Foster care in New York City: The grandstanding D.A. vs. the children: A tragedy in three acts

UPDATE, 10:30PM: See also this New York Times story, for context no one else has provided yet.


Last September, I wrote about how the Brooklyn, New York, District Attorney, Charles Hynes, had decided to score some political points, and get lots of media attention by launching a first-of-its-kind criminal investigation of the Administration for Children’s Services, in connection with the death of Marchella Brett-Pierce, a child “known to the system.”

I said that almost certainly would set off another surge in needless removals of children -  the last thing vulnerable children in New York City needed.

New York City had been a national leader in child welfare reform, until ACS Commissioner John Mattingly botched the response to the death of Nixzmary Brown just over five years ago.  His response consisted of a series of so-called “reforms,” which sent the same message to the frontlines: Take the child and run.  And they did.

Removals of children escalated sharply – only in the past year or so were there signs the surge in removals was starting to ease.  But all the standard indicators of child safety got worse.  Details are in our report on New York City child welfare.  And no wonder.  Though there was plenty of new hiring after Nixzmary died, there also were plenty of new cases, and more work in dealing with existing cases.  So it got harder to find children in real danger.

New York’s rate of removal is not nearly as high as Los Angeles or Philadelphia, and the surge in removals following the death of Nixzmary Brown has not been as bad as the one which followed the death of Elisa Izquierdo in 1995.  But the rate of removal in New York is significantly higher than, for example, the rate in metropolitan Chicago, where independent monitors say that, as foster care entries have declined, child safety has improved.

Then, last Septmeber, came Act One of “Look at me!  Look at me!  I’m Charles Hynes and I’m cracking down on child abuse!”

Not surprisingly, during that month, ACS workers removed at least 412 children from their homes, a 13 percent increase over the same month in 2008 and 2009.  (ACS lists entries in two different places in its monthly reports with two different figures, this is an apples-to-apples comparison using the lower figure in each case.)

Fortunately, after that everyone calmed down. 

But now, things are going to get a whole lot worse.  Yesterday, Hynes raised the curtain on Act Two.  He got a grand jury to indict the caseworker and the supervisor involved in the case on charges including criminally negligent homicide – apparently the first time this has happened in New York City. 

THE INDICTMENTS WILL BACKFIRE

There may be cause to charge the caseworker with something – he is accused of falsifying records to hide a failure to visit the home – but not criminally negligent homicide.  And so far, news accounts suggest no reason to charge the supervisor. 

ACS put out a statement expressing fear that the indictments will backfire, since they might discourage good people from becoming caseworkers.  The indictments are going to backfire alright – but for a very different reason.

Caseworkers all over the country already know that they’ll never get in trouble within a child welfare agency for taking away too many children.  In fact, in the nearly 35 years I’ve been following child welfare, I’ve never seen a caseworker fired, demoted, suspended, or slapped on the wrist for taking away too many children.  Which means that, contrary to what one often hears from caseworkers, when it comes to taking away children they are not, in fact “damned if they do and damned if they don’t,” they’re only damned if they don’t.

Now, in New York City, they know that if they leave any child in a home and something goes wrong, they could be thrown in jail as well.

So now the incentives skew even further toward take-the-child-and-run, which not only does enormous harm to the children needlessly taken, it means the system will be further overloaded and there will be even less time to find the next child in real danger.

And it’s going to get still worse.

Hynes offered a preview of Act Three: The grandstanding D.A. is continuing to use the grand jury to conduct an investigation of  “evidence of alleged systemic failures” at ACS.  According to The New York Times:

The grand jury will seek to determine whether the agency had followed through on its plan for reforms after the 2006 death of Nixzmary Brown, …

The real problem is the opposite: ACS did follow through on its so-called reforms – but all of the reforms involved encouraging workers to take away more children.  In that respect they worked just fine.  But, as noted above, every indicator of child safety worsened.

In contrast, as noted previously on this Blog, John Mattingly turned his back on real reform, becoming one of the most regressive forces in American child welfare.  Matingly’s record includes reneging on a pledge to use "differential response" (a national innovation he's long opposed) to deal with some "educational neglect" cases, opposing state legislation to encourage workers to be slightly more flexible about rushing to seek termination of parental rights for some mothers who are in jail or drug treatment, and even opposing legislation to place more children permanently with relatives through subsidized guardianship. Fortunately, both bills passed despite Mattingly's objections.

A TRAGEDY IN FOSTER CARE

Still another possible indicator of ACS’ failure came last week in the case of the horrifying, near fatal beating of a 17-month-old foster child, Kymell Oram.  The foster mother’s boyfriend has been charged.

The New York Times quotes a friend of the mother as saying she was in the process of adopting the child.  And according to the Daily News, someone from ACS came to the foster mother’s apartment just last month and saw nothing wrong. 

There are a number of possible reasons for this:

●Perhaps there was nothing to see.  Perhaps everything was fine and the foster mother and her boyfriend have nothing to do with the beating, or someone suddenly and unpredictably exploded.  Perhaps even the most diligent ACS worker had no reason to suspect anything.

●Or perhaps it had something to do with the fact that, when it comes to dangers in foster homes, caseworkers are prone to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil and write no evil in the case file since, of course, it is the child welfare system that put the child in the home in the first place.  How else to explain the fact that academic studies repeatedly find rates of abuse in foster care that are up to 30 times higher – or more – than the ridiculously low rates reported in official figures?

●Here again, another factor may be the surge in entries into foster care as a result of those ACS “reforms.” The more children you take away, the greater the pressure to lower standards for foster homes. 

●There may be still another factor as well; what in this case might be called “near-fatal neatness.”

As I noted on this blog four years ago, there is no field I know of where the phrase “cleanliness is next to Godliness” is taken more literally than child welfare – and no field I know where the consequences can be more harmful. Over and over again, in fatality reviews and news stories, caseworkers say something like “we never suspected anything because the home was so neat and clean” as though there is some direct correlation between cleanliness and love. In contrast, children can be taken from loving homes because an overwhelmed parent fell way, way behind on the house cleaning.

So in his report reviewing child abuse fatalities in 2005, the first director of New Jersey’s now-defunct Office of Child Advocate (and later commissioner of the state child welfare agency) Kevin Ryan issued the following recommendation:

In two cases here, and as also evidenced in the OCA’s prior reports, the caseworkers noted in the file that the home was neat and clean. Until someone demonstrates a correlation between cleanliness and child safety, [the state child welfare agency] should instruct employees that this factor is, at best, hardly relevant unless the filth is severe enough to cause a real and immediate risk to the child. This both will reduce needless removals from dirty homes, and encourage workers not to write off the potential for risk in homes that happen to be spotless. [Emphasis added.]

Perhaps the word has not crossed the Hudson.  The Daily News quotes a “police source” as saying:

"The apartment was in okay shape and there was food in the refrigerator. Apparently that's all they look at."

THE BAD INCENTIVES DON’T WORK IN REVERSE

One might hope that, when it comes to bad messages sent to caseworkers, the fact that one tragedy in the home of birth parents and one in the home of foster parents are in the news at the same time might cancel each other out – that is, the temptation to take away more children and throw them into foster care might be tempered by the tragedy in foster care itself.

It doesn’t work that way.  As I wrote five years ago, I believe there are two reasons for this:

Reason #1:  When the birth parents did it, it’s easy to find a scapegoat.  Typically one worker, or perhaps one worker and one supervisor, made the decision to leave the child in his or her own home.  That means one or two people who can be fired, demoted, suspended, and/or raked over the coals in news accounts – or charged with criminally negligent homicide.  Workers know this.  That’s why when a case hits the paper, they become terrified that the next case will be one of theirs and they rush to take away more children.

In contrast, when the child dies in foster care the blame is more diffuse.  The worker who removed the child often is not the one who chose the foster home. And even if she did, someone else had the responsibility to license the foster parents, so the worker who placed the children can’t be blamed.  The licensing may have taken place years before, so that worker can’t be blamed either.  And, for that matter, the foster parents who kill the child might be the second or third or fourth placement.

So when a child dies in foster care the response of caseworkers is the same: If I leave a child in his own home and something goes wrong, I’m the scapegoat; if another child dies in foster care, no one’s going to blame me.

The dynamic is compounded by –

Reason #2: the profound double standard in media coverage of “lessons learned.”  When the birth parent is the culprit there is an immediate rush to blame “family preservation.”  There is a ready supply of spokespeople, often from agencies that make their living off foster care, anxious to come forward and say, “See: This case proves that the state or county is doing too much to keep families together.”  When the child dies in foster care it’s written off as an aberration, something that can be fixed with more frequent caseworker visits to foster homes or tightening of licensing standards and background checks. 

So rather than counterbalancing each other, these two cases actually reinforce the tendency of caseworkers to rush to tear children from their homes. 

SOON IT WILL BE A “SPATE”

And here’s what makes it even scarier:

In New York City, a child “known to the system” dies an average of once every 9.5 days.  It’s only every few years or so that media pay attention.  Well, now they’re paying attention.  So when the next one happens, it officially becomes three tragic cases.  And that makes it “a series” or “a spate” of tragedies that “raise questions” about ACS.

It was exactly that kind of misreporting that started this cycle in 2006 in the first place. (Recall the New York Times reporter who declared “it was a series – but not statistically.”)

So there may be even more than three acts to this tragedy – unless someone rushes in real soon and demands that Charles Hynes, and the rest of the playwrights, do a rewrite.

Not OK: CR’s double standards for measuring abuse in foster care

The group that so arrogantly calls itself Children’s Rights (CR) has put out a press release concerning a report it commissioned from an outside expert, John Goad, concerning foster care in Oklahoma.

The findings are indeed horrifying.  They suggest a pattern of willful blindness to widespread abuse in substitute care in Oklahoma, especially in group homes and institutions.

For some reason, one division of the Oklahoma Department of Human Services investigates abuse in family foster homes while another, known as the Office of Client Advocacy (OCA) investigates it in group homes and institutions. 

That latter division, in particular, is the Keystone Kops of child welfare, according to the report.  According to CR’s press release, these “investigators”

do not specialize in child welfare or receive adequate training on how to investigate abuse or neglect. Investigations of harm in institutions and group homes “lack any sense of urgency, are haphazard, and superficial,” wrote Goad. “OCA’s failure to conduct even marginally adequate child protection investigations for this vulnerable population is far outside any reasonable standard.”

While it’s always good to have anyone point out the severe risk of abuse in foster care, as so often happens when it comes from CR, the press release leaves that strong, bitter aftertaste of hypocrisy.

That’s because there is not one word in CR’s lawsuit about the problem at the heart of so much abuse in foster care: Too much foster care.

Oklahoma takes away children at a rate 40 percent above the national average and more than double the rate in states widely recognized as, relatively speaking, models for keeping children safe.  The more children you take needlessly the greater the temptation to misuse and overuse group homes and institutions and lower standards for foster homes.  States like Oklahoma are begging for beds and beggars can’t be choosers.

So, having concluded that often Oklahoma foster care is hell, CR doesn’t lift a finger to keep more children out of hell in the first place.

But neither the revelations, nor the hypocrisy end there.

A LOWER STANDARD FOR MILWAUKEE

It seems that OCA is on a different computer system from the one that compiles data about everything else in Oklahoma child welfare.  So the abuse OCA does manage to find never gets into the statistics it shares with the public, or the statistics it is required to report to the federal government.

CR’s director, Marcia Lowry (or whoever wrote the quote in the press release for her) declared herself appalled:

“It is appalling to hear DHS rely on numbers it knows to be inaccurate at the same time it is completely ignoring the suffering of an entire group of children in its care.” 

That is indeed appalling.  It’s also appalling to see a group that claims defend these children apply one standard for measuring abuse in foster care in one state and another somewhere else.  Because in this case, CR’s hypocrisy extends all the way to Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

In Milwaukee, CR already has a settlement.  When the agreement first was reached in 2002, NCCPR pointed out in an op ed column for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (available in the newspaper’s paid archive) that a key weakness in the settlement was the lack of independent monitoring.  We wrote:

It wasn’t that long ago that …[CR] alleged widespread falsification of case records in Milwaukee.  Yet now, CR proposes to rely on the alleged falsifiers to provide accurate information …

And sure enough, CR is doing just that.  The Bureau of Milwaukee Child Welfare has examined itself and proclaimed that abuse in foster care is at an all-time low!   And what was CR’s response? No request for independent verification, much less the kind of study done in Oklahoma.  Instead, CR simply took the child welfare agency’s word for it and sang the agency’s praises.  According to the Journal Sentinel, CR attorney Eric Thompson declared that:

"The bureau has made tremendous progress transforming its child welfare system over the last several years improving the basic safety and well-being of the many vulnerable children in its care.”

What accounts for the difference?

Perhaps it’s because CR still is suing in Oklahoma, so they need ammunition.  In Milwaukee they’ve settled and need to show donors they’ve accomplished something.

Letting kids in foster care keep their own money: Is CWLA softening its opposition?

            The world of child welfare is filled with ugly little side streets and dark alleys – practices that may not affect huge numbers of children, relatively speaking, but which add insult to the injuries endured by some of the children already harmed by the foster care system.

            One of those dark alleys involves a practice that seems hard to believe: There are about 30,000 foster children eligible for some form of Social Security, usually disability of survivors benefits.  But, as is explained in this previous post, child welfare agencies typically swoop in and grab the money for themselves, so they can keep funding their foster care systems.  As I said last year, it’s worse than stealing candy from a baby.  But it’s perfectly legal.

            Up to now, the giant trade association for child welfare agencies, the Child Welfare League of America, has wanted to keep it that way.  After all, why should foster children get their own money when it can go to one of those oh-so-worthy CWLA member agencies instead?  So when Rep. Pete Stark (D-California) first introduced legislation to ban this practice, CWLA opposed it.  So did the Children’s Defense Fund, which has no interest in defending foster children against having their own money taken from them.  CDF is far more concerned that somewhere, somehow there might be a child welfare agency that has a little less money to use to throw children into foster care.

            That greedy stance is all the more amazing since while this money can make a huge difference to the individual foster children, it represents well under one percent of what government spends on child welfare every year.  That’s just one reason CDF really should change its slogan to “no dollar left behind.”

            Rep. Stark announced yesterday he is again introducing legislation to ban this practice. And judging by what longtime CWLA official Linda Spears told the Associated Press, they just might be modifying their position.  Said Spears:

            “In tough economic times, the states are between a rock and a hard place — they can’t afford services beyond the basic necessities. But the young person is there saying, ‘What about me?’ ... There’s so much in foster care that makes young people feel they’re not in charge of their lives, and that could be changed to give kids more say.”

            This is rather like saying “On the one hand you were mugged.  On the other hand, the mugger said he really needed the money.”  And it’s disingenuous since CWLA condoned this practice before the recession hit.  In fact, I’ve never known them to oppose this practice, no matter what the state of the economy,

            Still by CWLA standards, this may be progress.  Or it may be a calculation that the bill won’t pass, and they can remain neutral while still being sure the foster children won’t see their own money.

            Meanwhile Prof. Daniel Hatcher of the University of Baltimore continues to pursue his lawsuit challenging the practice in Maryland.  This greatly upset Judith Schagrin, assistant director for children’s services with the Baltimore County social services department.  She told AP that “States are not in fact maliciously stealing children’s money.”

            We didn’t say it was malicious.

The case for foster care finance reform, from those who know it best

It anyone still has any doubt about the need to reverse the perverse incentives in federal funding that encourage foster care and discourage better alternatives, they should take a few minutes to listen to Isha “Charlie” McNeeley and Jojo Murdock.

They are former foster children from Oregon and California who spoke eloquently about their own experiences at a hearing of the Senate Finance Committee last week.

The hearing concerned restoring the authority of the Department of Health and Human Services to grant waivers from foster care funding restrictions, waivers like the one that has done so much to improve child safety in Florida, according to independent evaluations.

Legislation to do this passed the House of Representatives in the final days of the lame duck session last year, but it got nowhere in the Senate.  Now, it seems, some in the Senate may be ready to take up the cause.

No one at the hearing actually spoke against restoring this authority. But that’s always the m.o. of groups like the Child Welfare League of America, the giant trade association for public and private agencies, including many that would go out of business without a steady supply of foster children: never say no, just “yes, but…” reform to death.  You can bet that’s what CWLA and its allies will be doing if there are any signs that restoring waiver authority actually might pass.

Ideally, of course, Congress would go well beyond simply restoring the authority to grand waivers.  At a time when good entitlements, like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are under attack, it would be nice if Congress turned its attention to an entitlement that actually does harm – the never ending open-ended entitlement to federal aid for foster care for every eligible child.

Ideally, Congress would end this entitlement, give all states what they’re getting now as a flat grant, indexed to inflation, and let the states keep any savings they achieved by reducing foster care.  But a state or county that caved in to a foster-care panic and started taking away lots of children needlessly would have to pick up the full tab for those placements. 

The Bush Administration wanted to give every state this option, on a purely voluntary basis, back in 2003.  As NCCPR reported in the trade journal Youth Today, had that passed Congress, and had every state taken the deal, states would have $5 billion more to spend on child welfare now than they got by sticking to the “entitlement.”

But CWLA and its BFFs at the Children’s Defense Fund, which is trapped in a 1960s entitlement = good, everything else = bad mentality, and their allies, killed the idea.  And it looks like they’ve learned nothing from their $5 billion blunder.

So odds are the best that young people like Ms. McNeeley and Ms. Murdock can hope for is that Congress might let HHS give more states the chance to reform foster care financing through waivers.  And given how the child welfare establishment really feels about this kind of reform, they might not even get that.

There is more about all of this in our briefing paper on child welfare finance reform.

Foster care in dairyland: CR brings its war against grandparents to Wisconsin

When 13-month-old Christopher Thomas of Milwaukee was beaten to death by the aunt who was caring for him, everyone familiar with child welfare in Wisconsin saw it as a tragedy.  That includes the people at the group which so arrogantly calls itself Children’s Rights.  For all their many faults, there’s no question they care deeply about vulnerable children.

But, it seems, CR also saw the death as something else: an opportunity to bring its war against grandparents to Wisconsin.  And, sadly, it is succeeding.

This week CR issued a report which, by their standards, was practically gleeful in recounting the big new bureaucratic hurdles the state has put in the way of grandparents and other relatives who come forward to take in children through kinship foster care.

As has been noted often on this blog, there is a wealth of research showing that kinship foster care is more stable, better for children’s well-being and, most important, safer than what should properly be called stranger care.  And there is no evidence that these benefits are any greater, or any less, if the grandparent or other relative is “licensed.”

But for an organization as enamored of bureaucracy as CR, licensure is the Holy Grail.  All over the country, CR has been trying to force grandparents to comply with the same licensing regulations required of strangers.

The problem, of course, is that just as most parents who lose children to foster care are poor, so are most grandparents.  But licensing regulations typically are geared more to middle class creature comforts than to health and safety.  So poor people can’t always meet all of them.  CR’s response boils down to: Who cares?  If you can’t comply with a plethora of bureaucratic regulations you can’t possibly be any good as a caretaker.

Not that CR says that, of course. They always point to how the pages of new bureaucratic regulations they want to impose include exceptions – but those exceptions are extremely hard to get. 

This can be seen in Michigan, where CR’s obsession with licensing has forced at least 1,500 children to be expelled from the homes of grandparents and other relatives – and no one is tracking what happened to them.

Wisconsin, in contrast, had been sensibly flexible about all this – until the death of Christopher Thomas prompted the state to impose an astoundingly byzantine licensing scheme. 

Now, Wisconsin doesn’t just have licenses for grandparents, it has five separate levels of licensing.  And don’t even think of taking in a level 3 child if you’ve only got a level 2 license!  But wait, there’s more: A process for granting “exceptions” that is so complex it requires creation of an “exceptions panel” to rule on requests.  It also requires that any grandparent who wins an exception from a regulation create her or his own specially- approved alternate means of complying with “the intent of the requirement.”  On the other hand, that’s not required if grandma seeks a “waiver” instead of an “exception.”  (There is no mention of whether there is a “waiver panel” or if the “exceptions panel” is empowered to handle waivers as well).  The regulations also impose an exhaustive regimen of training on grandparents who are likely to be pretty exhausted to begin with from suddenly being called upon to take in the children.

Since this is every bureaucrat’s dream, CR’s director, Marcia Lowry must be in heaven! 

Well, not quite.  It seems there’s still a loophole or two. 

For one thing, although every kinship foster parent must apply to be licensed, they don’t actually have to receive a license.  Under some circumstances, if the relatives find the process too burdensome or too overwhelming; or if they’re simply is too suspicious of the child welfare agency to want to be under its thumb, they can withdraw from the process.  They won’t get nearly as much in payments to help defray the costs of raising their children, but it remains their option.  The agency then decides if the love the relatives have shown is more important than meeting every technicality required for licensure.

And, in an indication of just how onerous licensure has become under CR’s grand scheme, 57 percent of the first group to go through the process, 194 in all, dropped out.

What is CRs response?  Do they consider that maybe, just maybe, the whole licensing process, geared to young, middle class strangers, is too burdensome for older, impoverished relatives?  Of course not.  CR demands that the loophole be closed and those who drop out not be allowed to keep the children in their care unless a court approves.  Of course CR knows full well that every judge is thinking: “If I approve this and something goes wrong, I’ll be blamed for causing ‘the next Christopher Thomas.’”  It’s going to be hard enough to get agencies to show the wisdom and courage to allow unlicensed relatives to keep the children, let alone get a judge to approve.

Or consider this classic example of the CR mindset:  Common sense says that if Aunt Jane and Uncle Joe are willing to take in their nephew, and their mother, Grandma Sally also lives in the home that’s an extra benefit.  But CR says it may be a threat.  So not only must Jane and Joe get medical examinations and have a medical professional provide a written statement that they have no physical or mental problems that could affect their ability to care for the child, Grandma Sally has to go through this as well.

The State of Wisconsin did allow an exception if Grandma Sally has no health insurance (not every grandma is old enough for Medicare) and can’t afford it.  CR’s response: Close that loophole!  Damn the expense to the family!  Sally is way too much of a risk to be allowed in that house until a medical professional checks her out!

No wonder, as noted in the previous post to this Blog, the new commissioner of the Department of Children and Families in Connecticut wants to move in precisely the opposite direction.

As I’ve noted before on this Blog, there can be real advantages to licensing both to states and to relatives themselves.  That’s why states should encourage licensing and help relatives to meet licensing standards.  It is not, however, reason enough to threaten the stability of children living with loving relatives.

So what can we expect in the future in Wisconsin?  Sadly, it’s likely to be another mass expulsion of children from the homes of grandparents and other relatives in the name of CR’s obsession with licensing and bureaucracy.  Soon, there is likely to be another state full of children wronged by “Children’s Rights.”

POSTSCRIPT: If you want to see exactly what Marcia Lowry and her minions at CR will never understand about love and family and kinship check out this story from the CBS Evening News.  Could anything be worse than some bureaucrat showing up at their door and taking the children away because of some picayune licensing requirement?

Foster care in Connecticut: Will you-know-who undermine real reform?

Connecticut is the great underachiever in child welfare.  Year after year, the state spends on child welfare at one of the highest rates in the country, and year after year the system produces lousy results for kids.

That’s because Connecticut spends the money in all the wrong ways.  First of all, as is discussed in detail in our report on Connecticut child welfare, the state takes away children at a rate 40 percent above the national average and more than double the rates in states widely-recognized as, relatively speaking, models for keeping children safe.

The problem is compounded by what happens after children are taken away.  Connecticut uses the worst form of care (and the most expensive), group homes and institutions, at one of the highest rates in the nation.  At the same time, it uses the least harmful form of substitute care, placing children with relatives instead of strangers, at one of the lowest rates.  Details are in NCCPR’s interactive database.

Now, the new Commissioner of the state Department of Children and Families, Joette Katz, is promising to change at least part of that – the part about kinship care.  And it’s clear she understands exactly what’s causing the problem.  According to a story from the non-profit news website Connecticut Mirror:

           

Katz blames the long list of agency regulations and requirements for families to take in a relative, which are identical to the requirements strangers have when fostering these children.

"I am not sure our rules make sense in every case. There's this catch-all. If Great Aunt Sally doesn't meet one requirement then that automatically eliminates her," said Katz. "Instead, we should be asking ourselves, 'Is this is something we can work around?' We need to start taking educated risks with the goal of keeping kids with relatives."

This long list of requirements ranges from ensuring that homes have working lights and heat to insisting on separate beds for same-sex relatives and separate bedrooms for opposite-sex relatives. Not all of them make sense when the issue is keeping children with their families, she says.

"It's punishing people for poverty. Lot's of people share bedrooms and they are fine," Katz said. "I am telling my [social] workers to start making more exceptions when they believe it makes sense, effective immediately... I will back their decisions."

Who in the word could be against that?  Who would be so obtuse – and so heartless – as to punish people for their poverty by insisting that grandparents comply with every single regulation used to license middle-class strangers, regulations often geared more to middle-class creature comforts than actual health and safety?

Quite possibly the same people who have had a consent decree in Connecticut for more than two decades – that’s who.

Yes, Katz may face a fight from Marcia Lowry and her minions at the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children’s Rights.  After all, CR is taking Michigan in precisely the opposite direction from where Katz wants Connecticut to go.  Under the consent decree CR foisted on Michigan, with rare and difficult-to-get exceptions, impoverished relatives have to comply with all the same hypertechnical licensing requirements as middle-class strangers.

The entirely-predictable result: At least 1,500 children have been kicked out of the homes of extended family members providing kinship care in Michigan – and no one is keeping track of what happened to them.

It’s happening because CR believes there is no problem in child welfare that can’t be solved with another form, another procedure or another bureaucratic requirement.  The people at CR are like the clerk you least want to see when you finally make it to the front of the line at the DMV.

So in her effort to finally do what’s best for Connecticut’s vulnerable children, Joette Katz may have quite a fight on her hands.  But my guess is Katz is up to it.  She is one of two justices on state supreme courts to leave those jobs this year to run state human services agencies.  The other is Maura Corrigan – in Michigan.  Perhaps Katz’s example will encourage Corrigan to put up a fight as well.

The best defense against needless foster care is – a good defense

            After speaking at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas last week, I was asked what would be the very first step I would take to reform child welfare systems if I could.  Of course I came up with two “first steps.”  One is to change financial incentives that encourage needless foster care and discourage better alternatives.

            The other is to provide high quality legal representation to parents who have lost or are at risk of losing their children to foster care.  Such programs are few and far between, but where they exist they have proven to save money and, more important, to save children.

            The most successful model typically teams lawyers with low caseloads with social workers who can do their own assessments and help prepare alternatives to the cookie-cutter-no-services “service plans” typically foisted upon families by child welfare agencies.  For each case there also is a parent advocate, typically a parent who has been through the system herself or himself.

            In Manhattan, for example, children represented using this model by the Center for Family Representation spend, on average, 73 percent less time in foster care than the average for foster children in New York City.  In half the cases, children never enter care at all, but instead stay at home with the services their families need.   The cost is from $4,000 to $6,600 per family – compared with anywhere from $18,000 and $49,000 per child to keep a child in foster care for a year in New York City.

           They’ve been doing it in a similar manner for some time now in many counties in Washington State.  The program, run by the Washington State Office of Public Defense, is so successful that even the lawyers who represent the state child welfare agency in these cases support it.  They found that when parents were innocent, there was no reason to tear apart their families; and when the reasons for removal were legitimate, competent lawyers with low caseloads and social work support could show parents exactly what they needed to do to get their children back – and make sure the parents got the help to do it.

            Between 2000 and 2003, of 144 cases in the program in which families were reunified, not one was brought back to court.  “These children aren’t coming back,” a former Washington State Supreme Court Justice, Bobbie Bridge, told a former newspaper, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, “and we do get them back when we make bad reunification decisions.”

And now, a new independent evaluation finds that the program shortens the time to reunification and also to adoption or guardianship when reunification really isn’t possible.