“Child welfare” in North Carolina: Take away poor people’s children. Pay strangers $100,000 to raise them.

Anybody out there know any Hollywood agents? ‘Cause I have a great idea for a film script: 

Scene 1: 

Two couples are sitting around a battered table in a broken-down trailer in, let’s say, North Carolina. They’re despairing over how to fix up their homes and put food on the table for their children.  Then one of the fathers spots an ad: 

“Will you look at this?” he says. “There’s a place that pays couples $100,000 to raise kids!”  

“Yeah, right,” says the other father. 

“No, look!  It’s $100,000 a year, plus fringe benefits, and they let you live in a really nice house, rent-free!” 

“No way! No one’s going to pay us $100,000 to raise our kids.” 

“No, no. Not our kids – it has to be someone else’s kids, who’ve been taken by CPS – you know, like when they can’t provide enough food, clothing or shelter, so CPS says it’s neglect.” 

And so is born a plan: The couples sign up and get the training to join this program. Then they convince the people running the program that, since they already know each other, they should be given adjoining homes.  Then they call CPS and turn each other in. Then they become “professional foster parents” for each other’s children! 

This idea catches on, more and more people sign up, and soon an entire small town is lifted out of poverty with six-figure incomes and free housing!  

The real-life version

I know what you’re thinking: No Hollywood producer will ever believe that there is a place that would  take away poor people’s children, often because of housing, and then pay two total strangers a combined total of up to $100,000 (plus free housing) to care for them.  

So just be ready to show them this exposé of just such a plan for children taken from their parents in North Carolina. It’s run by Crossnore Communities for Children with the enthusiastic support of the state family police agency. Did I say expose? My mistake. It’s 2,000 gushy, worshipful words in Business North Carolina about Crossnore, the program in question and the man behind it, CEO Brett Loftis. 

As is almost always the case, Loftis and those who work on the project, including the $100,000 foster parent couples, have the best of intentions.  As is also almost always the case, there is no reason to take any comfort from that. 

Loftis is running Bridging Families, in which couples are hired and trained to be “professional foster parents.” They do no other job and, in exchange, get up to $48,000 each plus a $3,000 signing bonus,* the fringe benefits and the rent-free accommodation. There's also "an insured agency vehicle for transporting the children, a budget for food, household supplies, and clothing for the children and an allotted stipend for family vacations."

Though the worshipful story in Business North Carolina portrays it as an amazing innovation, it sounds more like a group home with highly-paid “house parents.”  The program is paid for by a combination of federal Title IV-E and Medicaid funds, state funds, and private donations – North Carolina philanthropies seem to love it. 

So to review: 

● In North Carolina, the state Supreme Court has ruled that children can have their right to live with their parents taken from them forever for no other reason than a parent’s failure to help cover the cost of the children’s foster care. (They call it "child support," but when you take someone’s child and make the parents pay money to get the child back, the proper term for the payment is “ransom.”)  Some of that ransom might even wind up contributing to that $100,000 the professional foster parents are getting. 

● In North Carolina, one-third of the children placed in foster care are taken for reasons related to housing – that’s double the number taken because of physical and sexual abuse combined. So there may be roughly a one-in-three chance that a child living with strangers who are paid a combined $100,000 a year and are living rent-free was taken because her or his own parents couldn’t afford the rent on a decent place to live. 

The family police agency loves it 

Does any of this bother the family police agency in North Carolina? Not a bit. On the contrary, Lisa Cauley, division director of the North Carolina Department of Social Services, which oversees (badly) more than 100 county family police agencies (like the ones responsible for this case, and this one and this one), is thrilled with the program. The reasons why are unintentionally revealing. 

From the story: 

Bridging Families “allows us to keep siblings together, especially larger groups … Volunteer parents seldom accept more than two children at a time, and usually accept just one. The best option is to place (kids) together. They’ve lost their home, their parents. They don’t need to lose (siblings), too. And then the children get to visit with their parents, and the parents learn skills through demonstrated change. The professional aspect means there’s a consistency to it as well, which is rare in this world.” 

Parents in Bridging Families also come with no desire to adopt the children for whom they care. That’s a contrast to many volunteer foster parents who view the program as a test run for adoption. That can create problems when a court orders the children to be reunified with their birth parents. 

What Cauley really is saying amounts to: Here in North Carolina, we have a whole lot of selfish foster parents who view the system as the ultimate middle-class entitlement: Step right up and take a poor person’s child for their very own! They’ll undermine anything that would help lead to reunification, including regular visits! (And the term "volunteer" is inaccurate. Even regular everyday foster parents in North Carolina get at least $702 per month per child, tax-free.)

Cauley seems to be saying that rather than get rid of these selfish foster parents, and rely only on the many good foster parents who are in it for the right reasons, we’ll let the selfish ones keep on undermining families, and defying federal law, which requires “reasonable efforts” to reunite families. But we’ll find some foster parents we can persuade to not behave this way by giving them a six-figure income, fringe benefits and free rent. 

(By the way, when great foster parents really do fight to reunite families in North Carolina - without being paid $100,000 -- the system sometimes fights them every step of the way - as in this case).

What is striking here is that Cauley is admitting something damning about a practice known as “concurrent planning” – which encourages this sort of rotten behavior by telling agencies, and foster parents, to plan for reunification and adoption simultaneously. 

For decades, critics have been saying that concurrent planning has a built-in conflict-of-interest. That conflict may help explain the steady decline in the rates at which families are reunified. Cauley’s tolerance of this behavior may help explain why North Carolina has the second-worst rate of reunification in the country. 

That brings us to another claim made in the story about Bridging Families: The story says they have an 80% reunification rate vs. 40% for the state as a whole. (The figure the state gives the federal government is even worse - 29% in 2024.) 

For starters, that may not be accurate. Crossnore repeatedly tries to sell us on the idea that the best way to help birth parents is to pay a couple of strangers $100,000 to raise their children. But Crossnore itself doesn't actually say 80% of the children in its program are reunified. Rather, Crossnore claims that 82% of children "have been discharged to permanece with parents, relatives or pre-adoptive foster families." [Emphasis added.] Both the article and Crossnore itself compare the combined total for all these categories to the state total for reunification alone. And a case Crossnore itself chooses to highlight on its website ends with adoption, not reunification.

In any event, it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. The statewide figure includes children in group homes and institutions, those least likely to be reunified.  We also don’t know how the families in the Bridging Families program are chosen - except that Crossnore gets to choose who to accept and who to reject.  

Crossnore says: "The parents are highly motivated to progress through their court-appointed reunification plan and desire to partner with the Bridging Families team to accomplish that." A detailed addendum to the form agencies must fill out to request any Crossnore service uses the degrading, demeaning term "bio mother" and "bio father" to describe the birth parents.

But most important, if, in fact, the reunification rate for conventional foster care is lower, well, what do you expect when you tolerate foster parents who undermine reunification at every turn? 

The usual excuse about siblings 

And finally, there’s that claim about siblings: Cauley claims they just can’t find enough strangers to take in sibling groups – unless couples are paid $100,000, plus free housing, plus fringe benefits. If the claim about siblings sounds familiar, it’s because that is at the top of the excuse list for everyone defending institutionalizing children as well. 

But a key reason North Carolina has trouble placing siblings together is that North Carolina, far more than most states, hates the one group most likely to take in sibling groups: extended families providing kinship foster care. North Carolina uses kinship foster care at a rate nearly 20% below the national average. 

Ah, but I forgot that intangible benefit, you know, how, as Cauley puts it: 

“The parents learn skills through demonstrated change.” 

As one well-intentioned “professional foster parent” explained: 

“Mom is watching how we do things, picking up cues on that. We’re giving advice and we are really just involved with the whole family. 

Because you know what those people are like, right? They can’t possibly know how to be parents unless their saviors model it for them – notwithstanding the wealth of studies, like this one, indicating that families caught up in the family policing system do better with less “modeling” and more money. 

What else might all that money buy? 

What could $150,000 a year buy in North Carolina? 

50% child care subsidies for 28 families. 

50% rent subsidies for 16 families. 

1 pair of “professional foster parents.”

 Now let’s do a little “modeling” of our own and consider how else the money might be spent. 

First let’s add up the money: There’s $100,000 in salary plus fringe benefits, which typically equal 30% of salary, so that would be another $30,000.  Average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in North Carolina is $1,551 per month; the average monthly mortgage payment is $2,125. So we’ll be conservative and say that the free housing adds another $20,000 or so – making the total roughly $150,000 per year to subsidize this one foster home (not including training, administrative costs, etc.). 

What else might that buy? 

●As just noted, the average rent is $1,551 per month.  So $150,000 would buy 50% rent subsidies for an entire year for 16 families. 

● The average cost of childcare in North Carolina is roughly $892 per month per child.  So $150,000 would buy a year’s worth of vouchers covering half the cost of child care for 28 families. 

Now, consider that Crossnore’s CEO wants to set up 100 of these so-called Bridge Family homes. 

So imagine what would happen if, instead, that money were used to prevent poverty from being confused with neglect for anywhere from 1,600 to 2,800 North Carolina families every year. 

Now that would be a real Hollywood ending.

*-Yes, that's a mere $99,000; but Crossnore says "The recommended salary for each Bridge Parent is between $45,000 and $50,000 per year, plus benefits."

Points of no return

Here are some of the other states with child welfare systems so rotten that the vast majority of foster children are never allowed to go home.

The previous post to this Blog highlighted Virginia’s dismal distinction: worst in America for allowing foster children ever to return to their own homes. In Virginia, if you’ve been taken away from your parents, odds are nearly three in four you will never be able to return to them – unless you find them again when you’re an adult. 

Virginia’s rate of reunifying families is 27%. The national average is 44% - which itself is dismal. Virginia children are more likely to be torn from their parents forever and handed over, usually to total strangers, to keep through adoption than they are to go back to their own homes.  And Virginia’s contempt for families runs so deep that child welfare agencies will let nearly one in five foster children “age out” with no home at all, rather than exert any real effort to reunify families. 

But while Virginia wins for worst record in the nation, there were plenty of other contenders. Here are some of them: 

● Virginia may not be #1 for long. North Carolina is nearly as bad – only 30% of foster children get to return home.  And right now, North Carolina lawmakers are patting themselves on the back for supposedly passing a major “reform” bill.  While some provisions may be marginally helpful, what may be the most significant will make it even harder to reunify families. 

● Like Virginia, Michigan is triply dismal.  Only 35% of foster children are reunified, while 41% are adopted. And Michigan is another state where the proportion of children who age out with no home at all is nearly double the national average. 

● Much the same can be said for Ohio – except that the adoption percentage is lower. 

● Connecticut did good work in past years in reducing entries into foster care. But lately, there’s been backsliding. In 2023, Connecticut was one of the few states where the number of children taken from their parents over the course of a year increased over the previous year, and it was the second-highest increase in the nation. A huge proportion of the children Connecticut took – more than two-thirds -- probably are never going home. Connecticut is another state where the proportion of children exiting to adoption, usually by strangers, is higher than the percentage reunified. 

● There is a similar pattern, though not as bad, in Alabama, another state that saw great progress in past years, but now is backsliding. 

● Texas has made ongoing commendable progress curbing entries.  But here, too, nearly two-thirds of those taken will never go home. And in Texas, nearly as many are adopted as reunified. 

Guardianship is no excuse 

Some of these states, such as Connecticut, may claim their rates of reunification are low because they supposedly place a lot of children in guardianship arrangements with relatives.  Yes, that’s better than adoption by strangers, but: 

● It is not the same thing as being allowed to go home to your own parents.

● The fact that many of these states use formal adoption – which usually means strangers – at a rate nearly as high or higher than reunification suggests they’re not doing enough with guardianships either.

Adopted to death in North Carolina?

An adoptive mother is charged with murder, torture, and crimes straight out of a horror film nightmare.  That’s an aberration. 

At least one of the children probably never needed to be taken from his mother at all.  That’s not an aberration 

A horror film debuted in North Carolina last week.  The story has all the classic elements: torture, starvation, teenage victims, and elements too macabre to describe here.  But you can’t “keep repeating it’s only a movie.” Because it’s not. 

This horror film is a documentary. At a time when most television stations don’t even have documentary units, WRAL-TV has one that just produced a superb example of the form.  It’s about children taken from their own homes, in at least one case for no good reason, only to disappear – their bodies found years later.  They were allegedly adopted to death.  The starvation, torture, murder and other horrors all were allegedly orchestrated by Avantae Deven, the foster mother who adopted them. 

There have been tragically similar horror stories in Pennsylvania, Hawaii, Iowa, and of course, Texas and Minnesota. Most of them involved children who never needed to be taken from their own homes. 

So watch the documentary here – but take the viewer advisory seriously – and then I’ll add some context, including the one place where I think the producers went wrong:

 

Now, that context:

Of course, most adoptive parents never harm the children in their care – like most parents, period.  And yes, I’m the one who always says don’t make generalizations based on horror stories.  But I’m also the one who offered a mutual moratorium on their use.  The family policing establishment (a more accurate term than “child welfare establishment”) has not yet taken me up on that, and I’m not about to unilaterally disarm.  That’s why our weekly round-up of family preservation news and commentary usually ends with a section called “The Horror Stories Go in All Directions.” 

More important, the only part of this story that’s unusual is the alleged torture and murder.  The documentary reveals other horrors that are common in North Carolina and across the country. 

The first horror was the removal of these children in the first place, in particular, the children of the mother profiled in the documentary, Felicia Chandler. 

There is no allegation that Chandler ever beat her children, tortured them, raped them – or harmed them in any way.  The only ground cited in the documentary for the removal of her children was the fact that she was herself a victim of domestic violence.  As we have noted often on this blog, there is overwhelming evidence that children taken under these circumstances are even more traumatized than when they are taken for other reasons.  One expert called it “tantamount to pouring salt into an open wound.” 

That’s why more than 20 years ago, New York courts made it illegal to take children the way Chandler’s children allegedly were taken.  And just last week, a New York appellate court ruled that family police harassment of these mothers and their children, even when the children are not taken, also is illegal.

But in North Carolina, it’s open season on domestic violence survivors and their children.  Indeed, Chandler’s isn’t the first such case in North Carolina to get headlines.  The same kind of wrongful removal was the focus of this story from WBTV and The Assembly. 

Of course, we get the usual excuse from the family police: Oh, there was something else, we just won’t tell you.  Not can’t tell you – the confidentiality laws family police agencies hide behind generally are there because the agencies want them there – so they can hide their failings. 

Enter Chandler’s former caseworker.  In comments dripping with condescension says: “I know know that she loves her children but I will also say something that I learned many years ago through this career is that often love is not enough.” 

What that usually means is: Love is not enough, because they don’t have enough money.  Money can buy whatever is missing.  

For example, according to the lawsuit discussed here, North Carolina took away the children of one mother because she was hospitalized – with cancer.  The children suffered horribly in institutions. But the family police agency didn’t want to give them back because the mother “might get cancer again.” 

Have you noticed? You never see a rich person’s child taken because “love is not enough.” 

And let's not forget Cherokee County, where the removal of children with no due process at all, in cases so weak the county knew it couldn’t get a judge to approve, led to criminal charges.  And let’s not forget this story. And this story. And this story. And this story. And this story.  And this story. And this story. 

Unlike the alleged torture and murder of the adopted children of Avantae Deven, the horrors of wrongful removal are not unusual – in North Carolina or anywhere else.  

And if there’s one these stories make clear, it’s this: When you leave children at the mercy of caseworkers and agencies that don’t love them – it’s never enough. 

Felicia Chandler never got her surviving children back and, since her children’s rights to be with her were terminated, she almost certainly never will.  But she continues her fight.  The documentary ends with her speaking directly to her children, wherever they are, telling them how much she loves them, in the hope that they might see it. 

About those deck chairs

And that brings me to what I see as this outstanding documentary’s one failing: Having raised the issue of wrongful removal, and followed Felicia Chandler on her quest for justice, the documentary doesn’t circle back to the issue of wrongful removal when discussing solutions.  Instead, it focuses on rearranging the deck chairs on the North Carolina family policing Titanic.  Unfortunately, that focus is all the rage in North Carolina right now. 

That, too, is not unusual.  Reorganization is what agencies and lawmakers do when they don’t have real ideas. 

So sometimes, in states where the family police are a freestanding agency, there are proposals to make it part of a bigger agency.  Where it’s already part of a bigger agency there are proposals to make it a freestanding agency.  Where the work is largely done by public agencies you hear cries to privatize.  Where it’s mostly private you hear about the need for the accountability only a public system is said to bring.  Where states run these systems you sometimes hear proposals to have counties do it, because they’re supposedly closer to the people. Where counties run these systems – as in North Carolina – you hear the state should do it, or at least give the state more power to supervise.  

But there is no evidence that any one of these structures is any better, or worse, than the others.  The many terrible systems, and the few that are not so bad, come in all shapes and sizes. 

That’s true even when it comes to the kind of horrors exposed in the WRAL documentary.  I mentioned similar horrors in five other places. Pennsylvania has a county-run system. So does  Minnesota. But the systems in Hawaii, Iowa and Texas are state-run. 

As for North Carolina, what good is giving more power to the state oversight agency when a top official of that agency, interviewed by WRAL, insists the system isn’t broken?  

Yes, it might make some marginal difference around the edges.  But the fixation on organization diverts attention from the elephant in the room: all those children needlessly taken.  Wrongful removal drives everything else.  Ending it alone won’t fix these systems, but it’s the prerequisite for fixing these systems. 

UPDATE, FEB 15: Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, in a follow-up story, when lawmakers were asked what they were going to do about this, their answers were all about the deck chairs (with a quick mention of those other failed stand-bys "silos" and "background checks").

Similarly, it would be a huge mistake to spend more to make the system even bigger.  Rather, additional spending should focus on bolstering services and supports to families whose children often are taken when family poverty is confused with neglect.  That will ease any artificial “shortage” of foster homes and reduce worker caseloads, so workers have more time to find children in real danger and do their jobs well. 

In other words, spend more, but spend smarter. 

Two other notes

● Another proposal discussed in the documentary is one that always comes up when adoptive parents are accused of abusing their adopted children: require government monitoring of the family even after the adoption.  

Here’s the problem: Adoption by strangers should be very rare; almost always there are better ways to assure safe, permanent homes for children.  But when it does happen, then adoptive parents are parents, period. Before the adoption, they should be subject to intense scrutiny.  After the adoption they should be subject to no greater monitoring than birth parents.  Otherwise, it’s just foster care by another name.  As such it denies children the security and permanence they need. 

And to those who say: Well, adoptive parents often accept government checks so they should have to accept government supervision, well, I also get a government check every month. It’s called Social Security – and no one gets to make unannounced visits to my home to see if I’m spending the money wisely. 

● There’s one more thing to keep in mind, one more factor that can lead to quick-and-dirty slipshod placements in adoptive homes: Under the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act, for every finalized adoption over a baseline number, states receive a bounty from the federal government of $4,000 to $10,000.  Avantae Deven adopted five foster children. So North Carolina may have collected anywhere from $20,000 to $50,000 for tearing these children from their own parents and placing them with the adoptive mother now accused of murder and torture.  And get this: Under ASFA North Carolina doesn’t even have to give the money back. 

Lessons from the hidden foster care scandal in North Carolina

Cherokee County, NC Courthouse

Lesson #1: It’s probably happening in your community, and it should be a scandal there, too.

There is quite a scandal in the child welfare system in Cherokee County, North Carolina.  But where to begin?  How about with the first few paragraphs of this September 11, 2019 story by Kate Martin of the nonprofit news site, Carolina Public Press:

The State Bureau of Investigation is continuing to look into possible felonies at Cherokee County’s Department of Social Services, nearly a year and a half after its investigation began.

Current and former workers of Cherokee County’s DSS office, including former director Cindy Palmer, are under investigation related to removing children from parents without judicial oversight using a document called a custody and visitation agreement or CVA. Social workers at the office did so for more than a decade, according to testimony in court last year.

Whether the agents are now looking at related issues that have come to light in recent months remains unclear.

Although suspended as director in March 2018, Cherokee County DSS rehired Palmer as the office’s business officer in June 2018, and she continues in that role despite the ongoing criminal probe.

The reason we all should be paying attention is simple: Some of the things exposed in Cherokee County first by investigative reporters for the Associated Press and now by Carolina Public Press are highly unusual – at least I hope they are.  But at the heart of the scandal is a practice that goes on all over America.  And the real scandal is that only in North Carolina is it being treated as a scandal. 

          

  There are many names for the practice in question: shadow foster care, the foster care Twilight Zone, blackmail placements, and hidden foster care.  Whatever you call it, it is a system that rivals in size and scope the open, relatively above-board foster care system – but with even less due process and less accountability.  I’ve written about it in general and I wrote about the North Carolina scandal when it first broke well over a year ago.  But much has happened since.

How hidden foster care works

            It works like this: A parent is told at a minimum:  We’re going to take your children away and place them in foster care with strangers. In some cases they’re told: We’ll also separate them from each other and place them far, far away. You can go to court and try to get them back but, well, good luck with that. Good luck even visiting them.  Then they offer the alternative: Just sign this little piece of paper in which you “voluntarily” agree to have us place the children with someone nearby – usually a relative.

            Of course no lawyer for the family ever looks at that piece of paper first, or explains to the family their rights.  The parents’ only explanation of what the piece of paper means is what the caseworker tells them it means. And while many of these placements are theoretically short-term, in some of the North Carolina cases these agreements effectively involve signing away rights to a child forever.

            As I said, it happens all over the country. But only one state child welfare agency has aid the whole thing is illegal: North Carolina. (North Carolina is one of the states in which counties run child welfare and the state social services agency has some oversight.)  Even in North Carolina, it’s not clear if the state would have acted had the practice not been exposed in a major national news story by Associated Press reporters Mitch Weiss and Holbrook Mohr. Since then, Kate Martin of Carolina Public Press (CPP) has been following up aggressively. 

The timeline

            Here’s what happened and when, based on news accounts:

            October, 2017: A state Department of Health and Human Services team conducting a routine review discovers that plenty is rotten in the County of Cherokee Department of Social Services.  A memo obtained by Carolina Public Press nearly two years later reveals what the state examiners believed to be widespread falsification of records involving contact between child welfare caseworkers, birth parents and foster children.

            The memo also states that terminations of parental rights “are pursued very quickly with little or no engagement with parents.  It is hard to believe with the lack of engagement and documentation that TPRs are even granted.”

            There is no indication that they also discovered the use of hidden foster care at this time.  But, it appears the state did very little about what it did discover.  The Cherokee County district attorney told Carolina Public Press she was “flabbergasted” she was not notified at the time about what might be criminal activity.

As CPP put it: 

Although the DHHS memo expressed concern about records falsified by duplicating other records, it focused not on potential criminal fraud or violation of families’ rights, but on DSS funding and destabilizing DSS child placement actions: “These records are tied into funding. A parent’s attorney could get ahold of these records and make an argument to have the kids returned home.”

            December, 2017: A local attorney, Melissa Jackson, discovers the use of hidden foster care in Cherokee County while representing a father coerced into “voluntarily” signing a so-called “custody and visitation agreement.”  As the Associated Press would later report:

Soon after Jackson exposed the practice, the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services sent an “urgent” letter to county agencies on Dec. 20, 2017, warning that “facilitating the completion of private custody agreements” without court oversight “falls outside of both law and policy.”

            If the state did anything else at that point, there is no public indication of such action.

            December, 2017: Jackson and attorney David Wijewickrama sue Cherokee County on  behalf of parents whose children were taken using CVAs.  They are seeking class-action status.

            Early March, 2018: The state asks Cherokee County for a “corrective action plan.”

            March 14, 2018: With Jackson’s client prominently featured, the AP story exposing Cherokee County’s system of  hidden foster care is published.  The story reveals that the practice dates back at least to 2007 and may involve hundreds of families.  Exactly how many is unclear because former Cherokee County DSS attorney Scott Lindsay said at court hearings that many “files are missing.”

At about the same time, District Judge Tessa Sellers rules that CVAs violate state law, the state constitution and the United States Constitution.   According to the ruling:

The CVA is the product of both actual and constructive fraud on behalf of the Cherokee County Department of Social Services, it’s agents and Attorney Scott Lindsay and director Cindy Palmer.

            March 16, 2018: Now the state is really interested, and, apparently, concludes that a “corrective action plan” is not enuogh. After the scandal makes national news, the state announces it will temporarily take over the child welfare functions of the Cherokee County Department of Social Services.  The takeover begins three days later.

            At about the same time the county district attorney – who only learned of the scandal by reading the AP story – asks the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation to investigate possible criminal wrongdoing.

            March through June 2018: Though the state is taking over the child welfare functions, the county DSS still is overseen by a local Board of Social Services.  The Board holds what is apparently an unusually large number of special meetings. But we don’t know exactly what happened at all of them – because, Carolina Public Press reveals, the minutes are missing.  We do know, however, that Lindsay’s replacement as DSS attorney, David Moore, said Palmer may have lied under oath.

April 2018: The Board of Social Services suspends Palmer, with pay.  She is replaced with an acting director.  Moore tells the board Palmer should not be allowed to return.

May, 2018: The position of business officer for Cherokee County DSS becomes vacant. Palmer had held that job before she was named director. 

            June 11, 2018: Palmer resigns as DSS director.

            June 11, 2018: Palmer’s interim replacement hires Palmer to be the DSS business officer – the job Palmer held before she became DSS director.

            June 12, 2018: DSS attorney David Moore resigns.

            July, 2018: Cherokee County DSS receives a bill of $3,311.87 for document shredding services covering the period mid-June to mid-July, 2018.  The highest previous monthly total since November 2017 was $367.76, in May.  In November and December, 2017, the bills were $90.17 per month. 

            Or, as Carolina Public Press put it:

The DSS agency in early 2018 also started a curiously timed massive shredding campaign, which went into high gear after Palmer returned to the agency in June 2018. The effort was supposedly designed to create urgently needed space and did not touch child welfare documents, which DSS had been ordered not to destroy. But a year later, the space remains unused. Whether any additional child welfare documents went missing remains uncertain.

            October, 2018: The state Deparemtent of Health and Human Services ends its direct control over child welfare in Cherokee County.

            November, 2019: The State Bureau of Investigation’s findings concerning CVAs, and possibly other issues, are now in the hands of the state Attorney General’s office.  CPP reports that “Palmer, and possibly others, remain under criminal investigation…” by that office.

            And a new problem has been discovered: The county and the state have had to repay the federal government more than $247,000 in federal foster care funds to which they were not entitled “after mistakes by social workers and their supervisors.”

Another bill takes a swing at drug using parents – if it passes, guess who’s going to get hit

            The story on the online news site North Carolina Health News is headlined “Foster care bill could allow faster termination of parental rights.”  Written by the site’s founder, Rose Hoban, it is a far better take than most on issues involving child welfare and drug use, showing rare care and sensitivity.

It’s not unusual to see stories about the effects of opioid use on children in which reporters consider parents too subhuman even to talk to (Case in point: The Washington Post.) In contrast Hoban’s story begins with such a parent, brings out her humanity, and shows her successful reunification with her child.  Although I’ll spend much of this post citing parts of the story with which I disagree, Hoban goes to unusual lengths to present all sides.

            But (paragraphs like the one above are almost always followed by “but…”) I do disagree with one central premise of the story.  Hoban writes:

At issue is the tussle between the rights of children who have troubled parents to live less chaotic lives, in foster care, or with perhaps adoptive parents, and the rights of birth parents to take the time to get their lives in order, to win back their rights to raise those children.

            That is the standard framing of the issue.  But the problem with bills like the one in North Carolina, known as House Bill 918, is not that they hurt parents – the problem is that they hurt children.

Lessons from the last “Worst Drug Plague Ever”

            That is a lesson we all should have learned from the last “Worst Drug Plague Ever,” crack cocaine.

University of Florida researchers studied two groups of children born with cocaine in their systems; one group was placed in foster care, another left 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.  Typically, the children left with their birth mothers did better.  For the foster children, the separation from their mothers was more toxic than the cocaine. 

Similarly, consider what The New York Times found when it looked at the best way to treat infants born with opioids in their systems. According to the Times:

[A] growing body of evidence suggests that what these babies need is what has been taken away: a mother.  Separating newborns in withdrawal can slow the infants’ recovery, studies show, and undermine an already fragile parenting relationship. When mothers are close at hand, infants in withdrawal require less medication and fewer costly days in intensive care.

 “Mom is a powerful treatment,” said Dr. Matthew Grossman, a pediatric hospitalist at Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital who has studied the care of opioid-dependent babies.

It is extremely difficult to take a swing at so-called “bad mothers” without the blow landing on their children. That doesn’t mean we can simply leave children with hopelessly addicted parents.  But it does mean that in most cases, drug treatment for the mother is a better option than foster care for the child. 

Indeed, as I discuss in this column for the trade journal Youth Today, child welfare’s entire approach to substance abuse exists at the intersection of ignorance and arrogance.

The chaos of foster care

That Florida study is only one example of why House Bill 918 would hurt children. 

The story says that part of the issue is the right of children to have “less chaotic lives, in foster care or with perhaps adoptive parents...” Sometimes that’s what happens; often it isn’t.  Foster care is enormously chaotic.  That’s one reason why study after study after study has found what that Florida study found: in typical cases children left in their own homes fare better even than comparably-maltreated children in foster care.

That’s true even when the foster home is a good one. The majority are.  But another series of studies finds abuse in at least one-quarter to one-third of foster homes, and the rate of abuse in group homes and institutions is even worse.

Yes, I know. The story quotes proponents as suggesting families are lining up to adopt these children.  But that’s also what they said when they fooled Congress into passing the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997.  (I say fooled because some of those making the case at the time knew that wasn’t true.)  In any event, it didn’t work. Instead, terminations far outran adoptions, and the number of children “aging out” of foster care with no home increased. 

Attacking kinship care

The bill also seeks to undermine the least harmful form of foster care, kinship foster care, in which children are placed with relatives instead of strangers.

            The story also quotes a lawyer for a county social services agency whining about how hard it is to find relatives.  That simply gives away the fact that a lot of the impetus behind this bill isn’t what’s best for children, it’s what’s easiest for agencies. 

In Allegheny County, Pa. to cite just one example, 56 percent of foster children are placed in kinship foster care.  It’s not impossible; it just takes more effort, and a true dedication to putting the interests of children first – because (yes, it’s that pesky research again) study after study has shown that kinship foster care is better for children’s well-being and, most important, safer than what should properly be called “stranger care.”

There also are the usual trendy claims about brain science, bonding and trauma.  It’s not that those issues aren’t real, but those favoring a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare have been cherry-picking from the research.  For example, one of the worst “Adverse Childhood Experiences” a child can endure is removal from a parent. Yet those who cherry-pick from the research propose what amounts to trying to fight trauma with trauma.

As for bonding, that too is real, and really important.  But look at what those Florida infants are trying to tell us, and what we’re learning about how to treat newborns with opioids in their system: Don’t break the bond these children were born with.   More generally, bonding is a lot more complicated and nuanced than simply running a stopwatch and declaring that the child is bonded with, and only with, whoever had her or him the longest.

Indeed, one should be especially wary when child welfare agencies play the bonding card – they tend to deal it from the bottom of the deck.  In fact, the Trump Administration is using it to try to justify keeping apart some of the children torn from their parents at the Mexican border.

Racial and class bias

I was surprised that there was nothing in the story about the two factors that are at the root of almost everything in child welfare: Race and class.  The biggest single problem in child welfare is the confusion of poverty with neglect, compounded by the racial bias that permeates the system.

The North Carolina bill would add even more power to a system riven by racial and class bias. What this bill, and others like it, really would do is turn the child welfare system into the ultimate middle-class entitlement: Step right up and take a poor person’s child for your very own.

Child welfare, foster care and civil liberties: When CPS resorts to blackmail

Reporters in North Carolina exposed the practice of child welfare agencies blackmailing families into giving up all their rights and letting them take away children with no court review at all. 

The only thing unusual about this is that, in North Carolina, it’s illegal. Elsewhere it’s standard operating procedure.

What Associated Press reporters found in
one small county in North Carolina actually
is common all over the United states

I have often written about the lack of due process in proceedings involving child protective services.  CPS agencies can and often do take away children entirely on their own authority. Parents then have to go to court days later to try to get their children back.

At that point, while the CPS agency has had days to make its case, an impoverished parent – and it’s almost always an impoverished parent – if she has a lawyer at all probably met her overwhelmed public defender for the first time five minutes before the hearing.

The standard of proof is not beyond a reasonable doubt as in a criminal proceeding, or even the middle standard, “clear and convincing.” Instead, CPS need merely persuade the judge that it is slightly more likely than not that the child needs to remain in foster care – the same standard used to determine which insurance company pays for a fender-bender.

The judge usually is easy to convince. That’s because the judge knows that he can hold hundreds of children in foster care needlessly and while this will do enormous harm to the children, the judge is safe. Return one child to a home and have something go wrong and the judge’s career could be over.

Resorting to blackmail

But in many cases across the country, even this doesn’t stack the deck enough to suit CPS agencies.  So they’ve resorted to something else: blackmail, typically using a parent’s own extended family as bait.

They don’t call it that, of course. Usually it goes by a term such as “safety plan” or “parental child safety placement” or “custody and visitation agreements.”

Here’s how it works: The child protective services worker says to a parent: Sign this document allowing us to place the child with an extended family member or we’ll take the child on the spot and place the child with total strangers. (If that’s not enough, they might ratchet up the threat, saying they will proceed immediately to termination of parental rights.)

CPS then argues, with a straight face, that the placement was voluntary – the family chose to give up any rights they may have to a lawyer and court review.  In fact, these placements are about as voluntary as a mugger sticking a gun in your face, saying “give me your money” and then telling the judge “I didn’t mug the guy, he gave me the money.”

What the AP reporters found

All of this brings me to what two enterprising Associated Press reporters, Mitch Weiss and Holbrook Mohr found in Cherokee County, N.C.  But let them tell you:

When Brian Hogan got a call that his wife had suffered a massive heart attack, he knew he had to get to the hospital fast. So Hogan asked his neighbor to take care of his 10-year-old daughter, then headed 60 miles east to the intensive care unit in Asheville, North Carolina.

What happened next would eventually expose a practice by a child welfare agency that illegally removed potentially hundreds of children from their homes in this poverty-stricken mountain community …

Hogan said the Cherokee County Department of Social Services threatened to throw him in jail, place his child in foster care or give his daughter to another family for adoption if he didn’t sign a “custody and visitation agreement,” known as a CVA.

“They gave me no choice,” said Hogan, 38, who told AP that child-welfare workers wanted to remove his daughter because they believed he placed the girl in an “unclean” home while he was caring for his hospitalized wife.

AP found that the county “did the same thing with dozens, possibly hundreds, of other parents…”

The extent of the blackmail

But that’s just the tip of a very large iceberg.

In North Carolina, individual counties run child welfare with supervision by the state. To its great credit, the state Department of Health and Human Services says what Cherokee County did was illegal and ordered counties not to do it.  A judge also ruled the practice illegal.  And, in a follow-up story, AP reports that the state is going to take over the entire Cherokee County child welfare system.

But it’s a different story in much of the rest of the country.  One reason we don’t know how many blackmail placements exist is because states often don’t report them to the federal government as entries into foster care – even though federal regulations make clear they should be counted.

But by one estimate, on any given day, there probably are 300,000 children trapped in a foster-care Twilight Zone because of blackmail placements across the country – that’s over and above the more than 400,000 children states admit to holding in foster care.

In Texas nearly two-thirds of entries into foster care probably are blackmail placements.

In Illinois, blackmail placements have been the subject of repeated lawsuits that lead to settlements. Then the child welfare agency violates the settlements.

So to really understand the harm done to children by blackmail placements, take the pain inflicted on Brian Hogan’s daughter and multiply it – hundreds of thousands of times.