Foster care in dairyland: CR brings its war against grandparents to Wisconsin

When 13-month-old Christopher Thomas of Milwaukee was beaten to death by the aunt who was caring for him, everyone familiar with child welfare in Wisconsin saw it as a tragedy.  That includes the people at the group which so arrogantly calls itself Children’s Rights.  For all their many faults, there’s no question they care deeply about vulnerable children.

But, it seems, CR also saw the death as something else: an opportunity to bring its war against grandparents to Wisconsin.  And, sadly, it is succeeding.

This week CR issued a report which, by their standards, was practically gleeful in recounting the big new bureaucratic hurdles the state has put in the way of grandparents and other relatives who come forward to take in children through kinship foster care.

As has been noted often on this blog, there is a wealth of research showing that kinship foster care is more stable, better for children’s well-being and, most important, safer than what should properly be called stranger care.  And there is no evidence that these benefits are any greater, or any less, if the grandparent or other relative is “licensed.”

But for an organization as enamored of bureaucracy as CR, licensure is the Holy Grail.  All over the country, CR has been trying to force grandparents to comply with the same licensing regulations required of strangers.

The problem, of course, is that just as most parents who lose children to foster care are poor, so are most grandparents.  But licensing regulations typically are geared more to middle class creature comforts than to health and safety.  So poor people can’t always meet all of them.  CR’s response boils down to: Who cares?  If you can’t comply with a plethora of bureaucratic regulations you can’t possibly be any good as a caretaker.

Not that CR says that, of course. They always point to how the pages of new bureaucratic regulations they want to impose include exceptions – but those exceptions are extremely hard to get. 

This can be seen in Michigan, where CR’s obsession with licensing has forced at least 1,500 children to be expelled from the homes of grandparents and other relatives – and no one is tracking what happened to them.

Wisconsin, in contrast, had been sensibly flexible about all this – until the death of Christopher Thomas prompted the state to impose an astoundingly byzantine licensing scheme. 

Now, Wisconsin doesn’t just have licenses for grandparents, it has five separate levels of licensing.  And don’t even think of taking in a level 3 child if you’ve only got a level 2 license!  But wait, there’s more: A process for granting “exceptions” that is so complex it requires creation of an “exceptions panel” to rule on requests.  It also requires that any grandparent who wins an exception from a regulation create her or his own specially- approved alternate means of complying with “the intent of the requirement.”  On the other hand, that’s not required if grandma seeks a “waiver” instead of an “exception.”  (There is no mention of whether there is a “waiver panel” or if the “exceptions panel” is empowered to handle waivers as well).  The regulations also impose an exhaustive regimen of training on grandparents who are likely to be pretty exhausted to begin with from suddenly being called upon to take in the children.

Since this is every bureaucrat’s dream, CR’s director, Marcia Lowry must be in heaven! 

Well, not quite.  It seems there’s still a loophole or two. 

For one thing, although every kinship foster parent must apply to be licensed, they don’t actually have to receive a license.  Under some circumstances, if the relatives find the process too burdensome or too overwhelming; or if they’re simply is too suspicious of the child welfare agency to want to be under its thumb, they can withdraw from the process.  They won’t get nearly as much in payments to help defray the costs of raising their children, but it remains their option.  The agency then decides if the love the relatives have shown is more important than meeting every technicality required for licensure.

And, in an indication of just how onerous licensure has become under CR’s grand scheme, 57 percent of the first group to go through the process, 194 in all, dropped out.

What is CRs response?  Do they consider that maybe, just maybe, the whole licensing process, geared to young, middle class strangers, is too burdensome for older, impoverished relatives?  Of course not.  CR demands that the loophole be closed and those who drop out not be allowed to keep the children in their care unless a court approves.  Of course CR knows full well that every judge is thinking: “If I approve this and something goes wrong, I’ll be blamed for causing ‘the next Christopher Thomas.’”  It’s going to be hard enough to get agencies to show the wisdom and courage to allow unlicensed relatives to keep the children, let alone get a judge to approve.

Or consider this classic example of the CR mindset:  Common sense says that if Aunt Jane and Uncle Joe are willing to take in their nephew, and their mother, Grandma Sally also lives in the home that’s an extra benefit.  But CR says it may be a threat.  So not only must Jane and Joe get medical examinations and have a medical professional provide a written statement that they have no physical or mental problems that could affect their ability to care for the child, Grandma Sally has to go through this as well.

The State of Wisconsin did allow an exception if Grandma Sally has no health insurance (not every grandma is old enough for Medicare) and can’t afford it.  CR’s response: Close that loophole!  Damn the expense to the family!  Sally is way too much of a risk to be allowed in that house until a medical professional checks her out!

No wonder, as noted in the previous post to this Blog, the new commissioner of the Department of Children and Families in Connecticut wants to move in precisely the opposite direction.

As I’ve noted before on this Blog, there can be real advantages to licensing both to states and to relatives themselves.  That’s why states should encourage licensing and help relatives to meet licensing standards.  It is not, however, reason enough to threaten the stability of children living with loving relatives.

So what can we expect in the future in Wisconsin?  Sadly, it’s likely to be another mass expulsion of children from the homes of grandparents and other relatives in the name of CR’s obsession with licensing and bureaucracy.  Soon, there is likely to be another state full of children wronged by “Children’s Rights.”

POSTSCRIPT: If you want to see exactly what Marcia Lowry and her minions at CR will never understand about love and family and kinship check out this story from the CBS Evening News.  Could anything be worse than some bureaucrat showing up at their door and taking the children away because of some picayune licensing requirement?

Foster care in Connecticut: Will you-know-who undermine real reform?

Connecticut is the great underachiever in child welfare.  Year after year, the state spends on child welfare at one of the highest rates in the country, and year after year the system produces lousy results for kids.

That’s because Connecticut spends the money in all the wrong ways.  First of all, as is discussed in detail in our report on Connecticut child welfare, the state takes away children at a rate 40 percent above the national average and more than double the rates in states widely-recognized as, relatively speaking, models for keeping children safe.

The problem is compounded by what happens after children are taken away.  Connecticut uses the worst form of care (and the most expensive), group homes and institutions, at one of the highest rates in the nation.  At the same time, it uses the least harmful form of substitute care, placing children with relatives instead of strangers, at one of the lowest rates.  Details are in NCCPR’s interactive database.

Now, the new Commissioner of the state Department of Children and Families, Joette Katz, is promising to change at least part of that – the part about kinship care.  And it’s clear she understands exactly what’s causing the problem.  According to a story from the non-profit news website Connecticut Mirror:

           

Katz blames the long list of agency regulations and requirements for families to take in a relative, which are identical to the requirements strangers have when fostering these children.

"I am not sure our rules make sense in every case. There's this catch-all. If Great Aunt Sally doesn't meet one requirement then that automatically eliminates her," said Katz. "Instead, we should be asking ourselves, 'Is this is something we can work around?' We need to start taking educated risks with the goal of keeping kids with relatives."

This long list of requirements ranges from ensuring that homes have working lights and heat to insisting on separate beds for same-sex relatives and separate bedrooms for opposite-sex relatives. Not all of them make sense when the issue is keeping children with their families, she says.

"It's punishing people for poverty. Lot's of people share bedrooms and they are fine," Katz said. "I am telling my [social] workers to start making more exceptions when they believe it makes sense, effective immediately... I will back their decisions."

Who in the word could be against that?  Who would be so obtuse – and so heartless – as to punish people for their poverty by insisting that grandparents comply with every single regulation used to license middle-class strangers, regulations often geared more to middle-class creature comforts than actual health and safety?

Quite possibly the same people who have had a consent decree in Connecticut for more than two decades – that’s who.

Yes, Katz may face a fight from Marcia Lowry and her minions at the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children’s Rights.  After all, CR is taking Michigan in precisely the opposite direction from where Katz wants Connecticut to go.  Under the consent decree CR foisted on Michigan, with rare and difficult-to-get exceptions, impoverished relatives have to comply with all the same hypertechnical licensing requirements as middle-class strangers.

The entirely-predictable result: At least 1,500 children have been kicked out of the homes of extended family members providing kinship care in Michigan – and no one is keeping track of what happened to them.

It’s happening because CR believes there is no problem in child welfare that can’t be solved with another form, another procedure or another bureaucratic requirement.  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.

So in her effort to finally do what’s best for Connecticut’s vulnerable children, Joette Katz may have quite a fight on her hands.  But my guess is Katz is up to it.  She is one of two justices on state supreme courts to leave those jobs this year to run state human services agencies.  The other is Maura Corrigan – in Michigan.  Perhaps Katz’s example will encourage Corrigan to put up a fight as well.

The best defense against needless foster care is – a good defense

            After speaking at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas last week, I was asked what would be the very first step I would take to reform child welfare systems if I could.  Of course I came up with two “first steps.”  One is to change financial incentives that encourage needless foster care and discourage better alternatives.

            The other is to provide high quality legal representation to parents who have lost or are at risk of losing their children to foster care.  Such programs are few and far between, but where they exist they have proven to save money and, more important, to save children.

            The most successful model typically teams lawyers with low caseloads with social workers who can do their own assessments and help prepare alternatives to the cookie-cutter-no-services “service plans” typically foisted upon families by child welfare agencies.  For each case there also is a parent advocate, typically a parent who has been through the system herself or himself.

            In Manhattan, for example, children represented using this model by the Center for Family Representation spend, on average, 73 percent less time in foster care than the average for foster children in New York City.  In half the cases, children never enter care at all, but instead stay at home with the services their families need.   The cost is from $4,000 to $6,600 per family – compared with anywhere from $18,000 and $49,000 per child to keep a child in foster care for a year in New York City.

           They’ve been doing it in a similar manner for some time now in many counties in Washington State.  The program, run by the Washington State Office of Public Defense, is so successful that even the lawyers who represent the state child welfare agency in these cases support it.  They found that when parents were innocent, there was no reason to tear apart their families; and when the reasons for removal were legitimate, competent lawyers with low caseloads and social work support could show parents exactly what they needed to do to get their children back – and make sure the parents got the help to do it.

            Between 2000 and 2003, of 144 cases in the program in which families were reunified, not one was brought back to court.  “These children aren’t coming back,” a former Washington State Supreme Court Justice, Bobbie Bridge, told a former newspaper, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, “and we do get them back when we make bad reunification decisions.”

And now, a new independent evaluation finds that the program shortens the time to reunification and also to adoption or guardianship when reunification really isn’t possible.

Supreme Court to hear the case for full Fourth Amendment rights for kids

           Tomorrow, the U.S. Supreme Court hears its first major child protective services case in more than 21 years.  We review the issues in our monthly Blog for Youth Today.  And there is a more detailed discussion of the case on this special website.

The day the shelter closed in North Platte, Nebraska

            I’ve written before about the seductive appeal of “shelters,” those first-stop parking places for children torn from their parents.  Shelters do the children great harm while turning them into human teddy bears for the benefit of the staff and volunteers.

            One of the many reasons they are so hard to close is the way shelter operators stoke the fears of timorous child welfare agency leaders by claiming that there simply is no alternative, and if they close there will be no place for the children.  So the bureaucrats decide they can’t possibly close the shelters until every “i” is dotted and every “t” is crossed on a grand plan to replace them.  That’s what is playing out right now in Rhode Island.

            But when you do that, the shelters never close.  Because as long as there’s an easy dumping ground, child welfare agencies will use it.

            That was aptly illustrated by what happened this year in North Platte, Nebraska.  Last month, the North Platte (Neb.) Bulletin, had a story about how the local parking place shelter was going to close.  The story was full of handwringing about how terrible this would be since, of course, every child really had to be in that shelter and there simply would be no place to put them without the shelter.   In fact, children overflow into shelters in Nebraska because years after year, Nebraska takes away children at one of the highest rates in the nation  - even higher than Rhode Island.

            Last week, the Bulletin ran a follow-up story.  It turns out, the shelter not only closed, but closed a little ahead of schedule (not because of enlightened public policy, the shelter operator just ran out of money).  Law enforcement is the first responder on calls alleging child abuse in Nebraska, and here’s what really happened, according to the local police chief:

We’re doing everything in our power to keep kids in their homes. If that isn’t possible for safety reasons, then we try to find a relative for the child to stay with.

            But wait.  Isn’t that what every agency involved in child protective services says they always do anyway?  But, of course, when there’s an easy out – dump the kid in a shelter – they don’t really look all that hard for better alternatives. 

In contrast, as I told the North Platte Bulletin:  When you take away the easy option of dumping the children in the shelter, everyone gets more creative about finding better options.

            We all know the famous movie line, “If you build it, they will come.” In child welfare, there’s a corollary: If you keep it open, they’ll never go.

“Graphic” evidence of foster care failure (and, occasionally, success)

It’s no secret to anyone who reads this Blog that NCCPR believes far too many children are in foster care.   We believe that, for the overwhelming majority of children whose families are investigated by child protective services agencies, including many children now taken from their homes, the best placement is no placement.  These children should be left in their own homes and their families should be given the help they need to keep their children safe.

But some children really do need to be placed in substitute care.  In those cases, not all “placement settings” are created equal.  In the overwhelming majority of cases, the least detrimental alternative, the one most likely to “cushion the blow” of foster care placement is placement with a relative, typically a grandparent.  This is commonly known as kinship foster care.  Study after study has  found that kinship care placements typically are more stable, better for children’s well-being and, most important, safer than what should properly be called “stranger care.”

At the other extreme, the worst form of care is “congregate care” – a group home or an institution – where the child is denied any family at all.

Every year, the federal government asks the states for a “snapshot” of how many children they have in these and other “placement settings” on September 30, the last day of the federal fiscal year.  But the federal government publishes only the national totals.  At one time the Child Welfare League of America compiled the state-by-state data and presented them in a database.  It’s one of the few useful things CWLA ever did.  Now they’ve stopped doing it.

So using the federal Freedom of Information Act, NCCPR has obtained the state-by-state totals for the most recent year available, 2009. We present them here.

As is so often the case in child welfare, the data reveal enormous variation among the states.  Wyoming, which has the worst record for congregate care, uses non-family care at more than seven times the rate of Oregon, which reports using it the least.  Hawaii, with the nation’s best record for using kinship care uses it at more than seven times the rate of Virginia, which has the worst record.

Courtesy of Data Revelations, which donated their services (I'm on good terms with the CEO), we are pleased to present the data as an interactive database, allowing readers to see the data in graphic form, and customize data elements.  Have a look.

UPDATED, FEB. 19: Foster care panic in Los Angeles: It’s been curbed, but it’s not over

ALSO: THE PARALLELS BETWEEN TIMES EDUCATION COVERAGE AND TIMES CHILD WELFARE COVERAGE KEEP GROWING

Ever since his shoddy reporting set off a foster-care panic in Los Angeles County, Garrett Therolf, the embattled reporter for the beleaguered Los Angeles Times, has taken an approach to the panic that boils down to “don’t ask, don’t tell.” 

With one exception, he appears not to have even asked the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services for data on entries into foster care – and DCFS hasn’t particularly wanted to tell.

(The exception: In one instance, Therolf responded to a comment I posted on the Times website by posting some entry data, even inviting readers to “judge for themselves.” But he’s never allowed readers of his actual stories to “judge for themselves” since, as far as I can tell, he’s never included the relevant data on entries in those stories.)

Since Therolf doesn’t seem to ask, and definitely won’t tell, NCCPR has obtained the information by filing requests under the California Public Records Act.

The first such request produced data showing that, during the first five months of the panic, August through December 2009, the number of children torn from their homes was 16 percent higher than during the same period in 2008.  In January, we filed another request, for data on entries into care in 2010.  Those data show that for the first full year of the panic – August 2009 through July 2010, removals were up seven percent over the previous 12 months. 

That’s better than other cities which have faced similar media-driven panics, but the main reason for that probably is a waiver from child welfare finance restrictions – the very waiver Therolf smeared in stories at the end of 2010.

We’ve updated our report on the Los Angeles foster care panic with all the new data – including month-by-month entry data for every month from January, 2006 through the most recent available, November 2010.  So at least readers of this Blog really can judge for themselves.

A FAMILIAR RESPONSE ON EDUCATION COVERAGE

Meanwhile, there’s more on the Times’ failures in covering education, the ones that so closely parallel their failures on the child welfare beat.  There’s a comprehensive account at WitnessLA.

As I discussed on this blog last week, the Times had published rankings of teachers in Los Angeles based on a formula linking teacher evaluations to student test scores.  The National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder did its own rankings which, it says, show the Times rankings are unreliable.  The Times then distorted NEPC’s position, claiming that the NEPC study actually “confirms the broad conclusions” of the Times’ stories.

Now the Times has issued two responses, one as part of a discussion of the issue from the paper’s ever-faithful “reader representative”; that one is available here.

In that one, Assistant Managing Editor David Lauter (yes, that David Lauter) says the Times spin was justified because both the Colorado study and the Times stories show that teachers have some kind of effect on student achievement.  Therefore, says Lauter, the Colorado study “confirms the broad conclusions” of the Times stories.

That’s like saying if I hand you a mushroom and say: “Eat this, you’ll really enjoy the taste” while a mushroom expert says: “If you eat that, it will kill you” the mushroom expert confirms my broad conclusion because we both agree the mushroom will have some kind of effect on you.

In a second response, discussed below, the Times gets mean and petulant.

In both responses, the Times attempts to change the subject, focusing on whose evaluation method is better.  But the real issue is how the Los Angeles Times tried to distort the debate.

Had the Times simply reported the NEPC findings without adding its own absurd spin,  allowed the relevant Times editors and the scholar they chose for their own evaluation to respond, and given readers the necessary information to, once again, judge for themselves,  there would be no controversy now.  Instead, the Times wrote a misleading story about the NEPC findings.  Then, when NEPC and others complained, the Times retreated into petulance and name calling.

So, in its unsigned statement, the Times says that anyone who disagrees with how they evaluated teacher performance doesn’t want any evaluation at all.  The Times statement declares that

[NEPC]’s claim boils down to this: Until a perfect value-added system is developed that everyone agrees upon, nothing should be published. We reject that idea.

And later:

For years, school districts around the country, as well as academic experts, have conducted value-added analyses of teacher performance which they have kept secret. With “Grading the Teachers,” we put this information before the public, with ample explanation of the method’s limitations. That, we submit, is exactly what a newspaper should do. [NEPC] would like to put this information back behind locked doors. We disagree.

In fact, as one of the NEPC researchers states in an e-mail reprinted by WitnessLA:

Our report was a critique of [the Times expert]’s white paper, not on the decision by the Times to write the story and publish the ratings. We say this explicitly on p.2 and our narrative is consistent with this.

To some of us this kind of immature bunker mentality at the Times is depressingly familiar.  When NCCPR and many others criticized Times child welfare coverage Lauter replied by declaring that  “presumably” we don’t want news organizations to cover “mismanagement or poor execution of policies.”

Presumably, then, if anyone criticizes how the Los Angeles Times covers any topic, the newspaper will dive into a bunker and declare that we don’t want the topic covered at all.


UPDATE: NEPC has posted its own detailed response to the latest claims from the Times.  It's available here.


UPDATE FEB. 19: Caroline Grannan, a former copy editor for the San Jose Mercury News, posted a great comment under the Times' unsigned statement defending its coverage.  The comment perfectly sums up the problems with the hubris that has infected parts of American journalism.  Ms. Grannan writes:

Even if all parties involved agreed that the original gauge was valid, the Times was still dead wrong to engage in the project. Determining or approving the design of a gauge to measure teachers, or any other profession outside their own, is beyond the scope of journalists. It's outside their skillset, beyond their role -- just all-around wrong.

The role of the press is to serve as messenger. With the teacher-rating series, the Times set itself up as judge and jury -- and, some would say, executioner. That's out of bounds. The Times needs to press reset; rethink its ethics, professional standards and journalistic role; and recant and apologize. The Times brings shame on the entire already-battered news industry with this mistake.