Oregon’s child welfare director wants to institutionalize five-year-olds!

Some of the “littles,” as Marilyn Jones so cloyingly calls them, could wind up in “repurposed” juvenile jails.

 

How Oregon tries to "fix" foster care
(Photo by Tpapi)

In December, 2016, I wrote a post for this blog called Fixing Oregon foster care becomes a pathetic game of whack-a-mole.

I described how an expose of abuse in foster care by the alternative weekly Willamette Week whacked the state into raising standards for foster homes.  So the state wound up warehousing foster children in offices and jails.  So -- whack! -- a child advocacy group brought a lawsuit to prohibit the practice.  The Oregon Department of Human Services (DHS) settled.  And children promptly wound up warehoused in hotels. So –whack! – there was another lawsuit, and another settlement.

I discussed how this would keep happening until the state faced up to the real problem: Oregon tears children needlessly from their parents at a rate far above the national average.

Now, more than two years later, behold! The Oregonian reports that the foster children are back in juvenile jails. But this time there’s a twist.  They’ve repainted the cinderblock, added some pretty pictures and slapped new labels onto the jails – so now, the Oregonian tells us, they’re “repurposed juvenile jails” [emphasis added].

The Oregonian story then tells us that

Critics question whether former jails are the right place for foster children.

‘Ya think???

The story goes on to note that

for many, such placements mean moving far from their home communities, switching to unfamiliar and sometimes segregated foster-child-only schools and losing the chance to live in the care of a parent figure instead of a rotation of shift workers. … Nationally the movement in child welfare is away from caring for children in institutional settings, which research has shown yields poorer outcomes.

But once again, as with every other story I’ve seen in the Oregonian over the past several years, this story makes no mention of the root cause of this pathetic game of whack-a-mole: Oregon’s obscene rate of child removal and the failure of state government, the state legislature, and almost all of the state’s media to confront it.

The one thing that’s changed – for the worse

But one thing has changed.  It used to be that state child welfare officials would say that of course it’s terrible to institutionalize kids, but they would claim they have no choice because of a “shortage” of foster parents.  That’s not true – Oregon does not have too few foster parents, Oregon has too many foster children.

But leave it to Oregon Child Welfare Director Marilyn Jones - the poster-adult for child welfare mediocrity to suggest something even worse.  Jones is now saying that no matter how many foster parents Oregon recruits they will never be capable of caring for all the children who are now institutionalized, and even more need to be institutionalized in the future.  So either Jones has an astonishingly low opinion of Oregon foster parents or Jones is clueless about best practice in child welfare.

When Jones says Oregon should institutionalize more children, she’s not just talking about teenagers – though that’s bad enough.  Jones told the legislature she wants more beds to institutionalize children as young as five – children she cloyingly refers to as “the littles.”  Calling for institutionalizing five-year-olds should, in itself, disqualify someone from running a child welfare system.

Indeed just this week, Oregon Public Broadcasting told the story of exactly the sort of child Marilyn Jones wants to give up on and institutionalize – and how this child, age 9, was kept safely in his own home with intensive home-based services.  Of course this happened in Tennessee, not Oregon.  (The OBP story also broke the mold for the state’s media – it actually zeroed-in on the problem of Oregon’s high rate of tearing apart families.  OPB is the only media organization in the state to bring this up fairly regularly.)

But then, I suppose one should not expect any better from someone like Marilyn Jones, who has also justified sending children to an Iowa institution alleged by an independent advocacy group to be rife with abuse.  (And, I suppose one should not expect any better from someone like Jones who doesn’t even seem to know that Oregon is a bigger state than Iowa.)

Others who share responsibility

But Jones and her colleagues in DHS management are not the only ones to blame for this mess.

● Almost as culpable is State Sen. Sara Gelser. Oregon media seem to believe no child welfare story is complete without the obligatory quote from Gelser.  But Gelser has made the crisis worse by promoting hype and hysteria over high-profile tragedies and undermining what little DHS has tried to do to curb needless foster care. 

Gelser was the major force behind legislation that killed Oregon’s “differential response” initiative – either without waiting for or simply ignoring the final results of a comprehensive independent evaluation. (The evaluation is dated June, 2017, the bill passed in early July of that year.) According to that evaluation:

our analyses find no evidence that DR [differential response] undermines the safety of children in Oregon. [Emphasis in original.]

The evaluation found that families receiving a “differential response” intervention were significantly less likely to have another substantiated report of child abuse than a matched comparison group of families who got a traditional Oregon child protective services investigation.

Pretty institutions don’t work either

Even now, Gelser seems unaware of the fact that institutionalization simply does not work. Her comments suggest that she would be just fine with institutionalizing children if they just made the places really pretty – so they didn’t look like jails – and the people running them used all the right buzzwords, like “trauma-informed.”

So when Gelser then tells OPB that she’d like to do more about prevention (but notice it’s only the non-controversial net-widening primary prevention to which everyone pays lip service) it should be taken with more than a grain of salt.  OPB also reports that

It’s time, Gelser said, for the state to figure out how to find the appropriate place for the state’s most vulnerable children.

Actually, it’s time for Gelser to figure out that the appropriate place for a large number of those children is their own homes.

[UPDATE, MARCH 23: Gelser has responded to some of the above.  You can read all about that here.  But she still has not explained why she did so much to kill "differential response" even after the independent evaluation found it was safe.]

The whack-a-mole lawsuits

● The organizations that brought the whack-a-mole lawsuits – the one that said you can’t use jails and offices, but didn’t mention hotels, and then the one that said you can’t use hotels but was silent about “repurposed” jails -- also share responsibility.  Since the lawsuits never addressed the high rate of removal, DHS was never forced into the one solution that would really work: Taking away fewer children, thereby opening places in good foster homes for all the children who really need them.

The Oregonian reports that

The no-hotels settlement was supposed to get more children and teens who’ve been removed from their families into the family-like settings that experts and Oregon’s foster children’s bill of rights say gives them the best chance to flourish.

But having already seen that the lawsuit against keeping kids in jails led to keeping kids in hotels, how could they have possibly believed that stopping DHS from warehousing children in hotels wouldn’t wind up sending them right back to jails – albeit “repurposed” ones?

● Most of the state’s media also share responsibility – especially the Oregonian, which for years has chosen to ignore the state’s outrageous rate of child removal.

If most Oregonians think, mistakenly, that all parents who lose their children are sadists, brutes and/or hopeless addicts; if most Oregonians mistakenly confuse child removal with child safety; and if most Oregonians think that there are no options other than recruiting more foster parents and dumping five-year-olds in “repurposed” jail cells – it’s because that’s the story the Oregonian and most other Oregon media keep telling them over and over and over. (Again, OPB is something of an exception.)

If most Oregonians don’t know about the real rate of abuse in foster care, and if most Oregonians don’t know about the mass of research showing that, in typical cases children do better in their own homes even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care, it’s because the Oregonian and most other Oregon media don’t mention those details.

If “repurposed” doors on “repurposed” jail cells start slamming behind five-year-olds anytime soon, primary responsibility rests with Marilyn Jones.  But Sen. Gelser, the lawyers who brought the whack-a-mole suits, and the Oregonian all will have helped to put those five-year-olds in those cells.

Child welfare in Oregon: The audit and the elephant

A new audit of Oregon’s child welfare system is an exercise in willful ignorance. That makes it more part of the problem than part of the solution.

Earlier this week, Oregon Public Broadcasting’s Think Out Loud devoted a program to a new (and, as almost every headline noted, “scathing”) audit of the state child welfare system, conducted by the Oregon Secretary of State’s office. The producers invited me onto the program to respond to comments from the state’s two top child welfare officials and the lead auditor.

I was in a studio near Washington, D.C., so I couldn’t see the other guests. That’s why I’ll probably never know how they managed to fit all those guests and an elephant into one studio in Portland.

The elephant in the studio is, of course, Oregon’s obscenely high rates of tearing children from their families and trapping them in foster care. That elephant has been hanging around for decades – Oregon has been tearing apart families at rates far above the national average since at least the mid-1980s. Through all that time, the elephant has been ignored by the state Department of Human Services.  And the behavior of the auditors is, if anything, even worse.

The audit devotes exactly one sentence to the fact that Oregon is such an outlier when it comes to tearing apart families.  The lead auditor gave it a single sentence on Think Out Loud – and the sentence was shocking. She said she didn’t know if Oregon holding children in foster care at a rate she described as double the national average made the Oregon system “worse or better” than others.

In fact, it’s not quite that bad. Oregon actually holds children in foster care at a rate about 60 percent above thenational average, not double. But the fact that the auditor thinks the rate is double and still doesn’t know whether that makes Oregon better or worse is that much more appalling.

As I said during my segment on the program. which starts at 32 minutes in and can be heard here …

Listen to "What’s Wrong With Oregon’s Child Welfare Office?" on Spreaker.

… it’s understandable that someone entirely new to child welfare issues would not know, at the very start of the audit,  if an insane rate of removal is “better or worse.” But how can you go through months and months examining an agency and still not know by the end of the process?  Did the audit team even ask why Oregon is such an outlier?  Apparently not.

Not that you asked, but …

Though the auditors didn’t ask, here’s why a high rate of removal makes a child welfare system worse:

● Most cases are nothing like the horror stories. Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with “neglect.” Other cases fall between the extremes. Massive studies of typical cases show that children left in their own homes fare better in later life even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care.  And a study of foster children in Oregon and Washington State showed that the foster care system churns out walking wounded four times out of five.

● All that harm occurs even when the foster home is a good one. The majority are. But study after study, including two from Oregon, found abuse in one-quarter to one-third of foster homes. The rate of abuse in group homes and institutions is even worse. 

Oregon, in particular, has seen scandal after scandal over abuse in foster care.  Indeed, on the very day those child welfare officials, the auditor and the elephant piled into that studio, it was revealed that DHS proposed deliberately allowing children to remain in homes where caseworkers admit they think the children are not safe – in order to settle a lawsuit seeking to bar the state from warehousing children in hotels. (It’s another example of how efforts to fix Oregon foster care have become  a pathetic game of whack-a-mole.)

● All the time money and effort wasted on false allegations, cases in which family poverty is confused with neglect and needless foster care, as in this Oregon case and this one, is, in effect, stolen from finding children in real danger who really do need to be taken from their homes.

So the implicit assumption behind the auditor’s ignorance – what she really was saying is: Maybe that high rate of removal makes children safer – is false. In all those months, the audit team never checked to find out.

That makes the entire audit an exercise in willful ignorance. And it invalidates many of its conclusions.

Much of the audit is built around the premise that there is a shortage of foster homes in Oregon.  But if you don’t know why Oregon is taking away so many children, you don’t know if Oregon has too few foster parents, or too many foster children.

So we get page after page about recruiting more foster parents.  Worse, the audit calls for  institutionalizing more children in so-called “residential treatment” – accepting as fact the claims of the residential treatment industry that this is the only option for children with serious behavioral problems.

Apparently in all those months of auditing the auditors never reviewed the mass of research showing that residential treatment is a failure and there is nothing residential treatment does that can’t be done better with Wraparound programs. Such programs bring all the help a child needs into her or his own home or a foster home.  To see how, perhaps the audit team will have a look at this video:

Similarly, the audit refers to DHS resorting to the very worst form of “care” opening up more parking place “shelters” as “potentially positive steps…” They express no concern at all that shelters are terrible for children. The qualifier “potentially” refers only to the fact that the shelter might not be enough to deal with the so-called “shortage” of foster parents.

A gratuitous swipe at kinship care 

The audit even takes a gratuitous swipe at the least harmful form of foster care – kinship foster care, placing children with relatives instead of strangers. Study after study after study has found that kinship foster care is more stable, more humane and, most important, safer than what should properly be called “stranger care.” Yet the audit declares that many foster children “have acute mental and physical health needs that career foster homes may be better equipped and specifically trained to handle.”

Why? Do the auditors think relatives are inherently too stupid to be properly “equipped” and “trained”?

And speaking of biases, just as only one sentence is devoted to Oregon’s high rate of tearing apart families, less than a sentence is devoted to the racial makeup of Oregon foster care. The audit notes that one-third of Oregon foster children are nonwhite. But that is mentioned only in the context of – as you’ve probably guessed by now -- the need to recruit more foster parents of color. The possibility that Oregon’s high rate of removal might be related to racial bias is not even considered.

Even when the auditors are right, they fail to ask the obvious questions. 

●The audit paints a picture of an agency so incompetent it can’t even produce an up-to-date organizational chart.  It also confirms something some of us have long known: Oregon is where good ideas in child welfare go to die.

But the audit doesn’t go back far enough – to the 1990s, when Oregon had a chance to reform its entire system along the lines pioneered by Alabama – and blew it. It’s not as if this information is hard to find – it’s all laid out in the epilogue to this Oregon Public Broadcasting / Salem Statesman Journal story.

●The audit discusses how badly DHS sometimes treats foster parents, and even how badly people in the agency sometimes treat each other. But it never asks the obvious question: DHS really needs foster parents, and it really needs its own employees. If this is how staff and foster parents are treated, how are they treating birth parents?

But since the list of “stakeholders” the auditors spoke to includes virtually everyone with any connection to the system except birth parents who lost their children to that system, it’s not likely the auditors would think to ask that question.  

Given all that, it’s not surprising that the recommendations amount to nothing but more of the same: Recruit lots more foster parents and hire lots more caseworkers.

But we already know exactly what that will produce: The same lousy system only bigger.

That won’t start to change until, at long last, someone in Oregon says “Hey: There’s an elephant in the room!”