Child welfare in Michigan: Why let a few hundred “missing” foster children spoil the party?

            It was another love fest at federal court in Detroit last week, during a hearing on the dreadful consent decree between the Michigan Department of Human Services and the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children’s Rights (CR).

            According to one news account, the judge overseeing the decree praised “a different day, a different mindset, and a different atmosphere” in court compared to when the original settlement was reached in October, 2008.  According to another, a CR lawyer praised DHS for "some really important strides."

            No kidding.  The current director of Michigan DHS, Maura Corrigan, and the director of CR, Marcia Lowry, have identical outlooks: Both have contempt for birth families (Corrigan literally walked out on them during their one and only chance to tell their stories to one of those Obligatory Blue Ribbon Commissions that states and localities love to name to avoid actually changing their systems) both view permanence for children only in terms of adoption and neither cares about the slash- and-burn budget cuts in support for impoverished families used to finance their so-called reforms.  (For full details see our reports on Michigan child welfare.)

            Corrigan also is the one who wrote an op-ed column for the Detroit Free Press under the headline “Removing children from families always follows legal procedures” at the very time probation officers were illegally rubber-stamping the names of judges on orders removing children from their homes.

            So of course they get along famously.  The so-called progress largely involves hiring hundreds of new caseworkers to tear apart more families (financed in part by cutting family preservation and public assistance programs) and extending foster care until age 21.

            Amid all the celebration there is not one word about the hundreds, perhaps thousands of foster children who have gone “missing” thanks to the consent decree.

            They’re not literally missing, of course.  Someone knows where each child is individually – the foster parents and caseworkers, mostly.  But when it comes to their collective fate, they are entirely off the radar.  Corrigan and Lowry appear content to keep it that way.  They've adopted their own "don't ask, don't tell" policy.  In public, at least, Lowry's group doesn't ask and Corrigan's agency doesn't tell. 

            The children in question are those who were kicked out of the homes of grandparents or other relatives when those relatives couldn’t or wouldn’t comply with the ten pages of hypertechnical requirements to become formally licensed as a foster parent.  The consent decree requires that loving grandparents and other relatives, who often are poor, comply with exactly the same requirements as the middle-class strangers for whom those requirements originally were designed, unless they can obtain a waiver.  The consent decree deliberately makes those waivers very hard to obtain.

            Of course, all foster homes should be required to meet minimal health and safety standards – and all child welfare agencies should be required to provide the help needed to bring the homes up to those standards. But the Michigan foster care licensing requirements go way beyond that.  As I’ve noted before, the apartment where President Obama was raised by his grandmother would not have qualified under these regulations.  Some relatives simply may be too poor to provide all the required middle-class creature comforts.

            But Lowry, the ultimate bureaucrat, has shown that she doesn’t give a damn.  Licensing brings in federal money so the children be damned.  (Licensing also makes the relatives eligible for higher payments – no one is saying they shouldn’t be allowed to be licensed if they want it.)

            But damned to where?  Lowry doesn’t know, and DHS isn’t telling.

            The only clues to what is going on are in the periodic reports issued by the monitor for the decree.  The figures provided in those reports are confusing – and the most recent such report mentions only the number of unlicensed homes closed without any mention of the number of children affected.  But it appears that more than 2,000 children have been kicked out of homes with relatives since the decree went into effect.

            Where did they go?

            ● In some cases, they may have gone back to their own homes, almost always a positive outcome.

            ● In other cases, though children were forced to move, the home really might have been substandard and closing the home may have been valid.

            ● And in other cases (now that the monitor is reporting only on homes, not children) the home actually might not have had any children in it.

            But that probably still leaves hundreds of children needlessly kicked out of the homes of loving relatives and forced to live with strangers.  They may be bouncing from foster home to foster home and /or facing abuse in foster care, all to satisfy Marcia Lowry’s licensing fetish and the hostility to families she shares with Maura Corrigan. 

            The hostility runs so deep that I can find no public statement from either Lowry or Corrigan expressing the slightest concern about these children or the slightest interest in finding out what happened to them.

            The monitor, Kevin Ryan, says he’s trying to find out what happened to the children, but only those who were expelled from relative homes after July, 2011.  Why that date?  Because that’s when a new consent decree superseded the original consent decree, so he has no authority before that date.   

            So when it comes to all the children expelled from the homes of relatives between October, 2008 when the first decree was signed and July, 2011, when the second decree was signed, absolutely no one is inquiring into their status.

            After all, if they did, it might spoil the party.

Foster care in Michigan: Another reason for the love fest in federal court

For an overview of our perspective on Michigan child welfare, listen to this segment of  The Craig Fahle Show on WDET public radio.

The Detroit News had a story yesterday which further explains why a lawyer for the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children’s Rights was cracking jokes with Maura Corrigan in federal court yesterday even as children continue to suffer.

Corrigan turns out to be a big backer of still another of CR founder Marcia Lowry’s bureaucratic obsessions: separating the state child welfare agency from the larger human services agency.

There is not a shred of evidence that this kind of change makes a child welfare system any better – and a pattern is beginning to emerge suggesting it may be easier to create an improved system without such a change.

When you look at the few child welfare systems that are, relatively speaking, national models – with strong, independent evidence that child safety has improved, they all have one thing in common: They focused on reducing the number of children torn from their families.  But many have something else in common as well: They are not stand-alone agencies.  Rather they are part of larger human services agencies.

●A class action lawsuit brought by the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law transformed the child welfare system in Alabama into, relatively-speaking, a national model.  (Co-counsel for plaintiffs is a member of NCCPR’s volunteer Board of Directors.) The New York Times wrote about it here. In Alabama, the child welfare system is part of the larger human services agency.

●A former Michigan DHS official who got fed up with having all his reform ideas stymied in Michigan, Jim Beougher, went to Maine and led a transformation of child welfare so remarkable that, in 2009, it was a finalist in Harvard’s Innovations in American Government awards.  I’d be glad to send stories about Maine to anyone interested.  Beougher runs the child welfare division within a larger human services agency.

● Still another fed up Michigander / Michiganian (I’m neutral on that one), David Berns, led a similar transformation of child welfare in the county-run system in El Paso County Colorado.  Key to making the transformation work was the fact that child welfare and other human services were in the same agency, according to an evaluation by the Center for Law and Social Policy.

● Similarly, Marc Cherna, who was hired to run the child welfare division of the Allegheny Department of Human Services and now runs the entire agency thinks having everything in one agency was crucial to his success.

● And in Florida, although it sounds like the Department of Children and Families deals with nothing else, Florida DCF actually has pretty much the same functions as Michigan DHS.  Florida’s dramatic improvements were the result of bold new leadership and a waiver from federal funding restrictions (the same waiver Michigan got, but then turned down at the last minute.) The Florida reforms also caught the attention of The New York Times.

● In Illinois, which was transformed thanks largely to a number of class-action lawsuits and a relatively brief outbreak of good leadership, the child welfare agency is a stand-alone agency.

● In New Jersey, making the child welfare agency a separate agency was a way to get CR off everybody’s back.  The separate agency per se changed nothing.  What made the difference was an unusually good settlement, largely because CR was guided by the Annie E. Casey Foundation (a former funder of NCCPR), and, especially, strong leadership from the first commissioner of that new agency, Kevin Ryan.  Ryan now is the monitor for the Michigan decree.

INDIANA: A MODEL OF FAILURE

The most ludicrous claim is the one from Corrigan that Indiana is doing well by creating a separate child welfare agency.  I am aware of no one anywhere in the country who cites the Indiana system as it exists today as a model of anything good.

On the contrary, Indiana takes away children at a rate more than 60 percent above the national average and nearly triple the rate of Illinois.  In 2009, the most recent year for which data are available, even as most states were able to reduce entries into care, Indiana saw an increase.  Perhaps that’s exactly what Corrigan likes about Indiana, which certainly wouldn’t bode well for Michigan.  Or perhaps Corrigan simply assumes the child welfare agency in Indiana must have improved because a conservative governor named a grandstanding judge to run it.

So why does CR keep pushing for a change for which there is no evidence of benefit?  Probably two reasons.  First, anything that separates children from their families, whether individually or in bulk, seems to appeal to Maura Corrigan and to Marcia Lowry.  And CR loves anything that involves more bureaucracy.  Add another form to fill out, move around the boxes on a table of organization, and somehow CR thinks something has been accomplished.  As I’ve said before, the people at CR are like the clerk you least want to see when you finally make it to the front of the line at the DMV.

Foster care in Michigan: Here comes the new settlement, just like the old settlement

UPDATE, JULY 19: I discussed the failings of the new consent decree on The Craig Fahle Show on WDET public radio.  You can hear it here.


            The previous post to this blog predicted a disgusting spectacle in a federal court in Michigan today – and that’s just what it was.

            Sure enough, according to one news account, there was DHS Director Maura Corrigan “cracking jokes” with one of the lawyers suing DHS on behalf of the group that so arrogantly calls itself “Children’s Rights” (CR) as they agreed to a new settlement which is every bit as bad as the old settlement.

For the vulnerable children of Michigan, there is nothing to laugh about.  They gain absolutely nothing.  And all the harmful provisions of the old decree remain in effect.  That guarantees that many more children in Michigan will be shedding a lot more tears, while Corrigan and her new pals at CR pat each other on the back.

THE WAR AGAINST GRANDPARENTS CONTINUES

            The worst provision of the old settlement required grandparents and other relatives taking in their own family to comply with all of the hypertechnical licensing requirements imposed on strangers. 

            Of course, certain minimal health and safety standards are essential.  But the Michigan regulations, all ten single-spaced pages of them, go far beyond that; often revolving around middle-class creature comforts.  As I’ve noted often before, the apartment in Hawaii where President Obama was raised by his grandmother could not have passed inspection under the Michigan standards.

            The old settlement included cumbersome bureaucratic procedures to allow for the occasional exemption from some of these requirements or for waivers from licensing.  But the overall message was clear: The safer easier path, not for the families, but for DHS workers, was to say: No license, no child.

            That’s exactly what DHS has done.  As a result, by March, 2010, anywhere from 1,500 to 2,400 children had been expelled from the homes of their own grandparents and other relatives.  By September 30 of that year, the figure probably was at least 1,300 higher.   No one is keeping track of what happens to them.  Neither DHS nor CR seems to care.

            The new settlement changes none of this.  It has the same cumbersome procedures, and that sends the same dreadful message to the frontlines.  This puts at risk every grandchild now in the loving home of a grandmother or grandfather who is not licensed in accord with the bureaucratic mentality of DHS and CR. 

            Another onerous provision from the original settlement appears to give a preference to adoption of a child by total strangers over guardianship by a relative.  That, too, remains in the new agreement.

THERE IS NO “MAINTENANCE OF EFFORT” REQUIREMENT FOR FAMILY SERVICES

            The old settlement required DHS to conduct a “needs assessment” and then, based on that assessment, spend a small amount of money on services to help families.  By implication this was supposed to be additional money.  But DHS played a shell game.  DHS simply cut existing services to help families to fund the ones called for in the needs assessment.  DHS also has cut other prevention and family preservation services to fund other parts of the settlement, like the child abuse investigator / foster care worker hiring binge.

            Having seen how disingenuous DHS was about the first settlement, one would think that the new settlement would include a specific requirement that new funding for prevention and family preservation be additional funds, not just money moved from one pot to another.

            There is no such provision in the new settlement.

            That’s not surprising.  Since the settlement is with a group, CR, that doesn’t give a damn about keeping children safely in their own homes, obviously CR isn’t going to fight to avoid cuts to those programs.

STILL TRYING TO REPEAL THE LAWS OF HUMAN NATURE

The original settlement contained an attempt to repeal the laws of human nature known as “concurrent planning.”  Under concurrent planning, people who desperately want to adopt a child – and the child welfare agencies that desperately want those people to adopt -- are told, in effect: “Now remember, your first goal is to work with the birth parents and do everything you can to help them get the child back – but if, by some chance, you fail at this then you get what you really want – someone else’s child for your very own.”

One parent in New Jersey was honest enough to tell The New York Times what she called “the mantra” of parents in this kind of program, which is: “I’m on the next plane to South America if they think they’re getting this baby back.”

Meanwhile, the caseworkers are supposed to work equally hard to get the child adopted by people they like and can identify with – typically middle-class foster parents - as they do to try to reunite the child with people they often can’t stand, overwhelmingly poor disproportionately minority birth parents.

The new settlement continues “concurrent planning.”  Anything else would have been a shock, given that it’s hard to know who is more fanatical about adoption-at-all-costs, the director of CR, Marcia Lowry, or the Director of DHS, Maura Corrigan. 

BARELY A WORD ABOUT KEEPING CHILDREN OUT OF FOSTER CARE IN THE FIRST PLACE

            The original settlement was nearly silent on efforts to keep children in their own homes.  So is the new settlement.  Once again no surprise.  Keeping families together is the best option for the overwhelming majority of children the overwhelming majority of the time, it is of almost no interest to either Corrigan or Lowry.

            So children at risk of foster care in Michigan, overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately minority, remain at the mercy of CR and DHS, both of which appear to far prefer seeing them in the  middle-class suburban homes of strangers than in the poor, urban but loving homes that most of them came from.

            Only one question remains.  When Corrigan signed the new document, did she do it herself with a pen, or did she do it the Michigan way and just have some clerk  rubber-stamp it?

See the previous post to this Blog for a review of the record of DHS – and Maura Corrigan.

Michigan DHS goes soft on child abuse (when it’s in foster care)

THE AGENCY TAKES A KEYSTONE KOPS APPROACH TO POLICING ABUSE IN INSTITUTIONS

One of the more alarming sections of the report by the independent monitor of the Michigan child welfare consent decree is the section on abuse in foster care, especially abuse in the institutions so beloved by Michigan Department of Human Services (DHS) Director Ismael Ahmed and his "leadership" team.

When it comes to how many foster children are being abused in Michigan and who is abusing them, DHS doesn't know, and doesn't seem to care. DHS uses what can best be described as a Keystone Kops approach to policing maltreatment in substitute care.

The consent decree DHS signed includes a series of commitments to change that. The report found that, time and time again, DHS failed to keep those commitments.

According to the monitor's report:

By the end of Period Two, DHS still did not know the extent of abuse or neglect in care in Michigan and had fallen behind in delivering on its commitments in the Agreement to define and address this critical issue.

UNDERCOUNTING ABUSE IN FOSTER CARE

There are a couple of reasons for this. First, the DHS computer system doesn't include some categories of abuse in substitute care – so for years, DHS has been blithely underreporting the real figure. In addition, although DHS can determine that a particular child was abused, apparently the database that tells them that is not linked to the database that tells them which of these children are in substitute care. Brilliant.

The problem is even worse when it comes to investigating abuse in institutions. While child protective services (CPS) investigates abuse in foster homes, when the abuse is in institutions it's investigated by the Bureau of Child and Adult Licensing (BCAL). Leaving aside the question of whether licensing inspectors even know how to investigate child abuse, DHS does not actually allow BCAL inspectors to make a determination. Rather, BCAL is supposed to forward its findings to CPS – which is supposed to make the actual decision (apparently based solely on the paperwork). The trouble is, DHS couldn't prove to the monitor that the information from BCAL even was passed on to CPS.

And it gets worse. According to the monitor's report:

A review of a sample of BCAL special investigation reports raised serious concerns about the treatment of youth in some placements with the responses focused almost exclusively on institutional remedies – examples include: the firing of a staff person, the need for additional training, or flaws in personnel screening practices or staff coverage ratios - with little reference to the needs of the child or children involved. [Emphasis added.]

RESTRAINTS AND SECLUSION

Then there's the vital issue of the misuse and overuse of "restraints" and "seclusion" – nice euphemisms for solitary confinement and God knows what else.

The settlement requires that DHS ensure that the institutions report every use of seclusion and restraint to a "Quality Assurance" unit. But DHS didn't do it, and hasn't even tried to do it. DHS hasn't even started gathering information. According to the monitor's report:

This is particularly concerning because the monitoring team's review of BCAL special investigations identified multiple issues with restraints, many of which identified the need for improved restraint training and adherence to policy.

The consent decree also includes a requirement that DHS consider how often an institution abuses the children confined there when deciding whether to renew the institution's license. Yes, I'm serious. It took a consent decree to force DHS even to consider this.

But DHS broke its word. According to the report:

The monitoring team … read a sample of the available re-licensing reports from Period Two. The monitoring team found no documentation in any of those reports that DHS had, as DHS committed it would in the Agreement, taken into "due consideration" the history (or absence of history) of any substantiations [of maltreatment] or corporal punishment that occurred at any of those facilities or contract agencies. … There appears to be no place on the standard re-licensure reporting form for the necessary and critical consideration of the history of maltreatment and corporal punishment.

DHS also promised to implement a "two-strikes-you're-out" policy against institutions that covered up abuse by failing to report it to DHS. But DHS didn't to that either.

SPECIAL INVESTIGATION UNITS

And finally, there is the matter of creating special "Maltreatment in Care Investigation Units," starting in the state's five largest counties. In a press release issued the day before the monitor's report came out, DHS bragged about getting these units off the ground. DHS neglected to mention that they botched the planning and screwed up the implementation of these units. Again, from the report:

When the plan was provided to the monitoring team, it incorporated poor data that severely undercounted allegations of maltreatment in care. In relying on this data, DHS allocated too few staff to these units. The plan lacked information on training; analysis of the challenges inherent in investigations in institutional settings; clarity about reporting lines; and information on tracking, especially with regard to corrective action plans.

(Other than that, however, it was just fine.)

All of this can be found in the monitor's report on pages 61 through 67. Reading through it, it's hard to escape the impression that top management at DHS is more interested in protecting their friends who run private agencies than in protecting children.

Foster care in Michigan: DHS flunks ANOTHER exam

By now, it's well known that the monitor overseeing the consent decree between the Michigan Department of Human Services and the group that so arrogantly calls itself "Children's Rights" issued a report that found huge problems at DHS – including illegal budget cuts, understating abuse in foster care and the mass expulsion of children from the homes of relatives.

But this isn't the only scathing report to surface about DHS.

Every few years, the federal government reviews the performance of every state through what is called a Child and Family Services Review. States tend to do badly. But, as The Detroit News reports today, the latest review for Michigan shows that, even compared to other states, Michigan's performance was dismal. There are seven key categories in the CFSR – and Michigan flunked every single one of them.

How much does this really mean? The CFSR methodology is dreadful, a fact NCCPR has pointed out repeatedly. So, were this the only indication of failure, it really wouldn't tell us much. But because the CFSR tracks so closely with the far more rigorous review by the monitor, it suggests that, in this case, even if only by chance, the CFSR is on the mark.

Think of it this way: The CFSR is like one of those simple, inexpensive screening tests a doctor can perform for some forms of cancer. They don't really tell you if you're sick, but they may tell you that a more rigorous test, like a biopsy, is needed. The monitor's report is the biopsy. Unfortunately, the monitor's report confirms the CFSR "diagnosis": The Michigan child welfare system is gravely ill – and it is having a malignant effect on some of the children it is supposed to help. It needs radical surgery.

TWO REPORTS FIND THE SAME CORE PROBLEM

Both documents highlight the same core problem: The devastating cuts in safe, proven alternatives to tearing apart families. These cuts never had to happen. They were not caused primarily by the recession, but by the way DHS chose to meet the terms of the consent decree itself, and by DHS Director Ismael Ahmed's pandering to the state's powerful private child welfare agencies.

To cure the malignancy, DHS must reverse course. It must not only restore the cuts in prevention and family preservation, it must expand these programs, while doing its cutting in needless foster care and, especially, needless institutionalization of children. (Yes, DHS has begun to cut such placements, and that's commendable, but it's only a down payment on what it owes the children it has wronged.)

The monitor's report details the enormous harm caused by the cuts to prevention and family preservation – and makes clear that the cuts violate the consent decree, making them illegal. Unfortunately, CR, which is as hostile to real family preservation as DHS, isn't doing anything about it.

Similarly, the CFSR declares that

The State's low performance on the outcomes assessed by the CFSR may be attributed in part to State budget cuts that have had a negative impact on the ability of the State to provide services to children and families who come into contact with the child welfare system, particularly in-home service cases. [Emphasis added].

The CFSR singled out for praise the state's outstanding Intensive Family Preservation Services program, Families First, and its Family Reunification services program. But both programs were cut back to fund a foster care caseworker hiring binge and rate increases for residential treatment providers.

The CFSR goes on to conclude that, when it comes to services to families, Michigan actually has deteriorated since the previous federal evaluation in 2002. Among the findings:

●There is a scarcity of key services, such as mental health and substance abuse treatment services, which results in waiting lists for these services.

●Many of these services are not available at all in some parts of the state.

The CFSR also found:

● The State was not consistent in assessing and meeting the needs of children receiving in-home services, foster parents, mothers, and fathers.

● The State did not make concerted efforts to involve children, mothers, and fathers in case planning in both the foster care and in-home services cases, although children in the foster care cases were more likely to be involved than children in the in-home services cases.

This new CFSR notes that when Michigan flunked its previous CFSR, one response was to expand an initiative of the Annie E. Casey Foundation known as Family to Family.

But as NCCPR noted in our first report on Michigan child welfare last year, in 2008, DHS reduced the level of its participation in that program in Wayne and Macomb Counties.

And there was one more finding, which says a lot about the priorities of DHS. Once a child was in foster care, Michigan generally performed adequately at meeting the child's physical health needs. That was less likely to happen if DHS was helping a family while the child remained in the home. DHS had problems meeting children's mental health needs no matter where they were, but did worse when the children still were in their own homes.

In other words, parents have to lose their children to foster care before DHS will help those children get the health care they need.

When asked about this by The Detroit News, DHS showed that it still excels in two areas: cynicism and deceit. Among the "improvements" cited by DHS: Spending $4 million on prevention programs. What DHS didn't say, but the monitor's report reveals, is that this $4 million is not new money, it's money being shifted by cutting other prevention programs.

CR SHARES RESPONSIBILITY

None of this is solely DHS's fault. CR pushed DHS in this dreadful direction when it negotiated a consent decree that does nothing to demand that DHS do more to keep families together. Instead, it allows DHS to lower caseloads through that foster care worker hiring binge – which it is financing through cuts in prevention and family preservation. The cuts also are going to finance rate increases for residential treatment centers.

So far CR hasn't lifted a finger to stop these cuts. It's been up to the monitor to point out that they violate the consent decree, while CR sits on its hands. At the same time, of course, CR demanded that mass expulsion of children from the homes of relatives in order to satisfy CR's bureaucratic obsession with licensing.

Foster care in Michigan: The DHS horror show

MONITOR'S REPORT MAKES CLEAR CUTS IN PREVENTION AND FAMILY PRESERVATION WERE ILLEGAL – AND DHS MAY HAVE LIED TO THE LEGISLATURE

When the first report of the independent monitor overseeing Michigan's child welfare consent decree was released six months ago, I wrote that "No Hollywood studio is ever going to buy the rights" to such a report.

But if such a studio were to try to make a movie based on the findings of the monitor's second report, released Tuesday, I know the genre in which it would fit: horror film.

The expulsion of hundreds of children from the homes of loving relatives in order to satisfy the licensing obsession of the group that so arrogantly calls itself "Children's Rights," described in previous posts, is only the worst of it. There's much more.

Indeed, the cruelty of what the Michigan Department of Human Services is doing to the state's vulnerable children is matched only by the agency's cynicism in violating the consent decree. This is particularly clear when it comes to the already minimal provisions in the decree involving services to keep families together.

The section of the monitor's report on prevention and family preservation describes a litany of deceit and broken promises.

●The settlement required DHS to conduct a "needs assessment" and then provide $4 million in additional funds for those needs. The promise was broken.

●The settlement required DHS at least to fight for children by seeking the funding it needed from the legislature. But DHS Director Ismael Ahmed and his staff refused even to ask the legislature for the money. The promise was broken.

●The report raises the question of whether DHS lied to the Michigan Legislature. DHS claimed it did not need certain funds to comply with the consent decree, when there was overwhelming evidence that it did.

These were not just promises like the kind one makes in a political campaign. These are legally-binding commitments. The report makes clear that DHS has violated the consent decree. That means DHS has broken the law.

Unfortunately, since these broken promises involve prevention and family preservation, the group that brought the lawsuit, the group that so arrogantly calls itself "Children's Rights," doesn't seem to care. In Connecticut, when a prevention program that includes middle-class families was threatened, CR rushed into court to try to save it – and told us so over and over again in press release after press release. But in Michigan, where the cuts affect only the usual child welfare agency clientele – overwhelmingly poor people - CR has sat on its hands. Now, at last, some lawyers from the group are going to sit down and talk things over with DHS for 30 days.

Big deal.

DETAILS FROM THE MONITOR'S REPORT

Here's how the monitor's report explains what happened. (Wherever a section is in bold, the emphasis has been added by NCCPR.) According to the report:

The Agreement includes a set of necessary commitments to improve the Michigan child welfare system for children and families, many requiring additional investment.

But DHS decided it would rather spend additional funds on hiring more foster care workers and lavishing rate increases on the state's powerful private providers of institutional "care." So, even with children's futures, and possibly their lives, at stake, DHS played cynical shell games with state money.

The monitor's report notes that when the Governor ordered DHS to slash its budget, DHS chose to cut prevention and family preservation. According to the monitor:

Some of these eliminated services are identical to those that both DHS and Michigan State University have identified, as part of needs assessments in the Agreement … as critical – but scarce – for children and families involved with Michigan's child welfare system.

The State Budget Office and DHS did not ask the Legislature for funds to prevent these cuts in services to children and families involved with the child welfare system. These cuts are not consistent with DHS' pledge to build "additional services and placements" in the Agreement…

Moreover, DHS committed in the Agreement that it would, at a minimum, request of the Michigan Legislature "state funds and any federal/special fund authorization sufficient to effect the provisions and outcome measures set forth in this Agreement in connection with any budget, funding, or allocation request to the executive or legislative branches of State government." However, during Period Two, DHS and the State Budget Office did not advance to the Michigan Legislature a request for funds or spending authorization to fully replace the significant cuts in services to children and families that the administration implemented in FY2009 or to fully fund the commitments in the Agreement.

In June 2009, the State Budget Director submitted to the Michigan Legislature a revised FY2010 funding recommendation for DHS that eliminated slightly more than $20 million and 197 child welfare staff positions originally requested to implement the Agreement. DHS indicated these positions were no longer necessary to satisfy its commitments in the Agreement due to reductions in the overall caseload managed by DHS. However … DHS did not meet several of its caseload commitments in Period Two, standards which are only the starting point in a multi-year process of reducing caseloads from excessive to appropriate levels.

As for the "needs assessment," it led the monitor to call for spending $1.5 million more on housing for children aging out of foster care, $1.5 million to support youth "stepping down" from residential care, and $1 million in new family preservation services. And how did DHS "comply" with its legal duty? According to the monitor:

DHS advised the monitoring team that it will divert $4 million in existing family preservation funds, beginning in Period Three, to fund this expansion. Although DHS is not responsible for implementing this expansion of services until Period Three, the monitoring team observes that a diversion of pre-existing resources to fund services is not consistent with the Agreement or the underlying Needs Assessment, and will closely assess funding sources for additional services in future periods.

I'll bet Ahmed and his pals in the private agencies were really proud of that one.

NEXT WEEK: DHS HAS NO IDEA HOW MUCH ABUSE GOES ON AT RESIDENTIAL TREATMENT CENTERS – AND DOESN'T SEEM VERY INTERESTED IN FINDING OUT

Court Monitor: Michigan budget cuts may be illegal

SO WHY DIDN'T CR NOTICE?

No Hollywood studio is ever going to buy the rights to the report of an independent court monitor overseeing a child welfare system lawsuit settlement. And if you want to find the real news, you have to go past the executive summary.

Because the bombshell in the first report of the monitor overseeing the court decree governing child welfare in Michigan is buried in some genteel language at the top of page 34: Remember those slash and burn budget cuts in prevention and family preservation imposed by the head of the state's Department of Human Services, Ismael Ahmed, - even as he lavished rate increases on agencies that institutionalize children? According to the independent monitor, the cuts may well be illegal. They may violate the consent decree. As is discussed below, these cuts also are setting up some newly-reunified families to fail.

That leads to one crucial question: Why couldn't the group that brought the lawsuit, the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children's Rights (CR) – figure that out? And why aren't they doing something about it – the way plaintiffs in a similar lawsuit in Illinois did in a similar situation earlier this year?

NCCPR first raised these questions when the budget cuts first were revealed months ago. We've come back to the theme repeatedly since then, as a search of this blog for posts mentioning Michigan will make clear. But CR remained silent. They didn't go to court, they didn't even protest. After we pointed out their silence, months ago, they hinted at action in a "tweet" on Twitter, but they didn't deliver. Now, months later, they offer some tepid comments in a press release.

Why? You'd have to ask them. But if you wanted to craft a lawsuit, a settlement, and a post-settlement enforcement strategy designed to thwart efforts to keep families together and promote the taking of children from impoverished families for adoptive placement with middle-class strangers, it would be hard to top the approach that CR has taken.

So CR sits idly by while prevention and family preservation are eviscerated in order to fund a hiring binge of child abuse investigators and foster care workers – and to promote the only form of permanence CR really seems to support: Adoption.

To the extent that this has failed, and to the extent that there has been any real progress in Michigan, (and the report shows there has been a little progress) it is because outside advocates, like NCCPR, have raised hell about CR's approach and problems in the settlement – and, it turns out, because of what amounts to a rebellion among frontline caseworkers. (More on that tomorrow).

CR waited for the monitor to point out what any lawyers who really cared about the best interests of children would have been shouting about from the start: "Early analysis suggests that … service cuts are not consistent with the Settlement Agreement commitments to increase investments in services" [p. 34]. The settlement agreement is legally binding on the state.

The monitor's report also notes that "some of these eliminated services are identical to those identified by DHS in its permanency backlog gap analysis and by Michigan State University in the Needs Assessment as being already scarce for children and families involved with the child welfare system" [p. 33]. Those two documents also are legally required by the settlement.

Didn't CR notice this? Or did they simply not care because they were getting more money for foster care and child abuse investigations, at the expense of prevention and family preservation?

In Illinois, when similar slash-and-burn budget cuts threatened a longstanding consent decree, the plaintiffs in that suit – the Illinois Branch of the ACLU – didn't sit around waiting for a monitor's report. They went straight to court – and got the cuts stopped. Of course, that may have something to do with the fact that the Illinois settlement emphasizes working to keep families together – turning that state into, relatively speaking, a model of child welfare success.

In contrast, I haven't even seen CR speak out against the Michigan cuts, until its tepid press release today, much less use its enormous legal clout to fight them.

Setting up families to fail

The budget cuts also threaten one of the few substantive successes in Michigan reported by the monitor: The state is ahead of schedule in reunifying children in a "backlog cohort" – child welfare-speak for a great big group of children who have been trapped in foster care more than a year even though the goal is reunification. (Not surprisingly, most of this progress was made in cases where DHS directly supervises the case. The state's powerful private agencies, which are paid for every day they hold a child in foster care, are behind schedule in reunifications).

But successful reunification depends on ongoing help to the family after it's back together. Ismael Ahmed's budget cuts threaten those very services, increasing the likelihood that the children will come back into foster care.

Of course, if that happens, Ahmed's buddies at the private agencies can then scapegoat the reunification instead of the failure to support that reunification. They'll say "See? We shouldn't be reunifying these families? Let's just go back to rushing to terminate parental rights and pushing adoption-at-all-costs."

A win-win for Ahmed and his friends, a lose-lose for children.

Tomorrow: The frontline rebellion that helped save kinship care in Michigan

Betrayal in Baltimore

This one really stinks.

Of all the child welfare class-action lawsuit settlements around the country, one of those that has dragged on the longest concerns Baltimore. It was already well underway when I cited it in my book, Wounded Innocents, which was published in 1990.

It wasn't one of the better settlements, in part because there was less experience with this kind of litigation back then. And, as so often happens, the child welfare agency in Maryland, the Department of Human Resources, stalled and stalled rather than meet its obligations.

Then, just a few weeks ago, on June 23, a breakthrough: The two sides negotiated a smarter, slimmed-down consent decree. Unlike the original, this one emphasized family preservation. And, back in June, there was some reason to believe that Maryland was serious about compliance. That's because a new leader of DHR, Brenda Donald, already had shown some of the right priorities. She began closing group homes and reducing entries into foster care – though in recent months they've started to go back up again.

It sounded like an enlightened child welfare leader genuinely committed to working with advocates. It wasn't. In fact, it was just a tactic – a bit of expedience to create a veneer of cooperation. That became clear when an opportunity opened up to weasel out of the deal – and DHR raced to double-cross the advocates.

Two days after the agreement was reached, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision concerning a class-action suit in Arizona. Though that lawsuit was unrelated to child welfare, the Maryland Attorney General's office thinks it may be able to use the decision to worm its way out of the agreement his state just signed. And that's just what they're trying to do – apparently with Donald's encouragement.

In most states, the Attorney General acts as the lawyer for state agencies. That means the agency is the client and can tell the Attorney General what actions it wants taken on its behalf. In other states, the Attorney General can act without the agency's blessing and even against its wishes. (That used to cause a lot of problems in Utah, for example, though in recent years the human services agency and the attorney general's office there seem to have reached a truce.)

But either way, Brenda Donald had one obligation so simple, so fundamental that it shouldn't be necessary to explain it here: When you make an agreement you keep your word. In letter and spirit. Period. End of story. So Donald's obligation here was either to order the Attorney General's office to knock it off or, if she lacks that power, speak out forcefully against the attempt to weasel out of the agreement. She did neither.

On the contrary, her comments to The Daily Record, a Baltimore legal publication suggest she's thrilled with this turn of events. Donald told the record:

"I do want the ability to drive this reform agenda and to allow my extremely capable director [in Baltimore] to run her own agency without court oversight and without paying millions of dollars in lawyers' fees and taking hundreds of hours to go over fine points.

In fact, a hallmark of this new agreement was that it was not bogged down in fine points, precisely because the lawyers who brought the suit thought they were dealing with someone they could trust. But that's actually beside the point. The issue is: Brenda Donald gave her word on behalf of the State of Maryland. Then, she encouraged the state try to break it as soon as a chance presented itself. Therefore, the burden of proof rests with Brenda Donald to explain why she should ever again be trusted.

And since being in foster care already means one betrayal after another, the worst possible message to send to young people in the system is that the adults who have a responsibility to care for them will , at the first opportunity, weasel out of that obligation.

What all this reveals is the Achilles heel of even some reform-minded child welfare administrators: A particular kind of arrogance that says, in effect: "Accountability may be needed for bad child welfare administrators, but I'm one of the good guys. I believe what you believe. I won't abuse my power. So why should anyone bother me with all that pesky court oversight?"

This kind of arrogance also comes through in the barely disguised contempt too many child welfare administrators have for unions. And it's why some child welfare leaders who are good about bolstering services for families are less keen on bolstering due process protections. Both unions and due process are seen only as impediments to allowing them to Do What's Right.

But I've never seen a case quite this extreme. I've never seen a child welfare leader actually say, in effect, "trust me, we'll do this on our own" right after, at a minimum, standing by and cheering while others in state government stabbed her erstwhile partners in the back.

The Michigan “Needs Assessment”: A rebuke to DHS and CR

As the previous post to this Blog explains, a requirement of the consent decree between the Michigan Department of Human Services and the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children's Rights (CR) is a "Needs Assessment." As the name suggests this means lots of people spending lots of time creating one more document telling us what we already know: Michigan should be doing far more to keep families together.

The settlement calls for spending $4 million on needs found by the Needs Assessment. But in a true masterstroke of legal strategy, CR managed to forget to include anything in its settlement that would stop DHS from cutting ten times more than they now are required to add. Brilliant. So What DHS giveth with one hand, DHS taketh ten-fold with the other.

As for what the document actually tells us:

The Needs Assessment is a 221-page rebuke of the shortsighted approach of both DHS and CR.

Everything the assessment says Michigan's vulnerable children need more of, DHS is providing less of. The list of what Michigan's vulnerable children need and the list of children's services budget cuts are nearly identical.

And that is not because of the state budget crisis. The biggest fraud in Michigan right now is the notion that the cuts in safe proven programs to keep families together are needed to balance the budget. On the contrary, the money saved from these cuts is going into more money for institutionalization and a wasteful hiring binge.

For that, the blame rests both with Ismael Ahmed's apparent obsession with giving private agencies that warehouse children in "residential treatment" whatever they want (that's why he's so beloved by these agencies) and with CR, which allowed that giant loophole in the settlement mentioned above.

Though the spirit of the settlement and its legally binding guiding principles (not to mention common sense) make clear that DHS was not supposed to fund the settlement by cutting other help to vulnerable children, the settlement has no explicit provision saying this. So DHS has plowed through that loophole. DHS is using slash-and-burn budget cuts for prevention and family preservation to finance rate increases for residential treatment and a foster care worker hiring binge.

And the hiring binge is not actually required by the settlement. The settlement requires a reduction in caseloads – it doesn't say this has to be done by hiring child abuse investigators and foster care workers. Caseloads would be far more likely to go down if DHS put more money into the very programs it now is cutting. As it stands now, all those new workers are likely to chase down all the new cases of children needlessly removed from their homes because of the budget cuts, leaving Michigan with the same lousy system only bigger.

And I'm not the only one saying this. Look at what the Needs Assessment itself says about how to reduce caseloads (Page 23):

The settlement agreement assumes that Michigan's system reform efforts … will decrease the number of children entering the foster care system. The reduced entries will result from improvements in intake services, prevention services and in-home preservation services. These efforts will also decrease the caseload ratio for public and private agency workers, permitting MDHS to reduce caseloads to the specified levels." [Emphasis added].

The most important part of the Needs Assessment

What may be most important about the needs assessment is what's *not* in its recommendations:

●There is no call for more "residential treatment" or other institutional care of children.

●There is no call for big rate increases for providers of institutional care.

On the contrary, the Needs Assessment specifically cites the harm of institutionalization (Page 69) and examples of better alternatives (Pages 114, 115) – in other words, exactly what NCCPR said in our second report on Michigan child welfare.

●There is no call for a giant hiring binge of child abuse investigators and foster care workers.

So why is DHS spending more money on all of these things while cutting the very programs the Needs Assessment says are really needed?

Are caseloads really excessive?

●A key premise of the hiring binge is that it's needed to lower excessive caseloads. But the chart on Page 56 shows that caseloads actually are surprisingly reasonable. These numbers would be suspect if they came from management; but they're estimates from a survey of caseworkers themselves. So that raises further questions about cutting prevention to hire more investigators and foster care workers.

Other Key Findings

●A repeated theme is the urgent need for concrete services, particularly transportation and housing assistance, yet these services are among those least available. (Pages 14, 15, 21, 78, 84, 111, chart p. 113). The Assessment states flat out that time in placement often is extended needlessly for lack of this kind of help. (Page 14.)

●The unappreciated shining star of Michigan child welfare, the Families First Intensive Family Preservation Services program, is praised repeatedly in almost every section of the needs assessment – seen as enormously beneficial not only for preventing separation of families in the first place but also for making reunification work and for preserving adoptive families. (Pages 10, 44, 82, other references.) Yet this program is being cut yet again by Ismael Ahmed.

●On Page 41, the Needs Assessment lists seven vital programs for keeping families together. Most, if not all, have been cut repeatedly in the past and are or will be cut again in the two rounds of slash-and-burn budget cuts inflicted by Ahmed and Gov. Jennifer Granholm.

●The Assessment devotes two-thirds of a page to listing all the things wrong with the settlement's former demand that all grandparents and other relatives providing kinship care be formally licensed (Page 86). And then, on Page 90, it says that unlicensed homes are absolutely essential in order to have enough places for children. Fortunately, partly as a result of pressure from NCCPR, CR and DHS backed off from their war against grandparents and changed that part of the settlement. But NCCPR and many others saw these problems right from the start – why didn't CR and DHS?

●Page 75: Most families can't get the services they need.

●Page 41: Workers admit to resorting to foster care in cases where children could remain home if the right kinds of help were available.

●Page 116: There is a significant need for inpatient drug treatment programs in which parents can live with their children.

●Page 62: The Needs Assessment notes what NCCPR reported in March: There are enormous, and disturbing, variations in rates of child removal in different Michigan counties.

●Page 54: In the one focus group for birth parents, in Ingham County, which has one of the highest rates of removal in the state, every birth parent, no matter what the actual circumstances of her or his case, said he or she was asked to agree to termination of parental rights; an outrageous indication that the "Binsfeld mentality" – a legacy of a former lieutenant governor who trampled over the state's impoverished families in the name of adoption-at-all-costs (discussed in detail in NCCPR's first report on Michigan child welfare) - still is alive and well in Michigan.

●None of the birth parents said they were involved in developing and implementing the "case plan" explaining what hoops they would have to jump through to get their children back.

●Page 55: All of the birth parents said their case records contained inaccuracies.

Michigan update: Three tiny drops in a very large bucket

I know that after 33 years following child welfare, nothing should shock me – least of all cynicism and opportunism from the group that so arrogantly calls itself "Children's Rights" (CR) – but the level of hypocrisy in the press release they just put out here: http://bit.ly/JdPlq is appalling.

If the cynicism isn't bad enough, how about the fact that they apparently think every Michigan advocate and every journalist following child welfare in the state is an idiot.

They've put out a press release bragging about the fact that, due to their lawsuit settlement, the state is going to have to spend all of $4 million more on programs to help families. (Actually, even that figure is high, some of the money will go to other programs that are worthy but don't involve family preservation.)

That is about one-tenth the amount that Michigan DHR director Ismael Ahmed cut from similar spending just in the emergency budget cuts for the current fiscal year. (He's proposed another round of cuts – just as bad – for next year. Details on the cuts are in this previous post.) Did CR think no one in Michigan would notice that the "new" spending is only one tenth of the cuts?

The cuts are not being used to close the state's budget deficit. Rather the cuts are being used to finance rate increases for residential treatment providers, and to pay for a foster care worker /child abuse investigator hiring binge that is entirely unnecessary. (There are much better ways to cut caseloads).

And CR enabled those very cuts, because its settlement includes no provision barring Michigan from cutting prevention and family preservation programs in order to pay for the settlement.

A little background:

●The settlement called for a "Needs Assessment."

●Over and over again, the Needs Assessment stresses the urgent need to spend more on family preservation.

●The Needs Assessment, a comprehensive 225 page document, did not say there was any need for rate increases for residential treatment centers and other institutions. And it did not call for massive increases in child abuse investigator / foster care caseworker hiring. (In fact, on page 56, there is a chart that raises questions about whether caseloads really are excessive.)

●The settlement requires DHS to spend only $4 million on some of all of the needs that have been assessed as genuinely needed.

●The independent court monitor has recommended three categories of spending for this $4 million.

The process will be repeated next year.

But compared to what Ahmed already has cut and plans to cut next year, we're talking about three tiny drops in a very large bucket.

“Children’s rights”: All tweet, no action?

The group that so arrogantly calls itself "Children's Rights" (CR) has taken to sending out "tweets" on Twitter that portray the organization as actually interested in keeping families together – something that is very much at odds with the group's record in many parts of the country. In the process, the organization's double standards are showing. And now they've made a promise on which they have yet to deliver.

It started July 1, when CR praised the Illinois Branch of the ACLU – which has a much more progressive consent decree than anything CR ever would come up with – for going to court to prevent draconian budget cuts to that state's child welfare programs. CR tweeted:

"Just saw that our friends at @aclu have convinced a judge to order Illinois not to cut critical child welfare services!"

The next day CR bragged about doing something similar itself – in Connecticut:

"Just posted more details about our efforts to save a vital pre-foster-care program in Connecticut on the CR Blog"

But of course this raised one obvious question: What about Michigan? There, Gov. Jennifer Granholm and the director of the state's Department of Human Services, Ismael Ahmed, have initiated two rounds of slash-and-burn budget cuts, one proposed for next year, the other already in effect.

That's not because of the state's budget crisis. Rather, they're using the savings to fund big rate increases for powerful private agencies that institutionalize children, and to fund a child abuse investigator / foster care caseworker hiring binge – apparently the only option they could think of to meet the terms of CR's own Michigan lawsuit settlement.

In fact, all that hiring is not required to meet the settlement terms – the settlement calls for reducing caseloads, by and large it doesn't say how to do it. So Michigan could, in fact, reduce foster care caseloads by spending more on safe, proven programs to keep children out of foster care. But that is beyond the imagination of DHS or CR.

Even worse, CR neglected to include a "maintenance of effort" provision in its settlement. In other words, though the cuts clearly violate the spirit of the settlement and the statement of principles in the settlement, there is no explicit prohibition barring Michigan from funding the settlement by cutting other programs to help the same children. So Michigan went about slashing prevention and family preservation to fund increases in foster care and institutionalization – an apt reflection of both DHS' and CR's real priorities.

But with CR starting to claim it cares about family preservation in other states, we wondered…

NCCPR is on Twitter. So CR's professed interest in family preservation prompted us to tweet back:

"Group calling itself Children's Rights fights child welfare cuts in CT, but what about Michigan?"

In a two-tweet response to our pressure, CR replied:

"And we're really not happy to see Michigan -- where we're involved in a massive reform effort -- cutting prevention"

"We'll have more on the Michigan situation in the coming days/weeks. Stay tuned..."

Nearly three weeks later: Nothing.

No marching back into court to help Michigan children the way CR claims to be helping Connecticut children. No news conferences from the oh-so-PR-savvy CR in Detroit and Lansing denouncing budget cuts. Not even a press release expressing outrage.

In fact, as far as I can tell there hasn't been a peep – or a tweet – from CR.

This isn't the only time CR has failed to tweet and deliver.

Another tweet led readers to this excellent op ed column by Prof. Vivek Sankaran of the University of Michigan Law School, concerning the appalling lack of adequate defense counsel for birth families. CR tweeted:

"shameful: Michigan family torn apart as a parent is denied access to legal representation."

Nice of them to say. But what about action? What's really shameful is the fact that the Michigan settlement doesn't have a word about improving legal representation for families caught in the child protective services web. As far as I know, neither does any CR settlement.

So once again CR is making its priorities clear.

As for CR's suggestion they actually might try to do something about the Michigan cuts: It's not as if there's a lot of time. The first round of budget cuts already has taken effect. So isn't it time for CR to show it's more than all tweet, no action?

UPDATED JULY 2: Michigan and Illinois: The difference is leadership

An excellent story in The Detroit News Tuesday about cuts to youth services in Michigan includes this excuse from a spokesman for Michigan State Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop:

"I don't know where we're going to get the money," said Matt Marsden, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop. "It's not for not wanting to. It's just a matter of trying to reduce the budget enough to pay for it."
But that's, um, nonsense (there's a better word, but I try to maintain the same standards as a "family newspaper" on this blog). It's nonsense when it comes from Bishop, just as it is nonsense when it comes from the Governor's office.

In another excellent story, from Interlochen Public Radio, about the end of Michigan's Family Group Decision Making program, the head of the DHS office in Grand Traverse County (long one of the state's most regressive) says much the same thing.

But while some things are being cut to close a big budget deficit, that's not the reason for the cuts in prevention and family preservation. As is documented in detail in NCCPR's reports on Michigan child welfare, those cuts are being made to finance big rate increases for the powerful private agencies that institutionalize children - almost always needlessly – in Michigan. And the cuts are going to finance a child abuse investigator/foster care worker hiring binge most of which is not, in fact, required by Michigan's class action lawsuit settlement.

The settlement between Michigan and the group that so arrogantly calls itself "Children's Rights," says caseloads need to be lower – but that's far more likely to happen if you spend more on prevention and family preservation programs that keep children out of the foster care system. As it stands now, odds are the new workers are going to be investigating all the new cases that result from the budget cuts, and shoving a lot more children into foster care, leaving Michigan with the same lousy system only bigger.

Illinois also operates under a class-action settlement, and Illinois also faced draconian cuts in child welfare services. But the ACLU of Illinois, which brought that lawsuit, went back to court and won an order from a federal judge barring implementation of what have been called "doomsday" budget cuts. The head of the Illinois child welfare agency himself testified about the harm the cuts would do.

Compare that to Michigan where DHS director Ismael Ahmed is swinging the ax himself, and, as far as I can tell, CR has neither gone to court nor used its high powered PR machine to even speak out against the cuts. UPDATE, JULY 2: CR Just announced it is fighting similar cuts in Connecticut. So why the silence about Michigan?

What a difference leadership makes.

And speaking of leadership: The Michigan cuts certainly don't say much for the effectiveness of the state's giant Child Welfare Improvement Task Force and its get-along-go-along-let's-all-sing-kumbaya-with-Ismael-Ahmed approach to advocacy.

Perhaps if they'd been a little more, oh, I don't know – "inflammatory"?

A truce in Michigan’s war against grandparents

Give the Michigan Department of Human Services and the group that calls itself Children's Rights credit – because this time they deserve it. The Detroit News reports that DHS is revising a policy that could have forced thousands of foster children now in kinship care out of the homes of their grandparents and other relatives. And that couldn't have happened without CR agreeing to it.

As discussed previously on this Blog and in our first report on Michigan child welfare, the consent decree between CR and DHS originally required that all relatives providing kinship care become formally licensed. That meant complying with ten single-spaced pages of requirements, most of them unrelated to health or safety. Indeed, as we noted at the time, the home in Hawaii where President Obama was raised by his grandmother probably could not have met all the licensing requirements. The licensing rule was retroactive, raising the specter of thousands of children being kicked out of the homes of loving grandparents.

Now that won't happen.

There are lots of reasons for the change, including the fact that NCCPR has been raising hell about the problem for months. Of course DHS and CR will deny that this had anything to do with the change. Indeed, DHS already is saying it's not a change, it's a clarification. That's fine. They can call it a kangaroo for all I care – just as long as the change – er, clarification - means the children can stay with their grandparents.

NCCPR’s second Michigan report is now available online

Our second comprehensive report on Michigan child welfare, and all of our other Michigan publications, are available here.