Sleepless in St. Petersburg

Fresh from suggesting that pretty much every child who drowns in the state of Florida is, in fact, a victim of neglect, Manatee County Sheriff’s Major Connie Shingledecker, who chairs the Florida Child Abuse Death Review Committee, has another target: Co-sleeping.

There is considerable controversy over co-sleeping, as there is over many things involved in child rearing. In the United States, a lot of medical authorities, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, discourage it. Even advocates support it only if parents adhere to a list of common-sense precautions. News stories that emphasize the urgent need for such precautions, and include the perspective of those who think co-sleeping is beneficial and those who feel the benefits never outweigh the risk, perform a valuable service.

It would have been nice if such a story had appeared in the St. Petersburg Times a week ago instead of what actually turned up in that newspaper. Judging by the comments from Shingledecker and everyone else quoted, you would never know there is more than one side to this story. You’d never know that some advocates argue that mothers and babies were “designed” for co-sleeping, and they think it can benefit both. More important, the story went well beyond what could best be described as the cons and cons of co-sleeping into a series of finger-wagging attacks on any parent who engages in the practice. The message from almost everyone quoted in the story is that any parent who shares a bed with her infant is a selfish lout.

Co-sleeping is, in fact, the norm in much of the world, often by necessity, but also sometimes by cultural custom. According to a more balanced story in The New York Times, “some ethnic groups, especially Asians and Latin Americans, consider the North American norm of relegating infants to separate rooms to be coldhearted and psychologically harmful.” But in the St. Petersburg paper, the only hint that this might be a cultural issue comes when the story says that one doctor “doesn’t believe it’s a cultural issue as some advocates assert.

"’People just out of habit, when the baby is crying, they bring them into bed,’" the St. Petersburg pediatrician said. ‘It's a convenience. It takes a lot of effort to break them out of the habit.’

But he was outdone by Florida’s leading advocate of a take-the-child-and-run approach, Andrea Moore who heads a group called Florida’s Children First. Said Moore: “For some parents it’s an issue where the parents want the warmth and contact, but it’s based on more of the parent’s need, not the child’s need.”

Such a comment is especially harmful coming from someone with as much influence as Moore. For some Florida reporters, Moore is the Godsource – she turns up in almost every story, her words are viewed as Holy Writ and dissent is marginalized, or doesn’t appear at all.

According to The New York Times, in America, “Black infants were four times as likely as white infants to share an adult’s bed, and Asian Americans were almost three times as likely.” So I have to wonder: Does Ms. Moore believe that Blacks and Asians are inherently more selfish than her fellow middle-class whites?

The St. Petersburg story combines horror stories and data about the raw number of co-sleeping deaths – plus speculation from Maj. Shingledecker that the “real” number of such deaths is “huge.” But the data draw no distinction between the alcoholic who falls asleep in a drunken stupor and then rolls over on the baby next to her on the couch, and people who take proper precautions. That’s like reporting on children killed in auto accidents without breaking out children killed by drunk drivers and children who were not properly strapped into their carseats. (And, just as in the story discussed on this Blog last week, about drownings, the story includes an example of a death in foster care labeled “neglect” that, in fact, sounds more like an accident.)

The data also offer no comparison between the raw numbers and the number of parents who engage in co-sleeping, so it is impossible to tell the actual level of risk and how it compares to other everyday risks.

The New York Times also cited those who think co-sleeping is always dangerous. But, apparently based on the quaint notion that readers should hear all sides and make up their own minds, it also noted that

Dr. James J. McKenna, head of the Mother-Child Sleep Lab at the University of Notre Dame, an advocate of mothers and babies sharing beds, drew the opposite conclusion. Baby deaths from suffocation "are in extreme situations — being with Dad on the couch when he's half-drunk," Dr. McKenna said, while the comfort and closeness babies get from sleeping with their mothers makes them "more independent and able to deal with stress better.”

And it’s not as if Florida’s self-proclaimed “best newspaper” has never heard of Dr. McKenna’s Lab. In a box accompanying the story, the lab is cited as a source for some safety tips for those who, to use the St. Petersburg paper’s word, “insist” on co-sleeping.

A good case can be made against co-sleeping, on grounds that overtired parents may not take the proper precautions every time. What is disturbing, however, is the rush to assume the worst of any parent who disagrees – the attitude of the Andrea Moores of this world, who say, in effect: if you’re not exactly the kind of parent I am, you must be stupid or selfish or both.

At a minimum, editors might want to give careful consideration to diversifying the points of view in such stories. Not that they should jump to conclusions. Perhaps they could sleep on it.

Drowning in Misinformation

You’re late for work one morning. Before you get to work you need to get your two-year-old daughter to day care. You’ve just buckled her into her car seat – or did you? - when you remember some extremely important document you left in the house.

You know what you’re supposed to do – unbuckle your daughter and walk her or carry her back in with you; but you’re running late, it’ll only take a second and, what could possibly happen?

999 times (or more) out of 1000: Nothing. But there’s always that one time that can lead to catastrophe – especially if you hadn’t quite buckled the child in.

That’s just one scenario.

Are you sure you childproofed every electrical outlet? What about the one behind the sofa – until you rearranged the furniture last month? Now that your child is three, are you certain she can’t unlatch the back door? Are there any heavy items of furniture, even big books on high shelves, that can come loose while your back is turned or you’ve just run into another room to answer the phone? And, are you absolutely certain you locked the sliding door that leads to the swimming pool?

The number of such scenarios is endless; I suspect any parent could come up with a dozen variations off the top of her or his head. And, according to the Florida Child Abuse Death Review Team, unless you can honestly say none of them has ever applied to you, you are guilty of child neglect.

That means almost every parent in Florida, and pretty much everyplace else, is guilty of neglect. But if everything is neglect, nothing is neglect. It only desensitizes us to the real thing. And that’s the least of what is wrong with the approach the Team has taken in its latest annual report, which exanmines deaths that occurred in 2006 and was released at the very end of 2007. The worst of it is the incredible cruelty of its recommendations – and the harm those recommendations can do to the siblings who survive after a scenario like the ones suggested above takes the life of a child.

As usual in child welfare, the cruelty and the harm are not intentional. If I’d spent a huge amount of my time pouring over autopsy reports and other documents about the deaths of helpless, innocent children, I think it would distort my perspective as well. The resulting report is another example of the distortion inherent in a skewed sample, something discussed on this Blog previously in connection with reports from the New York City Department of Investigation and the New Jersey Office of Child Advocate. Tragically, the Florida team has a larger sample to work with, since it looks at every child maltreatment death in the state, and it is now applying a very broad definition of maltreatment – but in a state with four million children, the sample is still grossly unrepresentative.

This kind of distorted perspective becomes a form of self-indulgence – indulging one’s righteous wrath, even if the consequences are only more harm to more children.

In one sense, it would be in my interest not to bring all this up. The report generated headlines across Florida about a supposed record number of child abuse deaths. That reinforces what NCCPR has been saying in that state for a long, long time.

We first predicted that deaths would go up in 1999, when the child welfare agency came under the control of a leader more hell-bent on a take-the-child-and-run approach than any we’d encountered anyplace else in the country. She set off a huge foster-care panic; removals soared 50 percent in a single year. Though she’s long gone, and there now are wide variations in different regions, the foster-care panic she started never stopped, and statewide, Florida still takes children at the same rate as in 1999. (For more on all this, see NCCPR’s Florida Rate-of- Removal Index and our other reports on child welfare in Florida).

Unfortunately, our prediction about fatalities was correct. We’ve argued that the only hope for reducing such deaths is to rebuild the system to emphasize safe, proven programs to keep families together. And as the Florida system decentralizes, some parts of the state are trying to do just that.

So, if we used “advocacy numbers” and felt that it was o.k. to bend the truth because, after all, it’s for a good cause, (something done over and over by various alleged ‘child advocates’) NCCPR would put out a press release that said Florida’s ongoing embrace of a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare, statewide, had led to still another huge increase in child abuse deaths.

There’s just one problem: We don’t know that it’s true. In fact, it’s probably not.

It’s not entirely clear, either from news accounts or the report itself, but it appears that the “increase” is a result of a concerted effort to label scenarios like those above neglect instead of what they really are: accidents. Terrible, tragic accidents, but accidents nonetheless. The kinds of accidents that should make all parents of young children think twice, but before wagging a finger, also make us think: “There but for the grace of God…”

Consider some real cases, as reported by the St. Petersburg Times in its story about the Death Review Team report:

Joyce White, 54, of Plantation was sitting on the front porch with her 3-year-old grandson when the phone rang.

When she returned, Garcie Luna was gone. He was found in a neighbor's pool. The fence surrounding the pool had been damaged during Hurricane Wilma and was missing a gate.
"It was just a few seconds of carelessness on my part for answering the phone and my neighbor's part because they didn't fix the gate," White said of the death in March 2006.
"It's torn our lives apart. It was more than I could take losing him, especially for something so stupid."

___________

Ann Unger set her 9-month-old daughter on the floor of the family's Plant City home and headed to the bathroom. Angelica, a fast crawler, usually followed close behind. Not this day.
Five minutes passed. Or was it six?
When Unger, 22, returned to the room, Angelica wasn't there. A frantic search ended in the backyard pool, where Unger found the child floating face down.
The mother's screams pierced the neighborhood as efforts to save the baby failed. Angelica Unger died on Jan. 24, 2006, three months before her first birthday.
In the past, her death likely would have been considered accidental, a family tragedy. But investigators labeled her death a result of parental neglect. Unger had left open the door that led to the pool. …

Or consider a case that would, were I to accept the Review Team’s new definition of neglect, reinforce the case I’ve been making for years:

Cara Eaton's drug problems prompted caseworkers to take her infant daughter.
But weeks later, the baby died in foster care. The one-month-old suffocated after her Sarasota County foster mother put her to sleep face down.

Eaton, 31, of North Port blames DCF and its foster care contractor, the Sarasota Family YMCA. She wanted the child with her grandmother, instead of foster care.

But, if this is all that happened, Cara Eaton is mistaken. The Review Team report notes that nationwide there is a “back to sleep” campaign to alert parents to the fact that it is safer to put an infant to sleep on his or her back. Odds are the foster parent simply didn’t know it or, if it was part of her training, she forgot it.

The grandmother might have made the same mistake. (There are lots of other reasons to prefer kin placements, of course). It was an accident. Accidents happen. That doesn’t mean we have to be sanguine about it; on the contrary, we need to focus more efforts on real prevention, but that begins by recognizing accidents for what they are.

Of course the Times story also included some very different scenarios, like these two:

Alyssa Doe's mother left her to die in a West Tampa alley shortly after she was born. Relatives alerted police to her mother, Mary Louise Doe, after finding her no longer pregnant and unable to explain where the baby was. Mary Louise told authorities that alcohol and crack cocaine blurred her memory of the birth in May 2006. A judge sentenced her to five years in prison and 10 years of probation. Alyssa Doe was just one of many children who died while their caretakers were under the influence.

Hunter Lanier, 2, of Santa Rosa County died in a car accident after his mother wrecked after drinking and driving.

But that’s the whole point. Any reader can draw common sense distinctions here. The Death Review Team should be able to do so as well. Yes, there also are fact situations that fall in between, where the judgment call is tougher, but that’s part of the job.

Instead, the Review Team seeks to prohibit such judgment calls at all. It demands that every drowning death be reported to the state’s child abuse hotline for a neglect investigation.

The Review Team would argue that I don’t understand; none of this is meant to be punitive, they would say, we just need to label these cases as neglect in order to bolster prevention efforts. But why? Why, exactly, does it require labeling someone neglectful – and possibly taking away surviving siblings – in order to get more people to be sure the door to the backyard pool is locked?

Obviously it doesn’t. As with so much else in child welfare, this is another example of hate disguised as love. It’s not about helping children, it’s about punishing “bad parents.” Almost all of the recommendations involve doing more to treat parents as suspects and/or to punish them. Apparently, nobody on the Review Team even thought of a simple and obvious way to reduce drowning deaths: Florida law already requires fencing around pools built after 2000. So why not give a big tax credit or other incentive to homeowners and landlords who fence in their older pools? But that doesn’t involve wagging a finger at parents, so it’s not on the Team’s radar.

It also is revealing that Manatee County, the county where the chair of the review team is in charge of child abuse investigations, has the highest rate of removal in its region, and one of the higher rates in the state.

And the Review Team’s approach undermines real prevention.

For starters, all the money for all those additional investigations and additional foster care could have been used for things like a more effective “back to sleep” campaign – or those tax credits to put fences around pools.

Worse, it plays into the take-the-child-and-run mentality that still plagues much of Florida.

The worst consequence of that is the danger to the siblings.

There may be no time when it is more important for a family to stay together than in the wake of a tragic accident. But once you label the parent neglectful, the chances soar that the surviving siblings will be torn from their parents, and each other. So at the one time when, say the four-year-old brother of the two-year-old who drowned most needs his big sisters, ages 6 and 8, and his mom and dad, he is taken away from all of them and suddenly placed with strangers. It would be hard to find a better way to almost guarantee lifelong emotional scarring. Indeed, the four-year-old is likely to think he’s somehow responsible for the drowning – why else is he being punished?

Of course that won’t always happen. It depends on who’s running the state child welfare agency. And who’s running the private agency in charge of all substitute care in a given region of the state, under Florida’s “privatized” system. And who’s in charge of the child welfare agency in that particular region. And, perhaps most of all, it depends on whether a high-profile child abuse tragedy is in the headlines locally.

Not only does the Review Team fail to recognize this, the Team actually belittles the compassion of those who do. According to the report: “Often drowning deaths are not reported as neglect. It is felt that ‘the family has suffered enough’ or ‘it’s just a tragic accident.’”

But that’s because, in many cases, the family has suffered enough, and it is a tragic accident. (No one in fact would call something this awful “just” a tragic accident – that’s the Team’s way of stacking the rhetorical deck).

The report argues that any drowning in a bathtub “should be looked at as neglect” since the only way to be sure it never happens is for the caretaker always to be in the bathroom with the child.

And that is the heart of the matter: If a parent in such a circumstances runs out of the room to answer the door or the phone and the child dies, then the death was, indeed, preventable. But what is accomplished by slapping the label neglect on the parent? What is accomplished by, in some cases, throwing the siblings into foster care – where the risk of actual abuse probably is one in three?

Nothing. In fact, under circumstances like these (as opposed to those where the failure to supervise is due to drug abuse, for example) the one person in the state of Florida least likely ever to leave a child alone in a bathtub ever again is the one who has endured such a tragedy.

While not as serious a problem, the Review Team report also contributes to Statistics Abuse. I began this post with one example – claims that there were a record number of deaths in Florida in 2007. This is still another reason why it’s difficult to measure progress, or lack of it, in child welfare based on fatalities. What constitutes a child abuse fatality can be surprisingly subjective. Last year’s accident is this year’s “neglect” death.

And not only can definitions change from year to year, they also vary from state to state, and even region to region within a state. The competence of state death review efforts also varies enormously.

That’s why one of the most intellectually dishonest things an advocate – or a reporter, if she or he knows better – can do is to try to compare fatality rates among the states. The only thing that does is penalize states that are rigorous about determining causes of death and zealous (rightly or wrongly) about labeling a death as maltreatment.

For example, several years ago, Washington State bragged about its low rate of child abuse fatalities compared to other states. Then the Seattle Post-Intelligencer did a series on how many such deaths allegedly were unreported and/or mislabeled.

This kind of statistics abuse also fuels the hype about child maltreatment in general. For example, the St. Petersburg Times story says:

An analysis of 2006 state death reports, the latest data available, shows seven out of 10 child deaths were due to neglect.

Well, yes. And if the Review Team keeps broadening the definition of “neglect” in a couple of years it will be nine out of ten – and it will mean absolutely nothing. But it will make a great “scare number” to make people think “neglect” is far more prevalent than it actually is.

What the Review Team report really illustrates is the need to focus more attention on deaths due to accidents. Of course, Freud said there are no accidents. But I’ll bet Mrs. Freud raised the kids.

Turning foster children into unpersons

Correction: This post states that the Kansas child welfare agency licenses the state's foster homes and institutions. In fact, that is done by another state agency.

If torturing logic were a war crime, the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitative Services (SRS) would be hauled before an international tribunal.

In previous posts to this Blog I described how the state’s most populous county, Sedgwick, was taking children from their homes and institutionalizing them for more than a week before there was even a court hearing. It was all done at the whim of the state child welfare agency and local law enforcement.

When the legislature told Sedgwick County that it had to do what every other county in Kansas does – hold that first hearing within 72 hours – various county officials threw a fit, declaring that they needed to hold the children in foster care for a week in order to prevent foster care.

That really is what they said. You see, according to both county officials and the State of Kansas that week in an institution is not foster care. Why not? Because they don’t call it foster care, they call it “protective custody.” And if that isn’t absurd enough, the federal government is buying into the distinction, and letting Kansas get away with keeping huge numbers of foster care placements “off the books” for statistical purposes. That has implications for the safety and well-being of children well beyond Kansas.

The deputy district attorney in charge of these cases in Sedgwick County estimates that 80 percent of the children taken away this way go home or are placed informally with a relative within that first week – which raises an obvious question: If 80 percent of the children you take away can go home or be placed with a relative within a week, did those children really need to be taken away in the first place?

One possible way to answer that question is through a process called a Child and Family Services Review (CFSR), a process the federal government uses to examine each state’s child welfare system every few years. It’s actually a pretty pathetic process that can produce misleading results – see NCCPR’s publication The Trouble With CFSRs for details – but unless your particular state happens to be under a good consent decree, there’s not much else out there.

But when the federal reviewers come to Kansas, they’ll never know about all those children taken from everyone they know and love and then “thrown back” within 72 hours (or, until 2007, within a week in Sedgwick County).

That’s because Kansas either is violating federal regulations, or has concocted a clever scheme to exploit a loophole. Either way, Kansas has turned all these children into what George Orwell called “unpersons.” When it comes to the data Kansas shares with the general public, state legislatures, and the federal government’s national database on foster care, these children simply don’t exist.

They don’t exist because they were never in foster care. They were only in “protective custody.” And, SRS says, they were in the custody of law enforcement, not SRS.

Yeah, right.

Here’s how it all works: Every state is required to report data about its foster care system to a central federal database, the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS). It’s administered by the Administration for Children and Families which is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. AFCARS data help the federal government determine how well the system is serving America’s foster children. They help point out states that may be leaders and states that may be doing particularly poorly. And the data are used for the CFSRs.

AFCARS has bred a plethora of regulations and a huge online policy manual. And where there are lots of regulations, there are lots of potential loopholes. Kansas may have found one.

AFCARS requires that, whenever a child is taken from his parents because of suspected abuse or neglect and kept out of the home for at least 24 hours, the state must report this as an entry into foster care.

AFCARS also requires that states report the total number of foster care placements endured by each child. This is vitally important because the trauma of foster care is compounded when a child is forced to move repeatedly from one placement to another.

In Kansas, when a child is taken away without a court order it is done by law enforcement. Even though, in many cases, it is SRS that asked that the child be removed, the physical act of removing that child and driving him to that first placement, is performed by a police officer. (The trauma is compounded in Sedgwick County, because the first placement often is an institution, the Wichita Children’s Home). Therefore, says SRS, the child is in the protective custody of law enforcement, therefore, SRS says, we don’t have to report it. In addition, if SRS keeps custody after the court hearing, but the child is moved to another placement that same day, that first placement in the Wichita Children’s Home never goes on the books. What is really two placements appears as only one.

But AFCARS regulations don’t actually say that the child welfare agency has to have “custody” for a placement to count.

Rather, the online manual says that “the State is required to count a placement that lasts more than 24 hours while the child is in foster care under the placement, care or supervision responsibility of the State agency” [emphasis added].

When it comes to such placements in Kansas:

● It is SRS that often asks law enforcement to take custody in the first place.
● The children generally are placed in a home or institution that must be licensed by SRS.
● SRS workers visit the child while in the facility.
● In the case of the Wichita Children’s Home SRS workers even are on site to oversee the case.
● SRS develops the plan to either send the child home, place the child in informal care with a relative, find a foster home with strangers, or keep the child in an institution.
● SRS foots the bill. SRS reimburses institutions like the Wichita Children’s Home for the cost of these placements.

That sure sounds a lot like “placement, care or supervision responsibility.”

Whether or not the placement “counts” to SRS, whether or not it “counts” to the Sedgwick County District Attorney’s office, and whether or not it “counts” to the Administration for Children and Families, we may be sure of one thing: It counts to the child.

Apparently the Kansas Legislature thinks so, too. Because under Kansas law, it is not the police, but rather the home or institution where the child has been placed – such as a temporary foster home or the Wichita Children’s Home – that is deemed to “have physical custody and provide care and supervision for the child.” As noted above, such facilities typically are approved and licensed by SRS.

Here’s how all this has an impact on the CFSR process:

During that process, states are evaluated two ways: Evaluators look at the data compiled by the state and reported to AFCARS, and the reviewers conduct what is supposed to be an in-depth examination of a total of 50 cases from three counties. One of those counties has to include the state's largest metropolitan area - in Kansas that's Sedgwick County, where the problem of off-the-books foster care placements is worst. The files examined in these 50 cases are the child welfare agency's case files.

CFSRs are supposed to address issues including:

● Did the agency keep the child safe?
● Did the agency keep the child in her or his own home whenever possible?
● Did the agency avoid moving the child from one placement to another?
● Did the agency avoid needless use of "congregate care" - group homes, institutions, shelters?

So here's what happens when the reviewers come to Kansas:

● They won't know that a large number of placements ever occurred at all.

● Many of these are placements the reviewers probably would say were unnecessary, since the child was returned home or placed informally with a relative within a week. But they won't know about those placements when they "grade" Kansas on avoiding needless foster care.

● Both the state data and the casefiles are likely to understate the number of placements, since Kansas sometimes does not count that first placement in a shelter.

● The data will understate Kansas' use of congregate care, since many of those first placements, at least in Sedgwick County, are in an institution, the Wichita Children's Home.

I am not aware of any other state which engages in this kind of manipulation of data – and no one I’ve spoken to is aware of any either. And NCCPR can confirm that states responsible for at least one-third of entries into care either can’t engage in a similar dodge or won’t. That means Kansas’ evasion has implications well beyond the state’s borders – it compromises the ability to compare state performance and the integrity of the entire AFCARS process.

But ACF is looking the other way. We first asked the Acting Associate Commissioner in charge of the Children’s Bureau, Joe Bock, to tell us if this kind of dodge violated federal regulations without telling him which state was involved. That way we could be sure any opinion would be untainted by even the appearance of political concerns. (The Bush administration has politicized the CFSR process at least once before, when Florida, then governed by Jeb Bush was given special consideration in choosing which counties would be evaluated).

But Bock refused. He claimed it was his policy to refuse such requests, but also said the policy is not in writing. After we then told him the state, Bock sent a letter to NCCPR claiming that Kansas was not violating federal regulations.

Therefore, today – January 2 - we have asked the Acting Commissioner’s acting boss, Acting Assistant Secretary Daniel Schneider, to reverse that decision. ACF has reversed itself before when similarly absurd rulings led to bad press. But this time there may be a complication.

Guess what state Schneider is from.

Good news, except in some newsrooms

This Blog will be taking the holidays off. The post about Kansas, and how that state is compromising the integrity of an entire national database of foster care statistics will appear when the Blog resumes on January 2. (In the meantime, I’ve updated NCCPR’s Press Release on the issue).

But before pausing for the holidays, one note about a holiday tradition: the story about coping with holiday depression – you know, the story that talks about how suicides increase during the holiday season.

Except they don’t.

The Los Angeles Times reports on a review of 32 studies of the link between the holiday season and suicides. Here’s the link: Suicides go down, perhaps by as much as 40 percent.

What does this have to do with child welfare? Only this. Like so many “facts” and statistics that appear in stories about child abuse and foster care, the claim that the holiday season leads to more suicide was “too good to check.”

What Dorothy learned and Kansas forgot

Correction: This post states that the Kansas child welfare agency licenses the state's foster homes and institutions. In fact, that is done by another state agency.

There is a land where a child can be interned in an institution for more than a week, cut off even from all communication with family for three days, and yet be an un-person to the bureaucrats who run the state child welfare agency. It is a place where holding a child in foster care for a week can be labeled a way to prevent foster care.

As I wrote last week, it isn’t Oz. It’s Kansas.

In fact, the system in Kansas sounds less like something that sprang from the pen of L. Frank Baum and more like a creation of Lewis Carroll, with an assist from Charles Dickens, Rod Serling and, especially, George Orwell.

The consequences for the state’s vulnerable children are deadly serious.

Like most states, Kansas requires that, when a child is torn from her or his parents based solely on the authority of the child welfare agency or law enforcement, there must be a court hearing within 72 hours, excluding weekends and holidays. But in the state’s largest county, Sedgwick, which includes Wichita, authorities somehow were interpreting 72 to mean 144 – in other words, six days. And since you can’t go six days without hitting a weekend, children really were being interned – mostly in an institution – for eight days before any court ever heard the case. And here’s where it gets a bit Dickensian: The institution in question, the Wichita Children’s Home, actually has a policy of barring all communication between a child and his family for the first three days. Even an accused criminal gets one phone call, innocent children in Sedgwick County do not.

When the legislature “clarified” the law and told Sedgwick County it had to start behaving like every other county, judges and the District Attorney’s office, which effectively represents the child welfare agency in these cases, threw a fit. Their reasons offer a rare x-ray of the soul of a child welfare system. It’s not pretty.

For starters, the Assistant District Attorney in charge of child abuse cases in the county, Ron Paschal, argued that children needed to be held in foster care for eight days in order to prevent foster care. No, really. You see, by holding the child for eight days, he said, workers had time to investigate the case and find an alternative to foster care – like sending the child home or placing the child, informally, with relatives.

There are just two problems with this:

● First, if 80 percent of the children can go home or to grandma’s house within eight days, odds are very few of them ever needed to be torn from everyone they know and love, hauled off to an institution and interned there for a week in the first place – an enormously traumatic experience, particularly for young children.

● Second, (although this one would seem to be obvious): you do not prevent foster care by placing a child in foster care. You prevent foster care by not placing a child in foster care.

Authorities in Sedgwick County explain away this one in a way Orwell surely would have appreciated: Those first eight days in an institution are not foster care, they say. They’re “protective custody”! So they don’t count! (If you find this hard to believe, that’s understandable. Check out NCCPR’s Kansas Report for full citations). And what makes it “protective custody”? Simple. A police officer engaged in the physical act of removing the child, so law enforcement, not the child welfare agency, supposedly has “custody.”

Both Sedgwick County and state officials cling to this rationalization even though it is the child welfare agency that often asks law enforcement to remove the child, the child welfare agency that licenses the places the children go, the child welfare agency that oversees the investigation, the child welfare agency that recommends what to do next and – perhaps most important – the child welfare agency that foots the bill. The child welfare agency reimburse the Wichita Children’s Home.

In fact, this kind of placement – ripping a child away from everyone she knows and loves, sometimes in the middle of the night, based solely on a caseworker’s judgment - is supposed to be limited to emergencies; situations where a child would suffer immediate harm if this were not done. The reason for that is obvious. If the threat of harm is not immediate, there is time to remove the threat instead of the children, or at least time to go to a judge.

So if there really is such an emergency, there should be no need for eight days to “investigate” whether the child needed to be taken at all. Instead of taking children this way only in genuine emergencies, the policy in Sedgwick County, Kansas boils down to take-the-child-first-ask-questions-later. So it’s no wonder that 80 percent of the children could go home or to a relative within a week.

And what kind of a case would warrant traumatizing a child this way. Let Ron Paschal, the deputy district attorney, tell you. Here’s what he told the Kansas Health Institute news service:

Let's say police come upon a two-year-old child at night, wandering the streets. They do some investigating and they find out the child had been left with a six-year-old. Now, maybe the children were unsupervised because mom was passed out drunk or maybe she's working two jobs, doing everything she can to make ends meet - she didn't have anybody she could leave the kids with.
If she's working, it may be that she needs (public) assistance or some parenting classes or some other form of support. Maybe the child can stay with an aunt or uncle or a grandparent while all this is being worked out? If they can, that child may not need to be in foster care.

In other words, the deputy district attorney in charge of child abuse cases in Sedgwick County, Kansas is justifying the internment of children for more than a week – and returning them afterwards not necessarily to their own homes, but sometimes to relatives – solely because of their mother’s poverty.

In fact, faced with this kind of case, a well-functioning child welfare agency would not remove a child from the home for even one minute. Rather, the caseworker would wait in the home until the mother got home from work. Then the agency would send a babysitter into the home. Or the agency could provide a one-time payment of “flex funds” to the mother to arrange for a sitter until after-hours day care could be arranged.

It is incomprehensible why, under these circumstance, Paschal would call first for institutionalizing a child for more than a week and then placing the child 24-hours-a-day with grandparents instead of simply asking those grandparents to baby-sit.

Not that holding a hearing in a timely manner would help much. According to the same news story:

When these investigations don't come together in three days, judges are expected to choose between the uncertainty of a sending a child home and the safety of foster care. "It's a no-brainer," [Juvenile Court Judge Jim] Burgess said. "You go with safety."

Leaving aside the fact that the story makes the classic mistake of assuming foster care is safe and all risk lies in returning the child home, the judge’s interpretation raises questions about whether it is consistent with state law. That law requires probable cause to support a belief there are certain specified grounds to keep the child in foster care. It does not say “hold onto the child while we figure out if there’s actually a problem.”

But then, Paschal himself says the 72-hour hearings are a sham – in all those other counties, that is. In that same news story:

Paschal said he doubted that other judicial districts' hearings are truly held within 72 hours of a child entering police custody. "A lot of times what happens is, yeah, they'll have a hearing and the judge will say [to the parents], 'You want a hearing? OK, here, let's schedule a hearing. When can you be here?'" he said.
"That's not really a hearing" Paschal said. "It's certainly not the way it is in Sedgwick County. When we have a hearing, the evidence is presented, there will be witnesses, and you will have the opportunity to cross-examine your accusers.”

How, exactly, this cross-examination can be effective when the parent’s court-appointed lawyer typically just met her minutes before the hearing, Paschal doesn’t say.

But then, it is almost as if Paschal realizes he may have gone a bit too far. If after all, 72-hour hearings are a sham, and if Sedgwick County must now hold its hearings in 72 hours, then…

So Paschal quickly clarifies matters. Referring to the fact that he believes Sedgwick hearings are not a sham, he says:

"That's the way it was when we had 144 hours and that's the way it is now," he said.

So now, Paschal is saying that all those other counties don’t provide a real hearing in 72 hours – but Sedgwick does. In that case, what’s the problem with holding the hearings in 72 hours? He explains:

"The only difference is the social worker doesn't have as much time to come up with an alternative" to foster care.

But, of course, the child already is in foster care.

It’s not just Sedgwick County that’s playing games. The State child welfare agency is using a similar dodge to grossly underreport the number of children taken from parents every year, undermining the integrity of the entire national data-gathering process. That story next week.

But you would think in Kansas they’d remember: For most children most of the time, there’s no place like home.

P.S. An ombudsman takes on the virtual lynch mob

On November 19, I wrote about how newspaper publishers help poison the climate for civil debate by giving hate-mongers a forum, and the ability to hide behind anonymity. Yesterday, the ombudsman for the Miami Herald weighed in on the topic in a very good column.

It's not Oz, it's Kansas

One of the great fictions of child welfare is the one in which child welfare agencies deny that they ever take children away at all. “We don’t do that,” they piously proclaim, only a judge can order a child removed from the home.”

Since this Blog generally adheres to the style rules of a family newspaper, we can only call this nonsense.

In every state, child protective services caseworkers have the power to remove a child from any home they want at any time they want, if not at the snap of the fingers, then at least at the push of a “speed dial” button to call the police to do it for them. They don’t have to give notice to the family, they don’t have to go to court for a hearing – they don’t even have to call the judge on the phone.

Precisely because this is such a drastic action, with no real due process, it’s supposed to occur only in an emergency – a situation where a child is in immediate danger. The reason for this should be obvious: If the danger isn’t immediate, there is time to remove the danger instead of the child or at least to hear all sides first. That’s the theory. In fact, an emergency is anything the caseworker thinks it is, and emergency removal power routinely is abused.

Precisely because this is such a drastic action, most states require a court hearing within 24, 48 or 72 hours (usually excluding weekends or holidays). Even the American Bar Association’s Center on Children and the Law, which has never been a big booster of family preservation, says it is best practice to allow no more than 72 hours to pass before the hearing.

Sadly, the hearings don’t do much good. On one side is a child welfare agency and/or its legal representative which has had 24 to 72 hours to prepare a case. On the other side is almost always an overwhelmed, impoverished birth parent who, if she has a lawyer at all, met him in the hallway five minutes before the hearing.

Presiding is a judge who knows that he can approve hundreds of needless removals and, while the children may suffer terribly, his career is safe. But return one child home and have something go wrong and that career may well be over.

So it’s no wonder that, at these hearings, judges are far more prone to wield rubber stamps than gavels.

But all that is an argument for making the hearings meaningful, not putting them off for even longer.

All of which brings us to Kansas, and, in particular, Sedgwick County, which includes Wichita. NCCPR released a report on Kansas child welfare last week. Kansas is one of the states that has a rule requiring that first hearing to be held within 72 hours. But Sedgwick County judges, and the county district attorney’s office, which essentially represents the state child welfare agency in these cases, somehow were “interpreting” 72 hours to mean 144 hours – six days. Since you can’t go six days without hitting a weekend, that really means that in Sedgwick County, caseworkers had a free shot at any child I the county with no hearing of any kind for eight days.

And most of these children were not even placed with a family. Instead they were placed – interned is really a better word – at what amounts to the local orphanage, the Wichita Children’s Home. To add an extra dollop of cruelty, while a common criminal gets “one phone call” children interned at WCH do not. The children are cut off from any and all contact with their families for the first 72 hours.

In 2006, the Kansas Legislature clarified state law, to make clear that Sedgwick County has to do what every other county manages to do – hold that first hearing within 72 hours.

The judges and the D.A.’s office threw a fit - they’re trying to get the legislature to give them back the additional days. But it was an enormously revealing fit.

By the time they were done making their case:

--A judge admitted rubber-stamping removals even when the child welfare agency hadn’t really made a case.

--The Deputy D.A. in charge of child abuse investigations effectively endorsed taking away children solely because of poverty.

--The Deputy D.A. admitted that the 72-hour hearings are a sham – except in Sedgwick County.

--And most remarkable of all: The Deputy D.A. estimated that of all the children taken from their parents without a hearing in 2006, 80 percent of them were returned home or placed informally with a relative before that first court hearing.

But, of course, if 80 percent of the children you take away can be returned home or placed informally within a week, odds are most of them never needed to be placed in the first place.

Of course, as far as the child welfare agency in Kansas is concerned – they weren’t. In Kansas, all children placed in foster care but sent home before the first court hearing are what George Orwell called “unpersons.” When it comes to the state’s official statistics, they don’t exist. The children also don’t exist in reports every state is required to submit to the federal government. Kansas either is violating federal regulations concerning reporting entries into foster care, or has come up with a clever, albeit reprehensible, scheme to evade those regulations. NCCPR has asked the federal Administration for Children and Families to determine which it is.

More on all of this next week.

How "Dr. Sooze" distorts the nooze

Last week, I wrote about the harm done by child welfare “ombudsmen” or state Offices of Child Advocate. Because they are almost always created in the wake of deaths of children “known to the system” their primary mandate almost always is to focus on such cases. That inherently distorts the perspective of the office, leaving the impression that systems err in only one direction, leaving children in dangerous homes. The problem is compounded by the fact that the people named to head these offices often come to the job with exactly that preconceived notion.

Last week’s blog focused on one of the two exceptions: Kevin Ryan, New Jersey’s first Child Advocate. It talked about how his tough-minded reports focused on errors in all directions, and how that helped improve one of the nation’s most troubled child welfare agencies.

The New Jersey system was never very good, and a few years ago, under dreadful leadership dominated by a take-the-child-and-run mentality, it hit rock bottom. The number of children taken from their parents started to soar in 2001, engulfing workers and collapsing the system. That became all too apparent when the death of Faheem Williams was discovered in January, 2003. News coverage of that case set off a foster-care panic, making everything worse.

A class-action lawsuit settlement, and the naming of Ryan to run the child welfare agency, brought the first steps in the right direction – reduced entries into care and concrete evidence of improvements in child safety. The improvements were attested to in a report by the independent court-appointed monitor overseeing the settlement.

But those findings soon were overshadowed by the work of “Dr. Sooze.”

That’s how Dr. Susan Hodgson likes to be known. When Ryan went from watchdog over the child welfare system to top dog within that system, Hodgson was named the new “Child Advocate.”

Dr. Sooze is a pediatrician specializing in child abuse cases. In other words, she’s spent much of her life in settings where one sees the very worst cases, cases which bear no resemblance to a typical CPS worker’s load. It’s a background that easily can distort one’s impression of who gets caught up in the system and why, and that helps explain what happened next.

Dr. Sooze promptly abandoned the innovative approach of her predecessor. It was back to spewing out conventional reports filled with conventional wisdom about deaths of children “known to the system” – and nothing else.

And then she did something worse. She broke the previous record for an agency making vast generalizations based on minuscule, unrepresentative samples. The previous record-holder, New York City’s Department of Investigation, trashed the City child welfare agency based on the eleven worst cases it could find over a period of about six months. (See the August 13 entry on this Blog).

New Jersey OCA goes New York DOI one worse. It draws sweeping conclusions about the work of thousands of dedicated people in New Jersey’s child welfare agency based on the absurd notion that a grand total of three horror story cases, one of which dates back to 2004, can possibly tell us anything about the overall status of casework in 2007. The link to this report on the OCA website describes it as a report on “Global Issues.” The press release calls the issues “systemic.” But the report offers not a shred of evidence that the issues are either.

At least, unlike New York City’s DOI, OCA acknowledges on the first page that “from this review, it is impossible to know how widespread the errors are that were present in these cases…” but the report then goes on to generalize anyway.

And it’s the generalizations that are the problem.

On the one hand, the tone of the report is commendably measured and the specific recommendations largely meet the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy test: They’re mostly harmless. A few even are good.

But the biggest problem in this report is the problem that is inherent in how OCA, and its counterparts around the country, are structured. They are geared to examine fatalities and near fatalities. Inevitably, they leave the false impression that the child welfare agency errs in only one direction: leaving children in dangerous homes.

That impression is heightened when Dr. Sooze goes on to make broad, sweeping generalizations based on the three worst failures she can find. The distorted impression that leaves concerning where things stand in New Jersey child welfare, and what’s wrong with it, promptly overshadowed a far more objective, more nuanced – but still highly-critical – report from the court monitor.

Imagine what would happen were any of us judged the way Dr. Sooze judged the child welfare agency. Even the best doctors make mistakes. But what if a doctor’s entire career were judged solely by the three cases in which his or her diagnoses were farthest from the mark. Imagine if any of us walked into one of those annual “performance review” rituals only to be told that we would be judged only by our three worst screw-ups over the past 12 months.

Or to put it more cosmically, for those who believe in such things, suppose when its time to go to our eternal reward, we are judged solely on the basis of the three worst things we ever did in our entire lives. Were that to happen, I suspect most of us would be doomed to spend eternity trapped on one of the more odorous sections of the New Jersey Turnpike.

The issue here is not that Dr. Sooze’s methodology is unfair to the child welfare agency. Rather, it’s unfair to New Jersey’s children. The wrong methodology leads to the wrong diagnosis, and, as every doctor knows, if you get the diagnosis wrong, the patient is far less likely to recover. The New Jersey child welfare system is still in critical condition. To switch metaphors, the monitor’s report offered a road map for further reform, Dr. Sooze offered only a detour.

The detour is especially dangerous in light of one of the three cases that made up the so-called Global Issues report. In this case, the most critical of many tragic errors took place all the way back in 2004; when the system still was laboring under the foster-care panic set off by the death of Faheem Williams. If anything, this case was still one more illustration of how foster-care panics endanger children. But instead of pointing this out, the Global Issues report only increases the likelihood of another panic.

The only way to know the status of typical casework is either to be in a position like that of the court monitor, able to use a wide variety of means to see how the system typically operates, or to review a random sample of cases, using reviewers who either are objective or who are drawn from organizations with differing perspectives that balance each other. That’s exactly what Kevin Ryan did when he was child advocate, producing the Families Under Supervision report described in last week’s blog.

One look at the website of the current New Jersey Child Advocate suggests we’re not going to see anything better anytime soon.

One can see what has gone wrong at the New Jersey Office of Child Advocate just by looking at the agency’s website. Anyone who has seen the website evolve since “Dr. Sooze” took over will notice one thing immediately. The site, which used to be crisp and professional, is now cutesy and cloying. But that’s not the problem.

The problem is summed up by the following item that appeared in October under the heading “Dr. Sooze says:”

“Eating healthy will keep kids awake and aware throughout the school day. All children should be sure to start the day with a healthy breakfast and eat only snacks that help them grow up strong throughout the day.”

Now I just want to go on the record: I, too, favor children eating a good breakfast and healthy snacks. But so do 99 percent of New Jersey parents. They don’t need a smug reminder of the obvious. When it comes to the parents who are likely to be the subject of child welfare agency attention, what they need is help in getting the food.

I’ll bet almost every child taken into foster care was eligible for school lunch and school breakfast programs – precisely because those parents couldn’t afford to give them that “healthy breakfast.” So wouldn’t it be a lot more helpful if “Dr. Sooze” provided links to food pantry locations and to places where these parents could get help obtaining foodstamps? But no. There was only a link to another website full of things like “Halloween Candy Hints” and similar information.

It’s the difference between a mindset that emphasizes a helping hand and one that emphasizes a wagging finger, and a mindset that has some concept of what it means to be poor, and one that doesn't.