Michigan update: Three tiny drops in a very large bucket

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

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

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

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

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

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

A little background:

●The settlement called for a "Needs Assessment."

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

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

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

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

The process will be repeated next year.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nearly three weeks later: Nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So once again CR is making its priorities clear.

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

Update: Escape from Nebraska!

In that case discussed in the previous post to this Blog: After a month trapped in the Nebraska foster care system, the children from Palo Alto, California are free.

As their father's lawyer put it: "The kids were flown back here on Friday, interviewed by child protective services and returned to their parents in a matter of minutes." And on Tuesday, the juvenile court case officially was dismissed. The family will have to go through counseling. A criminal case against the parents still is pending in Nebraska.

The daughter will be allowed to travel – with her family - to South Korea to receive her prize in an international art competition.

By the way, her painting is scheduled to remain on display at the Omaha Children's Museum until October. But if you're thinking of dropping in from out-of-state to see it, you might want to leave the kids at home.

Nebraska: The speed trap of child welfare

There are communities across the country that are notorious for speed traps. The speed limit is set absurdly low and the local police lie in wait for cars with out-of-state plates. The unwary don't get to leave town without paying a very stiff fine.

Nebraska is a little like a giant speed trap. Only instead of levying a fine, they take away your children.

Consider the case of Suwen Wang, a physicist, and his wife, Charlotte Fu, a paralegal, from Palo Alto, California. On June 6, they were traveling through Nebraska with their 12-year-old daughter and 13-year-old son when some sibling rivalry apparently got out of hand. The result: The children wound up trapped in foster care for more than a month - and Nebraska authorities were all set to force the daughter to miss a once-in-lifetime opportunity to travel to Korea where her award-winning art will be exhibited as part of an international competition. Things only began to look up when the case got some news coverage.

The daughter was the North American winner of a children's painting contest sponsored by the United Nations. The painting was on display at the Omaha Children's Museum, and the proud parents flew the family out to see it. But on the way back to the airport, the 12-year-old girl and her 13-year-old brother apparently started acting like, well, 12 and 13-year-olds, with the boy "needling his sister," according to the father's lawyer.

So Dad pulled over to the side of the road, and Mom got out to deal with the situation – not knowing that someone was watching from her front lawn. The witness told a local television station Mom hit the 13-year-old several times on the back. (Police reportedly said she hit him in the face, but the witness herself says otherwise.) Ms. Fu does not look like someone who could inflict much damage on a 13-year-old boy. The boy cursed at his mother, pushed her, and may have hit her - since, while the boy was entirely uninjured, mom was bleeding from a cut above her nose. At that point, Dad turned around from the front seat and allegedly hit the boy. Lawyers for the couple deny that either parent hit the children.

After 20 minutes, everyone apparently had calmed down enough for the family to resume the drive. But by then the witness had called the cops, and a Plattsmouth, Neb. Police officer pulled the family over.

Mom and dad were arrested and jailed for a weekend. The children's sentence has lasted a lot longer. As of July 9, they still were in foster care, though, thanks to the news coverage and the parents' middle-class status (which meant they could afford private attorneys), Nebraska made a deal to let Santa Clara County, California, authorities take over the case. (In California, individual counties run their own child welfare systems.) So the children probably will be released soon, if they're not back in California already. Were this family poor, odds are the children would be trapped in foster care for years.

Of course, things like this can, and do, happen anywhere. But they're more likely to happen in Nebraska, which, year after year, takes away children at one of the highest rates in the United States, by far. The Neanderthal state of child welfare in Nebraska was exposed to the nation during the state's Safe Haven debacle last year, when the then-head of the child welfare agency, Todd Landry, made jokes at the expense of desperate parents and otherwise belittled their problems.

Landry since has left, but his replacement, Todd Reckling, appears to be cut from the same cloth, blithely declaring that these things take time, even as the children were trapped thousands of miles from home.

In fact, as the Omaha World-Herald pointed out, when Nebraska was desperate to send out-of-state "safe haven" children home, they made it happen within days. Meanwhile, the parents even reported themselves to Santa Clara County child welfare authorities in the hope it would speed up the process.

Nebraska authorities also appear to be justifying their actions based on the fact that there has been one other incident involving the parents back in California. Mom and Dad got into a loud argument. Mom said she was leaving to stay in a hotel. Dad may, or may not, have grabbed her arm to restrain her. And he may, or may not, have gotten into a scuffle with police when they were called.

But this also is a family so well-known for their love of their children that more than a dozen friends flew thousands of miles to be with them at a court hearing in Nebraska and to protest outside the courthouse.

"This is an Orwellian nightmare," one friend, Larry Markosian, told the San Jose Mercury News. "Every family occasionally has difficulty raising kids, especially teenage boys. I don't know what happened. But we know they are a loving and kind family and we see no reason whatsoever to keep these kids in a foster home so far from the community they grew up in."
So yeah, it seems the folks in this family have tempers – like real, fallible human beings. A couple of times it may have gotten out-of-hand. Apparently, no one told them about the CPS-endorsed Oprah-fication of American family life. They hadn't heard that to be sure you stay out of trouble with CPS you should never, ever lose control and all differences are to be settled by saying "I'm not o.k. with that" and otherwise mumbling therapy-speak at each other.

Who knows? Maybe this family could use some of that "counseling" that CPS agencies always try to impose – though in this case it should be strictly voluntary. After all, it is possible to live together as a family with neither the phony harmony of therapy-speak nor ever raising a hand (as opposed to a voice) toward another in anger. The issue here, as almost always, is balance of harms. And one thing is clear: Whatever problems may have existed before, the Nebraska child welfare agency has made them worse by punishing the children with needless foster care.

"These kids are very much involved in the Palo Alto community, with Boy Scouts, art and Chinese lessons," Markosian, the family friend, told the Mercury News. "And they are being ripped away from not only their family but from their whole community."

He went on to read aloud from an e-mail sent by the 12-year-old girl to her parents: "Dear Mom and Dad," the e-mail said. "We love you a lot. Remember that. We know you're doing everything you can to bring us back home and we are very thankful. Love you a lot." The e-mail is signed with 10 exclamation points.
Part of the explanation for the behavior of Nebraska authorities is just bureaucratic inertia. Another part is the fanaticism about child removal that permeates the state. But there also is an undercurrent of racism running through the case.

Although the family are American citizens and the parents have lived in the United States for 17 years, the 12-year-old's "law guardian," who, in theory, is supposed to watch out for her "best interests," wanted to seize the family's passports – which would have made it impossible for the girl to go to South Korea for the award ceremony. (After all, what could be more suspicious, and pose more risk to a child, than an Asian-American family going to – Asia?) The law guardian reportedly explained that the art contest was irrelevant to the foster care case.

In addition, during visits, the family was forced to speak English, though they prefer Chinese – so the supervisors monitoring the visits could understand every word. I've seen no explanation concerning why the visits had to be monitored in the first place.

Such bias is certainly nothing new in Omaha. In 2002, authorities tore 10 Hmong children from their families after they confused marks left by a traditional Southeast Asian healing practice known as "coining" with child abuse. Even after the error was explained, authorities kept the children – until publicity and protest marches, which included one Asian youth singing "We Shall Overcome," won their freedom. I have two letters from the Omaha police chief proudly justifying the raids.

Would the caller in this most recent case, who has refused to back up her claims by disclosing her name, have made the same call, had the family been white?

Meanwhile, authorities in Santa Clara County haven't acquitted themselves all that well either. They have not promised to return the children even after they obtain legal custody and they've come up with an absurd list of hoops the parents are going to have to jump through – something almost guaranteed to increase the stress in the family (though it's possible they did that to appease Nebraska.)

In general, though Santa Clara does a far better job than Nebraska, that's a mighty low bar. The county has one of the highest rates of removal in California, as is documented in NCCPR's California Rate-of-Removal Index. And, as former Mercury News columnist Peter Delevett documented, child welfare authorities in Santa Clara may not treat Mexicans any better than their counterparts in Omaha treat Asians.

Back in Nebraska, the child welfare agency justified what it did to these children by saying their staff followed procedures. But that, of course, is a big part of the problem: the procedures stink.

Then, at the hearing where the agreement with Santa Clara County was reached, an attorney for the Nebraska child welfare agency, Susan Buettner, declared: "The most important thing has been lost: This is a case that involved alleged child abuse,"

No, Ms. Buettner, that fact hasn't been lost at all. But it was your agency that did the abusing.

A post in response to The Post

There is a whole subgenre of child welfare writing that might be called "the-adoption-failed-but-it-wasn't-my-fault lit." In it, white upper-middle-class adoptive parents write about their noble efforts to rescue a Black a child from foster care, about how terribly hard they tried to make it work and how, because everybody else failed, ultimately, they had to throw the child back. Such accounts usually engender enormous sympathy from readers. Since most of the readers also tend to be upper-middle-class, they have no problem sympathizing – no, make that empathizing – with one of their own.

A classic example turned up in the Washington Post "Parenting" blog yesterday. This is one of the Blogs that also criticized Gary Staton, the father who came under attack in a Nebraska Safe Haven case. (This is the Blog I mentioned in my previous post about the case where at least the criticism was civil.)

Yesterday, the Blog owner, Stacey Garfinkle, turned over the blog to Wendy Bilen Thorbjornsen, an adoptive mother who told the story of adopting a child from the D.C. foster care system, and then throwing the child out less than a year later. She was deluged with empathy. Her "guest blog" was preceded by a glowing endorsement from Ms. Garfinkle.

In fact, it would not be fair to pass judgment one way or another based only on the information in Thorbjornsen's blog. The real problem with the blog was the way the Thorbjornsen passed judgment on everyone else – especially any and all birth parents caught up in the D.C. child welfare system.

So I posted a response – which Ms. Garfinkle went out of her way to include in the blog's comments section despite its length. I'm also offering it here:

Suppose somebody were to read [Thorbjornsen's] column and, just hypothetically, conclude the following:

These are spoiled upper middle class white people who treated a flesh-and-blood human being like a BMW that was out of warranty, throwing her back when she turned out to have too many defects.

The more mom professes "love" for her adopted child, the more it's as she approaches the moment she throws the child away. She gave the daughter she loves less than a year to overcome everything in her past and, when the system finally offered intensive help, she wouldn't even try to use it.

Thousands of parents, birth, foster and adoptive, do a lot more for children who are harder to deal with. They try longer and they go to greater lengths.

Never mind sympathizing with the parents, how about some sympathy for the child, who now has endured the ultimate rejection and may never trust again.

Unfair? Actually, yes. I've just stereotyped people I've never met – let alone walked in their shoes. They tried to do something I wouldn't even attempt. At a minimum, we who haven't "been there" should suspend judgment of those who have.

So why be unfair on purpose?

I did it in the hope that the readers of a column that clearly is of the upper-middle-class, by the upper-middle-class and for the upper-middle-class finally might feel how much it hurts to be stereotyped, even by just one poster to a blog, even when everyone else is rallying around you.

Now try, just try, to imagine how much worse it is to be stereotyped over and over again just because you're poor, Black and caught up in DC Family Court. Imagine what it's like for those stereotypes to be so ingrained that they have cost thousands of children the chance to be raised in loving homes – the loving homes they were born in. Because that's exactly what you did, Ms. Thorbjornsen, when you wrote that the children whose fates are decided by that court:

"have largely been removed from unfit homes rife with abuse, neglect, abandonment, and myriad other social and emotional ills. These kids have encountered more of life's seamy side than many of us will over a lifetime."

In some cases that's exactly what happened; in many more it's not. Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with "neglect" others fall between the extremes. Yet you saw fit to paint them all with the broadest of brushes based, apparently, on one case file (which only tells the agency's version of events) and some horror stories from the headlines.

Ms. Garfinkle also seems prone to some stereotyping, what with this column coming so quickly on the heels of the one about Gary Staton, the father in the Nebraska Safe Haven case.

So I challenge you, Ms. Garfinkle: Now that you've published Ms. Thorbjornsen's version of how the system works, publish the first-hand account of someone who actually saw what goes on in D.C. Family Court day after day, because he's one of the few allowed past the curtain of secrecy the system uses to cover up its blunders.

The University of the District of Columbia runs one of only two programs in the entire nation in which law students represent exclusively birth parents in cases alleging child maltreatment. Some great students, who themselves don't get the respect they deserve – they're from UDC after all – stand up for families who have been disrespected their entire lives.

One of those students spoke of his experiences during a news conference organized by my organization to mark the first anniversary of the discovery of the deaths of the Jacks children [a particularly horrific D.C. case]. If you're willing to have your preconceived notions challenged instead of reinforced, go here: http://www.nccpr.org/reports/dc1709.pdf and scroll down to page 11.

Then, how about letting your readers in on what you find?

In an e-mail Ms. Garfinkle said she will, indeed, take a look at what the student wrote.

Congratulations, World-Herald, you got your lynch mob

At the end of my post last week about Gary Staton, the Nebraska father who was the victim of a journalistic mugging by the Omaha World-Herald which read like something straight from Fox News, I wrote:

And, in the age of the internet, there is an extra reason to be extra careful about any story involving poor people having children. This is a particularly hot button for the virtual lynch mob – the despicable haters who fill the comment sections of newspaper websites under any story about poor people with vulgar demands for compulsory sterilization. The World-Herald does not post comments with its stories yet, but it's already started elsewhere, with one website calling Staton a "slimeball" and a "dirtbag." But then, that's essentially what the Omaha World-Herald did, with just a bit more subtlety.

Well, the mob has formed.

Fox News picked up the story with links to the World Herald coverage (although, as it turns out, other than repeating the grossly misleading aggregation of government benefits given over 17 years to this married two-parent family, the Fox story was a lot more "fair and balanced" than the one in the World-Herald.) And from there is spread quickly to the blogs.

At one site the comments were fairly civil, but at another, a very big, very mainstream site, there were more than 500 comments by last Friday, and if those I skimmed are any indication, each was more vile than the next. (You won't get the name of the site or a link here, since I have no intention of spreading the poison further.) The extent to which this issue brings the racists crawling out from under their rocks can be seen by the fact that at least one poster used the n-word - notwithstanding the fact that Staton is white.

In the internet age, in which almost anyone's location can be tracked down in minutes, even as the mob gets ever more frenzied, I'm sure anyone who wants to harass Mr. Staton directly will have no trouble finding him. And, no doubt stumbling across these comments will do wonders to help the children heal from the various traumas in their lives as they grow up.

As I said in the original post, the latest developments in the Staton case needed to be reported, but not in the way the World-Herald chose to do it.

As old media learns to cope with new media, here's a good rule of thumb: If you see the equivalent of a group of men wearing white hoods and sheets walking through the woods carrying a big wooden cross and cans of gasoline – don't strike a match.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What a difference leadership makes.

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

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