CASA strikes again

    In previous posts to this Blog, I've written about the serious problems with that most sacred cow of child welfare, the Court-Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) program. Now, it seems, CASA has struck again. In this story, KING-TV in Seattle, the city where CASA began, documents the enormous harm done to one child, needlessly taken from her grandparents, Doug and AnneMarie Stuth. In this post, all excerpts from the story are in italics.

    The child was born to the grandparents' 16-year-old daughter. The first time the child was taken, she was placed with the grandparents.

The grandparents raised the child for months and received glowing reports. One officer of the court wrote: "She's fortunate to have her grandparents as a safety net."

    The child was returned to her mother, then taken again. But this time, the child went into what should properly be called stranger care.

The Stuths were devastated. The child's daycare providers gave them heartbreaking reports. "(They tell me) that she cries for me," Doug Stuth said. "You have no idea (how hard it is)."
    Why the difference? One reason, it seems, was CASA.

    A court-appointed advocate for the baby wrote the Stuths were selfish, hyper-critical, and were derailing their daughter's parenting efforts. One example cited over and over in legal papers: They gave the child a pacifier, or binky, which was against the young mom's wishes. "You would not believe how many times that darn binky was brought up in court and in paperwork over the stupid binky!" AnneMarie Stuth said.
    It wasn't just the CASA. Everyone was piling on – making all sorts of allegations that the television station easily disproved. Why?

The Stuths think they were flagged as trouble-makers because they complained, a lot, about what was happening. They even called their senator, Pam Roach, who rattled cages in Olympia over the case.

    That's a good bet.

    But the CASA played a particularly troubling role:

Roach lobbied to get the Stuths visits with their granddaughter. They'd been told by the child's court advocate there was a court order forbidding them to see her. But we've found there was no such court order. They should have been allowed to see her all along.

To see how the child responded when she finally got to see her grandparents again, take a look at the video on the KING-TV website, and consider what would have happened had the CASA gotten her or his way.

Did some Michigan private agencies urge the state to violate federal law?

    The previous item on this Blog, originally posted in April, 2006, dealt with a campaign by some of Michigan's private child welfare agencies to undermine not only efforts to keep children in their own homes, but even efforts to keep them in their own communities. The agencies traipsed up to Lansing to tell a legislative committee that the children would be better off if they were sent far from everyone they knew and loved because then they'd be in "better neighborhoods" with "better schools."

    They made these claims in the course of opposing the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Family to Family initiative. (The Casey Foundation also helps to fund NCCPR, though they are not funding our current efforts in Michigan.)

    The previous post outlined the flaws in this logic, starting with the fact that this is exactly how American child welfare has operated for more than 150 years – and things haven't turned out too well.

    But, it turns out there is another problem with what the private agencies wanted: It might be illegal.

    This came to my attention when I read the results of a "casereading" conducted in connection with the lawsuit that the group which so arrogantly calls itself "Children's Rights" brought against the Michigan child welfare system. The authors of the casereading point out that "Federal law requires that children be placed in close proximity to their parents (42 U.S.C. 675[5][A]) to facilitate visitation and reunification."

    In other words, the feds know that if a child must be taken from her or his home, it is far better for that child at least to be able to see those parents, or to be able to see extended family, or be able to live near their friends and classmates and, yes, not have to change schools with all the disruption that causes. Common sense and 150 years of history say that as well. In fact, it's so obvious that, as the casereading points out, even the national trade association for child welfare agencies, the Child Welfare League Of America, feels compelled to say that "placement with foster families who live outside of the child's community should be avoided."

So who wouldn't say that?

    Well, it turns out the legislative testimony against keeping children in their own communities was coordinated by an outfit called the Association of Accredited Child and Family Agencies, based in Birmingham, Mi. The Association has no website I could find, but its president at the time of the hearing was John Schmidt. At the time Schmidt also was president of the Methodist Children's Home – a residential treatment center; in other words, an orphanage. (Schmidt still might run the place, their website doesn't say who's in charge). Institutionalization in a residential treatment center is both among the most expensive forms of "care" and among the worst for children. For details, see NCCPR's review of the literature and summary of better alternatives. But the people who run RTCs tend to be very good at rationalization; they convince themselves all that research just can't be right. So of course they're going to be threatened by alternatives that are both better for children and cost less. And clearly, if you run an institution that is "situated on 70 acres of beautifully wooded land and rolling open spaces" it's not right near where the families of most of the children institutionalized there actually live.

    The Methodist Home website and brochure say the agency also offers foster care and adoption services. They say nothing about services to keep families together.

    I'm not suggesting that anyone who testified at that hearing knew they were recommending a course of action that might be illegal. I didn't know myself until recently. But Michigan legislators need to know. They also need to check on the likely penalty for enacting a policy that deliberately avoids placing children close to their families. My guess is it's the penalty state lawmakers fear most: loss of federal money.

    So if the fact that the private agency recommendations would devastate children isn't enough reason for lawmakers to ignore them, the fact that it might further harm Michigan's budget certainly should be.

    There are other notable findings in the casereading but one stands out:

A key factor in cushioning the blow of removal from everyone loving and familiar is keeping children in stable placements; that is, stopping them from bouncing from foster home to foster home. According to the case reading, a child is far more likely to have only one foster care placement if it's an unlicensed placement with a relative – instead of a licensed placement with a stranger. Yet, as is documented elsewhere on this Blog, the very group that brought the lawsuit and sought the casereading, the one that pompously pronounces itself the arbiter of "Children's Rights," included in its settlement a provision likely to severely undermine kinship care in Michigan.

    Perhaps the people at CR simply didn't notice the findings in their own casereading. If they'd care to go back and look, they're on page 24.

Michigan: When the mask slips

 This post originally appeared on this blog on April 30, 2006; before the Blog moved to Blogspot and became searchable. I'm posting it again, with some minor updating, because I've learned a little more about the events described, but I want to recap those events before I add an update in a future post:
 
Every once in awhile, the mask slips, and a state or locality's child welfare establishment reveals its ugly side.  In Michigan the racial and class bias, and the naked self-interest, that permeate child welfare came out into the open at a public hearing this week.
 
According to an AP story, a parade of officials from private foster care agencies effectively made the case that children should be torn away from their parents, and everyone else they know, forever, just because those families are poor.  They claimed the children are simply better off among middle class strangers than with their own impoverished families.
 
No, they didn't quite say take children just because they're poor, and they didn't quite say never let them go home.  But that is the only logical conclusion if one is to believe the arguments they offered for opposing the Family to Family program, which seeks to reduce the number of children taken from their parents and place those who must be taken with friends and relatives in their own neighborhoods.  (Family to Family is an initiative of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which also helps to fund NCCPR. The Casey Foundation does not fund NCCPR's 2008 work in Michigan).
 
The basic argument the private agencies presented is that children are better off in foster care with total strangers in a swank suburb than with grandma or grandpa, an aunt and uncle, or a trusted friend in their own neighborhood.  That's because there is less crime and there are better schools in the suburbs.
 
But if that argument applies to children whose poverty has been confused with neglect so child protective services stepped in, why doesn't it also apply to every other impoverished child?  Why should "neglected" children be the only ones to gain benefits from suburban schools that are said to be so enormous they outweigh the love of a family?  Why not just confiscate all impoverished children? And if, in fact, these benefits are so huge, then it's hard to see how these same private agencies can really mean it when they say, with straight faces, "we really do try our best to reunify these families whenever possible."  After all, why would they want to pursue such reunification when that would doom the children to returning to a poor neighborhood?
 
In case the problems in suggesting that material comfort and even good schools are more important than love aren't obvious, consider:
 
--We've been doing it the way the agencies want for 150 years.  The very first foster care program, Charles Loring Brace's 19th Century "orphan trains" were based on precisely the theory that the Michigan agency chiefs offered the legislature: The dreadful influences of poor big-city neighborhoods can only be overcome by shipping the children of the immigrant poor off to farms in the south and Midwest.  Only it didn't work too well.  Many of the children were not orphans at all; they were taken from parents for the same reason children are taken today: The parents – typically Catholic immigrants -- were poor and despised. Many of the children wound up treated little better than slaves. 
 
-- It doesn't work well now, either – does it?  The system of taking impoverished children from everyone loving and familiar and throwing them in with middle-class strangers is the system we have now.  And, according to a recent comprehensive study of foster care "alumni" here's what that's given us:
 
--Alumni with twice the rate of post-traumatic stress disorder of Gulf War veterans.
 
--Alumni who report that one-third of them were abused by a foster parent or another adult in a foster home.  (In contrast, the rate of abuse in kinship homes is lower than in what should be called "stranger care.")
 
--Alumni of whom it could be said that only 20 percent were "doing well."  (NCCPR's full analysis of this study, and the URL for the study itself, are available here: http://www.nccpr.org/reports/cfpanalysis.doc )
 
One of the main reasons foster care is such a failure is the emotional devastation to a child when he loses not just mom and dad but also his aunts and uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers, friends, neighbors, teachers and classmates.  For a young enough child it's an experience akin to a kidnapping.  And in many cases, the odds are excellent that as soon as the child gets used to his new surroundings, she or he will be forced to move again, compounding the trauma.  What good is a "better" school if a child has to keep moving from one such school to another?
 
And why in the world do the private child welfare agencies of Michigan insist children are better off by continuing to throw them into a system that churns out walking wounded four times out of five?
 
--In contrast, consider the record of Family to Family.  According to the wire service story the chairman of the legislative committee "wants to see more data about [Family to Family's] effectiveness."
 
He could start here: http://www.unc.edu/~lynnu/f2feval.htm with a comprehensive outside evaluation of the program done by the University of North Carolina.  That evaluation found that  "[F]ewer children entered out of home care and those who had to be removed from their homes were placed in less restrictive forms of care."
 
Here are some of the other highlights:
 
While conventional foster parent "recruiting campaigns" are failing all over the country, Family to Family sites often succeed in recruiting foster parents in the children's own neighborhoods.  And instead of the hostility that often characterizes relationships between birth parents and foster parents, many foster parents embraced the Family to Family approach of working with and mentoring birth parents.
 
In addition:
 
-- With more foster families available, fewer children had to be institutionalized.
 
-- Increased use of relatives as foster parents also opened up a new option for permanency, as more relatives agreed to be permanent guardians of children who could not be reunited with their birth parents.
 
-- At most sites, there was a significant reduction in the number of placements children had to endure.  At one site, the number of children in care between one and two years who endured three or more placements was cut by more than 25 percent.  In another county, it was cut by more than 50 percent. 
 
-- Perhaps most significant: Because Family to Family succeeded in keeping more children safely in their own homes, the children who were removed had more serious problems.  Nevertheless, there was no increase in the "recidivism" rate – the number of children returned home who re-enter care – at any Family to Family site.  And in some sites, the recidivism rate went down.
 
That indicates that all of the other improvements in children's lives were accomplished while making children safer.
 
If legislators, or anyone else, want still more information about the benefits of placing children with relatives instead of strangers – including the fact that such placements tend to be safer - - they can check out the report from the University of Illinois Children and Family Research Center available here: http://www.fosteringresults.org/results/reports/pewreports_10-13-04_alreadyhome.pdf

 
The Michigan agencies' case is built on a foundation of false stereotypes, both about the birth parents who lose their children to foster care and the neighborhoods those parents live in.  They counted on the legislators to conjure up a picture of sadistic brutes who beat, torture and rape their children.  But such cases make up only a tiny fraction of workers' caseloads.  As is documented in detail in NCCPR's Issue Papers, far more common are cases in which a family's poverty is confused with neglect.
 
As for the neighborhoods, the portrait from the agencies is what one might expect not from people who genuinely care about what's best for children, but rather from someone whose only source of information is local television news, with its endless parade of crime scenes and "perp walks."
 
But – and it shouldn't really be necessary to point this out – even in the most crime-plagued neighborhood, most people don't commit crimes.  Even in neighborhoods where drug dealers congregate on the corner, most parents are doing everything they can to keep their children away from that corner.  Even the poorest communities have neighborhood associations, community-based social service agencies and churches that can form the foundation for helping child protective services keep children safe without forcing them to leave everyone they know and love.  The problem is, child protective services agencies have often been clueless about what these groups are and where to find them, and the community groups have been too suspicious, often with good reason, to work with CPS.

Bridging these barriers is what initiatives like Family to Family are all about.
 
Of course, it would be wonderful if poor children could stay with their birth parents, be surrounded by supportive extended family and neighbors and live in upper-middle-class suburban neighborhoods if they so chose.  If the Michigan Legislature would like to initiate a program to build more affordable housing in the suburbs, I think that would be a great idea.
 
But it is obscene to suggest that the only way a poor child should get to go to a "good" school is by trading in his family for the privilege.
 
This isn't really about the children at all.  This is about agencies that typically are paid for every day they hold a child in foster care.  If Family to Family proceeds, they'll get fewer children – because more of them will remain safely in their own homes.  Family to Family also is about reducing the use of group homes and institutions – again, threatening the survival of these agencies, which rake in huge per diem payments for warehousing children.
 
In addition, private agencies typically oversee a far lower percentage of kinship care homes than stranger-care homes; in other words, when it comes to kin care, the private agencies get a smaller piece of the action.

What happened at that hearing in Michigan is more evidence that the biggest addiction problem in child welfare is not substance-abusing parents, though that problem is serious and real.  The biggest addiction problem in child welfare is great big, prestigious, mainstream private child welfare agencies with blue chip boards of directors that are addicted to their per diem payments for holding children in foster care.
 
And they are putting their addiction ahead of the children. 

More in a future post. 

Paying the price for Michigan’s adoption obsession

    Perhaps it wasn't the best timing.

    I'm beginning work on what will be at least one report on child welfare in Michigan for release early next year, and it so happened that the very day reporters fanned out across that state to do their feature stories on Michigan Adoption Day was the day I sat down to reread scores of newspaper stories about the horrible death of Ricky Holland. What was shocking, even on second reading, was the extent to which the fanaticism for adoption-at-all-costs which has permeated child welfare practice in Michigan for so many years created an almost willful blindness to the danger awaiting Ricky.

    There is no question that Ricky's birth mother, Casey Jo Caswell, had problems – two in particular: chronic poverty and a tendency to hook up with the wrong kind of man; with the second problem probably closely related to the first. But there is no allegation that Ricky's birth mother ever abused him. None. In fact, it was Caswell herself who loved Ricky so much that she didn't want the boy to have to live in an environment of poverty and instability. So she sought out the only alternative she could think of: She asked the Michigan child welfare agency, the Department of Human Services, to take him, just until she could get on her feet and get housing and a job.

    In a civilized society, the child welfare agency would have said: "No. We don't tear apart families just because they're poor. We take away the poverty, not the child. We'll help you with housing and help you find a job. We'll help you become independent enough to avoid depending on lousy men." Perhaps that wouldn't have worked. But it's what a civilized society would try first – and if it had been tried, Ricky Holland might be alive today.

    But, of course, it doesn't work that way; certainly not in Michigan. And once you "surrender" your child to a government child welfare agency, the agency decides when you are fit to get the child back. (Yeah, yeah, I know the party line from the agencies: A judge makes that decision. But judges almost never turn down child welfare agencies.) In the case of Ricky Holland, who was only three when he was surrendered and was white, making him easy to adopt, the decision was that his mother would never get him back.

    After all, the Michigan Department of Human Services thought it had found the perfect home for Ricky – Tim and Lisa Holland – white, middle class, with a big house in the suburbs. Not only did DHS overlook one warning sign after another, the caseworker assigned to the Hollands even set up a personal baby pipeline for them – moving to confiscate every other child of Casey's at birth, and promptly deliver those children to the Hollands. In each case, of course, the placement had the potential to help Michigan collect a bounty of $4,000 to $8,000 under the federal so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act. (The maximum bounty is now $12,000 to $13,000). And in each case, the adoption helped give Michigan DHS numbers to brag about in those Adoption Day feature stories.

    In fact, the pipeline didn't stop until the Hollands wanted it to stop. We know that thanks to one reporter who truly saw Casey Jo Caswell as a three-dimensional human being, and thought her story was worth telling early on: Karen Bouffard of the Detroit News. In her story, "The boy who had no chance," available from the News' paid archive, Bouffard writes:

Caswell said ... the state social worker, never counseled her on continuing her education or job training. She says she didn't get any offers of housing assistance. In arguing to sever Caswell's parental rights, the caseworker said she didn't offer housing assistance because, since Ricky was in foster care, Caswell didn't qualify for such help.

Caswell also says she was not counseled about obtaining birth control, or to stop having babies. "The only thing she ever said to me was after (her last baby) was born," Caswell said. "She told me, 'You have to stop having babies because the Hollands don't want any more.' " [Emphasis added].

    But here's where the story moves from typical child welfare agency class bias to jaw dropping willful blindness:

    One reason the Ricky Holland story got so much attention is that it had a classic element: the fake "disappearance." You know how it works: The parents – whether birth, foster or adoptive – claim their child has disappeared; they go on television to plead for his return, a massive search follows - In the Holland case, there even was a segment of America's Most Wanted - but all the while the parents know exactly where the child is – or rather the child's body. The truth was, Lisa, who had made Ricky's life a living Hell for years, ended it with blows to the boy's head from a hammer. The boy lingered, semi-conscious for a week. Then Tim Holland stuffed the body – or perhaps the still-alive little boy – into trash bags and dumped him in a pond.

    But here's the part that really makes you wonder just how out-of-hand adoption fanaticism has gotten in Michigan. Ricky "disappeared" on July 2, 2005. Even as police suspicion of the Hollands grew, DHS made no move to take Ricky's siblings from the Hollands even temporarily, as they almost certainly would have done in the case of impoverished Black birth parents under similar circumstances. But even if one can buy that decision, get this: During this same time period, with Ricky still missing, DHS actually went ahead and finalized the adoption of Ricky's youngest sibling, who was living in the Holland home as a foster child.

    It's amazing what the combination of everyday class bias, plus the prospect of bounty money for the agency and lots and lots of good press will do. And just think: Had Ricky disappeared in November instead of July, the adoption of his brother by the Hollands might even have been finalized on Michigan Adoption Day.

    In any event, I've reread almost all the clips. Now I'm going through the many previous reports issued about child welfare in Michigan, and finding a fair amount that apparently was overlooked when those reports were issued. I'm reminded of things I first learned when I was a reporter: Just how much people will admit to when, apparently, they think it's for a document no one will read. Or what happens when a stray fact in an old report is linked to a news story. For instance: Is it possible that some of Michigan's child welfare agencies actually urged the State Legislature to adopt policies that break federal law? More on that in future posts.

There goes the judge

    Some updates to Sunday night's post concerning National Child Welfare Hypocrisy Day (a.k.a. National Adoption Day):

    First, New Jersey will again be celebrating reunification this year – one of the very few child welfare systems to do so.

    Second, in yesterday's Blog, I took issue with Michigan Supreme Court Justice Maura Corrigan, for placing far more emphasis on adoption than on reunification. I noted that this essay by a trial court judge, Kenneth Tacoma, condemning the consequences of Michigan's adoption fanaticism, and in particular legislation known as the "Binsfield laws," named for a former lieutenant governor, seemed to give Corrigan some second thoughts, but did not change her overall stance. A spokeswoman for Corrigan writes that she "would like you to know that she and Judge Tacoma worked together on legislation, which passed earlier this year, to address the issues [Judge Tacoma] pointed out in his article."

Actually, that legislation, which makes only minimal changes, is what I had in mind by second thoughts. As the Detroit Free Press reported when Corrigan and Tacoma first presented these changes:

Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform and a critic of Michigan's child protection system, called the proposals "small steps in the right direction. It is the first public acknowledgment that the Binsfeld laws were a horrible mistake," Wexler said. "But even these revisions don't address the worst legacy of Binsfeld: The take-the-child-and-run mentality, which still dominates Michigan child welfare, causing the state to take thousands of children from their homes needlessly every year, often in cases where family poverty is confused with neglect."

    Justice Corrigan also showed priorities I would argue are disappointing during a meeting of an 80-member task force studying Michigan child welfare. Corrigan is a member of the Task Force.

I attended an all-day meeting of the Task Force in Detroit on November 17 because I knew that arrangements had been made for one group largely left off the task force itself – birth parents – to speak to the group. I had the privilege of meeting some of the birth parents as they were preparing their presentation beforehand. Some tears were shed as more than 20 parents whose children had been taken from them worked up the courage to face what amounts to the power elite of Michigan child welfare. Afterwards, several members of the task force said they were deeply moved, and the Free Press ran a story about the presentations.

    But Corrigan, who had been there earlier and would return later, missed it. Her spokeswoman explained that she had to return to her office to deal with "pressing court business" - preparing for the Supreme Court's weekly conference at which cases are discussed and decided.

    But Justice Corrigan was back at the Task Force that afternoon, in time to chastise a task force committee, harshly and at length, for putting forward a recommendation that would require a little more work from the courts at a time when their budget is being cut. (Given that this is Michigan, however, odds are everyone's budget is going to be cut.)

National Child Welfare Hypocrisy Day

    How do we know what's really important to a person, or to a corporation, or to an institution?

    One way, of course, is how we choose to spend money, and I've written before about how child welfare agencies do that. But there's also another good measure: What we choose to celebrate.

    The father who has memorized the schedule of his favorite football team but always forgets his children's birthdays is sending a message. So, too, is the child welfare agency which claims that its first priority when a child is taken away is to reunify that child with her or his birth parents, with adoption as the second choice, but chooses to celebrate only the supposed second choice.

    In general, adoption is the right second choice; for some children it is the right first choice. Adoption can be, both literally and figuratively, a life saver for a child; it should be one important component of any good child welfare system; and there is nothing wrong with celebrating it as one avenue to permanence. But if the true intent of child welfare systems is revealed by what they celebrate, then one of the most noble concepts in child welfare, that urgent need for permanence for children, has been perverted into a synonym for adoption and only adoption. Reunification gets lip service until everyone in the system, from frontline workers, to agency chiefs to top judges can get what they really want – children taken from poor people and placed with middle class families; families like their own. The real agenda of most child welfare systems, and most of the people in them, is made apparent every year on National Adoption Day, or, as it should properly be called, National Child Welfare Hypocrisy Day.

    The day actually is celebrated on different dates in different states, but it's always in November. You know the drill. Open the court on a Saturday, bring in cake and balloons, finalize foster-child adoptions en masse – and reinforce every stereotype about how the system rescues children from horrible birth parents and places them with vastly superior adoptive parents. And, of course, get a guaranteed puff piece in the local newspaper, with no tough questions. This one, from the St. Petersburg Times is typical:

In general, a courthouse is not a happy place. People go there to get divorced, to fight eviction, to file for bankruptcy, to watch loved ones sent away to prison. You see a lot of suffering, and you hear it in the cries and cursing that echo through the hallways. Forty children, sugar-laden with sheet cake and bouncing around a lobby with balloons, made Friday an exception at the county courthouse in Tampa. As part of a National Adoption Day celebration, they were legally united with "forever families," mothers and fathers giving them a one-way ticket out of the foster care system. …

The treacle aside, it's almost certainly inaccurate. Given what we know about adoption "disruption" for some of the children, it may well be round trip. And, as is discussed below, stories like this one make such tragedies, and others, a little more likely.

    If nothing else, this is the day when almost everyone in almost every child welfare system in the country, from frontline workers to agency chiefs, show their true colors. This is the day that makes them genuinely happy. Yet all these same players will turn on a dime and blather on about how their first priority is reunification. Well, if that's your first priority, why aren't you celebrating it? Why is there no national reunification day? Why is there no happiness expressed over doing what you yourselves claim is priority #1? Why don't reporters note that, when a child finally gets to return to the birth mother she loves after months or years needlessly separated, that, too, can bring some happiness to a courtroom?

    The answer is obvious: It's not priority #1. Priority #1 is carrying out those middle-class rescue fantasies –taking children from people like them and placing them with people like us; people of the same race and, especially the same income level, as your average caseworker, judge, lawyer – or reporter. (No newspaper took the whole "people like us" thing as literally as Foster's Daily Democrat and its sister papers in New Hampshire, where a four story 4,900-word Sunday package of glop and goo about adoption day included a sidebar in which the saintly foster mother –who kept complaining about not getting enough taxpayer money for her adoptions – was none other than the newspaper's managing editor!)

For almost everyone working in the system, the truth is that keeping families together is the broccoli on the child welfare menu and adoption is the dessert. National Child Welfare Hypocrisy Day is another way to bring out the dessert tray before anyone's eaten their broccoli.

    The exceptions are few and far between. The first to recognize the hypocrisy was Marc Cherna, long-time reform-minded leader of the human services agency in Allegheny County, Pa. He was the first to create an annual celebration of reunified families and push it at least as hard as the adoption celebration. After NCCPR started spreading the word about this, a few – very few – other communities followed suit. New York City has done it for the past few years (though their effort is somewhat tarnished by other recent statements and actions undercutting their own recent reforms). New Jersey has done it at least once, and the Miami region of the Florida Department of Children and Families did it recently and plans more such events. There probably are one or two others I haven't heard about. But that's it.

    In comparison, there are hundreds of Adoption Day events.

    But it's not just hypocritical, it's also dangerous.

    When the only kind of "permanence" that receives any reward is adoption the message to the frontlines is obvious: Don't try to reunify, rush to terminate parental rights. And that's exactly what happens. In Kentucky it led to a scandal, as the Lexington Herald-Leader exposed "quick trigger adoptions" with workers rushing to terminate parental rights in cases where children may never have needed to be taken from their parents. The only difference between Kentucky and the rest of the nation is, in Kentucky, the Herald-Leader, was paying attention. That caught the attention of NBC Nightly News which offered an excellent overview of the Kentucky scandal.

But there are other dangers as well. Year after year, terminations of parental rights outrun actual adoptions. The result: A generation of legal orphans with no ties to their parents and little or no hope of adoption – with or without cake and balloons - either. The combination of these non-financial incentives, plus the adoption bounties paid by the federal government goes a long way to explain why the number of children who "age out" of foster care each year with no home at all has soared 41 percent since 1998.

And then there is the matter of where these children wind up.

Another reason for the mad rush to adoption-at-all-costs is the fact that getting those adoption numbers up is the one time a child welfare agency is guaranteed good press. Everyone knows the reporters will write a story like the one quoted above and not ask any tough questions about whether the children really needed to be taken, and how carefully the adoptive parents were checked out. And then, the same journalists will wonder how it could happen that children like Ricky Holland and Timothy Boss in Michigan and others across the country could be murdered by adoptive parents - in effect, adopted to death.

Of course abuse in adoptive homes is rare – just like abuse in birth parent homes. The bigger problem is adoption "disruption," when agencies rush children into a bad match and the parents change their minds. No one really knows how often that happens – child welfare systems almost never ask questions to which they don't want to know the answers. Some rough estimates are in NCCPR's Issue Paper on adoption.

But whether the problem is legal orphans, disruption or, rarely, severe, even fatal abuse in adoptive homes, it's all encouraged by adoption bounties and the adoption day mentality, both of which promote quick-and-dirty, slipshod placements. Indeed, even Marcia Lowry, who runs the group that so arrogantly calls itself "Children's Rights" has said that "… Congress should realize that far too many states … when they do, for example, raise their adoption numbers, are doing so by including many clearly inadequate families … along with the genuinely committed, loving families who want to make a home for these children, just to 'succeed' by boosting their numbers." That her own lawsuit settlements have been known to push states the same way is a contradiction someone might want to ask her about someday.

Nowhere is the adoption-at-all-costs mentality more deeply-ingrained than in Michigan.

For that, we can thank a number of politicians, most recently Maura Corrigan, Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court. When she was Chief Justice one of her first moves was to create a task force on adoption – not a task force on permanence – a task force on adoption. But her pride and joy has been creating more Adoption Day celebrations than any other state. Thanks to Justice Corrigan's crusade, the website of the Michigan Supreme Court – the state's chief "impartial" arbiter of termination cases - is slathered in promotional material for adoption – without so much as a single word on behalf of reunification.

In theory it is possible for one or more justices of this court to give a speech touting adoption in the morning, preside at an adoption luncheon at noon – and hear an appeal of a termination of parental rights that afternoon.

One can only imagine how much courage it took, therefore, for a lowly trial court judge to point out the harm Michigan's adoption mania has done to children. In a scathing essay, Judge Kenneth Tacoma exposed the giant surge in legal orphans and the sharp rise in children "aging out" of Michigan foster care. Wisely, the judge targeted not Corrigan, but earlier fanatical efforts to promote adoption-at-all-costs in Michigan as well as the federal Adoption and Safe Families Act, the law that pays those bounties for finalized adoptions. The article prompted even Corrigan to have some second thoughts – but not enough to prompt her to push for, say, a "reunification day" in Michigan courts, or to turn her adoption crusade into a permanence crusade.

Not even the tragedy of Ricky Holland could do that. Ricky Holland was taken from a birth mother who might have been able to care for him had she gotten the right kind of help. He was placed with well-to-do adoptive parents. The adoptive mother tortured him, and ultimately murdered him. This was one of those cases with more "red flags" than a Soviet May Day parade. Throughout the process, the Michigan child welfare agency ignored one blatant warning sign after another. We don't know why. But such behavior is to be expected in a system that lavishly rewards pushing adoption, and frowns on anything that would interfere with getting those adoption numbers up. (At least the Michigan press paid attention when Ricky died. When Timothy Boss was adopted to death years earlier, it barely got a mention.)

Most Michigan counties celebrate adoption day Tuesday. Perhaps this time, somewhere in that state, a reporter will ask a tougher question than "How's the sheet cake?"

Nebraska cops out

    In a disappointing, but unsurprising move, the Nebraska Legislature has voted to limit the state's "safe haven" law to infants 30 days old or younger – and do absolutely nothing about the underlying problem, desperate families with no place to turn. Well, not absolutely nothing: they've also resorted to the all-purpose government cop out, a special committee to study the issue.

    In fairness, that's not entirely the Legislature's fault. The governor called the legislature into special session in a way which largely tied its hands. This is the same governor who has shown unwavering support for Todd Landry, the head of the state child welfare agency and a man who is to the safe haven crisis as former FEMA director Michael Brown was to Hurricane Katrina. To their credit, a number of legislators have made clear they are appalled by Brownie – sorry, Landry's – handling of the whole mess.

    Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times did a very good story about the larger issues, including a close look at another case that Landry, presumably, would say was a non-emergency, and the man from Boys Town quoted in the Grand Island paper a few days ago, would say could be solved by going to a student intern. See what you think. It's also one of the few stories to note that Nebraska is one of the worst in the nation when it comes to throwing children into foster care.