The Rhode Island approach to Child Welfare: Throw away the money, throw away the kids!

The Rhode Island family police agency wants to spend up to $26 million 
to buy and renovate a residential treatment center that closed after revelations 
of widespread abuse. At the time, a state lawmaker said she could tell things 
were getting better because "I could smell the Pine-Sol

The state family police agency plans to spend up to $26 million to buy and renovate the notorious "House of Pine-Sol" RTC

Here’s what the Rhode Island Department of Children, Youth and Families wants to do with the now-closed hellhole institution known as St Mary’s Home for Children (or as it should be known, for reasons discussed below, the House of Pine-Sol):

 Spend $760,000 to buy what would have been a privately-run residential treatment center. Spend up to another $25 million to renovate the entire place and fix environmental problems.  Use only three of the seven buildings on the eight-acre site. Warehouse 16 girls there. 

(If you’re wondering why 16? It’s because large institutions are so inherently harmful that if more than 16 children are in one at any given time, the federal Medicaid program won’t pick up part of the very expensive tab.) 

And those are just the renovation costs. When it was privately run, DCYF was paying the operators more than $1,000 per day per child!

Apparently, no one in DCYF can think of a better way to spend all that money. This also helps explain why Rhode Island spends on “child welfare” at the highest rate in America, well over triple the national average  -while getting such dismal results. 

Rhode Island lawmakers haven’t shown much concern for the kids (or maybe they just don’t understand what’s best for children and won’t do what it takes to learn). But might they at least rebel at the cost to taxpayers? Nah. We already know that some Rhode Island lawmakers are pretty easy to fool. 

Look what happened after first the state’s Office of Child Advocate and then the Boston Globe exposed the extent to which St. Mary’s was rife with abuse. As we wrote on this blog in February 2024:

After her definitely-not-a-surprise inspection, Rep. Patricia  Serpa says things are soooooo much better now!  How does she know?  She told WPRI-TV: 

“What I saw today was encouraging.  The facility is clean. I could smell the Pine-Sol, I could smell the fresh paint. The kids’ rooms were kids’ rooms — they were messy, but an organized messy.” 

Of course!  Everyone knows children are never abused in rooms that smell of Pine-Sol!  And who would ever want to run from a room that was freshly painted?   (Where was Serpa expecting to see kids stay – in dungeons?)  

[DCYF Director Ashley] Deckert took the tour too. Deckert, more than any other individual, has a vested interest in downplaying any problems at the places where her agency institutionalizes children.  And sure enough, she called the progress “tremendous.” She, too, made a point of saying the place “smells nice.”

But in the end, St. Mary’s couldn’t pass the smell test. After DCYF stopped parking children there, the place had to close.

So what lesson did DCYF learn from this? We’ll buy the place and run it ourselves!

The rationale is the one you’ve heard a million times before – and it’s still BS: Some children have such severe problems they simply can’t stay in a home. They have to be in a residential treatment center – but this will be better because we’ll call it a psychiatric residential treatment center – and now, Rhode Island doesn’t have any of those.

That’s supposedly why so many children are being sent to RTCs out of state.

But the real reason Rhode Island sends all those kids out of state is that Rhode Island tears apart families at a rate more than 80% above the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in.

Of all the Rhode Island children torn from their families and thrown into foster care in 2024, 80% percent did not involve even an allegation of physical or sexual abuse. In 65% of cases, there was not even an allegation of any form of drug abuse.  Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with “neglect.” 

Get the children who don’t need to be in foster care back home, and Rhode Island will have plenty of room in good, safe family foster homes for all the children who really need them. As for those children who supposedly can’t live in a home: They can – if you provide intensive wraparound services to the family or the foster family. That’s an intervention proven to work – as opposed to residential treatment, which, even when the institutions aren’t hellholes, has been proven time and time again to fail. 

Wraparound also is far less expensive than residential treatment. You can buy a whole lot of it for $26 million – which apparently is readily at hand at DCYF. 

As for what might be done with the St. Mary’s campus: 

In 2024, Rhode Island threw more children into foster care because of inadequate housing than because of physical and sexual abuse combined. So how about renovating the place and using all seven buildings for housing for families that might otherwise lose their children to foster care, .  with some other agency – not DCYF – in charge of it.  Or, it might be used for a residential program that really can work: inpatient drug treatment where parents are allowed to stay with their children. 

Just don’t forget to keep a little extra money around for Pine-Sol.

NCCPR in Rhode Island Current: RI is No. 1 in child welfare spending. If only state had the best system to justify it.

If the fact that Rhode Island’s child welfare system wastes lives isn’t enough to prompt real change, consider the staggering waste of money. New data show Rhode Island spending on child welfare is proportionately the highest rate in the nation — well over triple the national average. 

The amount is equal to $11,244 for every impoverished child in the state. Rhode Island’s children would be far better off if the state could simply give every impoverished family $11,244 per child. 

The amount itself isn’t even the problem. I’m a tax-and-spend liberal and proud of it. If Rhode Island had the best child welfare system in the country it might be worth it. But most of this money is wasted on all those needless removals of children and unnecessary foster care. … 

Read the full commentary at Rhode Island Current.

NCCPR in Rhode Island Current: Wrongful removal leads to child abuse tragedies, artificial ‘shortage’ of foster parents

Last week saw the publication of two assessments of what’s wrong with child welfare in Rhode Island. Both missed the point. 

On May 12, Kayla David, a vice president of a foster care agency, wrote a commentary for Rhode Island Current suggesting foster parents need more support in order to improve recruitment and retention because, she said, there’s a shortage of such parents. 

The next day the state’s “Child Advocate” released a report that included some of the most horrifying cases of child abuse in Rhode Island since 2019. Some of the solutions offered were useful, such as bolstering drug treatment. But many of them were not, such as building more institutions. The Rhode Island House Committee on Oversight is scheduled to hear a presentation on the report on Wednesday. 

In both cases, the authors ignored the elephant in the room, the problem at the root of all the others: Rhode Island’s fanatical devotion to tearing apart families. … 

Read the full commentary in the Rhode Island Current

NCCPR in The Imprint: Rhode Island Public Officials’ Solutions to Abuse in Residential Treatment Centers: Dumb and Dumber

 Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one before. There’s a scandal involving horrific abuse at a residential treatment center.

No, not the one in Arizona, or the one in Kentucky, or the one in Tennessee, or Indiana, or Utah, or Oklahoma, or Washington state or Arkansas, or Connecticut or — well, you get the idea.

This time it’s Rhode Island. But don’t worry. Some Rhode Island lawmakers have come up with the perfect solution: Put locked suggestion boxes in all the group homes and institutions! And that was only the second worst idea to come from legislators or state officials. …

Read the full column in The Imprint

Residential treatment: Can the scent of Pine Sol cover up the stench of abuse?

Rhode Island State Rep. Patricia Serpa says she can tell things are soooo much better
at a residential treatment center because "I could smell the Pine-Sol"

Ever wonder why “residential treatment centers” almost always look so good?  It’s amazing how much these places, which always claim to need even more money, lavish on making sure the grounds are gorgeous the “cottages” are nicely painted and the lawns are mowed.  Then they invite public officials on a carefully guided tour.  

The amazing thing isn’t that these places keep pulling this stunt, the amazing thing is that it works! 

The latest to be snookered is Rhode Island State Rep. Patricia Serpa, who chairs that state’s House of Representatives Oversight Committee.  She and other officials got the full guided tour of St. Mary’s Home for Children in North Providence. 

Here’s what’s been happening at the place they are so anxious to save, according to news accounts summarizing a 119-page report from the state’s child advocate. 

“Staff-on-child physical assault, youth stealing the program van, overdoses, a high number of AWOLs, neglect and an overwhelming number of responses by the North Providence Police Department.” 

From just the beginning of April through May 8, 2023: 

There were more than 20 calls to the CPS hotline, they found, including allegations of drug overdoses, sexual contact among the children, staff assaulting children, runaway children, and an overwhelming amount of police responses, the [Office of Child Advocate] said. 

That’s just the start.  The Boston Globe did its own investigation and found that, at an institution with only 39 beds: 

The North Providence police were called to St. Mary's more than 300 times in the past two years, mainly for children as young as 8 running away, according to 317 pages of police call logs obtained by the Globe through a public records request. … 

North Providence Police Chief Alfredo Ruggiero Jr. told the Globe things are so bad that when runaways are found by police “there’s a part of us that our hearts are breaking” as they bring them back.

Neighbors such as Andrew Marsalli and his partner Ken Richey said they would often hear children screaming.  Marsalli recalled 

the boy with cuts and bruises who showed up at his door asking for help. 

"The boy would say, 'Please don't let me go with them. Don't let them find me,' " Marsalli said. "He would just come knock on my door to talk. But . . . they would know where to find him." … One time, Marsalli and Richey said, they watched in horror when two staff members tackled the boy in their yard and hauled him away. They said an ambulance was called because the boy's arm had been yanked back. 

Then there was the girl placed at St. Mary’s by Rhode Island’s family police agency, the Department of Children, Youth and Families (DCYF), because she’d been sexually assaulted and was at high risk of being sexually exploited.  She ran away several times.  Twice she was raped.  When her mother sued, St. Mary’s said the child “had assumed the risk of injury.” (The suit was settled.)  St. Mary’s is not the only residential treatment center to make that horrifying claim. 

And then there was the whole matter of the institution bringing in a bunch of bikers to help patrol the place. 

The head of DCYF, Ashley Deckert, admitted St. Mary’s was awful, but in a comment stunning for both its callousness and its candor, she said that because Rhode Island doesn’t have enough places to put kids, St. Mary’s is a “too big to fail situation.” 

As I pointed out when I wrote about St. Mary’s for Rhode Island Current, what she did not say is that the lack of places to put kids is because Rhode Island tears apart so many families needlessly – at a rate 80% above the national average. 

Pine-Sol to the rescue! 

But great news everyone!  After her definitely-not-a-surprise inspection, Rep. Serpa says things are soooooo much better now!  How does she know?  She told WPRI-TV: 

“What I saw today was encouraging.  The facility is clean. I could smell the Pine-Sol, I could smell the fresh paint. The kids’ rooms were kids’ rooms — they were messy, but an organized messy.” 

Of course!  Everyone knows children are never abused in rooms that smell of Pine-Sol!  And who would ever want to run from a room that was freshly painted?   (Where was Serpa expecting to see kids stay – in dungeons?)  

Deckert took the tour too.  Deckert, more than any other individual, has a vested interest in downplaying any problems at the places where her agency institutionalizes children.  And sure enough, she called the progress “tremendous.” She, too, made a point of saying the place “smells nice.”

 No wonder DCYF is moving full speed ahead on a plan to spend $11 million in taxpayer funds to expand St. Mary’s.

Fool me once … 

This isn’t even the first group of Rhode Island officials to buy into this routine.  As we discussed in our 2010 report on Rhode Island child welfare, the chief family court judge for many years, Jeremiah S. Jeremiah, fell in love with an institution in Pennsylvania; the Glen Mills School.  As we explained in our report: 

[I]n late January of this year, Jeremiah suggested that Andrew J. Johnson, a lawyer and director of the Rhode Island Court Appointed Special Advocate’s office, visit Glen Mills to see what their program has to offer. Johnson flew to Philadelphia, at the school’s expense, where a school van drove him the 22 miles to the school in Concordville, Pa. He met with admissions officials, toured the campus and talked to students.  “It’s a remarkable place,” Johnson said after he returned. “Step on the campus and it’s like a prep school or a university ... .” 

Again, that was 2010. 

It will probably not surprise readers who have gotten this far to know that the Glen Mills School was closed.  After the Philadelphia Inquirer exposed rampant, horrific abuse, the state of Pennsylvania shut the place down.  Unfortunately, they’ve now allowed the place to reopen on a (for now) much smaller scale.  The place has a brand new name.  It’s run by a new corporation headed by a former Glen Mills executive.  

And presumably, it has a good supply of Pine-Sol.

Rhode Island overuses group homes – because Rhode Island takes away too many children

A story in the Providence Journal on Thursday ran under the headline “Rhode Island Kids Count says state relies too heavily on group homes.”

To which I must respectfully reply: Tell us something we don’t know.

Seven years ago, NCCPR released a comprehensive report on Rhode Island child welfare emphasizing the same point: Rhode Island is way out of line in its misuse and overuse of the worst form of “care” – group homes and institutions.

We included a section comparing Rhode Island’s dismal record to Maine, a state which once had the same problem, but dramatically reformed. (There since has been some backsliding in Maine – as one would expect given that the state currently is run by Paul LePage, the man Politico called “America’s craziest governor.” – but it still does better than Rhode Island.)

But unlike Kids Count which gave the usual knee jerk (and wrong) explanation for this overreliance – a supposed shortage of foster homes - we examined the real reason: Rhode Island was tearing apart families at one of the highest rates in the nation. 

That’s still true.

The most recent comparative data available, from 2015, show that Rhode Island took children from their homes at a rate more than 70 percent higher than the national average – even when rates of child poverty are factored in.  Rhode Island’s rate of removal is double and triple the rate of states that are, relatively speaking, models for keeping children safe.

So, as we’ve said about other states with similarly absurd rates of removal, either Rhode Island is a cesspool of depravity, with vastly more child abuse than most places, or Rhode Island is taking away too many children.

No, it’s not because of opioids

And no, the all-purpose excuse for high rates of child removal, the “opioid epidemic” doesn’t hold up either.

● Rhode Island has been an extreme outlier for at least 16 years, since long before this latest “drug plague”

● Other states hard hit by opioids, such as Connecticut, do not take children at nearly as high a rate. That’s because Connecticut is responding by beefing up drug treatment instead of simply jerking its knee and tearing apart families. (For more about how the opioid epidemic has become a phony excuse for taking away children, see this NCCPR Issue Paper.)

So no, Rhode Island doesn’t have too few foster parents. Rhode Island has too many foster children. Get the children who don’t need to be in foster care back into their own homes and there will be plenty of room in good, safe foster homes for the children who really need to be there  - and no need to warehouse children in institutions. That’s how Maine did it.

Rhode Island’s failure to face up to the real reason it misuses group homes and institutions led us to call our 2010 report “State of Denial.”

Sadly, the denial has only grown deeper.

Foster care in America: Another excuse for high rates-of-removal bites the dust

I hear it all the time when I point out to reporters in certain states that their states are extreme outliers when it comes to tearing apart families – states like Nebraska, Iowa, Rhode Island and South Dakota, among others.

The reporters ask the flack for the child welfare agency and she or he almost always comes up with the same excuse: “We’re different,” the flack claims, “unlike other states, we count children placed in foster care through our juvenile justice system, not just our child welfare system.”

I then ask the reporter: What percentage of placements do they claim are juvenile justice placements?  It turns out that the percentage is so small that, even if you deducted those placements the extreme outliers remain just that - extreme outliers.

But there is another problem with this argument: If so many states are saying they’re unusual – if not unique – because they count these additional placements, it can’t really be all that unusual.

The federal government doesn’t actually count how many states include juvenile justice cases.  But one state legislature’s audit staff has.

Staff for the Performance Audit Committee of the Nebraska Legislature got tired of hearing this excuse.  So they checked with Casey Family Programs which actually asked the states.  The findings are in this report on pages 31 and 32.  It turns out that the majority of the states, 31 in all, include juvenile justice placements in the counts of entries into care and the snapshot number of children in foster care that they send to the federal government.

So the assorted public officials, agency leaders and flacks who have been blithely using the juvenile justice placement excuse all this time either are grossly ill-informed, or they are lying. 

Foster care in Rhode Island: The seduction of Kevin Aucoin

Here’s the thing about children’s “shelters” – those exercises in adult self-indulgence and adult self-delusion that turn real flesh-and-blood children into human teddy bears; those places where some communities dump children as soon as they are taken from their homes, supposedly to be examined and “assessed” by “trained staff” in order to prepare them for exactly what they would have gotten without the shelters – usually a succession of foster homes:

They can be oh, so seductive.

Sure, as discussed in a previous post to this blog, the research is overwhelming that children suffer enormously when they are cared for by rotating shift staff.  Sure, a comprehensive study specific to shelters showed that the outcomes for children who went through them were worse even than those for children shipped straight into foster care.

But, well, they usually look so nice, with pretty pictures on the walls, lots of toys and a staff that really does care about the kids.  And the behavior of the children themselves can disguise a shelter’s failure as success. Call it the “Mr. Lou” effect, after someone who used to run what was, a few years ago, one of the very worst such places, Child Haven in Las Vegas.

He told a local television station that he loved coming to work at Child Haven 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.

30 DAYS OF SHIFT STAFF

It’s bad enough when this goes on for a few days or a week.  It’s even worse when the children have to change caretakers every eight hours during the week and with still other caretakers on weekends for 30 days or more.

Yet that is the norm at the Washington Park Children’s Shelter, one of three such places in Rhode Island.

One of the last moves of the outgoing leadership at the state Department of Children Youth and Families was one of the few things they did right: they announced they would close the shelters in early January. But shelter owners always have the ear of politicians and the press.  They spread the usual horror stories of what would happen without them, citing a “shortage” of foster homes.  But that shortage exists only because Rhode Island tears apart families at one of the highest rates in the country.

Shelter operators also are good at using their good intentions (I don’t doubt they’ve convinced themselves that their life’s work helps kids, research notwithstanding) to deflect attention from all the harm shelters do.   So while it was disappointing, it wasn’t surprising when new governor, Lincoln Chafee, promptly gave in and ordered the shelter contracts extended through February 28.

According to the Providence Journal, Chafee’s interim DCYF director, Kevin Aucoin was scheduled to visit the Washington Park shelter on January 18. I don’t know whether he got there, or whether during any such visit, he had any “Mr. Lou” moments.

           

What I do know is the Journal story gave a new indication of just how low shelter operators will sink to keep their human teddy bears. 

The story quotes Carole Shauffer, executive director of the Youth Law Center which has sued states over the misuse and overuse of shelters:

No matter how well run a shelter is, Shauffer said, studies show that residential care facilities with multiple caregivers working in shifts cannot provide for the emotional needs of children, especially those under age of 6. Those children, she said, need one or two people whom they can attach to who will care for them regularly. That’s not possible, she said, when their caregivers change every eight hours.

“They [caregivers] can be good people. They can be doing the best job they possibly can,” Shauffer said. “But they’re dealing with a model that doesn’t work because that’s not how babies were born to be raised.”

And what did the co-founder of the Washington Park shelter, Frances Murphy, do to rebut the research?  She slimed all working parents who send their kids to day care.

The DCYF pays its foster care providers $15 a day, Murphy said, so those foster parents usually have jobs outside their homes and the children are placed in daycare. “Where’s the bonding taking place there?” she said.

Oh, right.  So being taken to day care by foster parents (or, presumably parents, period) and coming home to the same foster parents every night, and spending all weekend with those same foster parents, is just like being cared for by rotating shift staff 24/7.

And that assumes the only alternative to shelters is foster parents.  Particularly in a state with the kind of sky-high rate of removal seen in Rhode Island, the alternative often could be never taking away the children at all.

TRUST US, WE'RE BOYS TOWN

Boys Town also runs a shelter in Rhode Island.  Their executive director, William Reardon, wrote an op ed column responding to one I’d written supporting shutting the shelters down.  He said all those things shelter operators always say about “assessing” and “planning” etc.  (He also said his shelter uses so-called “house parents” instead of shift staff, but that still means the child needs to endure another placement and adjust to a whole new setting again, when the time in the shelter ends.)

And at a time when the buzzword in child welfare is “evidence-based” Reardon offers not a shred of evidence to show that his model actually helps children.  That’s because he can’t.  Exactly the same rationale – the same blather about assessing the children, making a plan, etc. - was offered for setting up a comprehensive network of shelters in Connecticut.  

But unlike Rhode Island, Connecticut actually funded an evaluation, by Yale University.  The evaluation found that the children placed in the shelters fared worse than those sent directly to foster care.  (Unfortunately, shelter operators have the same kind of political clout in Connecticut as in Rhode Island so not only are the shelters still open, the Connecticut Department of Children and Families took the study off its website – so I’ve posted it on ours.)

And excuse me if I’m not inclined to take the word of Boys Town for anything, in light of the problems at their flagship campus in Nebraska, as reported in the trade journal Youth Today.

So of course instead of providing actual evidence Reardon does what shelter operators always do -  invite people for a carefully-guided tour so they can see those pretty grounds and well-meaning staff.    

CUTE KIDS ONLY, PLEASE

But here’s the biggest giveaway that shelters exist to benefit the people who run them, staff them and volunteer at them, rather than for the children: Everyone in child welfare knows that the children for whom it is hardest to find a home are teenagers.  But Reardon’s shelter won’t take teenagers.  Neither will the others in Rhode Island.  They all take only children under age 12. 

That’s common across the country.  And it’s not hard to figure out why. As I noted in that previous post about shelters, a teenager who's been through removal from his or her parents is as likely to spit in your face as to throw his arms around you.  They don’t make good human teddy bears.  So the shelters only take the very children for whom it’s easiest to find a better alternative – the ones who are still cute.     

Adding to the obscenity of all this is the cost.  The Washington Park shelter costs $185 per child per day.  That’s an average of $5,550 to $8,325 per child.  For that kind of money, an Intensive Family Preservation Services intervention can keep all the children in a family from ever having to enter foster care in the first place.  That kind of money also could buy a year of rent subsidies so children aren’t taken because their parents can’t afford decent housing - or a year of subsidies for yes, day care, so families aren’t separated on lack of supervision charges.

Or Rhode Island can keep using the money to damage kids in order to make the people who run shelters feel like they are doing something useful.  At the moment it all depends on whether Kevin Aucoin does what research says is best for kids, or is seduced by those “Mr. Lou” moments at the shelter.

UPDATED JULY 21: Foster care in Rhode Island: The child warehousing capital of America

PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND (JULY 20): Today NCCPR released a comprehensive report on child welfare in Rhode Island. The full report, press release and other documents all are available on our website here. Among the key findings:

● Rhode Island takes away children at one of the highest rates in America, a rate 80 percent above the national average and nearly double and triple the rates of states widely-recognized as doing a better job of keeping children safe.

● Rhode Island is the child warehousing capital of America, trapping children in the worst form of care, group homes and institutions, at a rate more than double the national average.

● Rhode Island exports an astounding proportion of its institutionalized children across the country – out of state, out of mind. Representatives of the child welfare agency, the Department of Children Youth and Families, visit them only once every three months if they're in a nearby state – and only once every six months if they've been warehoused far away. (DCYF did not explain why institutions need to be checked less often, and the Rhode Island children in them need even fewer visits if they are farther away.)

● Two children are institutionalized nearly a thousand miles from Rhode Island in an institution run by a national chain that was the subject of a scathing report in December 2006, alleging substandard care. DCYF did not even know about this report until NCCPR called it to their attention.

● In addition to doing enormous harm to the children, all this wastes huge amounts of taxpayer money. Rhode Island spends on child welfare at one of the highest rates in the Nation, a rate more than two-and-a-half times the national average.

● Although DCYF is being sued by the group that so arrogantly calls itself "Children's Rights" the lawsuit is not likely to do much good – and might even do harm. That's because of CR's depressing track record of ignoring the problem of wrongful removal, and sometimes making it worse.

The only good news in all this: Because Rhode Island already is spending so much, and getting so little, it is possible to comprehensively reform the system without spending more money.

UPDATE, JULY 21:
The Providence Journal has two excellent stories on the report, available here and here and WPRO Radio has a story here

Most interesting has been the response from DCYF. For well over a day after seeing the report they would say nothing. Then, finally, they told the Journal, in effect: Look at the bright side. We used to be even worse!