UPDATED DEC. 9: Child abuse hotline pop quiz: Is this advice too dangerous to follow?

    The Florida child abuse hotline has a policy: Any time the hotline receives more than one a report alleging "unexplained" injuries to a child under five (presumably no matter how minor the "injuries") the report should be accepted for investigation. That got me to thinking about some advice I read more than 20 years ago. It goes like this:

"If a child is so carefully watched that she never has an accident, she is being fussed over too much. Bones may be saved, but her character will be ruined." [Emphasis in original.]

The problem is, taking that advice could set you up to be called in to your state's child abuse hotline. And, if it happens more than once, and you happen to live in Florida…

Of course some would wonder about the guy who gave that advice. Who would be so tolerant of what many might consider, at a minimum, neglect? Would you turn him in to the hotline?

Come back tomorrow, and I'll tell you who said it.

UPDATE, DECEMBER 9: The quote above is from Doctor Spock.  (Baby and Child Care (New York: Pocket Books, 1985) p.640.

Foster care in Florida: Error after error in the story that started hotline hysteria

    Previous posts to this blog discuss an editorial-disguised-as-a-news-story in the Miami Herald on Nov. 29 that essentially crusaded for drastically reducing, if not eliminating, the practice of screening calls to Florida's child abuse hotline. The de facto editorial was a collection of apparent horror stories about cases which the hotline allegedly should have accepted for investigation instead of screening out. In fact, a rebuttal from the Florida Department of Children and Families "raises questions," as newspapers like to put it, about the Herald's account of those cases.

Not just the accounts of these individual cases, but the entire story was devoid of context.

● There was only a passing mention, far down in the story, of the fact that Florida screens calls at roughly the national average rate, and no mention at all of the fact that, when screening was nearly eliminated in 2000, the results were disastrous.

●The Herald account blamed the alleged horror stories on policy when, in fact, to the extent that there were failures, those failures appear to be errors in implementing policy.

● The story also was a no-dissent zone – anyone who disagreed with the story's thesis was shut out, unless they worked for DCF – which inherently gave them less credibility.

    But we do have detail about one of the horror stories – because it was the subject of an earlier account in the Herald. More important, the Herald posted on its website some of the key documents in that particular case. They're still there. That allows anyone to do what Herald editors should have done – not only a fact check, but a nuance check and an innuendo check as well.

    Below are some excerpts from that story, followed by discussion of what we know from what the documents on which much of the story is based.

JUDGING WITHOUT HINDSIGHT

    In one sense, in this case the hotline failed by definition – the calls were not accepted, and now the child is dead. But the question is whether the hotline failed without the benefit of hindsight, back when the reports about this case were four of over 200,000 received by the hotline every year.

    By that standard, what the documents reveal is not a failure at the hotline but rather a failure by a judge who apparently believed that, since she's a judge, "because I said so, that's why" is reason enough for the hotline to accept a case. Unfortunately, DCF has given judges reason to believe that. Florida DCF Secretary George Sheldon compounded the problem by doing something one almost never sees among people with his job – being too quick to accept blame for something that was not the agency's fault.

Throughout the story excerpts below, I've bold-faced the loaded language and sneering sarcasm – the parts intended to instruct you as to what to think, instead of giving you the facts to do the thinking for yourself. Here's how the story began:

For six months, Broward Circuit Judge Eileen O'Connor had been struggling to referee Alberto and Jocelyn Barros' nightmare of a marriage.

A former federal prosecutor who presides in the county's specialized Domestic Violence Court, she knew all too well how badly such things can end.

But O'Connor was less worried about the warring adults than their infant son Bryce, whom she feared might well become collateral damage. Three times in February and March, she faxed the state's child-abuse hot line: ``The court is deeply concerned about the welfare of the minor child.''

Child welfare administrators finally accepted the case on July 3. By then, Bryce Barros was dead. He was just shy of 2.

Now, Hallandale Beach police homicide detectives are trying to figure out what child-abuse investigators never tried to, and to determine what, exactly, killed the dark-haired boy.

The Department of Children & Families, too, is looking for answers. Among them: why its hot line counselors repeatedly ignored what amounts to a court order. …

O'Connor first raised a red flag in the form of a handwritten fax to DCF that followed a threat to the warring parents from the bench.

In the case before O'Connor, Jocelyn accused her husband of stalking her, and he had sought a restraining order against her as well. The two were living separately and sharing custody of Bryce.

``Because you two couldn't get along, and are doing ridiculous things with your child, DCF is going to get involved and do an investigation and they are going to figure out whether you're doing an OK job,'' she warned the couple at a Jan. 29 court hearing.

It proved to be an empty threat. DCF investigators rejected the judge's request. ``The fax was screened because there are no allegations of abuse, neglect [or] threatened harm to the child,'' a hot line counselor wrote at the time.

    Now, let's look at what actually happened.

For starters, the story errs in calling Bryce an infant. As this story also says, but the Nov. 29 story does not, he was two-years-old when he died, and that's important in light of some of the allegations in the case. I'll come back to that later. But I'll start with the fax.

    Here is what the fax actually said in its entirety. Under "ordered and adjudged" it says:

    "The clerk of court is directed to refer the above-[word illegible] case to DCF for investigation/home study of both parents. Based on the history between the parties in this case and testimonial evidence presented, the court is deeply concerned about the welfare of the minor child. The court has ordered visitation with both parents in weekly increments and would like a report as to the department's findings."

    What's missing, of course, is any actual accusation of child maltreatment. You don't have to prove abuse to get a call accepted at the hotline. You don't even have to have any evidence. But it's not too much to ask that someone calling the hotline explain what it is they've seen or heard that, if true, would fit a state's definition of abuse and neglect. The judge never does even that much.

    In fact, it does not appear the judge had anything. She just wanted to use DCF to enforce her efforts to get divorcing parents to stop behaving badly. That is not DCF's job.

    And while the story implies that DCF did nothing but throw the judge's fax into a wastebasket, that's not true. When the judge had her "order" faxed the second time, the hotline operator did exactly what common sense says he should do. He got back to the judge's clerk and asked that the judge please send information explaining what she suspected the parents were doing to the child. As the hotline's call center manager explains in an e-mail obtained by the Herald, but not quoted in the story, "Even after calling the reporter back and asking that the allegation be sent, the same fax, without any new details, was re-faxed to us."

But the story never makes that clear. Instead, it says simply:

On March 10, at 11:22 a.m., O'Connor re-faxed the complaint. It was again rejected -- this time because it did not specify where the baby could be found, and because it contained ``no allegations'' of harm to him.

The story never questions why the judge didn't offer any actual reasons for the hotline to investigate. There's no indication that the reporter ever asked. The story continues:
O'Connor sent a third fax 32 minutes later, adding an address. Again, a hot line counselor threw it out on the grounds of ``no allegations,'' and ``insufficient information.''

Were I to write using the same tone as the Herald story I could say that the report was not accepted because O'Connor "couldn't be bothered" or "didn't seem to think the case was important enough" or [insert snide phrase here] to actually offer a reason for suspicion beyond the functional equivalent of: "I'm a judge, that's why!"

One can argue that the hotline operator should have done in response to call #1 what was done with call #2. Other than that, the people at the hotline did exactly what they should have done. They respectfully declined to do the judge's job for her. Without benefit of hindsight, they declined to launch what could have been a traumatic investigation that stole time from some other child in danger based on no allegation of maltreatment whatsoever.

DCF TAKES TOO MUCH BLAME

Now we get to where Sheldon was too quick to fall on its sword. At the top of the story, he says:

``The system didn't work in this case,'' DCF Secretary George Sheldon acknowledged. ``There are no excuses for it . . . This is a reminder to everybody that what we do is so critical to the lives of people.''

Later, he gets more specific:

Under DCF policy, O'Connor's third strike should have triggered an automatic review of the case by DCF quality-assurance investigators. The thinking: If anyone is concerned enough to ask three times, maybe it's worth another look.

``Somehow, in this case, that didn't happen,'' Sheldon said. ``There is no question that should have been done.''

If that's really the policy, it shouldn't be. It's like putting up a big sign saying: "Attention: Want to harass an ex-spouse? How about a neighbor against whom you have a grudge? Don't forget our handy 'three strikes' rule!" Cases should be screened based on the merits of the report, not on how often one pushes the 'redial' button on the phone or the 'send' button on the fax machine.

Unfortunately, it also apparently is DCF policy to treat anything from a judge as Holy Writ. Any report from a judge, even it doesn't allege any maltreatment, is supposed to be accepted and sent on to regional offices for investigation. Those offices have the option of going to court to challenge the order – as if that would ever happen. So, to the extent that a hotline operator made a mistake, it was, again to use Herald-speak: treating a complaint from a judge with the same sound response as if it had come from a mere mortal.

Now, back to the story:

On April 21, Jocelyn Barros called the abuse hot line herself. Bryce, she said, ``consistently returns from dad's [visits] with injuries.''

After a recent visit, the infant had a layer of skin peeled from his wrist ``along with deep lacerations,'' she said.

What's more, she said, the boy's father posted a video on YouTube of the baby standing up in a grocery cart, and has posted other videos of him climbing stairs by himself.

Fortunately, the Herald website posted links to the videos. The one involving the grocery cart is available here. I couldn't get back to the other, but I've seen it before, and when Bryce, who was a toddler, not an infant, starts to climb up the stairs by himself, his father goes after him immediately.

There also are links to more than two dozen other videos. I haven't looked at them all; knowing Bryce's fate makes it heartbreaking to view even a few of them. But from what I have seen, if the father ever is charged, were I his defense lawyer, I'd want the jury to see them. I saw nothing suspicious. The Bryce in these videos doesn't match the mother's description, which was another ground for her complaint to DCF: Bryce's eyes, she told the hotline operator, ``don't hold happiness.''

Child maltreatment statutes are very, very broad – but they're not that broad.

As for the injuries, DCF's internal investigation says the report should have been accepted because any time "unexplained" injuries occur more than once to a child under five they should be accepted. In fact, the injury to Bryce's wrist was "larger than a quarter" (not skin peeled from his entire wrist) with "deeper lacerations" that were "scabbed over" within this injury. The previous injuries were scratches. And since we're talking about an active toddler, not an infant, I think it's questionable whether this should be enough for automatic acceptance of a report.

But, as we've seen, DCF actually agrees with the Herald – which certainly belies any claim that screening criteria are too strict. Rather, the hotline operator who took the call did not follow policy.

The story continues:

…the mother's concerns, too, were dismissed -- though, apparently, after some greater consideration.
Laura Johnson, a special projects coordinator, wrote a May 11 e-mail to bosses. Jocelyn Barros had called, discussed her concerns for the baby, and asked why the judge's faxes had all been ignored. ``What is the protocol for this type of [court] order?'' Johnson asked.

``This is a custody issue,'' was one reply.

Actually, the reply said "If this is a custody issue, we would not be doing the home study. There needs to be an open dependency case" [emphasis added].

The story continues:

Caseworkers did not walk away entirely, though. They say they sent Jocelyn Barros a form letter, offering help from food banks, clothing closets, adult day care and Meals on Wheels. And a phone number for a domestic violence shelter. Jocelyn Barros says she never received the letter, and DCF says the agency no longer has a copy of it.

There was no further contact between DCF and the Barroses until July 3. The hot line received one more report: ``When the mom awoke, after putting Bryce to bed, he was not breathing and non-responsive.''

FROM INNUENDO TO FACTUAL ERROR

At the time of the original story, the cause of death still was unknown. In the Nov. 29 story, the Herald reports that Bryce was beaten to death. It does not say by whom. The story recaps the case and this time, moves from innuendo to outright factual error:

In July, 1-year-old Bryce Barros was beaten to death after a Broward County domestic violence judge, Eileen O'Connor, sent three faxes to the hot line requesting an investigation into Bryce's safety in the wake of ongoing family violence by his parents.

``The court is deeply concerned about the welfare of the minor child,'' O'Connor wrote in the three faxes she titled ``court orders.'' O'Connor's appeals were ignored.

Error #1: Bryce was two, not one, when he died.

Error #2: As the documents make clear, O'Connor's faxes were not ignored. The hotline tried to get O'Connor to specify what she thought was going on. The judge did not.

The Herald then uses Bryce's story to tee up an irresistible quote which the Herald should have resisted, or at least allowed to be rebutted, since it happens to be inaccurate:

``Hot-line calls are cries for help on behalf of a child,'' said Howard Talenfeld, the Fort Lauderdale-based chairman of Florida's Children First, an advocacy group. ``Any call that is screened out is a cry that falls on deaf ears.''

Any call?
    In fact, as I noted in a previous post: hotline calls can be all sorts of things. Sometimes they are, indeed, cries for help, sometimes they are well-meaning errors, sometimes they are mandated reporters covering their rears, and sometimes they are acts of harassment by vindictive ex-spouses, or neighbors, or anyone else with a grudge. That's why no child welfare system can operate effectively without screening calls to the hotline. Workers would be inundated with false allegations and trivial cases, leaving them no time to find children in real danger. And, of course, huge numbers of additional children would be traumatized by needless investigations and stripsearches.

Try to imagine what would happen to child welfare systems if they accepted every hotline call that alleged absolutely nothing except "I am deeply concerned about the welfare of the child." The systems would collapse. Just as Florida's did when DCF actually tried something similar under disgraced former DCF Secretary Kathleen Kearney.

Why would anyone want to do that again?

If anything, the documents posted on the Herald website in connection with the case of Bryce Barros reveal that errors at the hotline are just that – human errors in implementing policy. To the extent that there is a failure of policy, it is that the policies at the hotline – such as anything goes if it comes from a judge – are too broad, and screening needs to be tightened.

How can I say that when, after the hotline refused to accept the calls and faxes in the case of Bryce Barros, he died?

I say it because people who work at child protective hotlines and caseworkers for child welfare agencies don't have the luxury of reporters and advocates – the luxury of hindsight.

Bryce Barros died and part of the reason may be that these calls and faxes were screened out. But how many other children have died because workers lacked the time to investigate their cases properly – because they were too busy chasing down false reports that were wrongly screened in?

UPDATED 10:20 PM: Florida foster care: Horrors! The Miami Herald cries wolf, while DCF takes the road less traveled

UPDATE, 10:20PM: Ah, Florida: where the bureaucrats are candid and the journalists are stonewalling.

The post below deals with a detailed point-by-point rebuttal issued by the Florida Department of Children and Families to a story in Sunday’s Miami Herald.  The Herald has published a follow-up story.   Three general sentences from the DCF rebuttal are included far down in the story.  When it comes to DCF's specifics refuting the Herald’s allegations, there is not one word.

And the Herald repeats misleading claims from the original story.  The follow-up boils down to “it’s our story and we’re sticking to it.”

In a previous post to this Blog, I said that the Miami

Herald relied on innuendo, data out of context and horror stories to stack the deck in what amounted to an editorial-disguised-as-a-news-story calling for screening out fewer calls to the Florida child abuse hotline.

I was wrong.

Turns out, the "horror stories" are out of context, too.

With swiftness and detail almost unheard-of from a child welfare agency, (people in every other state should be demanding the same from theirs) the Florida Department of Children and Families issued a point-by-point rebuttal and an overview from DCF Secretary George Sheldon. I've posted the memos on the NCCPR website.

Whether one agrees with how DCF handled the cases or not, one thing is overwhelmingly clear: The Miami
Herald failed to give readers the information they needed to make up their own minds. In every case, the full story is different from the impression left by the Herald.

CASES IN POINT

Here are two examples:

●What the Herald Reported:

Sept. 16,[2009] 2:02 p.m.: A Broward sheriff's deputy calls the Florida child-abuse hot line to report that a 4-year-old had been molested by a babysitter as the sitter's boyfriend videotaped the assault. A hot-line counselor declines to forward the report to an investigator.

What the Herald left out:

The allegation concerned an incident that occurred in 2005. The September 2009 information indicated that neither the babysitter nor the babysitter's boyfriend had any access to the child who was the victim of the molestation. There were actually two children who were the subject of concern. For the child who was the victim of the molestation, the call was taken on 9/16/2009 as a prevention referral to determine if the victim or the victim's family needed services. It was subsequently determined that the child was receiving appropriate therapy [for the molestation in 2005] and was being appropriately cared for after the report was subsequently opened on 10/9/2009.

In the same call on 9/16/2009, it was determined that the babysitter and boyfriend had a child. The concern was that if they had molested one child then their infant could be at risk. This case was properly opened and investigated. It was further determined that law enforcement had an open and ongoing investigation related to the perpetrators in this case.

●What the Herald reported:

The hot line rejected a call from one of the agency's own child-abuse investigators: On Oct. 15, a state child protective investigator filed a report on behalf of an infant whose babysitters' own 4-month-old suffered ``significant head injuries.''

What the Herald left out:

Actually, the physical injuries had occurred to the child being babysat, not the babysitter's child. The concern in this case was that a babysitter was potentially involved in a case where a child was injured. Subsequently an investigation was opened to determine if the babysitter's own child was at risk of being harmed. It was determined the babysitter's child was not at risk and the babysitter was not determined to have caused the injury to the 4-month old. The original call regarding the babysitter's child was received at 5:37 p.m. on 10/15/2009 and the report was entered on 10/16 at 3:12 p.m.

THE REPORTS WERE, IN FACT, HEEDED

More generally, the two rebuttal documents make clear that it is flat wrong to suggest, as the Herald did, that these cases and others cited got no response, or even that they got only a form letter. DCF offers considerable evidence to support Sheldon's claim that "…in every specific case cited in the article, except one where we previously acknowledged error, the cries for help were in fact heeded and the agency did respond. … None of the calls were "turned away," or "rejected" or "unheeded." In addition:

●The rebuttal shows that DCF has an effective mechanism to "backstop" calls that become "prevention referrals" instead of full-scale investigations. If DCF workers at the district level disagree with the decision they can have the case "upgraded" to a full-scale investigation. In contrast, DCF workers have no power to "downgrade" a call passed on for investigation to a prevention referral. So if anything the imbalance in the system favors needless investigation.

● Twenty-five percent of calls that are not accepted for full –scale investigation become prevention referrals. This means that not only does Florida accept calls for full-scale investigation at a rate that is roughly the national average, (something discussed in detail in a previous post) an additional 25 percent of calls get some kind of response from DCF.

● All of the alleged horror stories come from just one county, Broward, where the county sheriff is responsible for child abuse investigations. As the Herald story itself notes, "For budget year 2008, Florida lawmakers reduced funding to the four sheriff's departments, including Broward, that conduct abuse investigations under contract with DCF by $2.9 million, or almost 6 percent. " That gives those departments a profound vested interest in hyping alleged failure to investigate child abuse.

●
If there's one thing that makes reporters roll their eyes when an agency responds to an unfavorable story it's when the agency says some version of: "we're already looking into that." But in this case, it happens to be true.

A committee whose charge includes reviewing the new hotline procedures and the adequacy of DCF's response to prevention referrals was announced publicly on October 23. Sheldon even included on the committee people likely to support the Herald position – including at least one member of what I have come to call the "Kearney DCF-in-exile" – meaning people I believe prefer something closer to the disastrous take-the-child-and-run approach of former DCF Secretary Kathleen Kearney. (Unfortunately, Sheldon left out the two most important people for any such group: A current or former foster child and a parent who lost her or his children to foster care).

THE OTHER CASUALTY

I hope the rebuttal will stop any foster-care panic before it starts. But even if it does, there is another casualty in all this: the credibility of The Miami
Herald, and that hurts everyone who cares about Florida's vulnerable children.

For a decade the Herald led the state in coverage of child welfare. That is largely because of Carol Marbin Miller, the reporter who wrote the hotline story. She is indefatigable, as good at working sources as she is at poring over documents. At one point a competing paper had five reporters trying to keep up with her, and they couldn't. If fewer Florida foster children wind up being doped up on psychiatric medication in the future, the person most responsible will be Carol Marbin Miller (followed, ironically, by the DCF leaders whose work she trashed on Sunday).

But this time, she overreached. She let her righteous indignation get the better of her. This time, and in an earlier hotline story I'll discuss in a future post, the Herald cried wolf.

That hurts everyone. Every government agency needs an aggressive watchdog. But once you cry wolf, it's hard to get the credibility back – readers may even start to mentally "screen out" the newspaper's assertions.

There also is a failing in DCF's rebuttal documents. It is Sheldon's penchant for – believe it or not – taking too much blame. Once again, he says DCF was wrong to screen out reports in the case of Bryce Barros a two-year-old (not one-year-old as the Herald reported) who subsequently died.

Sheldon is mistaken. it's the policy that requires accepting anything sent by a judge, no matter how flimsy, that is wrong. This case was the subject of an earlier Herald story. I plan to discuss the case, and how the Herald stacked the deck in that story too, on this Blog tomorrow or early next week.

FLORIDA STILL TAKES TOO MANY CHILDREN

Bottom line: Sheldon's responses to the Herald actually show that DCF is not doing enough to screen out false reports and trivial cases. And another paragraph in his overview memorandum also shows there has not yet been enough progress. Sheldon writes:

There may be a misconception that the Department is hesitant to remove children from unsafe homes. That is not the case. In November 2007 we removed 1,148 children. In October 2009, we removed 1,159 children. Our approach does not take abuse less seriously. Our success is in uniting children with a permanent family – their own whenever possible, or with adoptive homes or permanent guardianships if reunification is not possible.

That is worrisome. Though Florida takes away fewer children than it used to – and an independent outside evaluation finds it's been done without compromising safety – the most recent data available for all states, from 2008, shows that the rate of removal in Florida still is above the national average and significantly above the rate in systems that are, relatively speaking, models for keeping children safe. Success is not just giving children back quickly and safely after they've been taken. The bigger success is allowing them to remain safely in their own homes, without ever having their lives disrupted at all.

And DCF still lets governors politicize child welfare, as in the case of Rifqa Bary.

But at least Florida now is moving in the right direction. And that's never easy.

At the end of his letter, Sheldon notes how much still needs to be done, declaring that "we have miles to go before we sleep." The line is, of course, from a poem by Robert Frost. But there's another Frost poem that is at least as appropriate. It's the one that ends:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

For nearly a decade, the Florida Department of Children and Families trod the well-worn path of take-the-child-and-run. It made Florida a national symbol of child welfare failure. Now, DCF is taking the road less traveled. If DCF stays on that road, for the state's vulnerable children, it will make all the difference.

Florida foster care: Another error in Sunday’s Miami Herald story

In addition to the errors of interpretation and lack of context in Sunday's Miami Herald story about the Florida child abuse hotline (discussed in detail in the previous post to this Blog), there also is at least one important error of fact. In discussing one of the cases the hotline allegedly wrongly screened out, the story refers to a child who later died as an infant. But that term is defined as a child in the first year of life or a child before the age when she or he can walk. This child's tragic death occurred when he was about two years old and walking. The Herald made the same mistake in an earlier story devoted entirely to this case. (I made a similar error in my post yesterday, referring to the child, incorrectly, as one year old; the post has been corrected.)

The mistake may seem trivial, but actually it is important in judging DCF's handling of the case, as will be clear in what I expect will be the next post to this Blog in a day or two. The post will deal with that particular case and the handling of it by both DCF and the Herald.

In assessing the stories I apply two tests which I apply to all major in-depth reporting that is presented as news coverage rather than opinion.

The first test I learned in J-school. It's on a wallet-size card I've managed not to lose in 33 years, less because of its content than because one of the legends of broadcast journalism, the late Fred Friendly, handed it out to all his students. But every once in awhile it comes in handy. It's a description of what news analysis – that area between straight news and opinion – should be, that goes all the way back to 1939. It's from Ed Klauber, then the President of CBS News, who wrote:

What news analysts are entitled to do and should do is to illuminate the news out of common knowledge or special knowledge possessed by them or made available to them by this organization through its news sources. They should point out the facts on both sides, show contradictions with the known record, and so on.... It is the analyst's function to help the listener to understand, to weigh, and to judge, but not to do the judging for him.

The second test comes from many reporters' favorite fictional City Editor – Lou Grant. In the first episode of that iconic television series, he reads a draft of a story exposing police corruption. Then he turns to the reporter who wrote it.

Lou Grant, smiling: "You're really mad at these guys, aren't ya?"

Reporter (also smiling) "Yeah."

Lou Grant, still smiling: "I can tell." (No longer smiling): "I shouldn't be able to tell. … Rewrite it!"

Both Sunday's Herald story, and the one I'll discuss in the next post, flunk these tests.

Florida foster care: Hype and innuendo mark the start of the backlash against reform

NOTHING IN THIS POST WAS UNAVAILABLE TO THE MIAMI HERALD BEFORE THEY RAN THEIR STORY TODAY ABOUT FLORIDA'S CHILD ABUSE HOTLINE. THE NEWSPAPER CHOSE TO IGNORE IT.

Right after The New York Times
ran a story praising reforms by the Florida Department of Children and Families that emphasized keeping families together, I predicted a backlash. I wrote that:

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.

I referred to those who want to see the reforms fail as a "Kearney DCF-in-exile."

Apparently, The Miami Herald has jumped on the nostalgia bandwagon. In a huge, front-page article today based almost entirely on horror stories, an article that distorts both the actual data and the context, the Herald charges that Florida is endangering children by doing what every state does: screening out some of the calls phoned to the state's child abuse hotline. The Herald is wrong.

What the Herald knew – but did not tell readers – is that:

● For most of the past decade, Florida screened out calls to the hotline at a lower rate than the national average.

● Right now, Florida is rejecting proportionately fewer calls than it turned away in 2005 and 2006, before it reformed to emphasize family preservation.

● Florida's former policy of failing to screen out enough calls so endangered children that even the nation's foremost advocate of a take-the-child-and-run approach, Richard Gelles of the University of Pennsylvania, said Florida needed to screen out more calls.

The story also ignores the big picture: Measure after measure, including an independent outside evaluation shows that children in Florida are safer in the years since DCF abandoned the take-the-child-and-run approach and started doing more to keep families together.

But you won't find any of that information in the Herald's account. Instead you'll find what the worst child welfare reporting always uses as the ultimate crutch: Horror stories. And out-of-context horror stories about things DCF actually has done were not enough for the Herald. The story went on to attack DCF for off-the-wall ideas that have been discussed but never implemented – with no plans to do so.

NO SCREENING = "RUSSIAN ROULETTE" WITH CHILDREN'S LIVES

The most absurd single comment in the article has to be the one from Howard Talenfeld who chairs a group that calls itself Florida's Children First, a group that typically takes positions that can best be described as "Kearney-lite." Said Talenfeld: `Hot-line calls are cries for help on behalf of a child. Any call that is screened out is a cry that falls on deaf ears.''

In fact, hotline calls can be all sorts of things. Sometimes they are, indeed, cries for help, sometimes they are well-meaning errors, sometimes they are mandated reporters covering their rears, and sometimes they are acts of harassment by vindictive ex-spouses, or neighbors, or anyone else with a grudge. That's why no child welfare system can operate effectively without screening calls to the hotline. Workers would be inundated with false allegations and trivial cases, leaving them no time to find children in real danger. And, of course, huge numbers of additional children would be traumatized by needless investigations and stripsearches.

But, of course a family preservation advocate like me would be expected to say something like that. You would not expect to hear that from America's foremost proponent of the take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare, someone who has said only 20 to 30 percent of the children taken away should ever go home, someone beloved by Kathleen Kearney, who constantly consulted him (and almost no one else) on child welfare policy - the aforementioned Richard Gelles. But not only did he say it, he said it specifically about Florida, after he was commissioned to write a report about the Florida hotline, released in 2001:

"The hotline is supposed to be a gate," Gelles said. "They've got the gate rusted, stuck open." As a result, he said, cases pile up, creating a backlog of uncompleted investigations. "I equate that to the game of playing Russian roulette. It's just a matter of time before some child in the backlog pool is really badly injured."

Of course, now, even though Florida is screening calls at just about the rate he suggested, Gelles might change his mind and agree with the Herald. But someone who is fanatical about taking away children calling for less screening is no surprise, someone like that warning about too little screening, however, merits attention. In fact, what Florida, and every similar state needs is not less screening but better screening, and that should be the target of any effort to further reform the hotline.

STATISTICS ABUSE AT THE HERALD

In 2000, when Gelles studied the hotline, there was virtually no screening at all at the hotline, only about six percent of calls were screened out, according to data Florida reported to the federal government. Gelles said it should have been at least 35 percent. (The data DCF reported to the federal government, and discussed in this post, through 2005, mistakenly include both child and adult protective services cases, but since there are relatively few adult cases, that should not affect the percentages too much. Data from 2006 on do not include this error.)

In 2002 and 2003, Florida's rate of screening out calls approached the national average, then the state fell back below that average again in 2004. It was actually in 2005 and 2006 that Florida started screening out cases at a rate above the national average. That was back in what the Kearney DCF-in-exile still viewed as the good old days, when Florida still was taking away huge numbers of children. In State Fiscal Year 2007, the year reform really began in Florida, screening out of calls fell back to the national average, and the next year only 27.8 percent of all reports were screened out. In SFY 2009 the proportion of calls screened out rose to 40.2 percent – close to what probably will be the national average, when those data become available. It's also a figure not much higher than that recommended by Gelles, an extreme advocate of child-removal – and a lower figure than 2005 or 2006.

For details, see the table at the end of this post.

But even that figure underestimates the number of cases for which DCF reaches out in some way to families that have been reported. One of the other targets of a cheap shot from the Herald is a new practice of making "prevention referrals" – offers of help – in response to some calls. In the past, most of these calls would have been screened out with no outreach at all. So not only is DCF screening in just about as many calls as the national average, it's also doing some outreach, however limited, to a proportion of the calls it screens out.

DATA OUT OF CONTEXT

The Herald gets around all this by taking the numbers out of context. The Herald compares only four months in 2009 to the same months the year before. But as we've seen, 2008 was the aberration – a year in which exceptionally few reports were screened out. The Herald further distorts the data by using numbers without percentages. One would expect more cases to be investigated in 2008 than 2009 because more people called the hotline to report alleged child abuse in 2008 than 2009 – something else the Herald leaves out.

But, unfortunately for the state's vulnerable children, no one who reads the Herald story is likely to care about any of this.

Because nothing is more boring than a bunch of numbers – and nothing is more riveting than horror stories about allegedly unprotected children.

Everyone, even Richard Gelles, believes you have to have some screening. But once you do that you are guaranteed to have tragedies – some children will be harassed by traumatic interrogations and needless stripsearches, or worse, needlessly thrown into foster care. Other children in real danger will be missed because their cases will be screened out. You screen anyway because you endanger far more children if you don't screen.

But, of course, only one kind of tragedy was the focus of the Herald's "reporting."

If the Herald summaries are accurate – and I no longer take that as a given, particularly since the Herald is wrong about the one case, later in the story, where detailed information is available – then these were indeed tragic errors at the hotline – the same kind of tragic errors that are made in every child welfare system, and the same kind that you can bet were made in Florida even back in 2000, when almost nothing was screened out. But rather than give any sense of how common these errors are, the story moves immediately from three horror stories to a heart-of-the-hype paragraph that says:

"These decisions and thousands more are the result of a little known – but potentially dangerous – practice …" [emphasis added], a reference to the alleged increase in screening. That deft bit of weasel wording leaves the impression that all the cases screened out are like the horror stories. There is not a shred of evidence for that in the story. Instead, there's more innuendo: The story declares that "Among the callers being turned away: school counselors, grandparents, circuit court judges, hospital social workers, day care workers and juvenile justice staffers." The implication of course is that these are experts who couldn't possibly be wrong. Buried far deeper in the story is a comment from DCF Secretary George Sheldon that some of these same categories of mandated reporters have complained about having to phone in cases they knew were nonsense because they feared penalties if they didn't.

There was a time when, in fact, the hotline was barred from screening out anything from a mandated reporter – 2000, when the Legislature passed the notorious "Kayla McKean law." That was when the gate was "stuck open" – with all the horrors that followed.

The one tragic case where we have more to go on than the Herald's word for it concerns the death of two-year-old Bryce Barros. That was the subject of a Herald story in July that essentially previewed today's - complete with the same loaded language and innuendo. But for that story, the Herald also posted a number of source documents on its website, and those documents undercut the paper's own conclusions, something I will discuss in detail in a future post.

HYPOTHETICAL HORRORS

But horror stories about actual bad decisions were not enough for the Herald. They also mention what the story calls a "report" listing options for future policy changes involving screening. The actual report is not on the Herald website, so I can't tell what kind of a "report" it is. It sounds like a bunch of suggestions from people invited to come up with all sorts of ideas, no matter how off-the-wall.

And at least one of them certainly qualified. It allegedly suggested narrowing the definition of "lack of supervision" to the point where it could require, literally, a smoking gun. Under this proposal, which never went anywhere, a three-year-old playing with a loaded gun while adults watched would not be "lack of supervision" if the gun didn't go off. Idiotic? Of course. But I guarantee you that if every numbskull idea that was ever bandied about at a newspaper story meeting were made public, with the implication that they'd actually happen – nobody would ever trust their local newspaper again.

To make absolutely sure this long-form-editorial-disguised-as-a-news-story had its intended effect, the sourcing deck was stacked. All the outside "experts" and "child advocates" were suitably shocked and appalled at all the things that shocked and appalled The Herald (one was neutral, allowed to mention briefly that Florida was not out of line with the rest of the nation). Those left to defend the reforms were those people trust least: officials at DCF.

THE REAL SCREENING PROBLEM

There is, in fact, a problem with screening at child abuse hotlines, in Florida and most other states: There isn't enough of it. This is clear from what happens, nationwide, to all those calls that are screened in for investigation: nationwide, 61 percent of those reports turn out to be false, all the trauma of investigation inflicted on all those children was for nothing. (In Florida about half of reports are false, in part because Florida has three categories instead of the usual two.) Of course, just as with the initial screen-in/screen out decision, sometimes workers will wrongly declare a case unfounded. But the only major study I know of found that workers are two to six times more likely to wrongly substantiate a report they investigate than to wrongly declare one unfounded. All that wheel-spinning only steals more time from finding children in real danger. And that's probably one reason why, when Florida screened out even fewer reports than it does now, and took far more children, deaths of children known-to-the-system kept going up.

And that's why the lack of context in today's story in the Herald is so dangerous for children. It is likely to promote not better screening, but less screening. That means more false allegations investigated, more children traumatized – and less time for workers to find children in real danger; exactly the conditions that caused so much harm to children when Kearney was in charge.

The only acceptable goal for hotline errors is the same as the only acceptable goal for child abuse deaths: Zero. But we must seek those goals knowing that our reach always will exceed our grasp, and knowing that the wrong "fixes" will only make everything worse. So while the Herald story shows what everyone already knew – that every screening system needs improvement, that means helping the people at the hotline to make better decisions, not going back to leaving the gate stuck open. And it means remembering the same lesson every doctor is supposed to be taught in medical school: First, do no harm.

Talenfeld's absurd comment notwithstanding, there always will be screening in child welfare. The choice is not between screening and no screening, rather the choice is between rational screening, in which hotline personnel are trained to make better decisions, or irrational screening – in which the gate is stuck open again, cases cascade down upon workers and the case that gets "screened out" is whichever one happens to be on the bottom of the pile at the end of an overwhelmed worker's day.

SHELDON ON THE SPOT

Three months ago on this Blog I wrote that John Mattingly, Commissioner of New York City Administration for Children's Services was the only reform-minded leader of a big child welfare system who was still around when the backlash against his own reforms hit. I said that no one else in the country could have handled it better – but Mattingly himself could have done better than he did. He caved too much.

Now, it looks like he won't be so lonely. Right now hotline workers with copies of today's Herald at their desks are going to be scared to screen out anything, politicians already are jockeying for position – the governor is in a primary for an open U.S. Senate seat next year - legislators are going to have a field day – and I'll bet the Herald will fan the flames with one of those phony "react" stories, the kind that begin: "Responding to revelations in The Miami Herald that call screening at Florida's child abuse hotline endangers children, state lawmakers called for…"

And the buck will stop at the desk of Secretary Sheldon.

Whatever state lawmakers "call for" Sheldon probably shouldn't do it, since they'll probably call for things that will endanger more children. There should be no changes in current guidelines, no backing down from the fact that screening calls rationally makes children safer – and no new blue-ribbon commission or equivalent. To make sure the message goes out, loud and clear, that the errors go in all directions and errors in any direction can be equally harmful, any review of cases to see if they have been wrongly screened out should be accompanied by a review of an equal number of cases that may have been wrongly screened in. There should be a focus on helping frontline workers do a better job, call by call. The message to the frontlines has to be: We will help you to do your job better, but don't be afraid to exercise your best professional judgment.

PERCENT OF CHILD ABUSE HOTLINE CALLS SCREENED OUT IN FLORIDA AND NATIONWIDE

YEAR FLORIDA NATIONAL AVERAGE

1999 28.2 39.6

2000 6.3 37.9

2001 25.9 32.5

2002 36.9 32.9

2003 36.7 32.1

2004 27.8 37.3

2005 42.0 37.9

2006 53.2 38.3

2007 34.1 38.3

2008 27.8 37.5

2009 40.2 n/a

This chart was updated on April 3, 2010 to add the national average data for 2008.

Sources: 1999-2005, Florida and 1999-2008, national average: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, annual Child Maltreatment reports, available online at http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/stats_research/index.htm#afcars

2006-2009, Florida: Florida Department of Children and Families

Due to a mistake by DCF in reporting its data to the federal government, the figures through 2005 actually represent a combined percentage of child and adult protective services reports, but there are relatively few adult reports, so that is unlikely to change the percentages much. Data through 2005 also are by federal fiscal year (Oct. 1 through Sept. 30) data for 2006 through 2009 are for the state fiscal year (July 1 through June 30).

Prolonging foster care: The study CASA doesn’t want you to see

FOR YEARS, THE NATIONAL CASA ASSOCIATION BURIED A STUDY SHOWING THE PROGRAM IS A FAILURE DEEP IN ITS WEBSITE. NOW, IT SEEMS, IT'S GONE ALTOGETHER.

Several years ago, the National CASA association commissioned a study in order to tell the world how wonderful the Court-Appointed Special Advocate program is. This is the program in which well-meaning people who are overwhelmingly white, middle class, and have lots of time on their hands go into overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately minority homes to render judgment on the parents and tell judges if those parents ever should get their children back.

But the results of the study were not exactly what the folks at CASA expected.

●The study found that CASA's only real accomplishments were to prolong the time children languished in foster care and reduce the chance that the child will be placed with relatives.

●The study found no evidence that having a CASA on the case does anything to improve child safety – so all that extra foster care is for nothing. (The study specifically controlled for CASA's all-purpose excuse for this – the claim that CASAs handle the most difficult cases.)

●The study also found that when a CASA is assigned to a child who is Black, the CASA spends, on average, significantly less time on the case. (The study also found that CASAs don't spend as much time on cases in general as the organization's p.r. might lead one to believe. CASA volunteers reported spending an average of only 4.3 hours per month on cases involving white children, and only 2.67 hours per month on cases involving Black children.)

In some cases, as we reported previously on this Blog, the racism can be far more flagrant.

A columnist for the trade journal Youth Today aptly summed up the findings this way:

"The more rigorous evaluation … not only challenged the effectiveness of the court volunteers' services, but suggested that they spend little time on cases, particularly those of black children, and are associated with more removals from the home and fewer efforts to reunite children with parents or relatives."

None of this should come as a surprise – the problems are built into the CASA model. Who has time to spend even 4.3 hours a month on a case? Certainly not a poor person holding down two jobs. So it's no wonder CASA programs sometimes are pet projects of the local Junior League and the demographics of CASAs tend to be different from the demographics of the families they judge.

Indeed, in a cover story about the report (available on their website by subscription) Youth Today found that CASA's approach to spinning the study "can border on duplicity"

And now, it seems, that approach includes making sure as few people as possible actually see the report. It's always been hard to find on CASA's website. There used to be two such sites, and the study was buried deep in the one geared to CASAs themselves, not the general public. But when I checked again earlier this month, I found that the two websites had been merged – and the study seems to have disappeared. As far as I can tell, only a brief, self-serving summary remains. (If anyone can find the full report on the site, please let me know and I'll be glad to post the link.)

I'm just glad I downloaded the full report before it was too late. Since it no longer seems to be available on CASA's website, I've posted it on ours.

UPDATED, NOV. 20: Adoption of children from foster care: National Child Welfare Hypocrisy Day, 2009

This is an updated version of a post that originally appeared a year ago. Since the event is annual, perhaps the post should be as well.  And now it's updated again - see the brief note at the end of the post.

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, giving children permanence, 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.

EVERYBODY KNOWS THE DRILL

    The day actually is celebrated on different dates in different states, but it's always in November and most places will hold their celebrations this Saturday. 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 last year, 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 all the people 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. In 2008, 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 tarnished by other statements and actions undercutting their own reforms). New Jersey has done it at least twice, and the Miami region of the Florida Department of Children and Families is doing it regularly. 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.

THE DANGERS OF ADOPTION DAY

    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. 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.

MICHIGAN: EPICENTER OF ADOPTION-AT-ALL-COSTS

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 a 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.

In contrast, when birth parents addressed a task force of which she was a prominent member, Corrigan decided she was too busy to stay and listen to them.

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.

(Actually, I got a sense of how much courage it took, and how hard it is to maintain, when I singled out Tacoma and his essay for praise in NCCPR's first report on Michigan child welfare. Tacoma felt compelled to write an op ed column declaring that some minor tweaking of state law had made everything just fine now. It hasn't.)

Not even the tragedy of Ricky Holland could get Corrigan to bring balance to her adoption crusade. 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 Department of Human Services ignored one blatant warning sign after another. Even during the time after Ricky Holland had disappeared but his body had not yet been found, during the time police already strongly suspected the Hollands of murdering Ricky, DHS gave the Hollands final approval to adopt another foster child in their care.

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 year, somewhere in that state, a reporter will ask a tougher question than "How's the sheet cake?"

They didn't last year.

UPDATE:

            It doesn’t look like they’ll be asking this year either.  A particularly gloppy story is in the Lansing State Journal today.  Not only are there no tough questions, the story does not mention that the particular judge they quote is so fanatical about tearing apart families that even the Michigan Supreme Court can’t stomach it.  This year alone, in scathing decisions, they reversed her twice. 

In one of those cases the court agreed with a dissenting appellate court opinion which found that this judge seemed almost obsessed with a father’s poverty as a reason to take away his children forever.  In the other case, the Supreme Court found one due process violation after another – and Justice Corrigan, to her credit, was particularly appalled.