Foster care in Oklahoma: Cause for celebration: A baby warehouse is closing!

 I’ve written often on this Blog about the horror of parking place “shelters,”abominable first-stop placements where the worst child welfare systems leave children for weeks or months, to be “cared” for in shifts and then moved on to foster homes or other institutions.

There are fewer "human teddy bears" in Oklahoma

   The primary role of shelters is to turn real flesh-and-blood human beings into human teddy bears who exist for the gratification of the adult staff and volunteers who care for them.

In fact, those are the exact words I used the last time I wrote a post about shelters.  That post was about Oklahoma.  About the hideous conditions in their baby warehouses, about the fact that the state Department of Human Services was desperately searching for even one expert who would speak well of them (they failed), and about how there was probably a foster-care panic underway making everything worse.

But over the past three years, it looks like things have changed - for the better.  In fact, one of the baby warehouses just closed.  There even was a "turning off the lights ceremony." 

Here's what happened.

The first step toward solving a problem is admitting you have one. Oklahoma DHS now admits there was a foster-care panic.  Here's what DHS Communications Coordinator Katelynn Burns told Tulsa People in September:

Burns with OKDHS says the significant spike in children entering state custody was due to a state- and agency-wide fear factor that frequently resulted in the removal of children from their homes.

“There were a series of highly publicized child deaths that kind of put people in a foster care panic,” she says. “People were afraid to keep kids in families if they weren’t sure they were going to be OK.”

And, the article says,  

In the past few years, she says the agency’s focus has shifted to preserving families when it is safe for the child by contracting with private agencies to provide comprehensive home-based services to some families of children at risk for foster care.

For example, a child living in a filthy environment might previously have been removed from his home due to perceived neglect, Burns says. With the new approach, OKDHS might contract with private agencies to help teach his parents cleaning and organization skills that would allow the child to remain with his family.

 It's not yet clear how much has been accomplished.  Even before the foster-care panic, Oklahoma was taking away children at a rate far above the national average.  By 2013, the most recent year for which comparative data are available, the rate of removal in Oklahoma was nearly 70 percent above the national average and nearly triple the rate in states that are national models of child welfare reform.

A story in The Oklahoman reports a small drop in the number of children in foster care on any given day, but it gives no figures for the number of children taken away over the course of a year - the best measure of foster-care panic.

But we know this: Enough progress has been made to close a baby warehouse - and reduce the number of children in many other baby warehouses across the state.

That is cause for celebration.

Foster care in Oklahoma: Inside the baby warehouses

How many children have to suffer

so adults can get their “baby fix”?

            I’ve written often on this Blog about the horror of parking place “shelters,” abominable first-stop placements where the worst child welfare systems leave children for weeks or months, to be “cared” for in shifts and then moved on to foster homes or other institutions.

            The primary role of shelters is to turn real flesh-and-blood human beings into human teddy bears who exist for the gratification of the adult staff and volunteers who care for them.

            Case in point, “Mr. Lou.” He told a local television station that he loved coming to work at what was once one of the very worst of the baby warehouses, Child Haven, in Las Vegas,  because babies and toddlers "grab my leg. They call me Mr. Lou. They tell me they love me."

But when a young child grabs the legs of anyone who will pay him a little attention and tells him "I love you" he's not getting better – he's getting worse. He is losing his ability to truly love at all, because every time he tries to love someone, that person goes away. It's even worse than the well-known problem of children bouncing from foster home to foster home. We are setting some of these children up to become adults unable to love or trust anyone.

            Mr. Lou’s comment was so amazingly ignorant that, when I first wrote about him, I’d assumed he was a volunteer.  Turns out he actually ran the place.

            More recently, before leaving the agency last year, a reform-minded director of the child welfare system in Las Vegas, Tom Morton, got all of the babies out of the shelter, cut the number of children of all ages there on any given day from hundreds – yes, hundreds - down to a handful and made sure almost no one stayed more than 24 hours.  He also fired Mr. Lou.

STILL AWFUL IN OKLAHOMA

            Nothing like that has happened in another God-awful system, the one in Oklahoma.  Scores of children, including babies, routinely are parked in overcrowded shelters in Tulsa and Oklahoma City.  And adults still get their psychic satisfaction at the children’s expense. 

Before The Oklahoman ran a package of stories about the shelters Sunday, the state Department of Human Services apparently tried desperately to find even one national expert to tell the newspaper that shelters were a good idea.  They failed.  Then the agency turned around and claimed that they have no choice but to use the shelters.  That’s not true either.

            Data in the stories also raise the possibility that Oklahoma’s already- outrageous rate of child removal may be getting worse – and that may be partly because of The Oklahoman itself.

“I GET MY BABY FIX”

            One story features Oklahoma’s answer to Mr. Lou.  I won’t name her because she really is a volunteer and she almost certainly doesn’t know any better.  But what she said captures the real purpose of shelters in a nutshell.  The volunteer stops in two or three times a week to rock babies in the nursery because, she told the newspaper:

             “They are so cute — my kids are older — for me, I get my baby fix.”


             Indeed, that's just what it looks like.  Check out the 40 second video at the top of the main story showing strangers using other people's babies as human teddy bears, as they talk mostly about how much they - the adults - get from it; in effect, the "high" from their "baby fix."  It's almost as though the babies were taken down from a shelf just before the tape began, and put back whenever the adults got bored.

            As noted in previous posts to this Blog, the babies pay a very high price for giving the adults their “fix.”  As Carole Shauffer, senior director of strategic initiatives for the Youth Law Center in San Francisco told the Oklahoman:

there has been a significant amount of child development research that shows every month that babies and toddlers spend in shelters can lead to behavioral, brain and cognitive changes that can be long lasting.

“It's because a fundamental task for those very young children, particularly children ages 6 months to 3 years, is to attach to one particular caregiver and that's how they learn. It's how they learn language. It's how they learn to rely on people ... So, if they have constantly changing caregivers, which is what happens in a shelter, they cannot attach to any one of them because they are not there long enough.”

            When told about the Oklahoma shelters, John Mattingly, the former Commissioner of New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services, and someone who certainly has never hesitated to break up a family (albeit at far from the rate in Oklahoma) told the newspaper:

             “I'm really shocked. … An experienced child welfare person shudders to even think about that, to tell you the truth. That's how out-of-date it is …

 “Some teens you'll have trouble placing.  But infants and toddlers — foster parents, if you treat them right, will be beating down your doors to take care of those kids.”

DHS SCRAMBLES TO FIND AN “EXPERT”

            Knowing that The Oklahoman was working on these stories, in fact, just minutes after one of the reporters interviewed me, someone at Oklahoma DHS did a Google search using the terms: "Experts on shelter care for children is good."

            Apparently, they couldn’t find any such experts, because none is cited in the Oklahoman stories.  That suggests that for all these years, even as they tolerated the baby warehouses, no one at DHS actually checked to see how much harm they are doing.

            And if, by some chance, they’d actually found an “expert” somewhere to support shelters, what would DHS have done?  Would the agency then have said shelters are wonderful – and they’d known this all along?

With no “expert” to be found, the director of DHS's children and family services division, Deborah Smith, gave the usual excuse:  We don’t like shelters either, we really wish the children all could be in families, but we just don’t have enough foster parents.

OKLAHOMA STILL TAKES TOO MANY CHILDREN

            She failed to explain what it was about Oklahoma that made it so different from all the states that have dramatically curbed the use of shelters.

Here’s one key difference: Oklahoma takes away far too many children.

            After systematically ignoring the issue for more than a year, the team of reporters writing most of the child welfare stories in The Oklahoman finally noted in a sidebar Sunday that “Oklahoma traditionally has taken children into custody at a much higher rate than the national average.”

And, at the very bottom of the main story, the reporters included this from Oklahoma State Rep. Ron Peters:

Peters said he believes the big problem is DHS has been taking too many children into custody. … Peters said many reunifications occur within the first week. In cases where the children's safety isn't in jeopardy, everyone would be better off if necessary services were provided and the children were left in the home so they wouldn't have to experience the trauma of being taken to an unfamiliar home or shelter, he said.

            But The Oklahoman made two errors.  First, in noting that Oklahoma had “drastically [reduced] the number of children removed from homes” the figures the newspaper gave actually confused the number of children in foster care on any given day with the number of children removed over the course of a year. 

That mistake is less of a problem than it otherwise might be because, in fact, both figures have declined by about one-third since 2007.  But the bigger mistake the reporters made was failing to note that, even with these declines, in 2010, the most recent year for which comparative data are available, Oklahoma still was taking away children at a rate 30 percent above the national average.  And the number of children in foster care on any given day was more than 40 percent above the national average.

            And Oklahoma’s record might be getting worse.

            The stories note that for awhile, DHS had begun to get the shelter population under control.  But now, the shelter population has skyrocketed again, with both shelters often overcrowded and at least one in violation of the state fire code.  The newspaper quotes from a state fire marshal’s inspection on May 31, 2011:

            “The overcrowding of this facility creates a serious and immediate risk to the lives and life safety and welfare to all occupants and residents.”

HERE COMES “THE FIRE WATCHER”

            DHS “solves” this problem by hiring a “fire watcher” a firefighter who patrols the overcrowded building watching for fire hazards.

            But The Oklahoman never explains the sudden surge in the shelter population.  One possibility: Entries into care also may be going up again.  That certainly would be no surprise.  For the past year or so The Oklahoman has been covering child welfare in the usual mediocre way: systematically ignoring cases of wrongful removal and running story after story about deaths of children “known to the system.”

            That, of course, leaves the false impression that the only mistake made by DHS workers is leaving children in dangerous homes.  It also terrifies workers into taking away even more children needlessly.  In short, it’s a classic formula for foster-care panic.  (Oklahoman editorial board, please note: This does not mean we want The Oklahoman to stop covering the fatalities – rather we want The Oklahoman to start covering needless removal as well.  Much like the Los Angeles Times, some at The Oklahoman have been known to accuse critics of how they cover child welfare of not wanting them to cover fatalities.)

            The Oklahoman stories on Sunday do a pretty good job of conveying the stark, institutional landscape at the shelters:

“Unfortunately, we do not have the ability to keep siblings together,” said Patricia Rowe, supervisor and trainer at the [Oklahoma City] shelter.

Babies sleep in one area, toddlers in another. Older children sleep in sparsely furnished dormlike rooms, two beds to a room. Older children are separated by gender, as well as by age. Some have a stuffed animal resting on their pillows.

Staff members try to arrange visits between siblings as often as they can, Rowe said.

Shelter staff also tries to make sure children have plenty of visual stimulation.
There are toys — lots of toys. … But reminders that the shelter is an institution are constant.

The murals are painted on cinder block walls. Rowe said that's a good thing because they can withstand the punishment if residents get angry and frustrated by their situations.

            What The Oklahoman reporters don’t say is that they may share some responsibility for the fact that so many children are trapped within those walls.

Child welfare in America: Important stories from Iowa, Chicago, D.C. and Michigan

UPDATE, JANUARY 3: If you've had an experience with child protective services in IOWA, and are willing to share your story publicly, using your real name, the columnist for the Cedar Rapids Gazette whose work is discussed below invites you to post to this open thread on her Blog.

           The year 2011 ended with some excellent journalism about child welfare across the country.

            Last September, the Center for the Study of Social Policy issued a report on the racial bias that permeates child welfare in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.  That’s no surprise.  Iowa tears apart families of all races at one of the highest rates in the nation, four times the rate of neighboring Illinois, when rates of child poverty are factored in.  (Of course it’s Illinois where independent monitors say the emphasis on family preservation has improved child safety.)

            Across the country, states with the highest rates of removal also typically are among those with the worst rates of racial bias. Iowa is a case in point; South Dakota is another.

  

            Now, Jennifer Hemmingsen, a columnist for The Gazette in Cedar Rapids is telling some of the stories behind the statistics.  There’s an overview here, then a story about a perfectly fit father denied custody of his child.   That’s followed by a story about how the man’s extended family was turned down as well.  The child was adopted by strangers. 

            The New York Times has a very good story from its news-gathering partner, the Chicago News Cooperative, about cases in which adoption is not always the happily-ever-after it’s cracked up to be – particularly when the state stops paying the adoptive parents. NCCPR predicted this would happen in 1997, when Congress passed the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act which reinforced the take-the-child-and-run mentality in much of American child welfare, and threw in bounties to states for adoptions – bounties the states can keep even when the adoption fails.  We have some context for the Times story, including what little is known about the extent of the problem on our website here.

            For an excellent overview of how American child welfare got into this mess, and some of the ways to fix it, check out this Blog at the Huffington Post from Prof. Matthew Fraidin of the University of the District of Columbia School of Law.

            Another law professor, Vivek Sankaran of the University of Michigan Child Advocacy Law Clinic wrote an excellent op ed column for the Detroit Free Press on the widespread confusion of poverty with “neglect” in Michigan – a problem made worse by the state’s dreadful settlement with the group that so arrogantly calls itself “Children’s Rights.”  Sadly, Oklahoma soon may be headed for a similar fate.

They can’t fix foster care – but they sure have mastered doublethink

           One of the most, uh, remarkable things about Marcia Lowry and her colleagues at the group that so arrogantly calls itself “Children’s Rights” (CR) is their mastery of doublethink – the term George Orwell invented to describe “the power to hold two completely contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accept both of them.”

            CR’s skill at doublethink is now on display in a series of reports and press releases about Oklahoma, where they’ve brought one of their class-action McLawsuits.

            In a previous post to this Blog, I noted that CR had issued a scathing report on the widespread abuse of children in Oklahoma foster care.  The problem, I said, was that CR isn’t lifting a finger to actually keep Oklahoma children out of foster care.

            Turns out I underestimated CR’s capacity for doublethink.  Now they’ve put out another press release about still another report.  Among the complaints this time: Oklahoma supposedly has gone too much to reduce the number of children in the very system CR itself says is a grave danger to those children.

            The report is written by Viola Miller, an odd choice given her mediocre record running child welfare systems in Kentucky and Tennessee.  Her report appears to be based in no small measure on reading other reports commissioned by CR.

            Miller agrees with what those other experts said about Oklahoma foster care.  She concludes that children are being harmed at an “alarmingly high rate” and until DHS cleans up its act, “the children in its care will continue to live in danger.”

            Then, in the very next paragraph, Miller launches into an attack on DHS for its success in getting more children out of this abysmal system.  Miller condemns DHS for using “differential response” an approach that now is used in many other states.  Every independent evaluation done of differential response shows it does not compromise safety; some have shown that child safety improves.

            And what evidence does Miller have that differential response is unsafe in Oklahoma?  The fact that it’s working.  Miller complains that the number of children in Oklahoma foster care is dropping too quickly.

            But that ignores one key fact: Oklahoma started out with, proportionately, vastly more children in foster care on any given day than the national average, and a vastly higher number of children taken away over the course of a year.  Even with the reductions in recent years – the very reductions Miller says have come too quickly – Oklahoma still tears apart families at a rate 40 percent above the national average and the number of children in foster care on any given day remains 50 percent above the national average.

            That means Oklahoma simply had vastly more cases that could suitably be diverted to differential response, and a sharp decline in the foster care population makes sense.

            Miller’s other “evidence” of a problem is that DHS offers voluntary safety plans to families who are assessed using differential response.  But that’s exactly what DHS is supposed to do.  That’s the whole point of differential response – in cases where the risk is believed to be low, you go out and offer voluntary help, not a coercive investigation.  What Miller appears to be arguing for is perverting differential response into child abuse investigations by another name.

ERRORS IN ALL DIRECTIONS

            There is, in fact, a case to be made for the possibility that DHS is not doing differential response as well as it should – but not based on the reasons Miller suggests.

People often point to horror stories about children dying in their own homes when they are “known to the system” as supposedly proving that the only error made by child welfare agencies is to leave the children in dangerous homes.  I usually reply by saying, among other things, that child welfare systems are arbitrary, capricious and cruel; they err in all directions.  Indeed, it makes no sense to think the errors go only way.

            But that also means a system that has screwed up foster care as royally as Oklahoma DHS has done is bound to be having problems getting alternatives right as well.  And, in fact, Miller found contradictions in various manuals for implementing differential response and responding to hotline calls.  That raises legitimate cause for concern.

            But nothing in Miller’s report suggests that the problems with differential response come anywhere near the scope and severity of the problems with foster care; nothing justifies any notion that there is equal danger.

            The credibility of Miller’s claims about differential response are further undermined because they are part of a pattern of CR seeking to undermine almost anything in almost any state that doesn’t involve subjecting every family to a full-scale child abuse investigation and traumatizing children with needless foster care.  CR also is going after differential response in Georgia, despite significant evidence that the Georgia program does not compromise safety.

            And back when Miller herself still was running the system in Tennessee, CR successfully bullied the Tennessee legislature into repealing a law that would have brought just a little bit of balance to the incentives judges face when making decisions about whether to remove children from their homes.

            A lot of this boils down to the whole bureaucratic mindset at CR.  Sure, foster care in Oklahoma is horrible for kids’ psyches and puts them in grave physical danger, but, they seem to believe, we’ll fix it – we’ll hire lots more workers and give them lots more bureaucratic forms and checklists and “training” and then everything will be fine.  And while we’re fixing foster care, we’ll just keep shoveling more kids into it and opposing efforts to divert kids to better options.

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

            But even were it true, as Miller suggests, that the problems in Oklahoma foster care and Oklahoma’s efforts to avoid foster care are equivalent, that still raises a fundamental question: 

Miller writes that “children in Oklahoma are facing serious risk of harm both before and after they enter state custody.”

In that case, by tearing these children away from their families at a rate 40 percent above the national average, you accomplish exactly what?

Not OK: CR’s double standards for measuring abuse in foster care

The group that so arrogantly calls itself Children’s Rights (CR) has put out a press release concerning a report it commissioned from an outside expert, John Goad, concerning foster care in Oklahoma.

The findings are indeed horrifying.  They suggest a pattern of willful blindness to widespread abuse in substitute care in Oklahoma, especially in group homes and institutions.

For some reason, one division of the Oklahoma Department of Human Services investigates abuse in family foster homes while another, known as the Office of Client Advocacy (OCA) investigates it in group homes and institutions. 

That latter division, in particular, is the Keystone Kops of child welfare, according to the report.  According to CR’s press release, these “investigators”

do not specialize in child welfare or receive adequate training on how to investigate abuse or neglect. Investigations of harm in institutions and group homes “lack any sense of urgency, are haphazard, and superficial,” wrote Goad. “OCA’s failure to conduct even marginally adequate child protection investigations for this vulnerable population is far outside any reasonable standard.”

While it’s always good to have anyone point out the severe risk of abuse in foster care, as so often happens when it comes from CR, the press release leaves that strong, bitter aftertaste of hypocrisy.

That’s because there is not one word in CR’s lawsuit about the problem at the heart of so much abuse in foster care: Too much foster care.

Oklahoma takes away children at a rate 40 percent above the national average and more than double the rate in states widely recognized as, relatively speaking, models for keeping children safe.  The more children you take needlessly the greater the temptation to misuse and overuse group homes and institutions and lower standards for foster homes.  States like Oklahoma are begging for beds and beggars can’t be choosers.

So, having concluded that often Oklahoma foster care is hell, CR doesn’t lift a finger to keep more children out of hell in the first place.

But neither the revelations, nor the hypocrisy end there.

A LOWER STANDARD FOR MILWAUKEE

It seems that OCA is on a different computer system from the one that compiles data about everything else in Oklahoma child welfare.  So the abuse OCA does manage to find never gets into the statistics it shares with the public, or the statistics it is required to report to the federal government.

CR’s director, Marcia Lowry (or whoever wrote the quote in the press release for her) declared herself appalled:

“It is appalling to hear DHS rely on numbers it knows to be inaccurate at the same time it is completely ignoring the suffering of an entire group of children in its care.” 

That is indeed appalling.  It’s also appalling to see a group that claims defend these children apply one standard for measuring abuse in foster care in one state and another somewhere else.  Because in this case, CR’s hypocrisy extends all the way to Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

In Milwaukee, CR already has a settlement.  When the agreement first was reached in 2002, NCCPR pointed out in an op ed column for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (available in the newspaper’s paid archive) that a key weakness in the settlement was the lack of independent monitoring.  We wrote:

It wasn’t that long ago that …[CR] alleged widespread falsification of case records in Milwaukee.  Yet now, CR proposes to rely on the alleged falsifiers to provide accurate information …

And sure enough, CR is doing just that.  The Bureau of Milwaukee Child Welfare has examined itself and proclaimed that abuse in foster care is at an all-time low!   And what was CR’s response? No request for independent verification, much less the kind of study done in Oklahoma.  Instead, CR simply took the child welfare agency’s word for it and sang the agency’s praises.  According to the Journal Sentinel, CR attorney Eric Thompson declared that:

"The bureau has made tremendous progress transforming its child welfare system over the last several years improving the basic safety and well-being of the many vulnerable children in its care.”

What accounts for the difference?

Perhaps it’s because CR still is suing in Oklahoma, so they need ammunition.  In Milwaukee they’ve settled and need to show donors they’ve accomplished something.