Seven years ago, this story appeared in the San Antonio Express News:
MARCH 31, 2000:
San Antonio Express-News
Ad campaign focuses on child abuse awareness; Injury by neglect increasing in S.A.
By Suzanne Hoholik
The TV commercial shows two young girls walking hand-in-hand along a city street, a dog rooting around a trash Dumpster behind them.
They're alone, with no adult supervision, and almost walk into oncoming traffic.
The message: leaving your children unattended is neglect - a crime.
"I think what most people don't realize is that neglect can be child abuse," said Marla Sheely, spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Protective and Regulatory Services. "Things that areas simple as leaving a child alone in the bathtub can
be dangerous and even deadly. I don't think parents realize that some simple things like that can be abuse."
TDPRS launched a three-year campaign Wednesday to heighten public awareness about child abuse and neglect. …
The one thing just about everyone in Texas agrees on is that, in the past seven years, there has been, at best, no improvement in child welfare. There are a lot of indications that things have gotten worse, especially in San Antonio. (For details see NCCPR’s report on child welfare in Texas).
So, after seven years of failure, what did authorities come up with this year?
APRIL 3, 2007:
San Antonio Express-News
Officials resolve to fight abuse of children
By: Nancy Martinez
A young woman in a wedding dress walks down the aisle professing her love for a man with a killer smile and a killer laugh. When she gets to the altar, she finds a tiny casket. "But who knew that he had killer hands?" she says.
Two women are shampooing their hair at a salon and talk about how a boy was wearing long sleeves to hide his bruises -- that it was hard to believe no one had reported his abuse to Child Protective Services.
Bexar County CPS officials shared the public service announcements Monday with about 150 state, county, city and CPS officials Monday to kick off Child Abuse Prevention Month. The announcements will be broadcast locally to encourage people to pay attention to signs of child abuse and to report their suspicions.
The awareness campaign kicked off the way it does every year, with officials vowing -- in vague terms, generic pledges and poetic declarations -- that child abuse must stop. …
Wednesday, April 4, 2007
Sunday, April 1, 2007
Some (still) unanswered questions in New York City
A high-powered panel spoke at the Hunter College School of Social Work last week on the topic “One Year Later: A Forum Reviewing the Status of Child Welfare in New York City.” (When it comes to child welfare, nobody in New York City has to ask: “One year later than what?”)
There was the city’s “Public Advocate,” Betsy Gotbaum, who co-hosted the event and who has never missed a chance to exploit a child abuse tragedy. The commissioner of the Administration for Children’s Services, John Mattingly was present. So was Brooklyn Family Court Judge Susan Danoff. Also taking part, one of the city’s most astute advocates, Ilze Earner of the Immigrants and Child Welfare Project, and one of the system’s most perceptive critics, Andrew White of the Center for New York City Affairs. White edits the center’s Child Welfare Watch reports.
I wasn’t there, but from what I hear, a lot of important questions were not asked. Before getting to those questions, a few caveats:
● ACS is a much better agency than it was in the first years after Elisa Izquierdo died in late 1995. In fact, in spite of everything that’s happened, it’s a much better agency than its predecessor was before Elisa Izquierdo died. Mayor Bloomberg, John Mattingly and Commissioner Mattingly’s predecessors, William Bell and Nicholas Scoppetta, deserve a lot of credit for that.
● ACS is a much better agency than most of its big city and big state counterparts and that, also, is largely a function of good leadership.
● In the year since Nixzmary Brown died, the courage Mayor Bloomberg has shown in not pulling the plug on reform, not firing Mattingly, and not issuing demagogic calls for a foster-care panic, has been extraordinary. (One need only compare him to his counterpart in Philadelphia to see how much worse things could be).
● Commissioner Mattingly deserves enormous credit for pushing ahead with important long-term reforms, of which the recently-announced change in financial incentives (see the previous entry in this Blog) is only the latest. He’s also letting contracts for institutional providers of defense counsel for families, reducing the proportion of children in the worst forms of placement, group homes and institutions, and making progress in increasing kinship placements, an area where New York has lagged behind other progressive systems. (Commissioner Mattingly came to the job from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which helps to fund NCCPR).
All that said, there are still some things I hope someone asks the next time a reporter runs into someone who was on this panel:
To Public Advocate Gotbaum:
● You say there should be an independent ombudsman’s job created to watch over child welfare. Were you aware that one existed – in your own office - the day you walked in the door? The office was created by your predecessor as Public Advocate, Mark Green. It was run by a very capable leader, Hank Orenstein. Did you know Orenstein ran what was probably, at the time, the best such office in the country? Why didn’t you keep him? Why not bring him back? Why not at least put his office’s outstanding reports back on your website?
To Judge Danoff:
● Before becoming commissioner, John Mattingly served on a panel of national experts created by a settlement of a lawsuit against the city child welfare system. At that time, Mattingly co-authored a report which found that judges, with remarkable candor, said they rubber-stamped ACS decisions to remove children even when they felt ACS hadn’t made a good case - because they were afraid of what would happen to their own careers if they sent a child home and something went wrong. Have you ever done that?
To Comimssioner Mattingly:
● ACS has bragged that even as the number of children entering care has soared, the number in care on any given day has remained about the same. That raises the possibility that there is a lot of churning going on – children taken away, perhaps because of a hair-trigger mentality, then ACS realizes it was a mistake and sends the children home in a matter of weeks or months, much the worse for the experience.
At one point, before Nixzmary Brown died, you said you wanted to target cases in which children were in care for three months or less to see if there were ways to avoid placement. Has the proportion of such cases increased? If so, does that suggest some of these removals are not necessary? If not, what accounts for so many new entries and little increase in the total number of children in care?
● Ever since Nixzmary Brown died, ACS has maintained that there was no increase in needless removals because the ratio of removals to reports alleging maltreatment did not change. But that is no longer the case. According to the most recent Mayor’s Management Report, from July through October 2006, the number of reports increased 27 percent over the same months in 2005. But the number of removals increased 52 percent. So is the reverse also true – if removals are increasing faster than reports, does that mean some of these removals were not necessary?
● Schools, in particular, are now said to be a major source of a huge number of false reports and trivial reports. Those reports subject children to enormous trauma when their families are investigated, and drain away resources from finding children in real danger. Yet Mayor Bloomberg’s nonstop message can be boiled down to: Turn in anyone and everyone for anything and everything, and let ACS sort it out. How much collateral damage, in the form of traumatic child abuse investigations, should children have to endure as a result of such a policy? And doesn’t this also simply overload your own workers, reducing the chances that they will find children in real danger?
● If you were an inner-city parent who wanted to, say, challenge your child’s special education plan, could you honestly say you wouldn’t feel afraid to do so, given the speed with which some schools reportedly are using calls to ACS as a weapon? What about cases where a school official is not trying to coerce anyone, but is simply afraid for his own job if he doesn’t make a call, even when he believes it is absurd to do so? Will mandated reporters ever be taught what not to report, as well as what to report?
To anyone who wants to answer:
● Does the rate of deaths of children previously known to ACS tell us anything about overall child safety or not?
If the answer is yes:
● Why did deaths get so much attention toward the end of 2005, even before Nixzmary Brown died, when the rate of such deaths was, sadly, not unusual, yet there has been far less attention now, even though we know that such deaths increased by 50 percent, to a record high of 45 in 2006, even as removals of children increased significantly?
If the answer is no:
● Same follow up question.
There was the city’s “Public Advocate,” Betsy Gotbaum, who co-hosted the event and who has never missed a chance to exploit a child abuse tragedy. The commissioner of the Administration for Children’s Services, John Mattingly was present. So was Brooklyn Family Court Judge Susan Danoff. Also taking part, one of the city’s most astute advocates, Ilze Earner of the Immigrants and Child Welfare Project, and one of the system’s most perceptive critics, Andrew White of the Center for New York City Affairs. White edits the center’s Child Welfare Watch reports.
I wasn’t there, but from what I hear, a lot of important questions were not asked. Before getting to those questions, a few caveats:
● ACS is a much better agency than it was in the first years after Elisa Izquierdo died in late 1995. In fact, in spite of everything that’s happened, it’s a much better agency than its predecessor was before Elisa Izquierdo died. Mayor Bloomberg, John Mattingly and Commissioner Mattingly’s predecessors, William Bell and Nicholas Scoppetta, deserve a lot of credit for that.
● ACS is a much better agency than most of its big city and big state counterparts and that, also, is largely a function of good leadership.
● In the year since Nixzmary Brown died, the courage Mayor Bloomberg has shown in not pulling the plug on reform, not firing Mattingly, and not issuing demagogic calls for a foster-care panic, has been extraordinary. (One need only compare him to his counterpart in Philadelphia to see how much worse things could be).
● Commissioner Mattingly deserves enormous credit for pushing ahead with important long-term reforms, of which the recently-announced change in financial incentives (see the previous entry in this Blog) is only the latest. He’s also letting contracts for institutional providers of defense counsel for families, reducing the proportion of children in the worst forms of placement, group homes and institutions, and making progress in increasing kinship placements, an area where New York has lagged behind other progressive systems. (Commissioner Mattingly came to the job from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which helps to fund NCCPR).
All that said, there are still some things I hope someone asks the next time a reporter runs into someone who was on this panel:
To Public Advocate Gotbaum:
● You say there should be an independent ombudsman’s job created to watch over child welfare. Were you aware that one existed – in your own office - the day you walked in the door? The office was created by your predecessor as Public Advocate, Mark Green. It was run by a very capable leader, Hank Orenstein. Did you know Orenstein ran what was probably, at the time, the best such office in the country? Why didn’t you keep him? Why not bring him back? Why not at least put his office’s outstanding reports back on your website?
To Judge Danoff:
● Before becoming commissioner, John Mattingly served on a panel of national experts created by a settlement of a lawsuit against the city child welfare system. At that time, Mattingly co-authored a report which found that judges, with remarkable candor, said they rubber-stamped ACS decisions to remove children even when they felt ACS hadn’t made a good case - because they were afraid of what would happen to their own careers if they sent a child home and something went wrong. Have you ever done that?
To Comimssioner Mattingly:
● ACS has bragged that even as the number of children entering care has soared, the number in care on any given day has remained about the same. That raises the possibility that there is a lot of churning going on – children taken away, perhaps because of a hair-trigger mentality, then ACS realizes it was a mistake and sends the children home in a matter of weeks or months, much the worse for the experience.
At one point, before Nixzmary Brown died, you said you wanted to target cases in which children were in care for three months or less to see if there were ways to avoid placement. Has the proportion of such cases increased? If so, does that suggest some of these removals are not necessary? If not, what accounts for so many new entries and little increase in the total number of children in care?
● Ever since Nixzmary Brown died, ACS has maintained that there was no increase in needless removals because the ratio of removals to reports alleging maltreatment did not change. But that is no longer the case. According to the most recent Mayor’s Management Report, from July through October 2006, the number of reports increased 27 percent over the same months in 2005. But the number of removals increased 52 percent. So is the reverse also true – if removals are increasing faster than reports, does that mean some of these removals were not necessary?
● Schools, in particular, are now said to be a major source of a huge number of false reports and trivial reports. Those reports subject children to enormous trauma when their families are investigated, and drain away resources from finding children in real danger. Yet Mayor Bloomberg’s nonstop message can be boiled down to: Turn in anyone and everyone for anything and everything, and let ACS sort it out. How much collateral damage, in the form of traumatic child abuse investigations, should children have to endure as a result of such a policy? And doesn’t this also simply overload your own workers, reducing the chances that they will find children in real danger?
● If you were an inner-city parent who wanted to, say, challenge your child’s special education plan, could you honestly say you wouldn’t feel afraid to do so, given the speed with which some schools reportedly are using calls to ACS as a weapon? What about cases where a school official is not trying to coerce anyone, but is simply afraid for his own job if he doesn’t make a call, even when he believes it is absurd to do so? Will mandated reporters ever be taught what not to report, as well as what to report?
To anyone who wants to answer:
● Does the rate of deaths of children previously known to ACS tell us anything about overall child safety or not?
If the answer is yes:
● Why did deaths get so much attention toward the end of 2005, even before Nixzmary Brown died, when the rate of such deaths was, sadly, not unusual, yet there has been far less attention now, even though we know that such deaths increased by 50 percent, to a record high of 45 in 2006, even as removals of children increased significantly?
If the answer is no:
● Same follow up question.
Sunday, March 25, 2007
A New York Daily News series gets results -- 32 years later
Many people familiar with NCCPR know that I used to be a reporter, and it was my reporting on child welfare that led me first to write a book on the topic (Wounded Innocents, (Prometheus Books: 1990, 1995) and then into advocacy. And some journalists know that I covered my first child welfare story as a journalism student in 1976.
What I have not had occasion to mention before is one of the things that got me so interested in the topic: A May, 1975 five-part series in the New York Daily News, the first installment of which ran under the headline “Big Money, Little Victims.”
The series was full of genuinely shocking revelations about New York City children trapped in foster care and the sometimes-appalling conditions in which they lived. But that wasn’t new. What set this series apart was how reporters William Heffernan and Stewart Ain connected the dots, and traced the problems back to financial incentives - specifically the fact that private agencies which, then as now, handle almost all foster care in New York City, were paid for every day they kept a child in their “care.” Send the child home, or get the child adopted, and the money stopped.
Among the findings:
● “…[M]any private [child welfare] agencies regularly deny thousands of children the chance of finding permanent homes so that they can continue to collect millions of dollars each year in city child support payments.”
●“…[C]hildren … have become the lifeblood of these private agencies, which thrive on the millions of dollars the city pumps into them each year. These agencies systematically keep the children in their jurisdiction so that a constant level of government funding is maintained.”
The series documented how children were held in foster care needlessly, with no help for birth families and no moves to get them adopted. It documented the enormous power of the private agencies with their blue-chip boards of directors filled with prominent members of the city’s business, civic and religious elite, and how they effectively ran child welfare in New York with almost unlimited power and no accountability – a perfect example of what the late Jack Newfield called “the permanent government.”
The series documented the role of financial incentives in telling detail, complete with at least one “smoking memo” in which an agency acknowledged that it preferred collecting per diems day after day to the one-time flat fee which existed at the time for getting a child adopted.
I still think this series is the second thing anyone interested in learning about child welfare in New York should read – right after they finish New York Times reporter Nina Bernstein’s magnificent book The Lost Children of Wilder (Pantheon: 2001).
From time to time since 1975, another revelation would surface, like the deposition in a 1990 lawsuit in which a social worker said that “I have been advised by a foster-care agency caseworker that her facility has imposed a three-month moratorium on discharges, because it was not receiving sufficient referrals to fill its beds.”
And from time to time, the city would try to change the per diem system, only to have pilot projects scrapped by the power of the private agencies and their onetime opponent-turned-ally, Marcia Lowry of Children’s Rights Inc.
But in all the time since “Big Money, Little Victims,” no newspaper I know of, in New York City or elsewhere, ever again zeroed in on the crucial issue of financial incentives.
There is nothing more important in child welfare reform than changing financial incentives. When I offered 35 recommendations for change in my book, number one was: Change the financial incentives. In fact, on any “top ten” list, changing financial incentives should be one through nine.
Now, at last, New York City is trying again. According to a story in Thursday’s New York Times, The Administration for Children’s Services plans to replace per diem reimbursement with a formula giving private agencies a flat amount based on what they’re getting now. The agencies would get far more flexibility concerning how to spend that money, so they could use more of it to help families get their children back, and to help foster families take care of children who otherwise would have to go into group homes and institutions – options that are both more expensive and far worse for children. The agencies also would estimate the cost savings from reducing the use of those group homes and institutions, and ACS would pass those savings on to the agencies to use to bolster services. ACS says that means that for most agencies, their budgets would increase 15 to 20 percent in the first year they join the program.
In addition, ACS will revamp the way private agencies are monitored, stationing specially-trained city workers at the agencies both to see how those agencies really perform and to help them do their jobs better.
That Times story alludes briefly to the fact that Illinois saw success through changing financial incentives. Here’s what happened: The foster care population statewide fell from more than 50,000 in 1997 to under 17,000 today. Independent court-appointed monitors (put in place because of a consent decree) found that as foster care plummeted, child safety improved.
It’s a bold, courageous move for any child welfare agency, but especially for an agency that has been under as much pressure as ACS. And it is another indication that for all its failings in how it responded to the death of Nixzmary Brown and other tragedies, failings I’ll discuss next week, ACS remains far better than most of its big-city counterparts. (The current ACS Commissioner, John Mattingly, formerly worked for the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which helps to fund NCCPR).
Indeed, it is easier to implement a change like this when the number of children taken from their parents is falling. In New York City it is rising. That ACS is moving ahead with this reform also makes me hope they feel the surge in removals has peaked.
But this change won’t come easily.
Hell hath no fury like an agency denied its per diems. And the scare tactics already have begun. Not that anyone is saying no to changing financial incentives. As usual, they’re trying to “yes, but…” it to death.
Marcia Lowry, who once was a leader in making systems more progressive and now leads efforts to hold them back, raises the specter that agencies won’t take more difficult children. But there is just as much incentive to try to avoid such cases under a per diem system – there’s even a name for it, “creaming,” as in skimming the cream. And ACS has made creaming more difficult than it used to be.
The head of the trade association for the city’s private agencies already is hinting darkly that under this system his agencies might feel pressured to return children home too soon.
How odd. In all the decades that they’ve operated under a per diem system these same agencies have insisted that money never, ever affects their decisions, and they never would even think of holding onto a child for too long. In fact, New York’s existing system for monitoring agencies penalizes them if too many children they return home have to come back into foster care. And, if anything, the new monitoring system is likely to reduce errors in all directions.
So here’s what to expect:
If they can’t stop the new system, the private agencies will lie low for a year or so, and then start a whispering campaign. They’ll blame every death of a child “known to the system” on how they supposedly were pressured to return that child home too soon.
They will base this smear campaign on the assumption that reporters and the public have very short memories. They’ll assume that everyone will forget that the number of such deaths hit a record of 45 in 2006. That’s up 50 percent over 2005 – and of course that was before any change in the per diem system.
Even such a large change over just one year can be a fluke. But I can’t see how one can have it both ways – either fatalities tell you something about overall system performance, or they don’t. (It’s not so much ACS that wants to have it both ways as it is a certain large, influential news organization).
The deaths “come at a time when” the city is taking away significantly more children than the previous year, which, one would think might “raise questions about” all those additional removals, but that’s another story — one I’ll get to next week.
Oh, and to William Heffernan, who now is a novelist, and Stewart Ain, now at The Jewish Week – congratulations. Looks like that series finally got results.
What I have not had occasion to mention before is one of the things that got me so interested in the topic: A May, 1975 five-part series in the New York Daily News, the first installment of which ran under the headline “Big Money, Little Victims.”
The series was full of genuinely shocking revelations about New York City children trapped in foster care and the sometimes-appalling conditions in which they lived. But that wasn’t new. What set this series apart was how reporters William Heffernan and Stewart Ain connected the dots, and traced the problems back to financial incentives - specifically the fact that private agencies which, then as now, handle almost all foster care in New York City, were paid for every day they kept a child in their “care.” Send the child home, or get the child adopted, and the money stopped.
Among the findings:
● “…[M]any private [child welfare] agencies regularly deny thousands of children the chance of finding permanent homes so that they can continue to collect millions of dollars each year in city child support payments.”
●“…[C]hildren … have become the lifeblood of these private agencies, which thrive on the millions of dollars the city pumps into them each year. These agencies systematically keep the children in their jurisdiction so that a constant level of government funding is maintained.”
The series documented how children were held in foster care needlessly, with no help for birth families and no moves to get them adopted. It documented the enormous power of the private agencies with their blue-chip boards of directors filled with prominent members of the city’s business, civic and religious elite, and how they effectively ran child welfare in New York with almost unlimited power and no accountability – a perfect example of what the late Jack Newfield called “the permanent government.”
The series documented the role of financial incentives in telling detail, complete with at least one “smoking memo” in which an agency acknowledged that it preferred collecting per diems day after day to the one-time flat fee which existed at the time for getting a child adopted.
I still think this series is the second thing anyone interested in learning about child welfare in New York should read – right after they finish New York Times reporter Nina Bernstein’s magnificent book The Lost Children of Wilder (Pantheon: 2001).
From time to time since 1975, another revelation would surface, like the deposition in a 1990 lawsuit in which a social worker said that “I have been advised by a foster-care agency caseworker that her facility has imposed a three-month moratorium on discharges, because it was not receiving sufficient referrals to fill its beds.”
And from time to time, the city would try to change the per diem system, only to have pilot projects scrapped by the power of the private agencies and their onetime opponent-turned-ally, Marcia Lowry of Children’s Rights Inc.
But in all the time since “Big Money, Little Victims,” no newspaper I know of, in New York City or elsewhere, ever again zeroed in on the crucial issue of financial incentives.
There is nothing more important in child welfare reform than changing financial incentives. When I offered 35 recommendations for change in my book, number one was: Change the financial incentives. In fact, on any “top ten” list, changing financial incentives should be one through nine.
Now, at last, New York City is trying again. According to a story in Thursday’s New York Times, The Administration for Children’s Services plans to replace per diem reimbursement with a formula giving private agencies a flat amount based on what they’re getting now. The agencies would get far more flexibility concerning how to spend that money, so they could use more of it to help families get their children back, and to help foster families take care of children who otherwise would have to go into group homes and institutions – options that are both more expensive and far worse for children. The agencies also would estimate the cost savings from reducing the use of those group homes and institutions, and ACS would pass those savings on to the agencies to use to bolster services. ACS says that means that for most agencies, their budgets would increase 15 to 20 percent in the first year they join the program.
In addition, ACS will revamp the way private agencies are monitored, stationing specially-trained city workers at the agencies both to see how those agencies really perform and to help them do their jobs better.
That Times story alludes briefly to the fact that Illinois saw success through changing financial incentives. Here’s what happened: The foster care population statewide fell from more than 50,000 in 1997 to under 17,000 today. Independent court-appointed monitors (put in place because of a consent decree) found that as foster care plummeted, child safety improved.
It’s a bold, courageous move for any child welfare agency, but especially for an agency that has been under as much pressure as ACS. And it is another indication that for all its failings in how it responded to the death of Nixzmary Brown and other tragedies, failings I’ll discuss next week, ACS remains far better than most of its big-city counterparts. (The current ACS Commissioner, John Mattingly, formerly worked for the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which helps to fund NCCPR).
Indeed, it is easier to implement a change like this when the number of children taken from their parents is falling. In New York City it is rising. That ACS is moving ahead with this reform also makes me hope they feel the surge in removals has peaked.
But this change won’t come easily.
Hell hath no fury like an agency denied its per diems. And the scare tactics already have begun. Not that anyone is saying no to changing financial incentives. As usual, they’re trying to “yes, but…” it to death.
Marcia Lowry, who once was a leader in making systems more progressive and now leads efforts to hold them back, raises the specter that agencies won’t take more difficult children. But there is just as much incentive to try to avoid such cases under a per diem system – there’s even a name for it, “creaming,” as in skimming the cream. And ACS has made creaming more difficult than it used to be.
The head of the trade association for the city’s private agencies already is hinting darkly that under this system his agencies might feel pressured to return children home too soon.
How odd. In all the decades that they’ve operated under a per diem system these same agencies have insisted that money never, ever affects their decisions, and they never would even think of holding onto a child for too long. In fact, New York’s existing system for monitoring agencies penalizes them if too many children they return home have to come back into foster care. And, if anything, the new monitoring system is likely to reduce errors in all directions.
So here’s what to expect:
If they can’t stop the new system, the private agencies will lie low for a year or so, and then start a whispering campaign. They’ll blame every death of a child “known to the system” on how they supposedly were pressured to return that child home too soon.
They will base this smear campaign on the assumption that reporters and the public have very short memories. They’ll assume that everyone will forget that the number of such deaths hit a record of 45 in 2006. That’s up 50 percent over 2005 – and of course that was before any change in the per diem system.
Even such a large change over just one year can be a fluke. But I can’t see how one can have it both ways – either fatalities tell you something about overall system performance, or they don’t. (It’s not so much ACS that wants to have it both ways as it is a certain large, influential news organization).
The deaths “come at a time when” the city is taking away significantly more children than the previous year, which, one would think might “raise questions about” all those additional removals, but that’s another story — one I’ll get to next week.
Oh, and to William Heffernan, who now is a novelist, and Stewart Ain, now at The Jewish Week – congratulations. Looks like that series finally got results.
Sunday, March 18, 2007
One place where the news about child welfare is, mostly, good
That place is Maine, and nobody would have said that just six years ago.
Back in 2000, a little girl named Logan Marr was taken from her mother, Christy. Christy had some problems, but she had never harmed Logan nor had she allowed anyone else to harm her. Mostly, Christy’s problem was, she was poor.
Logan may have been abused in her first foster home. After that, Logan and her sister, Bailey, were moved to the home of Sally Schofield, herself a former caseworker for the child welfare agency.
In her searing account of the case, Logan’s Truth, award-winning independent journalist Terilyn Simpson published a letter that Christy wrote to Logan’s new foster mother:
Dear Sally,
My name is Christy. I'm Logan and Bailey's Mom. I'm writing this so you can know and understand my children. I thought I would let you know their likes and dislikes.
Logan - she likes butterflies, pizza (what kid doesn't?), flavored noodles, pitted black olives (she likes to put them on her fingers), white cheese, grape soda, Babes in Toyland (her favorite movie) the Cartoon Arthur. Logan's dislikes - peas, fish sticks, going to bed early, not picking out her clothes. Bailey's likes - her brown teddy bear blanket (she takes it everywhere, including visits), dry cereal, pitted black olives, cheese, eggs, cooked carrots.
Bailey's dislikes - having her poopie diaper changed (if you haven't noticed), someone taking her pacifier, fish sticks, someone feeding her (she likes to do it herself). Please ask [caseworker] Allison Peters what the kids are allergic to.
I don't blame you for not wanting me to know who you are, I will respect that. Regardless of what you have heard or read, I love my little ladies with all my heart. I have never hit, spanked or put my hands on my girls. I do respect my children. I'm not saying you would or wouldn't, but Please don't hit or hurt my children. The girls have already been through enough they don't need the added stress in their life.
Every night I look up at the sky about 7:45pm and say goodnight to my girls. In closing, I want to thank you for taking the time to read this. Please tell the girls before they go to bed I love them and give them a big hug and kiss. Thanks again!
--Christy
A few months later, Logan was dead.
Sally Schofield was convicted of taking Logan down to the basement and tying her to a high chair with 42 feet of duct tape. She died of asphyxiation. Logan’s story was told on the PBS series Frontline.
A month before she died, Logan could be heard on home video during a supervised visit complaining that her foster mother hurt her. Nothing was done. Indeed, at one point, the caseworker who was supposed to be supervising the placement sent an e-mail to Sally Schofield gloating about the prospect of terminating parental rights, so Logan could live with Schofield forever.
But I said this would be, mostly, a good news story.
At first the response to the death of Logan Marr was what it usually is when a child dies in foster care: The press focused on issues like whether there were enough visits by caseworkers to foster homes, were the licensing standards good enough, were background checks adequate, etc. Those are reasonable questions, and it’s understandable that they are the first to pop into people’s heads.
But whether a system will reform in the wake of a foster-care tragedy depends on whether journalists move on to the real problems. In Maine, that meant confronting a culture of child removal embedded in the child welfare agency. At the time Logan died, the proportion of children trapped in foster care in Maine was among the highest in the nation. But Maine was never the child abuse capital of America.
NCCPR began raising these questions – and the state’s newspapers began pursuing them. Two legislative committees held hearings, and one of them produced some good recommendations. An independent office of child welfare ombudsman was created, under the auspices of a leading state child advocacy group, the Maine Children’s Alliance.
At about the same time, a very good foster parent got fed up. Mary Callahan kept finding that the children placed with her could have remained in their own homes if only the birth parents had gotten the kind of aid she received as a foster parent. Already a published author, she decided to write a book about her experiences. It’s called Memoirs of a Baby Stealer (Pinewoods Press, 2003). She organized the Maine Alliance for DHS Accountability and Reform, a grassroots organization that demanded systemic change.
A new governor listened. Governor John Baldacci saw immediately what the problems were. He brought in new leadership. When a committee was formed to reorganize the human services agency, each member of the group found a copy of Callahan’s book at her or his place at the table. Her presentation to the committee is on NCCPR’s website.
A lot more committee work, and much frustration followed. Callahan describes it in an op ed column for the Bangor Daily News.
But the change has been remarkable and, by child welfare standards, remarkably swift.
● Since 2001, the number of children in foster care has dropped by one-third and the number of children taken from their homes each year is down 30 percent. More than a thousand children have been spared needless confinement to foster care.
● When children must be taken, far more are placed with extended family, which is better for children’s well-being and safer than what should properly be called “stranger care.”
● The proportion of children trapped in the worst form of care, institutions and group homes, has dropped from 28 percent to 18 percent.
● The independent child welfare ombudsman has found that the reduction in substitute care has come with no compromise of safety. He strongly supports the reforms.
There still is a long way to go. For example, that reduction in the proportion of children in group homes and institutions is a reduction from a rate that was 50 percent above the national average to a rate no worse than the national average. But the national average is, itself, too high.
And for some people, praising reform in Maine is like rubbing salt into a wound - -these are the people for whom reform came too late, or those it still hasn’t reached. Because every system still makes mistakes, in both directions. Every system leaves some children in dangerous homes and every system takes some children needlessly. What sets apart reformed systems, like Maine’s, is that the mistakes occur less often.
But what is good for vulnerable children can be bad for the industry that has grown up around them. With group homes closing and staff losing their jobs, the people running such places have launched a campaign of fear and smear, arguing that the pendulum has swung too far away from institutionalizing children.
In fact, as noted above, Maine has simply reduced the proportion of children in group homes and institutions from more than 50 percent above the national average to the national average, an average which is, itself, too high. If anything, the pendulum hasn’t swung far enough.
The most offensive argument from the group home industry is an unctuous claim that while they supposedly care only about children, the state allegedly is interested only in money. This from an industry scarfing up an average of $134,000 per child per year, paid on a per diem basis. The longer they hold onto a child, the more money they make.
Much has been said about the addiction problem in child welfare. But as I’ve noted before on this blog, the biggest addiction problem in child welfare is not substance-abusing parents, though that problem is serious and real. The biggest addiction problem is powerful, well-connected child welfare agencies that are addicted to their per-diem payments. And they are putting their addiction ahead of the children.
Six years ago, when NCCPR first criticized child welfare in Maine, the old leadership replied that Maine is a leader in human services. That’s true. Maine always has been in the forefront of helping its most vulnerable citizens, often setting an example for the nation. At the time, child welfare was a glaring exception.
On January 31, the sixth anniversary of the death of Logan Marr, NCCPR was able to add Maine to our short list of best practices around the country, Eleven Ways to do Child Welfare Right. Because now, thanks to the concerted efforts of state leaders, and the people of Maine, the state has a child welfare agency that is worthy of the state it serves.
I can’t believe anyone is going to let the selfishness of a few group home providers undo all that progress.
Back in 2000, a little girl named Logan Marr was taken from her mother, Christy. Christy had some problems, but she had never harmed Logan nor had she allowed anyone else to harm her. Mostly, Christy’s problem was, she was poor.
Logan may have been abused in her first foster home. After that, Logan and her sister, Bailey, were moved to the home of Sally Schofield, herself a former caseworker for the child welfare agency.
In her searing account of the case, Logan’s Truth, award-winning independent journalist Terilyn Simpson published a letter that Christy wrote to Logan’s new foster mother:
Dear Sally,
My name is Christy. I'm Logan and Bailey's Mom. I'm writing this so you can know and understand my children. I thought I would let you know their likes and dislikes.
Logan - she likes butterflies, pizza (what kid doesn't?), flavored noodles, pitted black olives (she likes to put them on her fingers), white cheese, grape soda, Babes in Toyland (her favorite movie) the Cartoon Arthur. Logan's dislikes - peas, fish sticks, going to bed early, not picking out her clothes. Bailey's likes - her brown teddy bear blanket (she takes it everywhere, including visits), dry cereal, pitted black olives, cheese, eggs, cooked carrots.
Bailey's dislikes - having her poopie diaper changed (if you haven't noticed), someone taking her pacifier, fish sticks, someone feeding her (she likes to do it herself). Please ask [caseworker] Allison Peters what the kids are allergic to.
I don't blame you for not wanting me to know who you are, I will respect that. Regardless of what you have heard or read, I love my little ladies with all my heart. I have never hit, spanked or put my hands on my girls. I do respect my children. I'm not saying you would or wouldn't, but Please don't hit or hurt my children. The girls have already been through enough they don't need the added stress in their life.
Every night I look up at the sky about 7:45pm and say goodnight to my girls. In closing, I want to thank you for taking the time to read this. Please tell the girls before they go to bed I love them and give them a big hug and kiss. Thanks again!
--Christy
A few months later, Logan was dead.
Sally Schofield was convicted of taking Logan down to the basement and tying her to a high chair with 42 feet of duct tape. She died of asphyxiation. Logan’s story was told on the PBS series Frontline.
A month before she died, Logan could be heard on home video during a supervised visit complaining that her foster mother hurt her. Nothing was done. Indeed, at one point, the caseworker who was supposed to be supervising the placement sent an e-mail to Sally Schofield gloating about the prospect of terminating parental rights, so Logan could live with Schofield forever.
But I said this would be, mostly, a good news story.
At first the response to the death of Logan Marr was what it usually is when a child dies in foster care: The press focused on issues like whether there were enough visits by caseworkers to foster homes, were the licensing standards good enough, were background checks adequate, etc. Those are reasonable questions, and it’s understandable that they are the first to pop into people’s heads.
But whether a system will reform in the wake of a foster-care tragedy depends on whether journalists move on to the real problems. In Maine, that meant confronting a culture of child removal embedded in the child welfare agency. At the time Logan died, the proportion of children trapped in foster care in Maine was among the highest in the nation. But Maine was never the child abuse capital of America.
NCCPR began raising these questions – and the state’s newspapers began pursuing them. Two legislative committees held hearings, and one of them produced some good recommendations. An independent office of child welfare ombudsman was created, under the auspices of a leading state child advocacy group, the Maine Children’s Alliance.
At about the same time, a very good foster parent got fed up. Mary Callahan kept finding that the children placed with her could have remained in their own homes if only the birth parents had gotten the kind of aid she received as a foster parent. Already a published author, she decided to write a book about her experiences. It’s called Memoirs of a Baby Stealer (Pinewoods Press, 2003). She organized the Maine Alliance for DHS Accountability and Reform, a grassroots organization that demanded systemic change.
A new governor listened. Governor John Baldacci saw immediately what the problems were. He brought in new leadership. When a committee was formed to reorganize the human services agency, each member of the group found a copy of Callahan’s book at her or his place at the table. Her presentation to the committee is on NCCPR’s website.
A lot more committee work, and much frustration followed. Callahan describes it in an op ed column for the Bangor Daily News.
But the change has been remarkable and, by child welfare standards, remarkably swift.
● Since 2001, the number of children in foster care has dropped by one-third and the number of children taken from their homes each year is down 30 percent. More than a thousand children have been spared needless confinement to foster care.
● When children must be taken, far more are placed with extended family, which is better for children’s well-being and safer than what should properly be called “stranger care.”
● The proportion of children trapped in the worst form of care, institutions and group homes, has dropped from 28 percent to 18 percent.
● The independent child welfare ombudsman has found that the reduction in substitute care has come with no compromise of safety. He strongly supports the reforms.
There still is a long way to go. For example, that reduction in the proportion of children in group homes and institutions is a reduction from a rate that was 50 percent above the national average to a rate no worse than the national average. But the national average is, itself, too high.
And for some people, praising reform in Maine is like rubbing salt into a wound - -these are the people for whom reform came too late, or those it still hasn’t reached. Because every system still makes mistakes, in both directions. Every system leaves some children in dangerous homes and every system takes some children needlessly. What sets apart reformed systems, like Maine’s, is that the mistakes occur less often.
But what is good for vulnerable children can be bad for the industry that has grown up around them. With group homes closing and staff losing their jobs, the people running such places have launched a campaign of fear and smear, arguing that the pendulum has swung too far away from institutionalizing children.
In fact, as noted above, Maine has simply reduced the proportion of children in group homes and institutions from more than 50 percent above the national average to the national average, an average which is, itself, too high. If anything, the pendulum hasn’t swung far enough.
The most offensive argument from the group home industry is an unctuous claim that while they supposedly care only about children, the state allegedly is interested only in money. This from an industry scarfing up an average of $134,000 per child per year, paid on a per diem basis. The longer they hold onto a child, the more money they make.
Much has been said about the addiction problem in child welfare. But as I’ve noted before on this blog, the biggest addiction problem in child welfare is not substance-abusing parents, though that problem is serious and real. The biggest addiction problem is powerful, well-connected child welfare agencies that are addicted to their per-diem payments. And they are putting their addiction ahead of the children.
Six years ago, when NCCPR first criticized child welfare in Maine, the old leadership replied that Maine is a leader in human services. That’s true. Maine always has been in the forefront of helping its most vulnerable citizens, often setting an example for the nation. At the time, child welfare was a glaring exception.
On January 31, the sixth anniversary of the death of Logan Marr, NCCPR was able to add Maine to our short list of best practices around the country, Eleven Ways to do Child Welfare Right. Because now, thanks to the concerted efforts of state leaders, and the people of Maine, the state has a child welfare agency that is worthy of the state it serves.
I can’t believe anyone is going to let the selfishness of a few group home providers undo all that progress.
Thursday, March 15, 2007
What are they smoking in Texas?
Perhaps you saw the videotape: Two boys, ages two and four, forced to smoke marijuana while their 17-year-old uncle who gave them the pot, and two other teenagers laughed – and recorded the entire scene. The uncle and the other teens are under arrest – and the children are in foster care.
Had the 17-year-old been the children’s father, and their only custodial parent, that would have been justified. The harm of foster care is likely to be less than the harm of leaving the children with someone who engages in calculated acts of cruelty.
But he was the children’s uncle -- and the children already had been made safe from him when he was arrested. According to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, which seems to be ahead of everyone else on this part of the story, the boys’ mother says she was napping in another room when it happened, and was shocked at what her brother did.
One can imagine any number of reasons for the mother taking a nap, ranging from scenarios that would make her equally irresponsible to the possibility that she was sleeping because she worked a night-shift job to make ends meet and it never occurred to her that her 17-year-old brother would do something like this.
So what should be the “default” position while Texas authorities figure this out?
● We know that children of this age almost always love their mothers and are tremendously attached to them.
● We know that when they are taken from their mothers there is no way to explain why; to them it might as well be a kidnapping.
● We know that they may well feel that they have done something wrong and now they are being punished.
● We know that they may recover from the trauma, or they may suffer from it forever.
● We know that Texas child protective services placed the children with total strangers, unable – or unwilling – immediately to find a relative to cushion the blow. (The agency says it’s looking for a relative now.)
We know all that harm is likely before we even get to little details like the likelihood the children will wind up bounced from foster home to foster home or the risk of abuse in foster care itself (probably about one in three nationally, one can only imagine the rate in Texas, which has been the scene of one scandal after another over abuse in foster care).
The risks on the other side:
● Even with her brother out of the house we don’t know if the children’s mother knew how irresponsible and cruel he was. So would she leave the children with some other unsuitable caretaker? Or did she really know what was going on and not care? Has this happened before?
No actual evidence has been produced to support any such speculation – but that’s still how CPS works.
So what alternative could CPS have used?
How about an Intensive Family Preservation Services (IFPS) intervention, in which a worker would be in that home several hours a day several days a week for up to six weeks? That doesn’t eliminate the alleged risks, but it significantly reduces them. These programs have a far better track record for safety than foster care. So then you need to weigh the relative risks: The well-known harm of foster care to the risk, even absent any known evidence, that the mother would be irresponsible when the IFPS worker wasn’t around.
In a rational system, the IFPS intervention should win hands down. In fact, for a child welfare agency to expose young children to all the known harm of foster care on these grounds, one has to ask: What are they smoking?
But, of course, this is the Texas system, one of the more chaotic in the nation, and one that is in the midst of its second foster-care panic since 1999. For details, see NCCPR’s report on Texas Child Welfare. (Although in fairness to Texas authorities, most systems would have the same take-the-child-and-run response to a high-profile case like this, not because it protects children, but because it protects the people who take away the children, who would have been painting targets on their backs had they done anything else).
But hey, at least the Texas Legislature has its priorities straight. On the same day this story was getting lots of play on cable news, Texas State Sen. Bob Durell was introducing a bill to restore the right of foster parents of severely emotionally disturbed children to keep guns in their homes. After all, it would be a tragedy if Dick Cheney were to retire to Texas only to discover he couldn’t be a foster parent.
THIS IS OUR FIRST POST AT BLOGSPOT, BUT THIS BLOG HAS BEEN AROUND FOR MORE THAN A YEAR. PREVIOUS POSTS ARE AVAILABLE AT WWW.NCCPR.ORG
Had the 17-year-old been the children’s father, and their only custodial parent, that would have been justified. The harm of foster care is likely to be less than the harm of leaving the children with someone who engages in calculated acts of cruelty.
But he was the children’s uncle -- and the children already had been made safe from him when he was arrested. According to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, which seems to be ahead of everyone else on this part of the story, the boys’ mother says she was napping in another room when it happened, and was shocked at what her brother did.
One can imagine any number of reasons for the mother taking a nap, ranging from scenarios that would make her equally irresponsible to the possibility that she was sleeping because she worked a night-shift job to make ends meet and it never occurred to her that her 17-year-old brother would do something like this.
So what should be the “default” position while Texas authorities figure this out?
● We know that children of this age almost always love their mothers and are tremendously attached to them.
● We know that when they are taken from their mothers there is no way to explain why; to them it might as well be a kidnapping.
● We know that they may well feel that they have done something wrong and now they are being punished.
● We know that they may recover from the trauma, or they may suffer from it forever.
● We know that Texas child protective services placed the children with total strangers, unable – or unwilling – immediately to find a relative to cushion the blow. (The agency says it’s looking for a relative now.)
We know all that harm is likely before we even get to little details like the likelihood the children will wind up bounced from foster home to foster home or the risk of abuse in foster care itself (probably about one in three nationally, one can only imagine the rate in Texas, which has been the scene of one scandal after another over abuse in foster care).
The risks on the other side:
● Even with her brother out of the house we don’t know if the children’s mother knew how irresponsible and cruel he was. So would she leave the children with some other unsuitable caretaker? Or did she really know what was going on and not care? Has this happened before?
No actual evidence has been produced to support any such speculation – but that’s still how CPS works.
So what alternative could CPS have used?
How about an Intensive Family Preservation Services (IFPS) intervention, in which a worker would be in that home several hours a day several days a week for up to six weeks? That doesn’t eliminate the alleged risks, but it significantly reduces them. These programs have a far better track record for safety than foster care. So then you need to weigh the relative risks: The well-known harm of foster care to the risk, even absent any known evidence, that the mother would be irresponsible when the IFPS worker wasn’t around.
In a rational system, the IFPS intervention should win hands down. In fact, for a child welfare agency to expose young children to all the known harm of foster care on these grounds, one has to ask: What are they smoking?
But, of course, this is the Texas system, one of the more chaotic in the nation, and one that is in the midst of its second foster-care panic since 1999. For details, see NCCPR’s report on Texas Child Welfare. (Although in fairness to Texas authorities, most systems would have the same take-the-child-and-run response to a high-profile case like this, not because it protects children, but because it protects the people who take away the children, who would have been painting targets on their backs had they done anything else).
But hey, at least the Texas Legislature has its priorities straight. On the same day this story was getting lots of play on cable news, Texas State Sen. Bob Durell was introducing a bill to restore the right of foster parents of severely emotionally disturbed children to keep guns in their homes. After all, it would be a tragedy if Dick Cheney were to retire to Texas only to discover he couldn’t be a foster parent.
THIS IS OUR FIRST POST AT BLOGSPOT, BUT THIS BLOG HAS BEEN AROUND FOR MORE THAN A YEAR. PREVIOUS POSTS ARE AVAILABLE AT WWW.NCCPR.ORG
Monday, October 16, 2006
Why foster care panics don't work in reverse
UPDATE: In the more than 11 years since this post first appeared there have been changes in several of the child welfare systems discussed. There has been backsliding from reform in Maine and, especially Missouri. In contrast, Butler County, Ohio, has embraced reform.
I write often about the phenomenon of “foster-care panic,” huge surges in removals of children following the high-profile death or serious injury of a child “known to the system.”
“Well, then,” reporters sometimes say, “It must work in reverse. If the child dies in foster care there must be a drop in removals.” The comment often comes with the not-very-subtle implication that, perhaps after a child dies in foster care workers become too reluctant to tear children from their parents.
Some reporters even assume this as fact without checking, or take the word of those who make such a claim, in part because it feeds into the longing of so many reporters for anything that smacks of a “swinging pendulum.”
But it’s not true. Foster-care panics almost never work in reverse.
On the contrary, no matter where a child dies, a high profile child abuse fatality is likely to lead to an increase in children taken from their homes.
After it was revealed that Rilya Wilson had been missing from her Florida foster home (and presumed dead) for fifteen months before anyone at the state Department of Children and Families noticed, there was an increase in removals of children from their homes.
And that’s what’s happening now in Butler County, Ohio. That’s where three-year-old Marcus Fiesel lived, until he was taken from his desperately overwhelmed mother. His foster parents are accused of tying Marcus up and leaving him in a sweltering closet. After Marcus died, the foster mother allegedly made up an elaborate story to fool authorities, while the foster father allegedly burned the body.
So what’s happened to the number of children taken from their homes in Butler County? According to a story in the Journal News, the newspaper based in the county seat of Hamilton, Ohio, it’s gone up. Way up.
That would be bad in any county, it’s worse in Butler, which has a long history of embracing a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare. Last week NCCPR released it’s Ohio Rate-of-Removal Index, comparing the propensity of counties in that state to take children from their parents. Only five counties took children at a higher rate than Butler. And that was in 2005 – before Marcus died.
But why does it happen? Why is it that when a child dies, allegedly at the hands of birth parents, removals go up, while when a child dies, allegedly at the hands of foster parents, removals go - - up?
Two reasons, I think.
Reason #1: When the birth parents did it, it’s easy to find a scapegoat. Typically one worker, or perhaps one worker and one supervisor, made the decision to leave the child in his or her own home. That means one or two people who can be fired, demoted, suspended, and/or raked over the coals in news accounts. Workers know this. That’s why when a case hits the paper, they become terrified that the next case will be one of theirs and they rush to take away more children.
In contrast, when the child dies in foster care the blame is more diffuse. The worker who removed the child often is not the one who chose the foster home. And even if she did, someone else had the responsibility to license the foster parents, so the worker who placed the children can’t be blamed. The licensing may have taken place years before, so that worker can’t be blamed either. And, for that matter, the foster parents who kill the child might be the second or third or fourth placement.
So when a child dies in foster care the response of caseworkers is the same: If I leave a child in his own home and something goes wrong, I’m the scapegoat; if another child dies in foster care, no one’s going to blame me.
The dynamic is compounded by –
Reason #2: the profound double standard in media coverage of “lessons learned.” When the birth parent is the culprit there is an immediate rush to blame “family preservation.” There is a ready supply of spokespeople, often from agencies that make their living off foster care, anxious to come forward and say, “See: This case proves that the state or county is doing too much to keep families together.” When the child dies in foster care it’s written off as an aberration, something that can be fixed with more frequent caseworker visits to foster homes or tightening of licensing standards and background checks.
Nowhere is the double standard more blatant than in Michigan right now. Three children have died in foster homes under suspicious circumstances in just over a year, two of them in just the past three months.
Had there been three such cases with birth parents as suspects one can easily imagine the fury on the editorial pages about the state’s allegedly excessive efforts to keep families together. But with three children dead in foster care, I have found no comment on any editorial page or from any columnist questioning whether Michigan is taking away too many children.
There are only two occasions I know of in which foster care panics worked “in reverse” – and both times children benefited enormously. One case was in Maine, where Logan Marr was taken needlessly from her birth mother, only to be tied to a high chair by her foster mother with 42 feet of duct tape and asphyxiated. The other was in Springfield Missouri, where Dominic James was taken needlessly from his father, only to be killed by his foster father.
In both cases, newspapers refused to be suckered by the “it’s an aberration” argument. In both cases they refused to settle for bromides about background checks and licensing standards. In Maine, thePortland Press Herald, Kennebec Journal and Bangor Daily News all began asking why the number of children trapped in foster care on any given day in Maine was, proportionately, among the highest in the country.
Today, the number of children taken away over each year in Maine is down by 25 percent, and the proportion of foster children placed with relatives has doubled – and it’s been done with no compromise in safety. [UPDATE, MARCH 23, 2011: In the years since, there has been still further improvement in Maine].
In Missouri, the Springfield News-Leader refused to settle for pat answers. They asked why Missouri was taking away children at a rate well above the national average, and Greene County (which includes Springfield) was taking children at a rate well above the state average. The 66,000-daily circulation Gannett paper even sent a reporter, photographer and editorial writer to Alabama to look at the reforms there. TheNews-Leader’s reporting caught the attention of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which also did some very good work.
Today, the number of children taken from their parents is down 15 percent statewide, with no compromise of safety. In St. Louis, which also is home to an innovation called Community Partnerships for Child Protection, the decline is 36 percent, and safety has improved.
But those are the exceptions. Because the journalists at those news organizations were exceptional.
Monday, July 17, 2006
Meth and The Oregonian
Two news organizations in Portland, Oregon have been criticizing
each other over coverage of methamphetamine lately. One offered a careful,
well-sourced analysis. That would be the alternative weekly, Willamette
Week, in March. The other offered up derision, straw men and cheap
shots. That would be the Portland Oregonian editorial
page -- yesterday.
In fact, the hype from
the editorial page has undercut reporting in the Oregonian that’s been better than most media coverage of meth, and encouraged the
paper’s worst excesses.
I don’t know why
the Oregonian is complaining about Willamette
Week’s gutsy cover story about the Oregonian’s meth
coverage nearly four months after it was published - -but the page has become
increasingly shrill in attacking anyone who doesn’t support their party line on
meth. In effect, their position is: If you don’t believe every word we
write, you don’t care if children die, lives are ruined, and all sorts of other
havoc is wrought by meth.
Both the editorial page
and the paper’s managing editor for enterprise, Steve
Engelberg, have sought to recast the paper’s coverage, after-the-fact,
hiding behind some early, excellent reporting and ignoring the rest.
I didn’t see Willamette
Week’s story when it first ran on March 22. I noticed it cited in
a footnote to a recent study which included a discussion of meth and media, and
then forgot about it until the Oregonian editorial appeared
yesterday. Not that the Oregonian actually mentioned the
story - - that would violate the first rule of mainstream media: Never mention
your town’s “alternative weekly” if it can possibly be
avoided. But the editorial reads like a direct response to the WW story.
That story certainly has
its flaws. Most notably, it fails to give proper credit to the series that
essentially kicked off the paper’s coverage, Unnecessary Epidemic by reporter Steve
Suo. Whatever flaws there may have been in characterizing the scope of the
problem are outweighed by the overall thrust of the series - - which remains
the only systematic reporting of its kind I’ve seen in any American newspaper.
Instead of the usual
horror stories about mom and pop home labs, Unnecessary Epidemic focused
on how simple ways to control the ingredients used to make meth at their
source, overseas factories, have been blocked by the pharmaceutical lobby. And
the series documented the existence of a way to manufacture decongestants whose
key ingredient can’t be turned into meth and how the pharmaceutical
industry would not bring it to market.
When Columbia
Journalism Review gave the series a “laurel” it was on my recommendation (and I’m sure the recommendation of
many others). Others who have criticized meth coverage in general, such as Slate media
critic Jack Shafer, also have singled out Suo’s work for praise. Unfortunately,
no big national newspaper picked up on Suo’s excellent reporting.
Willamette Week mentions this good work only in passing,
and criticizes Suo largely for his role in a PBS Frontline documentary
based in part on the series. (Suo did tell WW that he approved Frontline’s
script).
Suo’s series wasn’t the only time the Oregonian got
it right.
On the specific
issue of meth and child welfare, I have repeatedly recommended to journalists a
powerful story by a team of Oregonian reporters led by Bryan
Denson. They followed the case of one infant, Timothy, with one reporter
covering the birth parents, another the foster parents and a third the
caseworker.
The result was a
finely-nuanced story (“A baby in the balance,” March 27, 2005, available in the
paper’s paid archive), which undercuts much of the
hype that would turn up later in the Oregonian itself. The
mother used meth, but was in outpatient treatment and doing well. The
father was not accused of drug use at all. The child was in foster care
because there was no inpatient drug treatment facility in the local community
for the mother, and because of child welfare system’s pervasive bias against
fathers.
Yet, for statistical
purposes, this is a “meth case.” And when child welfare agencies claim
that a huge percentage of their cases “involve” meth use, that includes cases like this one.
Willamette Week didn’t mention this story either.
But where Willamette Week does criticize the Oregonian it’s usually right on the mark. Time after time the alternative
weekly takes an Oregonian claim, usually built on some “advocacy
number” or other, tracks it back to its source and finds - - there is no
source, or at least none that is remotely reliable. And WW’s target often
is the editorial page itself, and its increasingly shrill rhetoric.
WW also took a close look at an August, 2005 piece by Joseph Rose
on meth and child welfare which ignored
and undercut all the good work Denson and his colleagues had done several
months earlier. (“The Children of Meth,” August 28, 2005).
Every cliche that turns up in bad meth coverage can be found in
this story, including the term “meth orphans,” which, if anything, is even worse
than that notorious term from the 1980s, “crack babies.”
The story accepted as fact the claim that Oregon’s astoundingly high rate of child removal is all because of meth. But
Timothy, that child at the center of the Bryan Denson piece, was not an orphan
in any sense. He had a mother recovering from addiction and a father who
was not abusing drugs. And, of course, when Rose accepted at face value
claims that 2,750 children in foster care were taken away because of meth, that
includes Timothy.
Rose’s piece also contains a huge, fundamental error
of fact, which he has refused to correct. The story claims that the
so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act requires states to terminate parental
rights if a child has spent 15 of the past 22 months in foster care. Not
true. ASFA often requires states to ask a court to
terminate parental rights under these circumstances and even then, there are
several major exceptions, including one that covers cases in which parents are
doing well in drug treatment.
I wrote to Rose and asked him where he got this misinformation. In
an e-mail Rose said it came from “various
sources” apparently including grandparents caring for grandchildren taken from
meth-addicted parents. His sources did not include the crystal-clear text of
the law itself.
Hmmm. Which source to choose for what a law requires? Second-hand
impressions of well-meaning grandparents or the actual text?
But my biggest concern with the story was its toxic mix of horror
stories and “advocacy numbers.”
The story begins with Sadie, a child whose experience is atypical
even for meth cases. Most children do not, in fact, live in meth labs and
most do not have parents whose behavior crosses the line from neglect to
sadism. Then come the numbers alleging huge proportions of cases involve
meth. Then back to Sadie. By the time the reader is done, he is left
with the impression not only that almost every foster care case is a meth case
but that almost every parent in such a case is like Sadie’s sadistic dad.
The misimpression is reinforced by Rose’s claim, toward the top of the story that “roughly 2,750 children”
were taken from parents using or making the potent drug
[emphasis added].
Only much later in the story it is noted that of those 2,750
children, fewer than four percent were found in labs. (Even if you double
or triple that number to account for the children in school, clearly labs are
not the heart of the problem). Even a top Oregon Department of Human
Services official told the National Center on Substance Abuse and Child Welfare
that the number of times that [child protective] workers confronted actual
manufacturing was rare in their practice compared to the number of families
affected by methamphetamine abuse and dependence.
And, of course the story ignored the most fundamental fact of
Oregon child welfare: That state has been taking children at an absurdly high
rate since at least 1985, long before it could be blamed on meth.
When I wrote to Rose I offered to meet with him the following
month while in Portland for the annual convention of the National Conference of
Editorial Writers. Unlike Denson, editorial writer Mary Kitch and several
colleagues who’d met with me on a previous trip, Rose declined.
Clearly the WW piece hit a nerve. The day after the piece
ran, and was noted in Jim Romenesko’s media news column,
Engelberg, the Oregonian managing editor for enterprise, sent a long e-mail to WW and Romenesko - -which
both published on their websites.
Unlike the WW story, which was measured in tone, Engelberg lashed
out, calling the WW story: “a
one-sided, intellectually dishonest, fake expose built on anecdotal comments that ignore the facts of The
Oregonian's coverage. It meets no acceptable journalistic standard and
is filled with hyperbole, sloppy reporting and the use of intentionally
misleading statistics.”
And the WW story may explain why, starting last month, the Oregonian editorial
page got nasty with any of us who question anything the Oregonian says
about meth.
On June 6, an editorial declared that “All those people now chattering about whether the meth epidemic is
little more than media hype ought to visit with some of those abused and
neglected kids carrying their few belongings into Oregon foster homes.” This
appears to be a shot not only at Willamette Week, but also at an excellent Youth Today story on the
hype surrounding meth and child welfare -- and it’s off-base about both.
First, the statement is an example of a disturbing habit on the Oregonian editorial
page: setting up straw men. If you don’t believe everything the Oregonian says
about meth you must believe there is nothing to the problem at all but media
hype. No in-between options are allowed.
Second, the Oregonian is particularly unqualified
to criticize anyone else for not talking to abused and neglected kids. Until
late 2004, Oregon was a “black hole” for coverage of child welfare. The
state’s largest newspaper appeared unaware of the fact
that the state had a child welfare system. The paper’s own “public editor” took it to task for lacking “sustained
coverage” of the topic.
In contrast, the author of the Youth Today story
is Martha Shirk, the journalist who practically invented the children’s beat during a long, distinguished career at the St.
Louis Post-Dispatch. Her most recent projects include co-authoring a
book about the problems of children aging out of the foster-care system.
In short, she has almost certainly talked to more foster children
than all the reporters writing about the topic on the Oregonian news
and editorial page staff combined.
Then came yesterday’s editorial attacking
the “tinny little chorus of media critics and drug
control skeptics” who don’t accept every word about meth in the Oregonian as
Holy Writ. The editorial continues in a nasty, personal vein, explaining
that they’d previously resisted deigning to dignify
criticism of their coverage with a reply because, after all, it’s hard to argue with anyone who can look seriously at Oregon and
much of rural America, at meth use and addiction, at meth-related crime and
child abuse and still insist that the problem is a “myth.”
Once again, a straw man. The Willamette Week story
never uses the word “myth” nor does it imply that
the problem is a myth. I’ve used the word, but to describe things like
the claim that meth is more difficult to treat than other drugs - -which is,
in fact, a myth - not to claim that meth is not a problem.
Mostly, the editorial regurgitates Engelberg’s e-mail to Romenesko nearly four months earlier; in particular
the way Engelberg hid behind Steve Suo’s original series. According
to the editorial:
[F]rom the beginning of Suo's initial meth series,
"Unnecessary Epidemic," published in October 2004, The Oregonian has
consistently called for international, national and state steps to control
access to ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, the legal chemicals used in cold medicines
and the central ingredients in meth. Virtually all the world's pseudoephedrine,
Suo found, is produced by a few Asian manufacturers. That makes meth far more
vulnerable to interdiction and control than drugs produced from poppy and coca
fields around the globe. Suo used drug treatment statistics and other data
to show that past efforts to control ephedrine and pseudoephedrine had been
successful, before they were abandoned or subverted.
O.K. So according to the editorial, this 351,000-circulation
newspaper, which can explain itself at whatever length it chooses every single
day, has been misunderstood. Or victimized by a conspiracy of
media critics albeit one too small even to notice. According to the
editorial, “those few scattered critics” (who now are worth an entire editorial
in the Sunday paper) “keep trying to twist our meth coverage.”
Or maybe, if your coverage is so misunderstood, you haven’t always
written about the topic all that well.
The editorial goes on to note that the Oregonian has
advocated only enlightened solutions, such as control at the source and
treatment. But the hype in the editorials themselves and stories like Rose’s
“meth orphans” piece drown out that reasonable
message.
And the hype about meth and child welfare makes meth the perfect
all-purpose excuse for any decision to remove any child from any home under any
circumstances. No one need look at Oregon’s absurdly high rate of removal
going all the way back to 1985, if state child welfare officials can reply to
every criticism just by “crying meth.”
When I wrote to Joseph Rose, I began the letter this way: “Can
a major social problem be serious, real and hyped? Yes. And that’s what’s been happening in the case of
methamphetamine and child welfare.
Why do so many at
the Oregonian find that so hard to understand?
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