In Cleveland, child welfare goes to pot

On September 26, Hollie Sanford of Cleveland, Ohio, gave birth to a healthy baby girl.

For reasons that are unclear, the hospital tested both mother and baby for drugs.  Both tested positive – for a byproduct of marijuana.  That’s because Hollie drank marijuana tea to ease the pain of labor.  According to one of several excellent stories in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Hollie said she took that approach because she thought it was safer than narcotics or medicines.

The whole thing should have been none of the county child welfare agency’s business.  And you can bet that had Hollie Sanford been, say, a Junior Leaguer from Chagrin Falls or Bentleyville it wouldn’t have been.  She never would have been tested and, if somehow she had, Cuyahoga County Children and Family Services (CFS) would have done exactly what it should have done: Nothing.

But while news accounts don’t specify their income, Hollie and her husband appear to be a working class family.  And they’re an interracial couple.  That’s more than enough to trigger the racial bias and class bias that permeate American child welfare.  (NCCPR President Martin Guggenheim discusses exactly this sort of double standard in the context of marijuana cases in this article from The Nation. And there's more about the double standard, and the harm it causes in this piece from The Huffington Post.)

So Cuyahoga County went to court to put the family under “protective supervision.”  Your newborn still can live with you, the County told the Sanfords, so long as you promise never, ever to use marijuana and let us monitor your life – at a time when that life already has more than enough stress, what with the arrival of a new baby.  Hollie agreed.  As she told the Plain Dealer: “I said I’d do anything they wanted to get my daughter home.”

All that extra stress poses far more risk to a newborn’s healthy development than a mom who sometimes uses marijuana tea, or even smokes a joint.

But then it all got worse. 

The case came before a magistrate  - essentially an assistant judge - by the name of Eleanore Hilow.  She took it upon herself to go far beyond what even CFS wanted – she ordered the child confiscated from the parents and consigned to foster care.  Fortunately, a cousin stepped forward, so at least the child wasn’t placed with a stranger.  Hollie and her husband had daily visits.  But still more stress was placed on the parents – and most important, the infant – during a crucial period of parent child bonding.

After Plain Dealer reporter Rachel Dissell wrote an excellent story on the case, the actual judge, Thomas F. O'Malley, overruled his magistrate and allowed the child to come home – still under protective supervision.

As often happens in situations like this, the Plain Dealer story prompted others to come forward.  In a follow-up story, Dissell wrote: 

Several attorneys and guardians ad litem with cases in Hilow's courtroom told the Plain Dealer she often makes unilateral decisions to remove children from parents or caregivers, forcing them into the county's custody without sufficient, or any, evidence being presented during a hearing.

 Then Dissell dug further, and found this: 

Hilow and her judge, Thomas F. O'Malley, drew more appeals than any other pair – 28 out of a total of 120. They also had more full or partial reversals.  On cases they decided since 2011, the typical judge/magistrate pair drew fewer than two reversals. O'Malley and Hilow drew 9. That was more than a quarter of the roughly 30 reversals for the entire local juvenile court. The next closest pair had five reversals. More than once, appeals court judges used unusually direct language in reversing Hilow's rulings. They did not question her motivations, but, like some lawyers who have practiced in her court, they said that her rulings exceeded both her discretion and her authority.

 And unfortunately, not all of the bad decisions have been overturned – at least not yet.  Again, from the story: 

Hilow decided that a newborn, born with methadone in his system, should be placed in the emergency custody of the county. A county worker and addiction professional testified that Dara Gibson and her baby could stay safely in a treatment center. But Hilow, according to her decision, was skeptical. There was nothing to prevent Gibson from fleeing the center with the baby, who at only about 2 months old, couldn't fend for himself. He's now in a foster home.

But the egregious conduct of one magistrate should not be allowed to distract attention from the only slightly less egregious behavior of the Cuyahoga County child welfare agency.  Not only did they harm this child by ordering around the parents, putting everyone under surveillance, and dragging the whole matter into court in the first place, they also used up time, energy and resources that could have been spent finding children in real danger.

Cuyahoga County is not alone in this.  New York City has its own version of child welfare reefer madness.  So does Philadelphia.

But as long as it’s a hot topic in Cleveland right now, I hope someone asks the current head of Cuyahoga CFS, Thomas Pristow, why he’s doing this kind of harm to families. Perhaps it would get the agency to, uh, turn over a new leaf.

Foster care in Cleveland: Did Plain Dealer sleaze claim another victim?

UPDATE, NOV. 30: Citing court records WKYC-TV is now reporting that, in foster care “the child is having dreams of dying, is wetting the bed, and is anxious that the world is going to end in 2012.”  The station also reports that part of the reason Cuyahoga County DCFS took the child away is that the mother missed some appointments.  As noted below, the foster mother also is having trouble keeping up with appointments, but DCFS is responding somewhat differently.


            You’ve probably already heard about this one: the eight-year-old boy who weighed 218 pounds and has been consigned to foster care as a result.

            Apparently oblivious to the emotional trauma of tearing this child from his mother, (including the fact that, at age 8, this child may now believe he did something wrong and now is being punished) the Cuyahoga County Department of Children and Family Services showed up at his school one day last month and refused to let him go home.  They shoved him directly into a foster home.   His mother can’t even visit him for more than two hours a week.

            The Cleveland Plain Dealer actually did a very good job with the story.  Among other things the story noted that:

            ● The child was on the honor roll at his school and participated in school activities.

            ● The child only came to the attention of child welfare authorities, early in 2010, because his single mother, a substitute teacher who also is taking vocational school classes, brought him to the hospital because of breathing problems.  He was diagnosed with sleep apnea, which often is caused by obesity.

            The story doesn’t say exactly how this led to DCFS intervention, but, as we all know in the wake of Penn State, doctors and nurses are “mandated reporters” required to call in any suspicion of “child abuse.”

DCFS did not remove the child then and there; instead, the agency started monitoring the family.  There is no mention of the agency helping the family.

            ● The boy did, in fact, lose weight.  But recently he began gaining it back – apparently siblings were sneaking him food.

            ● The mother voluntarily enrolled the child in a special hospital program to help obese children.

            What mom could not do, of course, was hire a personal trainer, or enroll the child in special camps or even keep an eye on him at all times, as wealthy families can do.  So it’s no wonder that Dr. Arthur Caplan, America’s most quoted medical ethicist, told the Plain Dealer he was concerned that, as the newspaper put it, “families with the fewest resources, which often are minorities, will end up being the ones with their children removed.”

            No kidding.

            Prof. Vivek Sankaran of the University of Michigan Child Advocacy Center is dealing with a similar case in Detroit.  "This is really dangerous stuff we're talking about," he told a Time magazine blog in July.  "A lot of people don't realize how traumatic it is for children to be ripped away from their parents."

In the case he’s working on, Sankaran said:

What we've seen … is that the actual removal causes irreparable damage to the child — emotional problems, behavioral problems — and it's the type of thing that can't be remedied.  People think [removing the child] is a quick fix, but you need to make sure you have tried every other possibility to protect the child.

Clearly in the Cleveland case they didn’t.  Because here’s the kicker – according to Mom’s public defender it turns out that the foster mother, who lives in a nearby suburb, can’t keep up with all the child’s appointments – even though that’s what was expected of the boy’s single mother, even as she juggled her efforts to improve her education and make a living.

But The Plain Dealer reports that DCFS was far more solicitous of the foster mother.  The newspaper reports that, according to the mother’s public defender, “There was even a discussion about getting the foster mother additional help or moving the child again, this time to a foster home with a personal trainer.”

            That prompted the public defender to ask the obvious question: “I wonder why they didn’t offer the mother that kind of extra help.”

           

THE NEWSPAPER AS ENABLER

            So if the Plain Dealer covered the story so well, why do I think the newspaper shares responsibility for this travesty?  Because the Plain Dealer did so much to create the climate made it almost inevitable.

            Early in 2010, after the Plain Dealer rediscovered two facts:

1.       Cuyahoga County has a child protective services agency and

2.      sometimes children known to that agency die,

it was the sleazy reporting by Harlan Spector and the even worse editorials by Sharon Broussard, falsely blaming the deaths on efforts to keep families together, that set off a huge foster-care panic in Cuyahoga County.

            The panic began in March of 2010.  By September of that year, the number of children taken from their homes had soared 65 percent over the same period in 2009 – and the panic has continued at the same rate this year.

            So why did the Plain Dealer do better on this story?  Probably because it was written by a different reporter, Rachel Dissell.

            I don’t know how it happened that Dissell was assigned to the story.  Perhaps in the midst of all the misery this family has been forced to endure, they got one stroke of luck.  Maybe Harlan Spector was taking the days around Thanksgiving off.