The Detroit News does “the fatality series” right

And Michigan’s leading family advocate blasts a Children’s Rights McLawsuit consent decree for making things “much worse.” 

How many times have you read what journalists covering child welfare call “the fatality series”? A now-defunct publication that purported to advise journalists on how to cover child welfare actually said: “Do the fatality series” – with what seemed like the implication that it should be done the usual way: by scapegoating efforts to keep families together and setting off a foster-care panic. That’s the easy way to cheap glory; the way chosen by the Miami Herald, the Los Angeles Times and many others. 

On June 8 and 9, the Detroit News did “the fatality series.” But they did it the hard way: In parts one and two they presented horror stories, but focused on the extent to which a key reason for the horrors is  taking away too many children in the first place, and how that overloads the system, making the horror stories more likely. 

Then, in parts three and four of the series, the News illustrates how the horrors go in all directions – with stories of needless removal of children from their mothers. (As you read them, recall that Michigan is the state where judges admit they routinely lie when they certify that the state complied with federal law and made “reasonable efforts” to keep families together before taking their children.) The stories also look at what Michigan says it’s doing to change – and contrasts it with what real change would look like. 

I can find no “grand unifying link” but all the stories can be found on on this page. (The stories are behind a paywall, but the News has a great deal on subscriptions right now.) 

The failure of the McLawsuit 

We appreciate the inclusion of NCCPR’s perspective, of course, but even more significant: The series allowed Michigan’s foremost family advocate, Prof. Vivek Sankaran, of the University of Michigan School of Law, to blast the longstanding consent decree won as a result of one of those awful McLawsuits brought by the group that calls itself “Children’s Rights.” From the story: 

The consent decree wastes agency resources and diminishes creativity because the state is worried about violating the consent decree, Sankaran said. 

The UM professor has been practicing law in Michigan since 2005, a year before the Children's Rights lawsuit was filed, and said he has seen a lack of improvements from the consent decree. 

"The consent decree stifles innovation; it squanders funds," Sankaran said. "I can tell you on the ground with the families and the kids I represent, nothing has gotten better because of the consent decree. … (The consent decree has), if anything, made the situation much worse because it's funneling money from front-end stuff to really fund our foster care system." 

That’s only part of the harm this consent decree and its underlying lawsuit have done.  The lawsuit called for strengthening enforcement of the so-called Adoption and Safe FamiliesAct.  The settlement demanded an odious practice called  “concurrent planning.” And the whole thing made it harder to place children in the least harmful form of foster care – kinship foster care.  You can read about it in our publication The Children Wronged by “Children’s Rights.” 

Though Michigan may be CR’s worst McLawsuit, others have done similar significant harm. That harm is all the more glaring now, because in recent years, Children’s Rights has taken some excellent public policy positions, such as calling for repeal of ASFA – the very law the Michigan Lawsuit (and by the way, their Texas lawsuit as well) said needed tougher enforcement!  But over and over the McLawsuits undermine the policy positions. 

It’s about time the group’s leader, Sandy Santana, was held accountable for the contradiction.

Why “permanency” is the “creme” of child welfare (and other problems with a new "report" from Charles Murray’s favorite think tank).

Second of two parts. Read part one here. 

I’ve often wondered why so many in the family policing establishment love to take the perfectly good, clear English word “permanence” and add an extra syllable, turning it into “permanency.”  The dictionary says they mean the same thing, so for a long time I figured it was just a way for family policing professionals to make themselves feel more important. 

But, thanks in part to Sarah Font of the Penn State University “Child Maltreatment Solutions Network” (or, as it should be called the Penn State University Penance Institute), I have a new theory.  Her new “report” on “permanency” for the American Enterprise Institute, home of  Charles Murray, is so full of false premises and false promises that perhaps “permanency” is to child welfare what “creme” is to food.  No, not crème as in crème brûlée, “creme” as in the word the law makes you use when you want to pass something off as cream – but it really isn’t.  

Similarly, “permanency” sounds like permanence – but often it is not; not when it is defined as adoption and only adoption.  

As I discussed in a previous post, the worst part of Font’s “report” is what it says about her attitude toward older foster youth – she seems to think they need money more than love.  Or as Font put it: 

Although permanency is important for older youth as well, the implications are less clear given that reunification or guardianship or living with relatives (adoption is exceedingly rare for older youth) may deprive older youth of additional resources that are conditional on aging out. 

That’s just the beginning.   But before getting to what else Font got wrong, let’s look at the two things she got partially right: 

● She’s right about the enormous emotional harm foster care inflicts on children.  She’s even right that the more time a child spends in foster care the greater the risk of harm.  But she is wrong to suggest that shorter stays are harmless – not by a longshot.  It is precisely because foster care is so harmful, at any length, that the family preservation movement exists – because the best solution to the harm of foster care is not to put children there in the first place. 

And she is wrong to dredge up the myth of the Vast Family Preservation Conspiracy as the reason for prolonged foster care.  On the contrary, children languish in foster care because workers, overloaded with false reports, trivial cases and cases in which poverty is confused with “neglect,” rush to place them there needlessly.  Then the children are filed away and forgotten as workers rush on to the next case.  Not only did the law Font loves, the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act not fix it, ASFA may well have made it worse. 

That’s because the real purpose of ASFA had little to do with adoption or any other form of “permanency.”  The real purpose was to encourage states to take away more children.  In 2000, unable to resist a little gloating, one of those who took responsibility for writing ASFA, the late Richard Gelles declared: 

Initially, this was just supposed to be a safe families bill, not really an adoption bill at all. The adoption component was a way of sanitizing the bill, to make it more appealing to a broader group of people. Adoption is a very popular concept in the country right now. 

● Font also is right about the enormous value of permanence – but real permanence is not the same as what Font calls “permanency.”  For Font, the preferred form of permanency, by far, is rushing to terminate children’s rights to their parents, a more accurate term than termination of parental rights, and then trying to get the overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately nonwhite children adopted by strangers who are likely to be neither.  

That’s based on 1950s-era social science theories that we’ve long since outgrown, and in retrospect are a bit bizarre: they postulate that permanence requires children to have just one connection to one authority figure; even if that means cutting them off from everyone else they know and love – extended family, friends, teachers, classmates, in some cases even siblings. 

When this is accomplished through termination of children’s rights to their parents the termination itself can add enormously to the emotional trauma – indeed, it can create what scholars call “ambiguous loss,” which can be more traumatic for a child even than a parent’s death.  

And adoption isn’t always the happily-ever-after that it’s often claimed to be.  Because child welfare systems almost never ask questions to which they don’t want to know the answers, we know very little about how often adoptions fail, but what we do know is disturbing.  

As Professors Vivek Sankaran and Christopher Church write: 

Only 16 states had federal identification numbers that allowed children from failed adoptions to be linked to prior foster care records. Thus, any public reporting of the number of adopted children who once again enter foster care is likely an underestimate. 

Even with these limited data, a recent study found that more than 66,000 adopted children ended up back in foster care between 2008 to 2020, an average of 12 a day. A disproportionate number of those children were Black; they faced more than a 50% greater risk of adoption failure than a white child. 

That may be “permanency” but it sure as hell isn’t permanence. 

And even when the adoption lasts, Sankaran and Church remind us 

One survey showed that only 41% of children over six adopted out of foster care expressed having a very warm and close relationship with their adoptive parent.

Yes, there are rare occasions when termination of parental rights and adoption are appropriate. But where children genuinely can’t remain with their parents, there often is a far better option: legal guardianship with a relative, often a relative with whom a child already is in kinship foster care.  As Sankaran and Church explain: 

[N]umerous studies by Mark Testa and others have shown that guardianships - which do not require terminating a parent's rights - are as legally secure as adoptions - which do require termination. Testa found that a caregiver's commitment to the child, the child's sense of belonging, and the length of the placement bore very little relationship to the particular form of legal permanency chosen by the family. … Even the federal government has conceded that children discharged from foster care with legally secured guardianships have living arrangements just as stable as those in other legal statuses. 

Indeed, given the emphasis Font puts on reducing time spent in foster care, she should be embracing guardianship as a better option in many cases.  Since it doesn’t require either termination of parental rights or seeking out a total stranger, it typically takes far less time to arrange a guardianship. 

But, of course, since children are taken almost exclusively from poor families and disproportionately from nonwhite families, their extended families are likely to be poor and nonwhite as well.  Strangers who adopt are more likely to be richer and whiter – perhaps that’s the real reason this is such an attractive option to the family policing establishment. 

Indeed, Font says that “adoption is considered preferable to guardianship” in part because of, here we go again, “post-permanency financial and therapeutic support.” 

Stacking the deck when ranking the states 

So now let's see how Font’s false premises, false promises and general deck-stacking play out in her “timely permanency report cards.” 

● In discussing ASFA, she claims the law “maintained a strong preference for reunification…”  As Gelles made clear, it did not.  That’s why the law pays states bounties for adoptions over a baseline number, lesser bounties for guardianships (for most of its history it paid none) and no bounties for reunification. 

● In deciding what to measure in order to grade states, Font chooses to measure the percentage of
children exiting to some form of “permanency,” including reunification within set time periods.  She also measures the percentage exiting to every “permanent” placement except reunification.  She does not measure the percentage reunified alone.  Apparently, Font doesn’t want any state regarded favorably for reunifying families.  Font even warns that some states might look good because they do well on reunification. 

● States also are downgraded if they have a high percentage of children who remain in care “and are not legally free for adoption after 18 months and after three years.”  Notice she said legally free, but not necessarily adopted.  So a state can rate highly by creating lots of legal orphans – children with no ties to their own parents and no permanent home of any other kind either. 

● Font has a measure for what she calls “failed reunifications,” when a child is returned home and later placed again.  She implies that when this happens it's because the child never should have been sent back to those horrible parents.  In rare cases that’s true.  In other cases, the child was taken when family poverty was confused with neglect.  When the child was returned home the family was still poor – or possibly made poorer.  That can happen because of everything from being forced to quit a job to jump through various family police agency hoops to being forced to pay what amounts to ransom – “child support” payments to the state for the privilege of having their child “cared” for in foster care.  

So, if a child is taken because poverty is confused with neglect and when the child is returned home the poverty is as bad or worse, it stands to reason that poverty can be confused with neglect again and the child can be taken again.  

● Even more telling: Though Font has a whole measure for failed reunification, there is no measure for failed adoption.  And, as explained above, while a formal measure would be difficult, this crucial issue is barely even mentioned. 

● Not mentioned at all: The high rate of abuse children face in foster care itself.  I don’t blame Font for not doing a state-by-state comparison because official, laughably low figures from any state are b.s.  But she doesn’t mention the independent studies that, conservatively, find abuse in one-quarter to one-third of family foster homes, and rates of abuse in group homes and institutions that are even worse. 

● Font concludes by claiming that there has been “a clear retreat from the idea that foster care can help children in dire circumstances.”  That is not true.  Rather, there is a growing understanding that in most cases, the circumstances prompting children to be taken were not, in fact, dire and that there are far better answers than inflicting upon children the very traumas Font herself admits can accompany foster care. 

Should we all really be like West Virginia? 

To understand how ludicrous all this is, and how many children will be hurt if Font’s approach is taken seriously, consider a state that, over and over again, scores among the best in Font’s rankings:  West Virginia. 

Now consider a few facts about West Virginia that Font doesn’t mention: 

● West Virginia tears apart families at the highest rate in the nation.  Ah, but it’s a poor state, right?  But when you factor in rates of child poverty, West Virginia still tears apart families at the highest rate in the nation. 

● West Virginia has proportionately more children in foster care on any given day than any other state.  When you factor in poverty, West Virginia still has the second-worst record. 

Right now, American family policing agencies take away just over 200,000 children every year.  If every state were like West Virginia, America would take away 945,000 children every year.  

Right now, on any given day, nearly 400,000 children are stuck in foster care.  If every state were like West Virginia, the American foster care population would be more than 1.4 million. 

And it doesn’t stop there.  

● West Virginia uses the worst form of “care” group homes and institutions, at a rate 30% above the national average.  Font may not view that as a problem.  Font endorses another AEI publication suggesting institutionalization has gotten a bad rap and the federal government should make it easier to institutionalize children. 

If you want to know just how much of a horror show West Virginia foster care is in terms of actual care, just Google a few news accounts. 

And we’re still not done. 

There aren’t many Black children in West Virginia, but the state’s family police agency has effectively painted a target on the backs of every one of them.  

● According to a new study, at some point, nearly one-third of Black children in West Virginia will be forced into foster care.  No other state even comes close. For the four states tied for second place, it’s 18% - which would seem appalling if not for West Virginia. 

● And 14% of Black children will, at some point, be taken from their parents forever.  The second highest rate of termination of parental rights for Black children is 6% - which, again, would seem appalling if not for West Virginia. 

And yet, if you judge family policing systems by Sarah Font’s criteria, you’d think West Virginia was – almost heaven. But then, what else should one expect from a "scholar" who co-authors an op-ed condemning only one kind of removal of Black children from homes: their removal from white middle-class foster homes, that is, because of what Font claims are "woke views on race."

That’s what happens when you take a noble concept like permanence, turn it into something fake and destructive – and call it “permanency.”

Highlights from a special issue of Family Court Review

In addition to our regular news round-up, which will be posted later in the week, I want to highlight several excellent articles in a special issue of Family Court Review

● Vivek Sankaran and Christopher Church turn the current “master narrative” about securing “permanency” for children on its head.  That false narrative, pushed hardest by those who hate birth parents (and yes, that’s the right word) claims that only adoption guarantees a truly permanent home for a child removed from her or his parents. 

Sankaran and Church show that is false in every respect.  Partly that’s because adoptions sometimes fail.  As Sankaran and Church point out: 

any public reporting of the number of adopted children who once again enter foster care is likely an underestimate. Even with these limited data, a recent study found that more than 66,000 adopted children ended up back in foster care between 2008 to 2020, an average of 12 a day. 

Equally disturbing: 

[O]ne survey showed that only 41% of children over six adopted out of foster care expressed having a very warm and close relationship with their adoptive parent … Often, in the words of researcher Monique Mitchell, “they are grieving the loss of their identities and their role within their psychological family.” So they experience feelings of fear, anger, abandonment, shame, embarrassment, and low self-esteem. 

In contrast, a status known as guardianship does not require such a trade-off.  Guardianship, typically with a relative or close family friend, is as legally secure as adoption and just as stable.  But it doesn’t require children to sever all ties with parents and sometimes with siblings, extended family and community as well.  They also take less time to achieve than adoptions. So in many cases, they are a better and a faster route to “permanency.”  

And that gives away the game: Those who equate permanency with adoption only (and you’ll notice those advocates are disproportionately white and middle-class) aren’t really interested in permanency.  They’re interested in getting overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately nonwhite children into homes that most closely resemble their own, no matter what the cost. 

Also in Family Court Review: 

● In an essay called “Why abolition” Dorothy Roberts explains “not only how the family policing system harms children, but also why abolishing it is essential to keep children safe.”

● The tragedy of needless termination of parental rights, adoption failure and legal orphans – children who “age out” of foster care with no home at all -- all were worsened by the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act.  Shanta Trivedi explains why “The adoption and safe families act is not worth saving: The case for repeal.” 

● Even with ASFA in place, judges have a lot of discretion. Too often when the family police seek to tear a child from parents (or after they’ve already just gone ahead and done it) and when they seek to terminate children’s rights to their parents, judges wield rubber stamps instead of gavels.  Angela Olivia Burton and Joyce McMillan explain “How judges can use their discretion to combat Anti-Black racism in the United Statesfamily policing system.”   

● Five women, all affiliated with the parent-led, community-based organization Rise discuss their experiences: Still, we rise: Lessons learned from lived experiences in the family policing system

● And Daniel Hatcher exposes the seemingly endless ways that various government agencies have found to make poor families miserable. He calls it "Commodified inequality: Racialized harm to children and families in theinjustice enterprise."

NCCPR News and commentary round-up, week ending August 14, 2019

Lots of news this week, starting with two important court decisions.

● An appellate court in Washington State blasted the scandal-plagued Snohomish County CASA program – that’s the one a judge found engaged in “the blatant withholding and destruction of evidence … rampant, continuing lying …” and “pervasive and egregious” misconduct. 

The appellate court also blasted the Snohomish County Superior Court for making a fair termination of parental rights trial impossible – because court employees actually worked with the CASA program instead of remaining neutral.  Through it all, the National CASA Association has remained silent.  Do they actually approve of the Snohomish County CASA program’s actions?  Details on all of this, and a link to the decision, in this NCCPR Blog Post.

● A federal appellate court also brought good news last week: It upheld the constitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act. Here’s the National Indian Child Welfare Association statement on the decision.

● In Youth Today, I review recent studies that all have one thing in common:  They demonstrate that, when it comes to reducing child abuse, there’s nothing like the transformative power of cash.  And, great news! In the same column, I reveal the apparently up-to-now secret way to target child abuse prevention without resorting to Big-Brother, privacy-invading predictive analytics!

● I have long argued that the so-called Family First act has been vastly overhyped. The funds can be used on only a few types of services and they have to meet criteria for being “evidence-based” that are vastly higher than the criteria for say, foster care or residential treatment (which have no real evidence base).  But now comes word that the federal government will be studying whether to allow funding under Family First for programs that follow the Homebuilders model for Intensive Family Preservation Services.  That alone would make Family First vastly more useful.  Here’s how Homebuilders works.  And here’s a summary of the impressive evidence base for it.

● In the Chronicle of Social Change, Vivek Sankaran writes about the need for judges to behave like – you know, judges, and enforce the law. He writes:

[T]hroughout my career, I’ve heard judges chide lawyers and parents when they emphasize the law. One frustrated judge said to a colleague, “I see you’re going down the statutory road again.” Another said to a parent, “I know there’s a legal right to ask for more visits. But if I gave it to you, then I’d have to give it to every parent.” A third said, “I know the law says that corporal punishment is allowed. But in my courtroom, this is what we do.”

And I would argue that, at its most extreme, this attitude helps explain what happened in Snohomish County (see first item above).

● Another Chronicle story looks at how “In Aftermath of Latest Child Death, L.A. Contends with Potential Foster Care Panic.”  I’ll have some thoughts on this one soon.

● In Talk Poverty Elizabeth Brico writes about how “State Laws Punish Pregnant People Just For Seeking Drug Treatment.” And of course, they also punish the children.  Ms. Brico cites an Amnesty International report documenting how such laws drive women away from treatment and away from prenatal care.

● When a parent who has lost a child to foster care – or is at risk of it – can get help from another parent who’s been through the same ordeal it can help prevent the placement, or shorten it, lessening the trauma for children.  So, Rise, a magazine written by parents who have been in this position, asks: Why aren’t more of them working in NYC? This is, of course, an excellent question for the rest of the country as well.

● Also in New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo has on his desk a bill that could significantly ease the trauma for children who have lost their parents forever due to termination of parental rights.  The bill would allow judges to continue contact between these children and their parents if the judge is persuaded it’s in the child’s best interests. 

In the New York Daily News, Chris Gottlieb, co-director of the Family Defense Clinic at New York University School of Law, explains why the governor should sign the bill.  And family defense attorney Amy Mulzer has a letter to the editor about the bill in the Albany Times Union.

● Until it was surpassed in 2017 by Montana, Wyoming had the dubious distinction of child removal capital of America. (It’s still #2 in that regard.)  So it’s encouraging that the legislature in that state is considering a bill that would bolster family defense.  The story illustrates the importance of both the new study showing that high-quality family defense safely reduces foster care and the change in federal rules that allows some of the cost of such defense to be reimbursed with federal funds.

● I have a guest commentary in the Times of Northwest Indiana about how the latest McLawsuit filed by the latest group founded by Marcia Lowry, A Better Childhood, may well make that state’s dismal child welfare system even worse.

● And finally, though not related directly to child protective services, Vice News has a disturbing story about how the private adoption industry coerces parents into giving up their children.  The common denominator shared by these cases and those involving CPS is poverty. The Vice story cites a survey which found that “most women … put up their babies for adoption at least in part because of financial concerns.

News and commentary round-up, week ending May 13, 2019

●Last week I posted a link to an op-ed column by a family defender in New York City about the kind of family that doesn’t have to worry about having child protective services in its life.  This week: Another family defender writes in the New York Daily News about the kind of family that does.

●From Honolulu Civil Beat: An excellent story about a family faced with two kinds of trauma. First, the children were needlessly taken because the mother was herself a victim of domestic violence.  And now, the mother may be denied the career she’s wanted all her life because she can’t get off the state’s central registry of alleged child abusers – a registry she never should have been on in the first place.

●I have a column in Youth Today about how the foster care-industrial complex is trying to get legislation through Congress that would more than double federal foster care spending – and remove the last federal fiscal brake on needless foster care.

●Vivek Sankaran has a column about how his own experiences illustrate what’s revealed by a new study: High-quality family defense, using the model pioneered in New York City, dramatically curbs needless foster care, with no compromise of child safety.  And this story discusses East Bay Family Defenders, which is bringing the New York model of family defense to Alameda County, California.

●In another column Sankaran talks about foster youth who endured years of abuse in foster care, finding strength in their relationship with each other – and their mother.

●I have a blog post about why Philadelphia’s Department of Human Services is the Kellyanne Conway of child welfare agencies. They both have a fondness for “alternative facts.”  (And, of course, they’re both deeply involved with the needless separation of families.)

● Youth Today has a story about a court decision that stops the New York City Administration for Children’s Services from sending out the police to arrest foster youth who run away.

● And The New York Times has an op-ed that says not one word about foster care or the child welfare system – and yet explains exactly how to fix it.

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.

UPDATED, OCT. 30: Foster care in South Carolina and New York: The power of getting the story right

          UPDATE: Johnny Smith's daughter will get her father back on Thursday.

  I’ve written a fair amount on this blog about shoddy journalism, the kind that drags down my former profession.  So it’s good to have a chance to write about journalism that elevates that profession – journalism that has just helped reunite a traumatized little girl with her father, Johnny Smith.

            Two years ago, the Albany, N.Y. Times Union ran a five paragraph item on a sexual assault of a three-year-old in Warren County, about 60 miles north.  The last paragraph says “The child is now in foster care.”

            She’s still there.

            And odds are the only reason she’s finally getting out, is because of  Issac Bailey, a tenacious columnist for The Sun News in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina – and his editors, who put the story of this child, and her father, on the front page for six days in a row.

            Why Myrtle Beach, South Carolina?  Because not long before the child was brutally assaulted, the mother had absconded with her, and taken her to Warren County.  And all along, this girl’s father, Johnny Smith of Conway, SC, has been fighting to get her out of foster care and back home.

            Part one of Bailey’s series ends this way:

          “I want to know what I did wrong," Smith said he thought long ago.  He found out later it matters little that the answer to his question is: nothing.

          Originally, the screw-ups were on the South Carolina end.  That state’s Department of Social Services refused to approve the father as a placement for his own daughter  - the daughter he’d raised from birth until she was stolen - because he was poor.  You know all those times child welfare agencies say they never separate families because of poverty?  Six front page stories show that, in this case, that was a lie.

          Normally, a parent at least can challenge such a decision in court.  But not when the case involves more than one state – thanks to an incredibly screwed-up document known as the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children.  As you’ll see in Bailey’s stories, the comments of those in charge of this awful back-alley of child welfare set some kind of record for arrogance even by the standards of child welfare agencies.

          Fortunately, after Bailey started asking tough questions, South Carolina reversed itself.  But meanwhile, in New York, where individual counties run child welfare systems, Warren County was moving full speed toward termination of parental rights.

         Bailey first contacted NCCPR early on in his reporting.  NCCPR put him in touch with the nation’s leading expert on the ICPC, and someone working hard to reform it, Prof. Vivek Sankaran of the University of Michigan Law School Child Advocacy Law Clinic and director of the Detroit Center for Family Advocacy.

         After the stories were published NCCPR contacted journalists whose work would be seen in Warren County, including another very good columnist, Carl Strock of the Daily Gazette in Schenectady.  He wrote an excellent column, available from the newspaper’s paid archive.

         Yesterday, Bailey reports, the court did the right thing.  No later than Christmas, and maybe as soon as tomorrow, Johnny Smith’s daughter should be going home.  And here's the account from today's Times Union.