not to hate.

Why do they do this to kids?  I had a Mom who loved me and took care of me.  Even if my Mom couldn't take care of us, we have a big family that would.  Instead, ACS put us in hellholes and for what? 

ACS sees all parents the same once the call is made.  My Mom and dad then have to prove why they should be allowed to keep us.  I think ACS should have to prove why they should be allowed to take kids.

                                                                                               

We just moved downtown to a nice area.  I thought I could put all of the bad ACS memories behind me.   ACS called my new school and I don't want to go back there.  I don't want everyone looking at me like I'm an abused child.   I don't want them asking: Is everything ok at home?

We just moved into the building so everyone knows when ACS comes a knocking.

People always know.  I feel ashamed.  I want to leave New York City.  I want to leave so ACS can never take me and my brother again.  My Mom said we can't leave just like that while the case is open. 

I'm scared when I hear a hard knock at the door. I think they are coming.  I was scared to go to school because they will come to the school and remove me and put me in a foster home.  All because if my Mom and Dad don't do what they want, never mind they are not abusing us. 

I feel safer at home.  I feel like my Mom and Dad could keep them from taking me.  I failed a test I had to take for my new school on purpose because I'm scared ACS will come to the school and take me.  My head started to hurt every time it came time to leave the house.  Every morning I was sick throwing up and diarrhea.

I will be so glad when I am 18 and my brother is 18.  Then I know ACS will never be able to put us in a foster home again.

When I started to write this story, my Mom asked me: If I had a chance what would I say to ACS and people who read this?  I wanted to say please leave me and my brother alone and other kids who don't need to be put in foster care. ACS don't take us and put us back in those bad homes.  I want to be with my Mom and Dad.  I want to be a normal kid.  I don't want to be scared to go to school.  I don't want to jump every time there is a knock at the door.  I want to feel safe in my own home without worrying that acs is coming.

The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer... Psalm 18:2

Once again, New York City children pay the price of foster care panic

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. Photo by Kevin Case

And it comes just as data show City children "known to the system" at their safest in at least six years.

The data are still preliminary but, as first reported by the website Gothamist, it appears that for the third time in two decades New York City is in the midst of a foster-care panic – a sharp sudden increase in children removed from their homes in the wake of a high-profile tragedy.

Zymere Perkins, a child “known to the system,” died in September. Politicians immediately started tripping over each other in the rush to advance their careers with the usual demagoguery. That had the usual effect. Data from the city child welfare agency, the Administration for Children’s Services, show that in October the number of children taken from their homes apparently was 75percent higher than in October, 2015. (ACS keeps these data online for only a month at a time, the link goes to a cached version of the rerlevant data.)

Making this doubly tragic: In Fiscal Year 2016, before the panic, key measures of child safety show that New York City children were safer than at any time in at least six years.  In contrast, foster-care panics make children less safe.

That doesn’t mean all was well at ACS. I am not suggesting there is validity to the common complaint about the media: “You don’t report the good news” – and Mayor Bill de Blasio needs to stop whining about this.  Of course media don’t report the good news. When I was a reporter, I didn’t go out to the airport to write stories about all the planes that landed safely.

What is needed is more reporting about the bad news: Tearing apart far more families needlessly does the children in those families enormous harm. We need more reporting on that kind of bad news – as Gothamist has done.  ACS and other agencies like it routinely err in all directions – we need more reporting on the stumbling and bumbling that leads to needless removal, as well as the stumbling and bumbling that leaves children in danger in their own homes.

In the absence of such reporting, the foster care panic will go on for years, just as it did starting in 1996 and again a decade later. Many more children will be harmed, and all New York City children will be less safe.

That’s because of the message to the frontlines: If the only kind of blunder for which a caseworker can get in trouble, or wind up on the front page, is leaving a child in danger in her or his own home; if there is no penalty for making scores or hundreds of blunders that lead to needless foster care, then, of course, caseworkers will remove children needlessly.

What the data tell us

There are two key measures of child safety – they are the standard measures used by the federal government: One is the percentage of children re-abused after they become known to a child welfare agency after a given period of time. The federal government measures reabuse within six months. New York City uses a tougher standard, reabuse within a year. The second standard is foster-care recidivism, the percentage of children returned home from foster care who have to be placed again within a year.

The percentage of children reabused in 2016 was the lowest since 2009. The rate of foster-care recidivism was the lowest since 2006.  Data and sources are in NCCPR’s report on New York City child welfare.

Now, consider what happens during foster care panics.

The 1996 panic, set off by the death of Elisa Izquierdo late in 1995, did nothing to make New York City children safer. Removals skyrocketed, reaching the highest number in decades in 1998. That same year the rate of re-abuse was the highest it’s been in any year since, and foster-care recidivism barely budged.  And, of course, thousands more children were exposed to enormous inherent harm of needless foster care, and the high rate of abuse in foster care.

After Nixzmary Brown died, in January, 2006, removals shot up again from 2006 through 2009. So did rates of reabuse and foster care recidivism. As entries into foster care went down again, first recidivism and then reabuse rates slowly declined.

What about fatalities?

Of course, the measurement of choice for politicians isn’t something relatively reliable such as how many children actually are re-abused. The measurement of choice is: Was there a particularly horrifying case in the news that supposedly “proves” the child welfare agency is incompetent? 

By that measure every child welfare agency in America is incompetent, always was incompetent, and always will be incompetent. Because there is no child welfare agency that can prevent every tragedy – or even every tragedy in which the case file had more “red flags” than a Soviet May Day parade.

But here’s what we do know: Foster care panics make children less safe, even when the measure is the number of deaths of children “known to the system.”

That’s actually a lousy measure – for reasons for which we all should be grateful. Though each is among the worst imaginable tragedies, let us be grateful that the number of such tragedies, even in a city the size of New York, is low enough to rise or fall due to random chance.

That’s why it’s irresponsible in the extreme to try to draw sweeping conclusions, as the commissioner of the city’s Department of Investigations tried to do, based on examining only the horror stories.

But as long as everyone insists on using such deaths as a measure, I’ll point out that during the two previous foster-care panics, deaths of children “known to the system” in New York City increased.

Here’s something else we know: The only places in America that have succeeded in improving child safety are those that did what New York City has done in recent years – rebuild to emphasize safe, proven alternatives to tearing apart families. In contrast, there is no place in America where foster-care panic has made children safer.

And there’s one more thing we know: Foster care panics are not inevitable.

The state run child welfare system in Connecticut also has had high profile tragedies in recent years. Those tragedies have been followed by the same sorts of self-serving demagoguery seen now in New York City.  But there’s been no foster care panic – for the simple reason that the leader of the state child welfare agency refuses to allow it, and her boss, the governor, is backing her up.

A dose of Connecticut courage is just what New York City needs right now.

Foster care in New York: Legacy of a failed commissioner

Two very good stories this week offer rare insight into how child welfare agencies really work, the dynamics of foster-care panic, and the price paid by children for poor leadership.  In a future post, I’ll discuss a Washington Post column about the legacy of former-Mayor Adrian Fenty’s dreadful response to a high-profile tragedy.

First, though, to New York City and its Administration for Children’s Services.

New York Magazine has a very good story  by reporter Jennifer Gonnerman about a caseworker and supervisor indicted on charges of criminally negligent homicide after a child on their caseload, Marchella Pierce, died.  (Gonnerman was interviewed about the story this evening on NPR's All Things Considered)

The portrait of caseworker Damon Adams and supervisor Chereece Bell painted by a grandstanding Brooklyn District Attorney is of two workers who didn’t give a damn and one who allegedly falsified records to cover incompetence.

The New York Magazine story paints a very different picture.  Adams fell behind on his paperwork because he was so extraordinarily dedicated that he kept helping parents, and former foster children, who called him even after their cases were closed.  Bell took on the unit that handles all the toughest cases – and she was denied the help other supervisors got because she was so good at her job that others supposedly needed the help more.  She even received an award – “a wooden plaque commending her for her ‘extraordinary efforts to protect children.’” from then-ACS Commissioner John Mattingly.

We’ll probably never know for sure if they’re really that good, anymore than we’ll ever know if they were as bad as the District Attorney claims.  I suspect New York Magazine came closer to the mark, though there are some comments Bell makes in the article itself (which I’ll get to below) which raise concerns.

But the fundamental reason we won’t know for sure is that incompetent workers hide in incompetent systems.  When it is impossible for even the best worker to do the job, it’s hard to tell the best from the worst.

A CULTURE OF FEAR

The New York Magazine story captures brilliantly how the system sets up everyone to fail – and the culture of fear created as a result.

The story documents how everyone is mindful of what happened to workers after Nixzmary Brown died in 2006 – not least Bell herself who would tell the caseworkers she oversaw to make those extra calls and visits because

 “You’re not going to make me lose my job; you’re not going to have my face on the front page of the news”

Obviously, such a culture of fear is going to lead to a lot of children being taken away from their parents needlessly.

There was a time when John Mattingly understood that.

More than a decade ago, several New York City Family Court judges said almost exactly the same thing to a commission advising ACS – explaining that this was why they would rubber-stamp ACS removals even when they thought the agency had no case.  John Mattingly served on that panel.   At the time he was appalled.

But after Nixzmary Brown died, Mattingly brought exactly the same culture into ACS – with the same dreadful consequences.  He took a series of actions that all sent the same message to the frontlines: Take away all the children you want and, while the children may suffer terribly, your jobs are safe.  Leave one child in her of his own home and let something go wrong, and I’ll hang you out to dry.

That’s what happened in the Pierce case. 

If, in fact, either Adams or Bell falsified records then they deserve to be fired.  There might even be a case for some kind of criminal charge specific to falsifying records.  But criminally-negligent homicide?  No way.

Mattingly should have been the first to condemn the D.A. for grandstanding at his caseworkers’ expense.  Instead, he remained silent right up until his recent resignation.

FUDGING THE FIGURES ON CASELOADS

But the revelations don’t end with the culture of fear.  The New York story got past Mattingly’s spin on another key point, his claims about worker caseloads.  According to the story:

Mayor Bloomberg, with ACS’s then-commissioner John Mattingly by his side, was telling reporters that the workers’ average caseload was only ten families—less than the national average. This enraged the workers even more, since they all knew this calculation didn’t reflect their entire workload. It includes only active investigations, but not court cases. After an investigation goes to court—often because ACS is trying to get custody of a kid—the case can still stay on a worker’s plate for months, requiring the worker to trek to Family Court, do more paperwork, and sometimes visit the home.

And, as everyone knows, anytime you have to go to Family Court, you’re at the mercy of a notoriously inefficient system. Compared with his co-workers, Adams had “a really bad draw,” as Rae Phillips, a caseworker in the Hospital Unit, puts it. Co-workers recall Adams was in court three or four days a week, sometimes more than once a day. “That’s where all your time goes,” Phillips says. Bell estimates that at the end, Adams had fourteen open investigations and at least twenty court cases. When he was interrogated after Marchella’s death, Adams said his caseload totaled about 40.

The fact that Adams makes this claim doesn’t make it so.  But the entire New York press corps, which normally prides itself on its skepticism, simply took Bloomberg and Mattingly at their word concerning caseloads – unlike decades past when newspapers exposed a shell game behind similar claims during the administration of former Mayor Ed Koch.

GOOD IDEAS UNDERMINED

The article also illustrates how the culture of fear can undermine even the few progressive moves Mattingly retained even after Nixzmary Brown died, such as Child Safety Conferences.

They’re supposed to work this way: When a caseworker is about to remove children from the home she or he convenes a meeting involving everyone who cares about those children (and if they’re old enough, sometimes the children) in an effort to find a better option.

But the New York article describes a process that has become a sham, in which workers either are too closed-minded, or simply too afraid, to consider any other options:

In practice, caseworkers say, the decision about whether to remove a kid is almost always made ahead of time, rendering these meetings virtually useless. “A fantastic idea, terrible in actuality,” says [a] … former caseworker. “A monumental suck of time.”

Bell often had two of these conferences a day, maybe three, each lasting one and a half to two hours, sometimes even longer. All the while, phone calls are flooding into her voice-mail … and the paperwork was piling up. To a friend in the office, she’d say: “How am I supposed to get anything done with all these f------ conferences?”

These meetings not only consumed much of her time but also left her emotionally drained.

If Ms. Bell finds actually coming face-to-face with the families whose lives she is about to turn upside-down too draining, then maybe the job has become too much for her, and it calls into question some of the portrait in this article.

So does the way she responded to some of Adams’ efforts to go the extra mile for families:

 “Get off the phone!” Bell would holler when she heard him counseling yet another parent whose case had been closed. “We don’t have time for that!” Sometimes she would rip the phone right out of his hand and slam it onto the receiver.

(As that comment indicated, Bell argues this isn’t what she wanted to do, it’s what she had to do in order to keep up with the workload.)

But while it’s hard to blame workers trapped in a culture of fear for refusing to take the conferences seriously, the fact is in other parts of the city, workers have risen above that culture.

Michael Arsham, executive director of an outstanding grassroots family advocacy group, the Child Welfare Organizing Project,* discussed this in a comment on the New York website:

CWOP has partnered with the Manhattan Borough Office of ACS and the Center for Family Representation [which provides high quality legal representation for families caught in the ACS net], training life-experienced Community Representatives to staff CSCs in East Harlem. CWOP parents have staffed over 700 of these conferences, and have helped avert non-relative placement of children in about two-thirds of them. In the over four years that we've been involved in this initiative, we have never heard any of our ACS partners deride CSCs as a distraction from their duties. In fact, there is nothing more fundamental to good child protective work than talking in a direct, straightforward way with parents about child safety concerns, and how best to address them through use of extended family supports and community services.

Because of the unit in which Bell and Adams worked, the article also risked leaving a mistaken impression of typical cases.  As Arsham pointed out:

ACS is repeatedly characterized as the agency that investigates "abusive" parents. It would be much more accurate to say "allegedly neglectful" parents. The large majority of parents called to the attention of ACS - 85 - 90% - are accused not of abuse but of neglect, usually related to poverty: substandard housing, lack of health insurance or daycare, children resistant to attending failing schools, etc.

TREATING CASEWORKERS AS SOME CASEWORKERS TREAT FAMILIES

The article concludes with the final irony:

These days, the fears that keep Bell up at night concern her own children, her 12-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter. It seems the ultimate irony: the possibility that this whole saga might end with her being removed from her home, taken away from her two kids. For Bell, it’s the most terrifying part of this whole ordeal. In the courtroom, in front of the prosecutors and the reporters, she tries to conceal her fears, but to a former co-worker she admitted the truth. “I’m scared,” she said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. Do you know I could go to jail for four years? Do you know how old my son will be when I come home?”

That prompted a question, posed on the NCCPR Facebook Page, by Melanie Williams Smotherman, the director of another outstanding grassroots organization, the Family Advocacy Movement in Nebraska:  She wonders if Adams and Bell realize how similar their treatment is to the way many caseworkers treat families?

*NCCPR receives funding to assist CWOP with media work.

Foster care in New York: Two views from the frontlines

On Friday, the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School in New York City, which publishes Child Welfare Watch, sent out excerpts from an interview with a caseworker for New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services.

It was pretty much what you’d expect, and pretty much like dozens of other such stories that have appeared all over the country.  The caseworker talked about the enormous stress of the job and the constant fear of having something go terribly wrong with one of the cases on her caseload.

It begins this way:

I always wanted to work here and now that I'm here I'm like, "You've gotta be kidding." When the school year picks up, we just get case after case, and once a case is generated the clock is ticking. It's like a ticking time bomb. It's a juggling act. It's like that guy in the circus spinning those plates, and that's how I feel, I'm spinning those plates, and I can't drop one because that means a kid could be dead or a kid could be hurt.

As I read it, I was reminded of another perspective from an ACS worker.  The worker herself wrote it, more than ten years ago, for City Limits magazine.  This was not the typical “life of a caseworker” story.  Rather, it was what really went on at the time.  Some excerpts:

To the manager … who makes the fateful decision to remove a child and the judge who approves it, a child exists only on a piece of paper, alongside a list of disturbing circumstances.  They don’t see a child having a panic attack at 3 a.m. because he is suddenly alone in the world.  Or slamming his head against the wall out of protest or desperation.  The good intentions that go into the decision to remove a child often have little to do with the sometimes brutal outcomes of that choice. … Unlike fatalities, the trauma a child endures from being wrongly removed, followed by years of difficulty growing up in foster care, are not measurable.

A manager or supervisor has no one to answer to if a child who shouldn’t be in foster care is removed from home anyway.  There is no penalty for the wrongful taking of a child.

At moments of uncertainty, the mantra was ‘Cover your ass’ – a phrase heard often around the office. … The obsessive concern with liability at the field offices quickly overshadows the reasonable criteria [workers] have been taught for identifying abuse and neglect. Most quickly learn to abandon their training and to do what it takes to survive.

One week after the investigation begins, caseworkers have to file an electronic report.  The computer offers two options: ‘safe’ and ‘unsafe.’  But my manager accepted only one.  Any time I determined a child to be ‘safe’ my manager rejected it and returned it to me.  The first step to protect yourself, I quickly discovered, is to determine that a child is ‘unsafe’ from the outset of an investigation.

Any caseworker can tell you that they have done removals that they did not personally agree with. But they rarely complain to management, since they will never get in trouble for removing a child under supervisors' orders. Caseworkers are also quiet about unnecessary removals because doing a removal and then transferring a case to foster care takes them a lot less time than keeping it and trying to work with a family. Keeping a case obligates a worker to do regular home visits and follow-ups to make sure a family is getting preventive services. It also means dealing with anything that may go wrong and continuing to be responsible for the children's safety.

By the time I resigned, I felt strongly that the system was working against children instead of for them. [Emphasis added.]

The full story is still available on the City Limits website.

Back when it was written, New York City was taking away even more children than it takes now.  Gradually, the culture changed.  Removals steadily declined.  Workers no longer had to be constantly on the defensive about choosing the best option for the overwhelming majority of children the overwhelming majority of the time: leaving them in their own homes.

But then came Nixzmary Brown and a new surge in removals.  Today, the rate of removal in New York City still is lower than it was in 2000, when this caseworker told her story.  But now a grandstanding D.A. has responded to the death of a child “known to the system” by bringing charges of criminally negligent homicide against a caseworker and his supervisor. How much longer will it be until the CYA, take-the-child-and-run mentality this worker described once again is the norm at the Administration for Children’s Services.

Foster care in New York City: The grandstanding D.A. vs. the children: A tragedy in three acts

UPDATE, 10:30PM: See also this New York Times story, for context no one else has provided yet.


Last September, I wrote about how the Brooklyn, New York, District Attorney, Charles Hynes, had decided to score some political points, and get lots of media attention by launching a first-of-its-kind criminal investigation of the Administration for Children’s Services, in connection with the death of Marchella Brett-Pierce, a child “known to the system.”

I said that almost certainly would set off another surge in needless removals of children -  the last thing vulnerable children in New York City needed.

New York City had been a national leader in child welfare reform, until ACS Commissioner John Mattingly botched the response to the death of Nixzmary Brown just over five years ago.  His response consisted of a series of so-called “reforms,” which sent the same message to the frontlines: Take the child and run.  And they did.

Removals of children escalated sharply – only in the past year or so were there signs the surge in removals was starting to ease.  But all the standard indicators of child safety got worse.  Details are in our report on New York City child welfare.  And no wonder.  Though there was plenty of new hiring after Nixzmary died, there also were plenty of new cases, and more work in dealing with existing cases.  So it got harder to find children in real danger.

New York’s rate of removal is not nearly as high as Los Angeles or Philadelphia, and the surge in removals following the death of Nixzmary Brown has not been as bad as the one which followed the death of Elisa Izquierdo in 1995.  But the rate of removal in New York is significantly higher than, for example, the rate in metropolitan Chicago, where independent monitors say that, as foster care entries have declined, child safety has improved.

Then, last Septmeber, came Act One of “Look at me!  Look at me!  I’m Charles Hynes and I’m cracking down on child abuse!”

Not surprisingly, during that month, ACS workers removed at least 412 children from their homes, a 13 percent increase over the same month in 2008 and 2009.  (ACS lists entries in two different places in its monthly reports with two different figures, this is an apples-to-apples comparison using the lower figure in each case.)

Fortunately, after that everyone calmed down. 

But now, things are going to get a whole lot worse.  Yesterday, Hynes raised the curtain on Act Two.  He got a grand jury to indict the caseworker and the supervisor involved in the case on charges including criminally negligent homicide – apparently the first time this has happened in New York City. 

THE INDICTMENTS WILL BACKFIRE

There may be cause to charge the caseworker with something – he is accused of falsifying records to hide a failure to visit the home – but not criminally negligent homicide.  And so far, news accounts suggest no reason to charge the supervisor. 

ACS put out a statement expressing fear that the indictments will backfire, since they might discourage good people from becoming caseworkers.  The indictments are going to backfire alright – but for a very different reason.

Caseworkers all over the country already know that they’ll never get in trouble within a child welfare agency for taking away too many children.  In fact, in the nearly 35 years I’ve been following child welfare, I’ve never seen a caseworker fired, demoted, suspended, or slapped on the wrist for taking away too many children.  Which means that, contrary to what one often hears from caseworkers, when it comes to taking away children they are not, in fact “damned if they do and damned if they don’t,” they’re only damned if they don’t.

Now, in New York City, they know that if they leave any child in a home and something goes wrong, they could be thrown in jail as well.

So now the incentives skew even further toward take-the-child-and-run, which not only does enormous harm to the children needlessly taken, it means the system will be further overloaded and there will be even less time to find the next child in real danger.

And it’s going to get still worse.

Hynes offered a preview of Act Three: The grandstanding D.A. is continuing to use the grand jury to conduct an investigation of  “evidence of alleged systemic failures” at ACS.  According to The New York Times:

The grand jury will seek to determine whether the agency had followed through on its plan for reforms after the 2006 death of Nixzmary Brown, …

The real problem is the opposite: ACS did follow through on its so-called reforms – but all of the reforms involved encouraging workers to take away more children.  In that respect they worked just fine.  But, as noted above, every indicator of child safety worsened.

In contrast, as noted previously on this Blog, John Mattingly turned his back on real reform, becoming one of the most regressive forces in American child welfare.  Matingly’s record includes reneging on a pledge to use "differential response" (a national innovation he's long opposed) to deal with some "educational neglect" cases, opposing state legislation to encourage workers to be slightly more flexible about rushing to seek termination of parental rights for some mothers who are in jail or drug treatment, and even opposing legislation to place more children permanently with relatives through subsidized guardianship. Fortunately, both bills passed despite Mattingly's objections.

A TRAGEDY IN FOSTER CARE

Still another possible indicator of ACS’ failure came last week in the case of the horrifying, near fatal beating of a 17-month-old foster child, Kymell Oram.  The foster mother’s boyfriend has been charged.

The New York Times quotes a friend of the mother as saying she was in the process of adopting the child.  And according to the Daily News, someone from ACS came to the foster mother’s apartment just last month and saw nothing wrong. 

There are a number of possible reasons for this:

●Perhaps there was nothing to see.  Perhaps everything was fine and the foster mother and her boyfriend have nothing to do with the beating, or someone suddenly and unpredictably exploded.  Perhaps even the most diligent ACS worker had no reason to suspect anything.

●Or perhaps it had something to do with the fact that, when it comes to dangers in foster homes, caseworkers are prone to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil and write no evil in the case file since, of course, it is the child welfare system that put the child in the home in the first place.  How else to explain the fact that academic studies repeatedly find rates of abuse in foster care that are up to 30 times higher – or more – than the ridiculously low rates reported in official figures?

●Here again, another factor may be the surge in entries into foster care as a result of those ACS “reforms.” The more children you take away, the greater the pressure to lower standards for foster homes. 

●There may be still another factor as well; what in this case might be called “near-fatal neatness.”

As I noted on this blog four years ago, there is no field I know of where the phrase “cleanliness is next to Godliness” is taken more literally than child welfare – and no field I know where the consequences can be more harmful. Over and over again, in fatality reviews and news stories, caseworkers say something like “we never suspected anything because the home was so neat and clean” as though there is some direct correlation between cleanliness and love. In contrast, children can be taken from loving homes because an overwhelmed parent fell way, way behind on the house cleaning.

So in his report reviewing child abuse fatalities in 2005, the first director of New Jersey’s now-defunct Office of Child Advocate (and later commissioner of the state child welfare agency) Kevin Ryan issued the following recommendation:

In two cases here, and as also evidenced in the OCA’s prior reports, the caseworkers noted in the file that the home was neat and clean. Until someone demonstrates a correlation between cleanliness and child safety, [the state child welfare agency] should instruct employees that this factor is, at best, hardly relevant unless the filth is severe enough to cause a real and immediate risk to the child. This both will reduce needless removals from dirty homes, and encourage workers not to write off the potential for risk in homes that happen to be spotless. [Emphasis added.]

Perhaps the word has not crossed the Hudson.  The Daily News quotes a “police source” as saying:

"The apartment was in okay shape and there was food in the refrigerator. Apparently that's all they look at."

THE BAD INCENTIVES DON’T WORK IN REVERSE

One might hope that, when it comes to bad messages sent to caseworkers, the fact that one tragedy in the home of birth parents and one in the home of foster parents are in the news at the same time might cancel each other out – that is, the temptation to take away more children and throw them into foster care might be tempered by the tragedy in foster care itself.

It doesn’t work that way.  As I wrote five years ago, I believe there are two reasons for this:

Reason #1:  When the birth parents did it, it’s easy to find a scapegoat.  Typically one worker, or perhaps one worker and one supervisor, made the decision to leave the child in his or her own home.  That means one or two people who can be fired, demoted, suspended, and/or raked over the coals in news accounts – or charged with criminally negligent homicide.  Workers know this.  That’s why when a case hits the paper, they become terrified that the next case will be one of theirs and they rush to take away more children.

In contrast, when the child dies in foster care the blame is more diffuse.  The worker who removed the child often is not the one who chose the foster home. And even if she did, someone else had the responsibility to license the foster parents, so the worker who placed the children can’t be blamed.  The licensing may have taken place years before, so that worker can’t be blamed either.  And, for that matter, the foster parents who kill the child might be the second or third or fourth placement.

So when a child dies in foster care the response of caseworkers is the same: If I leave a child in his own home and something goes wrong, I’m the scapegoat; if another child dies in foster care, no one’s going to blame me.

The dynamic is compounded by –

Reason #2: the profound double standard in media coverage of “lessons learned.”  When the birth parent is the culprit there is an immediate rush to blame “family preservation.”  There is a ready supply of spokespeople, often from agencies that make their living off foster care, anxious to come forward and say, “See: This case proves that the state or county is doing too much to keep families together.”  When the child dies in foster care it’s written off as an aberration, something that can be fixed with more frequent caseworker visits to foster homes or tightening of licensing standards and background checks. 

So rather than counterbalancing each other, these two cases actually reinforce the tendency of caseworkers to rush to tear children from their homes. 

SOON IT WILL BE A “SPATE”

And here’s what makes it even scarier:

In New York City, a child “known to the system” dies an average of once every 9.5 days.  It’s only every few years or so that media pay attention.  Well, now they’re paying attention.  So when the next one happens, it officially becomes three tragic cases.  And that makes it “a series” or “a spate” of tragedies that “raise questions” about ACS.

It was exactly that kind of misreporting that started this cycle in 2006 in the first place. (Recall the New York Times reporter who declared “it was a series – but not statistically.”)

So there may be even more than three acts to this tragedy – unless someone rushes in real soon and demands that Charles Hynes, and the rest of the playwrights, do a rewrite.

Foster care in New York City: Another pol tries to exploit a child abuse tragedy

            A month ago on this Blog I wrote about the first child abuse death in several years to get significant media attention in New York City.  I concluded that post by noting that even before this tragedy the Commissioner of New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), John Mattingly, had rolled back almost all the gains made before the last high-profile case, the death of Nixzmary Brown in 2006, and added:

The only thing to be determined now is whether this latest tragedy will set off another surge in needless removals of children, make things even worse, and jeopardize what little progress still exists.

            Last week, that surge became more likely.  Another politician rushed to exploit the tragedy.  The Brooklyn District Attorney, Charles Hynes, grabbed himself a headline and a chance to bask in the glow of contrived righteous indignation.  In the process he almost guarantees more tragedies.

            In a move that may be the first of its kind, ever, and certainly the first in the memory of anyone in his office, Hynes is investigating not just the parent accused of abusing the child, but also ACS and an outside contractor who handled the case.  A  New York Times story called it “a rare and wide-ranging criminal investigation…”

            As the Times reported, Hynes

cited the Brown case in making his decision to order the investigation. “Given the history of the Nixzmary Brown tragedy and the city’s failure to protect that child, I am sufficiently troubled enough by the death of Marchella Pierce to find out why she died,” Mr. Hynes said.

            Yet Hynes didn’t do this in the case of Nixzmary Brown herself, even though she, too, lived, and died, in Brooklyn.  And, of course, he didn’t do it for any of the scores of children previously known to ACS who died in the intervening years.  Why not?  Could it be because the media didn’t pay much attention to all those cases either?

All of this means that, if caseworkers weren’t already terrified of what ACS itself might do, now they know that they face possible criminal prosecution if they screw up and leave a child in a dangerous home.  But they can take thousands of children needlessly from everyone they know and love, consign them to the chaos of foster care (and the high risk of abuse in foster care itself) bounce them from foster home to foster home and expel them years later, unable to love or trust anyone, and while the child’s life has been destroyed, the caseworker is safe.

It’s not as if they can count on Mattingly to protect them from being scapegoated.  He’s already thrown two caseworkers involved in this case under the bus; suspending them without pay. 

They may, in fact, belong there.  I don’t know.  There was a time when I felt I could trust John Mattingly to make a fair judgment in these situations; that is no longer the case.

But regardless of whether those caseworkers should have been disciplined, the action reeks of hypocrisy for another reason, one cited by Mike Arsham, executive director of New York’s Child Welfare Organizing Project in recent testimony before the City Council.

Top ACS officials recently botched the process for awarding hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts for services to help troubled families.  It’s all very arcane, thanks to a process Arsham calls “the most opaque and unaccountable of any in memory.” But the bottom line is that it was a screw-up of truly monumental proportions – comparable in the child welfare world to how Michael Brown of FEMA responded to Hurricane Katrina.  But as Arsham points out, the managers responsible for these blunders “which devastated the entire Preventive Service system, potentially endangering thousands of children, have not been held comparably accountable.”

Frontline workers know all this, of course.  And they are rational beings.  So it's likely they will behave rationally and, once again, embrace a take-the-child-and-run approach – leading to another explosion in removals of children, even as children continue to suffer from the surge in removals following Nixzmary Brown’s death, a surge that was only beginning to ease in the past year or so.

Meanwhile Mayor Michael Bloomberg reaffirmed his support for Mattingly.  According to The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg said that Mattingly is “the best this country has to offer. Every other city would love to have this guy,”  (Of course, the fact that Mattingly stuck to blaming his frontline workers, and defended what Arsham points out are the deepest cuts to preventive services in ACS’ history, probably helped Mattingly win the continued favor of his boss.)

There was a time when Mattingly was, indeed, the best the country had to offer.  But not anymore.  The latest example of who gets hurt by his failure, - in this case a five-year-old boy - can be seen in this story from the Daily News.  As you read it, recall that Mattingly had promised to reform the way ACS responds to “educational neglect” cases, and then reneged.

Best practice in child welfare has passed John Mattingly by; now, he holds back progress at ACS.   Running a large child welfare agency is an extremely difficult job; very few people can do it well.  But there are better leaders in the field today.  Maybe the Mayor should start seeking them out. 

Foster care and family preservation In New York City: There are very few “gains” left to lose

There's been another death of a child "known to the system" in New York City. Actually, that's not unusual. In a city as huge as New York, that happens once every nine days or so.

But this one is the first in awhile to get a lot of media attention. The case is more ambiguous than the death of Nixzmary Brown, whose death set off a huge surge in removals of children from their homes. In particular, it's not at all clear that the city's Administration for Children's Services could have seen this one coming.

But facts have never stopped Bill De Blasio. He chaired the City Council's Human Services Committee at the time Nixzmary Brown died, and he never missed a chance to score political points by attacking ACS in ways that encouraged the agency to take even more children.

Now, De Blasio is telling The New York Times he's concerned that some of the "gains" in child protection since the death of Nixzmary Brown have been lost. He can relax. There were no gains in the years since Nixzmary Brown died, there were only losses.

THE PROGRESS STOPPED IN 2006

There were considerable gains made starting in 1999, when the first commissioner of ACS, Nicholas Scoppetta, abandoned his embrace of the take-the-child-and-run approach and began pushing efforts to keep families together. But almost all of those gains under Scoppetta and his successors were wiped out after Nixzmary Brown died in January of 2006. And the person most responsible for that is the current ACS Commissioner, John Mattingly.

ACS' own statistics and the annual Mayor's Management Reports show that the "gains" since then are a fiction. The perception of improvement is a result of some slick pandering by Mattingly, who either played to the crowd or worse, really believed the answers lay in talking tough, tearing apart more families, creating a sibling confiscation policy, and opposing just about every real reform in child welfare.

Since gut instinct says that should work, people like De Blasio, who fanned the flames of hysteria throughout, were glad to claim that it did. (It certainly worked for De Blasio. It probably helped him get elected to his current job as the city's "Public Advocate.")

But the numbers tell a very different story. The table below is an excerpt from the data page (Page 20) of NCCPR's report on New York City child welfare (where you'll find data for some measures all the way back to 1993 as well as full source citations). It shows entries into care, deaths of children "known to the system" and the two key measures used to evaluate child safety: Reabuse of children left in their own homes and foster care "recidivism," – the proportion of children taken from their homes who have to be placed again. The time period starts with the last year before Nixzmary Brown died.

Does this look like progress?  Do these look like “gains”?

Year*	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009
Entries into foster care	4,813	6,213	7,132	7,451	7474
Recidivism %	8.8	7.8	11.4	11.1	14.1
Re-abuse %	11.7	12.6	14.7	14.2	14.7
Fatalities, “known to the  system”	30	44	41	49	NA

*-Fatality data are for calendar years, the other measures are for fiscal years.

Every measure has gotten worse. I agree with those who say you can't judge safety based on fatalities (I only wish I could convince more reporters). But you can get some idea based on reabuse and recidivism – particularly when it's a trend over several years.

THE RETREAT FROM REFORM

And it doesn't end there: The list of ways John Mattingly has retreated from reform keeps growing:

reneging on a pledge to use "differential response" (a national innovation he's long opposed) to deal with some "educational neglect" cases, opposing state legislation to encourage workers to be slightly more flexible about rushing to seek termination of parental rights for some mothers who are in jail or drug treatment, and even opposing legislation to place more children permanently with relatives through subsidized guardianship. Fortunately, both bills passed despite Mattingly's objections.

Now, even one of ACS' signature achievements during Mattingly's tenure, a remarkably successful initiative in the Highbridge section of the Bronx called Bridge Builders, is in jeopardy. (In 2005, NCCPR received a grant from one of the foundations that helped create Bridge Builders, the Child Welfare Fund, to write about the initiative).

Mattingly's actually become one of the most regressive forces in child welfare nationwide. In an appalling presentation to an Urban Institute symposium last December, he suggested that child welfare agencies were going too far in efforts to combat racial bias, took another swipe at subsidized guardianship, and said we really shouldn't talk so much about foster care as a "bad outcome" because it makes foster parents sad. He even suggested caseworkers might be getting too careful about not taking children from battered mothers.

The damage Mattingly has been doing becomes even clearer when his retreat from reform is contrasted with the dynamic, progressive leader of New York State's Office of Children and Family Services, Gladys Carrion. She championed the bills Mattingly opposed, and has led a huge reform of the state's juvenile justice system (an issue where she and Mattingly are in agreement).

Mattingly's retreat from reform has harmed children not only directly, through needless foster care, and making all children less safe, but also by scarfing up resources that could have been used to save prevention programs from recent budget cuts.

While it is progress of a sort to see Mr. De Blasio zero in on cuts in prevention as his primary concern – or so he says at the moment – it's also hypocritical, given how much he did to push ACS into taking away so many more children. There could be a lot more money available for such programs had the number of children taken from their homes each year not shot up by 50 percent.

Not everything is gone. Mattingly has done a good job of curbing the use of group homes and institutions. And he's made a serious attempt finally to set up a mechanism to hold accountable the scores of private agencies that provide almost all foster care and most other child welfare services other than investigations. It's been partially successful. Though ACS botched the scoring on the latest "request for proposals" as part of this process, causing turmoil among the agencies, I don't think that was Mattingly's fault.

So relax Mr. De Blasio. John Mattingly already undid almost all the progress he made in his early years as commissioner, and before that, as an advisor to Scoppetta. In New York City child welfare, there are very few "gains" left.

The only thing to be determined now is whether this latest tragedy will set off another surge in needless removals of children, make things even worse, and jeopardize what little progress still exists.