The myth of the underpaid foster parent

The photo dominated the front page of The Arizona Republic Tuesday. Mom, Dad, their two kids sitting around the table saying a prayer before family dinner. The only nonwhite person at the table (seen from the back): One of the family's foster children.

The huge headline above the photo: "Slashed foster payments make it HARDER TO HELP"

All the usual clichés followed – swipes at birth parents, the incredible nobility of the foster parents who rescued the children – and how it all might be in jeopardy because Arizona's budget deficit prompted legislators to impose a 20 percent cut in payments to foster parents.

Then, the story officially certifies this a "crisis," the reporter declaring that "Foster care advocates worry that the crisis has erased years of improvements to the foster care system."

They can stop worrying. First of all, with one tiny, recent exception, unrelated to foster parent pay, there haven't been any improvements to the foster care system in Arizona. On the contrary, it's one of the nation's most regressive. NCCPR issued a report on Arizona child welfare two years ago and, if anything, it's only gotten worse.

But also, no great harm is done by cutting payment rates that were, in fact, the second highest in the entire country – rates vastly above the national average. Even with the cuts, Arizona still is paying foster parents far more than most states.

According to the story, before the cuts, the average monthly payment to an Arizona foster parent was $910 per child. That's not including special allowances for clothing books education and other expenses. Now, with the cuts, it's a mere $728 per month per child. The extra allowances have been cut back, but they're still on top of that $728.

That was in the story. Not in the story: The money is tax free. And foster children's health insurance is covered by Medicaid.

The story did mention Arizona's second-highest-in-the-nation status, but the reporter got spun, big time, thanks to a study by guess who? Yep – the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children's Rights. (And yes, it is depressing that over and over this once progressive group reveals itself to have become one of the most regressive forces in American child welfare.)

Their "study" portrayed the exceptionally-high payments in Arizona and Washington DC as the bare minimum needed to care for a foster child – everybody else, the study said, was falling terribly short. Even a glance at the study methodology shows this is nonsense. But glancing at the methodology requires looking at a separate document called a Technical Report. Labeling something a "technical report" is like putting a great big sign on it that says HEY REPORTERS: DON'T BOTHER TO READ THIS!

And in this case, it seems to have worked like a charm. Because of all the stories written about this report, I've seen none that included the following information:

●CR's calculation of "minimum" requirements includes far more than food, clothing and shelter.

●It includes the full cost of day care for foster children – even those who were taken from their own parents on "lack of supervision" charges because those birth parents couldn't afford day care.

●The so-called minimum also includes the increase in the foster family's electric bill caused by foster children leaving the lights on and opening and closing the refrigerator a lot – even when the children were taken from their birth parents because those birth parents couldn't afford a decent place to live.

●The so-called minimum even includes every penny spent on movie tickets, amusement parks, games and toys.

But who in the world would want to place a child with foster parents who demanded government reimbursement every time they bought a foster child a teddy bear?

These are only some of the bizarre assumptions that make up CR's definition of "minimum." More are discussed in NCCPR's report on Virginia child welfare in which we argued, unsuccessfully, against a big raise for the state's foster parents.

I am among those who believe that the overwhelming majority of foster parents are not in it for the money. I'm sure the family in the Republic story, which is continuing to foster children in spite of the cut, deserves the praise it received. But you can't have it both ways: You can't say, as some others apparently do, "I'm not in it for the money, but I'll quit if I stop getting the second highest rates in the nation and have to use my own money the next time I take my foster child to the movies."

Similarly, you can't say, as many foster parents do, "we can't be in it for the money because there's not enough money" – and then keep demanding more money. Indeed, paying too much creates the risk that the wrong people will go into fostering.

And, in fact, precisely because most foster parents do care so much about the children they take in, when they are polled on reasons for quitting, pay actually ranks quite low. (Lack of respect from child welfare agencies – in other words, being treated the same way agencies treat birth parents – ranks much higher.) And that helps explain why, even with the second highest pay rates in the nation, Arizona still claims to have a so-called shortage of foster parents.

In fact, Arizona doesn't have a shortage of foster parents. Thanks to a take-the-child-and-run mentality that has left Arizona in a state of perennial foster care panic, Arizona has a surplus of foster children. Stop taking so many children needlessly, and the so-called shortage would disappear.

That's also why we shouldn't be fooled by claims that if Arizona pays foster parents at rates that are merely above average instead of second highest-in-the-nation that would force the state to throw even more children into group homes and institutions.

All these problems arise before we even reach the fundamental issue of taking so many children largely because they are poor and then giving vastly more financial help to the strangers who take those children in.

All that said, I'm not suggesting that the cuts in pay for Arizona foster parents are a good idea. They would be a good idea if the money was going to bolster prevention and family preservation programs. But those are being cut, too. The cuts are just making one of the stingier states in the nation when it comes to helping children even stingier.

This whole issue touches on something that doesn't get nearly as much discussion as it should: What is our "social contract" with foster parents? If foster parenting is an act of compassion, like volunteer work, done for the psychic satisfaction, is it unreasonable to ask that foster parents dip just a little into their own pockets – and shouldn't we be concerned about those who won't? I've raised that issue on this blog before, but there is a better discussion, by Maine foster and adoptive parent Mary Callahan, in this op ed column from the Los Angeles Times.

As for the one piece of good news from Arizona, that involves federal, not state money. As this story from Phoenix New Times explains, the state child welfare agency and local housing authorities in Phoenix, Tucson and Yuma, did an outstanding job in securing vouchers to help families in which children may be taken from their parents because of housing problems, or housing problems are preventing reunification. The vouchers also can be used for young people "aging out" of foster care. The federal program was restored, after an eight-year absence, thanks largely to the work of the National Center for Housing and Child Welfare (the executive director of which is a member of NCCPR's Board of Directors). You can find out how your state and locality did by checking the NCHCW website.

Michigan explained

From the alternative weekly in Detroit, Metro Times: an excellent story about one case that typifies the failures of child welfare in Michigan and nationwide.

This is the kind of case that workers see all the time; one of those "in-between cases," where there are real problems, but nothing that couldn't be fixed without resorting to foster care, let alone termination of parental rights.

And there is plenty of context about Michigan child welfare in general. I have to admit, I particularly like this part:

"Our position is that Mr. Wexler's reports [on Michigan child welfare] contain inaccurate, inflammatory information about Michigan's efforts to protect children while ignoring the strides taken to protect their safety," contends Colleen Steinman, a spokeswoman for the Michigan Department of Human Services.

However, the department, when asked specifically about budget numbers reported by Wexler, didn't directly dispute any of his reporting.

What DHS did do, of course, as always, was to blame its budget cuts on the economy. But DHS never explains why it was slashing funding for family preservation long before the current budget crisis. DHS never explains why it turned down the waiver Florida got, a waiver that would have cushioned the blow of the recession on funding available for child welfare. Nor does DHS explain why, in spite of the economy and the budget deficit, the savings from these cuts are being plowed right into increases in rates for residential treatment centers and other institutions and a foster care worker hiring binge that is not, in fact, required by the state's class-action lawsuit settlement.

Meanwhile, the group that brought the lawsuit leading to that settlement, the group that so arrogantly calls itself "Children's Rights" continues to sit on its hands, taking no action to prevent the cuts.

NCCPR's reports on Michigan child welfare are available here.

NCCPR: The Prius of Child Advocacy

As NCCPR celebrates its Tenth Anniversary in its current form (we've been around since 1991, but it took eight years to get enough grant money for a full-time staff of one) I think we've earned the right to a little shameless self-promotion. I believe that there are a lot of children living safely in their own homes today who would have been trapped in foster care if not for NCCPR, and now we've posted the evidence for that assertion on our website.

The fuel of any advocacy movement is money, and by that standard, NCCPR is the most fuel-efficient national child advocacy organization in America. We get outstanding "RPD"(reform per dollar). To read what others say about our work, and see our top five accomplishments, please click here to go to our website.

After the Times, the backlash?

There is a downside for any child welfare agency that winds up the subject of a big newspaper story talking about how much the agency has improved by working to keep families together. Such stories have the unintended consequence of painting a target on the agency's back.

As is discussed in detail in the previous post to this Blog, the Florida Department of Children and Families was the subject of such a story in The New York Times. The story even noted the independent evaluation which found solid evidence that the reduction in entries into care was accompanied by improvements in child safety.

But mere facts have never stopped the kind of backlash that happens whenever family preservation starts to gain this kind of traction.

You don't change the way child welfare has been done for 150 years without making enemies. There are plenty of people who think of the days when Kathleen Kearney ran DCF as the good old days. That was when she so terrified the agency into taking away more children that, as one administrator at the time put it: "I don't dare say the word 'reunification' in her presence." The fact that this endangered many more children, destroyed countless lives, and collapsed the entire system has not dampened this nostalgia.

Some have a vested interest – they run agencies that stay in business by providing foster care or residential treatment. Others are simply true believers in the take-the-child-and-run approach who aren't about to be confused by pesky things like data.

To paraphrase a former colleague at the Albany Times-Union writing, long ago, about a faction out of power in that city, think of the enemies of reform as kind of a Kearney DCF-in-exile.

You'll hear from them as soon as the next high profile tragedy takes place.

Unfortunately, there's no "if" about such tragedies, only a "when" – because no system, even the very best in the country, stops all of them. And while Florida is much improved, it still has a long way to go.

●
So when the next tragedy captures everyone's attention, that Kearney DCF-in-exile will come out of the woodwork, fingers wagging to say "See? See? DCF is doing too much to preserve families! The pendulum has swung too far!" (I was a reporter for 19 years, but even then I never understood why nothing could hypnotize some of my colleagues faster than a metaphorical swinging pendulum). In fact, the best child welfare systems in the country still take children at a lower rate than the statewide average in Florida – so the alleged pendulum still hasn't swung far enough.

●The backlash will start when the first tragedy occurs. If there happen to be, say, three in a relatively short period then that, of course is "proof" of a "pattern." Then it's a "series" or even a "spate." (You would think, by now, people running child welfare systems would make sure to keep the tragedies evenly spaced, so no one would claim there's any kind of trend.)

The Kearney DCF-in-exile is counting on being able to exploit such tragedies. They're counting on the state's reporters either having very short memories or all taking buyouts before the next tragedy so it's reported by people with no "institutional memory."

Here's what they want everyone to forget:

●There were more tragedies when the take-the-child-and-run approach dominated Florida child welfare. As noted in the previous post to this Blog, Marcia Lowry of the group that so arrogantly calls itself "Children's Rights" got her facts wrong about child abuse fatalities in Florida. The first year that entries into foster care in Florida significantly declined also was the first year deaths of children "known to the system" declined. (I've also said often before that fatalities are not a very good measure – but as long as they are the measure of choice for media, and people like Lowry, I'm not going to unilaterally disarm.)

●A crucial side benefit of Florida's waiver from federal funding rules is the fact, noted above, that it joins the ranks of the few states that undergo regular systematic, meaningful independent evaluation. As the Times story notes, that evaluation showed that the standard measure of safety, reabuse of children left in their own homes, is improving.

The formula for exploiting the first tragedy after a "things-are-improving-thanks-to-family-preservation" story has worked quite well at setting back reforms elsewhere, notably in New York City. My guess is it won't take long to see if Florida does better.

MONDAY ON THE NCCPR CHILD WELFARE BLOG: See why NCCPR is "The Prius of Child Advocacy"

The waiver that saved Florida (and could have saved Michigan had they been smart enough to accept it)

There are people in child welfare who thought Florida would never change. They despaired of ever persuading officials at the state's Department of Children and Families that their fanatical embrace of a take-the-child-and-run approach in 1999 would lead only to disaster – which, of course, it did.

But now, Florida has changed. And now The New York Times has documented that change. The story shows how a state once synonymous with child welfare failure has begun a transformation, by emphasizing safe, proven programs to keep families together. And it shows how one change in particular made everything else possible – a change with profound implications for federal child welfare policy.

There are a lot of reasons Florida changed. NCCPR's four comprehensive reports, three rate-of-removal indexes comparing regions within the state and eight trips to Florida to meet with reporters (for the record, almost always in the summer) had more than a little to do with it. We wore away resistance to solutions that work, but that go against "gut instinct." By approaching media, not government, we helped break the monopoly in the marketplace of ideas held by the state's "child savers," to use the term their 19^th Century counterparts proudly gave themselves.

The case for family preservation is so strong that it can win any free competition in that marketplace; the problem is getting those ideas heard. In contrast, the take-the-child-and-run approach is a bit like almost anything made by Microsoft; nobody really likes the product, but people keep buying it because everybody else is buying it or they don't know something else is readily available.

Our give 'em hell advocacy from the outside strengthened the hand of reformers on the inside. And when Charlie Crist became governor and his first DCF Secretary, Bob Butterworth, decided it was time to listen to new ideas, the reformers were ready.

Then Butterworth did something revolutionary: He ordered his agency to stop stonewalling. Under Butterworth and his successor, George Sheldon, DCF has become the most open, accountable child welfare agency in America. (O.K., that's a really low bar, but even by non-child welfare standards, DCF has been pretty impressive. It's done everything the law allows to be open, and interpreted every ambiguity in favor of openness.) Among other things, that bought DCF time to begin to show substantive improvement.

But credit for what may have been the most important single change – because it made all the others possible – actually goes to Crist's predecessor, Gov. Jeb Bush. Now, let me be clear: There is probably no political leader in America who did more to screw up a child welfare system than Jeb Bush. He and his appointees made one appalling decision after another. But the one and only thing Bush got right allowed Crist and his leaders at DCF to undo all the things Bush got wrong.

But, let the Times explain it:

While the focus on preserving families has taken hold in several states, here it has been backed by a federal waiver that allows the state to use foster care financing for prevention and mental health, an approach that advocates of the program hope will become standard nationwide.

Like an addict who finally realizes the destructiveness of his addiction and vows to quit, Florida agreed to give up its addiction to endless dollars for foster care. Florida relinquished the open-ended entitlement to federal aid for part of the cost of foster care for every eligible child. This is the system that, nationwide, has led to the federal government spending at least nine times more on foster care than on alternatives.

But Florida DCF agreed to accept this money as a flat grant. In exchange they were allowed to spend this money – more than $140 million per year - on safe, proven alternatives to foster care, instead of only on foster care itself.

It was a bold move. Had Florida been unable to control needless removal of children, it would have had to pay for all of those additional placements itself. (Indeed, the existence of the entitlement is one of the main reasons states don't control their addiction to foster care.) But when, as happened in Florida, these alternatives, which cost less in the first place, also led to reductions in foster care, the waiver let Florida keep the savings and plow that money into more help for families.

But the advantages don't end there. The waiver includes what is known in government jargon as a "maintenance of effort" provision. In other words, DCF can't just use the flexible federal funds to replace state funds. In fact, if Florida cuts state spending too much, it loses all the federal money. So even though Florida is among the states worst hit by the recession and even though there was enormous temptation to enact Michigan-style slash-and-burn child welfare budget cuts, the Legislature backed off, rather than lose all that federal aid.

Why mention Michigan in particular? Because, as I've mentioned so often before on this Blog, Michigan initially accepted the same waiver and then, at the last minute, someone in that state's child welfare agency turned it down. (Isn't it time someone in Michigan media tried to find out who made that idiotic decision and whether he or she still has any influence over child welfare in that state?)

So, the waiver saves children from the horrors of needless foster care, it improves child safety (as documented in an independent evaluation) and it saves money. Who could be against that?

Pretty much the entire American child welfare establishment, actually.

Of course, Marcia Lowry, supreme leader of the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children's Rights (CR) has problems with the Florida reform effort. For her it's a four-way threat:

●It relies on preventing foster care instead of hopeless efforts to "fix" it while shoveling more children into it.

●It's flexible instead of bureaucratic – the antithesis of the CR approach.

●It was accomplished without decades of litigation caused by one of Marcia's micromanaging lawsuits. Indeed, Marcia tried to bring a class-action suit in Florida – joining one that originally had been brought by a very good Florida lawyer – and it got tossed out of court. (The fact that, in some jurisdictions, even Marcia's lawsuits can be better than nothing tells us only how bad some systems are.)

●And it's got to be embarrassing that the waiver included that maintenance of effort provision, while Marcia's consent decree in Michigan doesn't have one, leaving that state free to slash funding for prevention and family preservation.

But none of that excuses getting figures, dates and context wrong, which she managed to do in the Times. She cited an increase in Florida child abuse deaths, as the Times put it, "in recent years."

She neglected to mention that:

● As the Times story explains, much of the most recent increase was a result of a radical change in what the state's Child Fatality Review Committee considers neglect instead of an accident (something NCCPR pointed out on this Blog at the time). Indeed, the state's Fatality Review Committee itself attributed the "increase" in deaths to changes in reporting. It's on Page 1 of this report from the committee.

●
There is nothing recent about child abuse deaths increasing in Florida. All through the years that the take-the-child-and-run mentality dominated Florida child welfare, child abuse deaths, and in particular deaths of children "known to the system," increased.

●In contrast, everything changed when reform started to take hold. The first year in nearly a decade in which entries into foster care in Florida significantly declined – 2007 – also was the first year in nearly a decade that such deaths actually decreased.

[UPDATE: JAN. 12, 2010: In 2008, the number of such deaths increased again, to about their 2006 level. So, in spite of the recession, and the ongoing pressure to broaden the definition of a child abuse fatality, deaths of children known-to-the-system were no worse than before the waiver - a remarkable accomplishment if one is inclined to measure safety based on fatalities.]

More important, since, as NCCPR has stressed repeatedly, fatalities are among the worst ways to measure overall safety, (and we'll gladly stop using that measure, just as soon as the media and people like Marcia agree to stop as well) that independent evaluation found that a far better measure of safety, reabuse of children, had been cut in half.

Marcia also objects to even setting goals for reducing the number of children in foster care. Yet Marcia's own lawsuit settlements don't just set numerical goals, they demand that child welfare systems meet specific target numbers for almost everything they do. She seems especially keen on adoption quotas. In other words, it's o.k. to set a goal for how many children you will sever from their families forever – and demand that a child welfare system meet it - but not o.k. to set a target for how many children you can return to their own parents.

But while Marcia objects to the whole reform effort, the waiver has many more enemies.

A few years ago the (George) Bush administration tried to change federal law to allow – not require, just allow – any state to fund child welfare the way Florida is funding it. The plan was strictly voluntary.

But, of course, if every state had the option to do this, then every state could reduce needless foster care the way Florida has done it. And that would be a huge problem for big, powerful private agencies that make their living warehousing children in foster care. It also would be a problem for public child welfare agency bureaucrats (like that one in Michigan) who'd have to explain why they had so little confidence in their own ability to avoid needless foster care that they were turning down the best chance in decades to fix their systems.

And who represents both groups? The Child Welfare League of America, of course.

So they were a major part of a successful campaign of fear and smear against flexible funding. "Block grant! Block grant!" they screamed (a term which, to liberals, is as scary as "death tax" is to conservatives, and, in this case every bit as misleading).

They were joined by groups like Every Child Matters and the Children's Defense Fund. At one point, CDF actually claimed that this voluntary plan would "dismantle foster care." (Did I mention that the plan was voluntary? What part of "voluntary" don't my fellow liberals understand?) CDF never even tried to back up the claim. But I am aware of no journalist ever demanding that CDF justify its patently-absurd claim, or calling them out for failing to do so.

Unfortunately, the opposition has the ear of the Obama Administration. My fellow liberals tend to be as deferential to the "foster care-industrial complex" as conservatives tend to be to the military-industrial complex.

The opponents have the politics. All Florida has is success. So it may be a long time before other states are offered the chance to do what Florida has done.

The caption says it all

On Monday, I'll post a detailed blog about the excellent story in today's New York Times about child welfare reform in Florida. But the caption under the photo that accompanies the story says it all. It reads: "Sylvia Kimble, 46, of Jacksonville, with some of the six grandchildren she is raising with financing that would otherwise have gone to foster care programs." [Emphasis added.]

The Michigan “Needs Assessment”: A rebuke to DHS and CR

As the previous post to this Blog explains, a requirement of the consent decree between the Michigan Department of Human Services and the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children's Rights (CR) is a "Needs Assessment." As the name suggests this means lots of people spending lots of time creating one more document telling us what we already know: Michigan should be doing far more to keep families together.

The settlement calls for spending $4 million on needs found by the Needs Assessment. But in a true masterstroke of legal strategy, CR managed to forget to include anything in its settlement that would stop DHS from cutting ten times more than they now are required to add. Brilliant. So What DHS giveth with one hand, DHS taketh ten-fold with the other.

As for what the document actually tells us:

The Needs Assessment is a 221-page rebuke of the shortsighted approach of both DHS and CR.

Everything the assessment says Michigan's vulnerable children need more of, DHS is providing less of. The list of what Michigan's vulnerable children need and the list of children's services budget cuts are nearly identical.

And that is not because of the state budget crisis. The biggest fraud in Michigan right now is the notion that the cuts in safe proven programs to keep families together are needed to balance the budget. On the contrary, the money saved from these cuts is going into more money for institutionalization and a wasteful hiring binge.

For that, the blame rests both with Ismael Ahmed's apparent obsession with giving private agencies that warehouse children in "residential treatment" whatever they want (that's why he's so beloved by these agencies) and with CR, which allowed that giant loophole in the settlement mentioned above.

Though the spirit of the settlement and its legally binding guiding principles (not to mention common sense) make clear that DHS was not supposed to fund the settlement by cutting other help to vulnerable children, the settlement has no explicit provision saying this. So DHS has plowed through that loophole. DHS is using slash-and-burn budget cuts for prevention and family preservation to finance rate increases for residential treatment and a foster care worker hiring binge.

And the hiring binge is not actually required by the settlement. The settlement requires a reduction in caseloads – it doesn't say this has to be done by hiring child abuse investigators and foster care workers. Caseloads would be far more likely to go down if DHS put more money into the very programs it now is cutting. As it stands now, all those new workers are likely to chase down all the new cases of children needlessly removed from their homes because of the budget cuts, leaving Michigan with the same lousy system only bigger.

And I'm not the only one saying this. Look at what the Needs Assessment itself says about how to reduce caseloads (Page 23):

The settlement agreement assumes that Michigan's system reform efforts … will decrease the number of children entering the foster care system. The reduced entries will result from improvements in intake services, prevention services and in-home preservation services. These efforts will also decrease the caseload ratio for public and private agency workers, permitting MDHS to reduce caseloads to the specified levels." [Emphasis added].

The most important part of the Needs Assessment

What may be most important about the needs assessment is what's *not* in its recommendations:

●There is no call for more "residential treatment" or other institutional care of children.

●There is no call for big rate increases for providers of institutional care.

On the contrary, the Needs Assessment specifically cites the harm of institutionalization (Page 69) and examples of better alternatives (Pages 114, 115) – in other words, exactly what NCCPR said in our second report on Michigan child welfare.

●There is no call for a giant hiring binge of child abuse investigators and foster care workers.

So why is DHS spending more money on all of these things while cutting the very programs the Needs Assessment says are really needed?

Are caseloads really excessive?

●A key premise of the hiring binge is that it's needed to lower excessive caseloads. But the chart on Page 56 shows that caseloads actually are surprisingly reasonable. These numbers would be suspect if they came from management; but they're estimates from a survey of caseworkers themselves. So that raises further questions about cutting prevention to hire more investigators and foster care workers.

Other Key Findings

●A repeated theme is the urgent need for concrete services, particularly transportation and housing assistance, yet these services are among those least available. (Pages 14, 15, 21, 78, 84, 111, chart p. 113). The Assessment states flat out that time in placement often is extended needlessly for lack of this kind of help. (Page 14.)

●The unappreciated shining star of Michigan child welfare, the Families First Intensive Family Preservation Services program, is praised repeatedly in almost every section of the needs assessment – seen as enormously beneficial not only for preventing separation of families in the first place but also for making reunification work and for preserving adoptive families. (Pages 10, 44, 82, other references.) Yet this program is being cut yet again by Ismael Ahmed.

●On Page 41, the Needs Assessment lists seven vital programs for keeping families together. Most, if not all, have been cut repeatedly in the past and are or will be cut again in the two rounds of slash-and-burn budget cuts inflicted by Ahmed and Gov. Jennifer Granholm.

●The Assessment devotes two-thirds of a page to listing all the things wrong with the settlement's former demand that all grandparents and other relatives providing kinship care be formally licensed (Page 86). And then, on Page 90, it says that unlicensed homes are absolutely essential in order to have enough places for children. Fortunately, partly as a result of pressure from NCCPR, CR and DHS backed off from their war against grandparents and changed that part of the settlement. But NCCPR and many others saw these problems right from the start – why didn't CR and DHS?

●Page 75: Most families can't get the services they need.

●Page 41: Workers admit to resorting to foster care in cases where children could remain home if the right kinds of help were available.

●Page 116: There is a significant need for inpatient drug treatment programs in which parents can live with their children.

●Page 62: The Needs Assessment notes what NCCPR reported in March: There are enormous, and disturbing, variations in rates of child removal in different Michigan counties.

●Page 54: In the one focus group for birth parents, in Ingham County, which has one of the highest rates of removal in the state, every birth parent, no matter what the actual circumstances of her or his case, said he or she was asked to agree to termination of parental rights; an outrageous indication that the "Binsfeld mentality" – a legacy of a former lieutenant governor who trampled over the state's impoverished families in the name of adoption-at-all-costs (discussed in detail in NCCPR's first report on Michigan child welfare) - still is alive and well in Michigan.

●None of the birth parents said they were involved in developing and implementing the "case plan" explaining what hoops they would have to jump through to get their children back.

●Page 55: All of the birth parents said their case records contained inaccuracies.