They can’t fix foster care – but they sure have mastered doublethink

           One of the most, uh, remarkable things about Marcia Lowry and her colleagues at the group that so arrogantly calls itself “Children’s Rights” (CR) is their mastery of doublethink – the term George Orwell invented to describe “the power to hold two completely contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accept both of them.”

            CR’s skill at doublethink is now on display in a series of reports and press releases about Oklahoma, where they’ve brought one of their class-action McLawsuits.

            In a previous post to this Blog, I noted that CR had issued a scathing report on the widespread abuse of children in Oklahoma foster care.  The problem, I said, was that CR isn’t lifting a finger to actually keep Oklahoma children out of foster care.

            Turns out I underestimated CR’s capacity for doublethink.  Now they’ve put out another press release about still another report.  Among the complaints this time: Oklahoma supposedly has gone too much to reduce the number of children in the very system CR itself says is a grave danger to those children.

            The report is written by Viola Miller, an odd choice given her mediocre record running child welfare systems in Kentucky and Tennessee.  Her report appears to be based in no small measure on reading other reports commissioned by CR.

            Miller agrees with what those other experts said about Oklahoma foster care.  She concludes that children are being harmed at an “alarmingly high rate” and until DHS cleans up its act, “the children in its care will continue to live in danger.”

            Then, in the very next paragraph, Miller launches into an attack on DHS for its success in getting more children out of this abysmal system.  Miller condemns DHS for using “differential response” an approach that now is used in many other states.  Every independent evaluation done of differential response shows it does not compromise safety; some have shown that child safety improves.

            And what evidence does Miller have that differential response is unsafe in Oklahoma?  The fact that it’s working.  Miller complains that the number of children in Oklahoma foster care is dropping too quickly.

            But that ignores one key fact: Oklahoma started out with, proportionately, vastly more children in foster care on any given day than the national average, and a vastly higher number of children taken away over the course of a year.  Even with the reductions in recent years – the very reductions Miller says have come too quickly – Oklahoma still tears apart families at a rate 40 percent above the national average and the number of children in foster care on any given day remains 50 percent above the national average.

            That means Oklahoma simply had vastly more cases that could suitably be diverted to differential response, and a sharp decline in the foster care population makes sense.

            Miller’s other “evidence” of a problem is that DHS offers voluntary safety plans to families who are assessed using differential response.  But that’s exactly what DHS is supposed to do.  That’s the whole point of differential response – in cases where the risk is believed to be low, you go out and offer voluntary help, not a coercive investigation.  What Miller appears to be arguing for is perverting differential response into child abuse investigations by another name.

ERRORS IN ALL DIRECTIONS

            There is, in fact, a case to be made for the possibility that DHS is not doing differential response as well as it should – but not based on the reasons Miller suggests.

People often point to horror stories about children dying in their own homes when they are “known to the system” as supposedly proving that the only error made by child welfare agencies is to leave the children in dangerous homes.  I usually reply by saying, among other things, that child welfare systems are arbitrary, capricious and cruel; they err in all directions.  Indeed, it makes no sense to think the errors go only way.

            But that also means a system that has screwed up foster care as royally as Oklahoma DHS has done is bound to be having problems getting alternatives right as well.  And, in fact, Miller found contradictions in various manuals for implementing differential response and responding to hotline calls.  That raises legitimate cause for concern.

            But nothing in Miller’s report suggests that the problems with differential response come anywhere near the scope and severity of the problems with foster care; nothing justifies any notion that there is equal danger.

            The credibility of Miller’s claims about differential response are further undermined because they are part of a pattern of CR seeking to undermine almost anything in almost any state that doesn’t involve subjecting every family to a full-scale child abuse investigation and traumatizing children with needless foster care.  CR also is going after differential response in Georgia, despite significant evidence that the Georgia program does not compromise safety.

            And back when Miller herself still was running the system in Tennessee, CR successfully bullied the Tennessee legislature into repealing a law that would have brought just a little bit of balance to the incentives judges face when making decisions about whether to remove children from their homes.

            A lot of this boils down to the whole bureaucratic mindset at CR.  Sure, foster care in Oklahoma is horrible for kids’ psyches and puts them in grave physical danger, but, they seem to believe, we’ll fix it – we’ll hire lots more workers and give them lots more bureaucratic forms and checklists and “training” and then everything will be fine.  And while we’re fixing foster care, we’ll just keep shoveling more kids into it and opposing efforts to divert kids to better options.

            Lowry likes to say that she doesn't know how to fix poverty, but she knows how to fix foster care. In fact, the results of her lawsuits suggest she doesn't know how to fix either one – and her efforts sometimes make the poverty worse.

            But even were it true, as Miller suggests, that the problems in Oklahoma foster care and Oklahoma’s efforts to avoid foster care are equivalent, that still raises a fundamental question: 

Miller writes that “children in Oklahoma are facing serious risk of harm both before and after they enter state custody.”

In that case, by tearing these children away from their families at a rate 40 percent above the national average, you accomplish exactly what?

UPDATED, APRIL 7: Foster care in Michigan: CPS plays “the muscle game”

To the surprise of absolutely no one familiar with how courts operate in these cases, in the case discussed in the previous post to this Blog, a judge in Detroit has rubber-stamped the institutionalization of Maryanne Godboldo’s daughter and her continued separation from her mother.

Lawyers for Godboldo are appealing. But for now, this means this 13-year-old girl, already in foster care five times longer than Leo Ratte, the upper-middle-class white child in the Mike’s Hard Lemonade case, will remain institutionalized indefinitely.

And what of the Detroit Free Press, which has lagged behind on the story? They finally produced something more than a news brief.  The Free Press, which rightly rushed to the defense of Leo Ratte and his college professor parents, showed no such sympathy for the child of a Black single mother.  On the contrary, not one person quoted in the story supported Ms. Godboldo’s position.

Instead, a CPS spokesman got four paragraphs to offer up the Disney version: We only take children when absolutely necessary, it’s a last resort, etc. etc.

The Free Press also quoted from the court order authorizing CPS to take away the children.  Among other things, the order says that “mother is in denial about her daughter’s mental health issue.”  (Yes, they still talk that way at CPS!)

As usual, The Detroit News had a more thorough story, including both sides.  Their story quotes a CPS supervisor as saying a total of four “referrals” had been made about the child.  It is quite possible, however, that three of them came from the same place – an institution where, Godboldo told WXYZ-TV, three separate employees had threatened to call CPS if she didn’t voluntarily admit her daughter.

But once again, it was Darrell Dawsey who first added real context to the story in his Blog for MLive Detroit, who advanced it once again today, with an interview with a doctor Godboldo turned to when psychiatric medication was making her child worse.  Here’s some of Dawsey’s column:

"She did what she was supposed to do," says Dr. Margaret Betts, a veteran Detroit MD who specializes in holistic treatments and who consulted with … Godboldo on alternative treatments for her child. "The treatment they recommended wasn't helping. Maryanne sought further medical attention. She acted like a good parent. It's a parent's right to choose." …

"The treatment she was using was helping her daughter much better than the treatment (Child Protective Services) had recommended," explains Dr. Betts, who's practiced medicine for 25 years, in an exclusive interview with MLive Detroit. .. 

“When the parent chose a different treatment,” says Dr. Betts, “CPS played a muscle game.”

So, just to review what either MLive Detroit, The Detroit News or WXYZ-TV have reported but which the Free Press omitted from today’s story:

● Maryanne Godboldo sought out medical treatment for her daughter in the first place.

●She agreed to give the child psychiatric medication.

●It was only after the medication worsened her daughter’s condition that she sought a second medical opinion from Dr. Betts.

●It was only after Dr. Betts said to do so that Ms. Godboldo started weaning her daughter off the psychiatric medication.

●Ms. Godboldo says the people who turned her in to CPS all work for an institution that demanded she admit her daughter.  It was when she refused that they called CPS.  Can you say “conflict of interest”?


And even if a case could be made to deny custody to the mother, what about the father?  According to the Detroit News story:


A lawyer for the girl's father, Mubuarak Hakim, also accused protective services of failing one of its mandates to keep families together by not trying to find the father or another relative with whom to place the girl. ...

The father's lawyer, Roger Farinha, said during the hearing that throughout her 13 days in state custody, the girl has still not been given the prescribed drug in question, and yet the authorities have said she has been stable in their care. "So maybe the mother was right," Farinha said.


In a classic example of the kind of hearsay that is standard operating procedure in these cases, the CPS supervisor claimed, however, that a counselor claimed the girl has become "agitated and aggressive" without her medications.  But apparently she wasn’t on the medications before she was taken away, since that’s why she was taken away in the first place.  And either way, if, in fact, the claim is true, it apparently occurred to neither the counselor nor the CPS supervisor that the girl may be "agitated and aggressive" because she is without her mother.

The choice here is between returning this child to the mother who loves her (or placing her with her father or another relative), vs. leaving her institutionalized and at the tender mercies of the Michigan child welfare system. The more you know about Michigan foster care, the easier it is to see why the best option is for Ms. Godboldo’s daughter to be freed from the institution immediately. 

Foster care in Michigan: Now everybody’s double standards are showing

SEE THE APRIL 2 UPDATE AT THE END OF THIS POST


Two child welfare cases from Detroit are back in the news this week.  The one that dates back nearly three years got more attention from the daily newspapers in Detroit than the one going on right now.  The children in the two cases also have been treated very differently.  In each case, it’s not hard to see why.

The case from 2008 now is widely known as the “Mike’s Hard Lemonade” case.  It involves a man named Christopher Ratte who tried to buy lemonade for his seven-year-old son, Leo, at a baseball game.  By mistake, he gave the boy an alcoholic beverage, Mike’s Hard Lemonade, instead.

The boy was thrown into foster care for two days – plenty long enough to do serious emotional harm – then released.  The suffering of thousands of other children is vastly worse.  Yet this is the case that made the front page of the Detroit Free Press it made CNN, it even was the subject of a Scott Simon commentary on NPR Weekend Edition Saturday.

It’s easy to explain the response of both the system and the media.  The child is white and the parents are upper-middle-class.  They’re college professors.

As I wrote at the time:

 [This case is an] extremely rare example of the long arm of child protective services extending into the upper middle class. … Don't get me wrong. I'm glad the story made it onto NPR. In fact, part of the reason this story got so much attention, starting with this excellent column in the Detroit Free Press, is that the family's lawyer asked NCCPR for advice on calling attention to it. But the other part is simply because this was one of those very rare times when the system harmed somebody journalists at NPR, and elsewhere, can identify with. Read about this case and it's going to send a chill up the spine of middle class professionals as they think: "This could happen to my child."

The case is back in the news now because the parents have filed a civil lawsuit. The Michigan branch of the American Civil Liberties Union is representing them.  That, in itself is remarkable, since often the ACLU is the perfect exemplar of  how so many of my fellow liberals abandon everything they purport to believe in about civil liberties when someone whispers the words “child abuse” in their ears.

And to the great credit of the Ratte family, they’re not just suing for damages – they’re seeking a change in Michigan law to make it less likely that any child of any race or class will have to endure this kind of ordeal in the future.

THE OTHER CASE

In contrast, not many middle class professionals in child welfare or media are likely to identify with Marianne Godboldo.

She had been homeschooling her child and exercising her right not to vaccinate her.

But this is not one of those cases about a parent getting into trouble with CPS for not vaccinating her child.  On the contrary, when her daughter, at age 13, said she wanted to enroll in public school, Ms. Godboldo got her all the required vaccinations, in an accelerated sequence.

But the child suffered serious side effects. 

Here’s what happened next, according to Darrell Dawsey, a columnist for MLive Detroit, a website run by the Newhouse Michigan Newspapers – and, for awhile, the only mainstream journalist in Detroit to take the story seriously:

the Detroit mother went to the Children's Center, a group that works with troubled children, to seek advice and a treatment plan for her 13-year-old daughter. The girl, who'd never had behavioral problems before, was suddenly irritable and not her usual self following a series of immunization shots.

As part of the center's treatment plan, a doctor prescribed the child an anti-psychotic medication. But the child's symptoms only worsened. As a result, Godboldo sought another physician, who quickly recommended taking the child off the psychotropic drug.

The mother agreed and, according to her attorney, who spoke exclusively with MLive Detroit earlier today, Godboldo began following that doctor's orders.

Unfortunately for Godboldo, the state didn't agree. Child Protective Services wanted Godboldo's child medicated according the center's plan, and CPS workers essentially told the 56-year-old mother - who was never under any court order to follow the plan - to agree to their program or surrender her child.

She refused both. And so, on Thursday, CPS workers showed up at Godboldo's house with the police, who said they had a warrant to take the child. But according to Godboldo's lawyer, Wanda A. Evans, officers never produced a warrant even after Godboldo repeatedly asked to see one.

Had the story ended there, with Ms. Godboldo reluctantly surrendering the child, no one would know about it.  After all, news is the unusual.  Wrongfully taking a child from white upper-middle-class college professors is unusual; taking a child unjustly from her low income Black single mother is a grand case of “So what else is new?”

But it didn’t end there.  According to Dawsey:

A standoff ensued. A gunshot was fired from inside the house - though, according to Evans, not at officers. Finally, after long hours of tense negotiations, Godboldo - a mother, a teacher, a dancer and a respected figure in the city's arts circles - surrendered, was jailed and, on Sunday, was arraigned on multiple felony charges.

Now that’s news.

IMPOSSIBLE BAIL

Ms. Godboldo’s daughter was placed in foster care with strangers – even though many relatives had come forward offering to take her in.

Bail was set at $500,000.  Only when the story started to get news coverage and friends in the community started to rally around, was it lowered to the point where she could get out of jail and try to see her daughter, though according to one news account, CPS wouldn’t allow the visit.

The ordeal endured by Leo Ratte in the Mike’s Hard Lemonade case was terrible, and the story deserved all the attention it got.  But there was, if anything, even less reason to take away Marianne Godboldo’s daughter.  Yet so far the Free Press, which put the Lemonade case on the front page, has devoted only a couple of news briefs to the Godboldo case.  The Detroit News wrote a story, but one that mostly parroted the police line.  They did a much better follow up story, after Dawsey’s column appeared.

And national media?  It’s early yet, but so far, nothing.  Perhaps that will change Saturday when a rally is scheduled on behalf of the family.  But somehow, I doubt I’ll be hearing anything about it from Scott Simon on NPR Weekend Edition.

Because Godboldo case didn’t happen to people like us, it happened to people like them.  They are people most of us know as story subjects only, (and often the stories are not flattering) not as friends, relatives or colleagues. 

Of course one could argue there’s another difference.  The Rattes never fired a gun, not even a warning shot to keep from having their door broken down, and they didn’t barricade themselves in their home.  And, in fact, there is no excuse for Ms. Godboldo doing that, if she did.  There needs to be some kind of penalty - but the price should be paid by her - not her daughter, who is being punished by being separated from her mother.

It’s also the case that the Rattes didn’t have to fire a gun.  They could get great lawyers to help them.  That and their upper-middle-class status got Leo out of foster care in days. That still was plenty of time to do real emotional damage.  But odds are the ordeal for Ms. Godboldo’s daughter is going to last a lot longer – and it would have lasted a lot longer even had there been no confrontation.


As for the high-handed behavior of Michigan child protective services in both cases, there's nothing unusual about that at all, as is documented in NCCPR's reports on Michigan child welfare.

If they win, the Rattes lawsuit will help change the system.  Paying as much attention to all the Maryanne Godboldos would help a lot more.

TWO FOOTNOTES:

● Some of Ms. Godboldo’s supporters have set up a website in support of her and her daughter, but the individuals and organizations involves are not identified.

● And this one almost goes without saying: There is one group that has been entirely consistent in its treatment of the two cases: The group that so arrogantly calls itself “Children’s Rights.”  Their name, and the fact that they have a consent decree in Michigan notwithstanding, they have shown absolutely no interest in the rights of either Leo Ratte or Maryanne Godboldo’s daughter.


UPDATE, APRIL 2: Guess who turned in Marianne Godboldo

            In an extended interview with WXYZ-TV, Marianne Godboldo added some details to the story of what happened to her daughter – including exactly  who it was who turned them in to CPS.

            According to the story:

            ● The child is not even in a foster home, she’s been institutionalized.

            ● The child has not even been allowed a visit with Ms. Godboldo or her father since her ordeal began.  Visits, but only under state supervision, are expected to start sometime next week.

           ● The problems actually began when her daughter was 11.  That’s when she received the accelerated series of immunizations.  Ms. Godboldo says shortly afterwards the child was diagnosed with encephalitis.  But Children’s Hospital in Detroit recommended the girl be tested at another institution.

            ● After ten days of tests, that institution claimed the child was psychotic, and urged Ms. Godboldo to put her daughter on psychiatric medication.  She reluctantly agreed.

            ● When the child’s symptoms worsened – including hallucinations – she returned to the institution and said she wanted to take her child off the meds.

            ● The institution then demanded that the child be admitted to that very institution – or they would call CPS.  Ms. Godboldo says the threats came from a nurse, a psychiatrist and the director of the institution.

            ● Ms. Godboldo refused, and said she wanted a second opinion.

            ● That’s when the institution allegedly carried out its threat. 

It’s not absolutely clear if the place where the child is institutionalized is the same one that allegedly threatened to call CPS if Ms. Godboldo did not admit her child there.  But this much we know: While the child suffers the loss of her parents, the institution that allegedly turned the mother, or some other institution, gets at least a couple of hundred dollars a day for the “care” of the child.

Meanwhile, the Detroit News has a good story on its website about today’s rally.  There is still nothing from the Free Press. [UPDATE: The Free Press posted a story late Saturday afternoon.]  Scott Simon's commentary on NPR Weekend Edition today was about the Bronx Zoo cobra.

And Marianne Godboldo’s daughter already spent more than twice as much time in foster care as Leo Ratte.

FOSTER CARE IN LOS ANGELES: THE TIMES WAS DEAD WRONG

New data show how the Los Angeles Times 

blew the story on child abuse fatalities

Add the new data released today to all the other revelations about the newspaper’s shoddy reporting and the Times case against child welfare reform in Los Angeles collapses like a house of cards.

UPDATE, APRIL 2: See also the very good story in the Los Angeles Daily News.

UPDATE MARCH 31: See also the very good analysis of the new data at WitnessLA.


Pursuant to a resolution of the Board of Supervisors, Los Angeles County has released data on deaths of children “known to the system” all the way back to 2000.

However, the figures before 2005 and after can’t be compared because of a radical change in which types of deaths were reported by the County Coroner.  (See Page 10 of Attachment A in the report released late today for details).

But that still gives us enough data to compare DCFS before and after the waiver from federal financing restrictions which the Los Angeles Times falsely suggested compromised child safety and led to more child abuse deaths.

The waiver began in 2008.  The decline in entries into care it should have produced was thwarted by the foster-care panic set off by the Times stories.  (Full details are in our report on the panic.)  The waiver probably did prevent the panic from being even worse.

The one thing that is abundantly clear from the data is that there is no correlation between the number of children taken away by DCFS over the course of a year, and the number of children “known to the system” who died.  The only pattern is no pattern.  And as NCCPR has noted before, there is no evidence of any kind that the waiver compromised safety.  The key data are at the end of this post, and the full report is available here.

This is not particularly surprising.  There are 2.75 million children in Los Angeles. In 2010 there were 55,443 children who have open cases with DCFS.  Add in the number who ever have been investigated by DCFS at any time in their childhoods, or whose siblings ever were subject to such an investigation, and, of course, the number gets vastly higher.  The only acceptable goal for child abuse deaths is zero.  But while each death of a child “known to the system” is the worst form of tragedy, they are needles in a huge haystack.

It makes no sense to believe you can find all the needles by attempting to vacuum up the entire haystack.  But that, in effect, is what the Times was suggesting.

The failure of this approach is borne out by this study from a Texas think tank which actually tends to be sympathetic to a take-the-child-and-run approach.  Nevertheless, they were forced to conclude that :

● The rate at which people report child abuse does not contribute to more child abuse deaths.

● The rate at which a state screens in reports for investigation does not contribute to more deaths.

● The rate at which a state takes children from their parents does not contribute to more deaths.

In short, none of the traditional investigative and "police" functions of child protective services contributes anything to raising or lowering the rate of child abuse fatalities.

So, what does reduce child abuse deaths? According to the report:

●Reducing poverty

●Reducing teen pregnancy

●More investment in prevention programs (which is, of course, exactly what DCFS was trying to do with the waiver).

Two other points stand out:

●Between 2000 and 2010, 37 percent of the deaths actually occurred while the children were in out-of-home care; in 2010 it still was 25 percent.  That does not mean that substitute caregivers were responsible for all of those deaths.  It’s possible that the children died of abuse inflicted before they were taken away, or during a visit with birth parents. And it also includes deaths not due to abuse or neglect at all. But this certainly deserves further investigation.

● Supervisors Mark Ridley-Thomas and Michael Antonovich deserve credit for forgoing past practice of the supervisors – which was to rush to come up with a suitably- outraged sound bite – and seek hard facts instead, by sponsoring the resolution requesting these data. 

The silver lining to the recent controversy over child welfare in Los Angeles has been the mature response by the Board.  That should make the job of running DCFS permanently a little more attractive to good candidates.

As Ridley-Thomas said in a press release:

It is particularly important to resist the temptation to exploit child deaths to push ideological agendas.  The CEO’s report shows we cannot honestly link child deaths to specific policies or the performance of particular government departments or individuals. …  It would be negligent to be satisfied with any total more than zero; but it is also reckless to suggest there are quick fixes.  We must shun policy gimmicks that produce sound bites for news conferences but yield no true solutions.

Add these latest findings to what we already known about how the Times distorted the evaluation of the waiver, and the well-documented  allegations that reporter Garrett Therolf quoted people as saying things they never actually said, and the entire Times case against reform in Los Angeles County collapses like a house of cards.

Of course, that’s not how the Times will write it.  Given how they handled findings challenging their system for evaluating teachers, no doubt the Times headline will be something like: “County data confirm Times findings on child abuse deaths.”

But I suspect most people in Los Angeles know better than to believe that anymore.

DEATHS OF CHILDREN KNOWN TO THE LOS ANGELES COUNTY DEPARTMENT OF CHILDREN AND FAMILIES AND ENTRIES INTO CARE 2006-2010

Calendar Year	2006	2007	2008	2009	2010
Deaths from all causes	242	220	205	192	200 / 175*
Homicides	69	58	46	41	30
Children removed from their homes	11,331	11,683	10,935	11,323	10,935**

*For 2010, the county was able to re-analyze data in ways not available in previous years.  As a result, they came up with two different figures, one before the re-analysis, one after.  Full details are in the county power point presentation, starting on Page 10.

**This figure includes an estimate for December 2010, since the figure was not available at the time the county fulfilled our Public Records Act request.

Sources:

Fatality Data: William T. Fujioka, Response to Reporting Aggregate Trend Data on Child Deaths Board Motion, County of Los Angeles, Chief Executive Office, March 31, 2011, available online at http://www.nccpr.org/reports/laceo.pdf

Entries: DCFS responses to California Public Records Act requests submitted by NCCPR.  Full details are in our report on the Los Angeles County foster care panic.

UPDATED, 7:15PM ET: Foster care in Texas: CR's latest McLawsuit won't help

SEE UPDATE AT THE END OF THIS POST


While it may have come as a surprise to some in the state, readers of this Blog have known for nearly a year that the next target for a McLawsuit from the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children’s Rights would be Texas. 

The Texas child welfare system is every bit as bad as CR says it is in its Complaint.   Indeed, we cited many of the same problems in our own report on Texas child welfare in 2005.  And, as always, CR has good intentions. But, of course, the lawsuit won’t solve the problems, and might even make the Texas system worse.  

That’s because, as always, CR ignores the elephant in the room: the urgent need to reduce the number of children taken from their parents needlessly in the first place.  CR actually has thwarted efforts to reduce wrongful removal in other states, including Georgia Tennessee, and, most recently, Oklahoma.

And its recent settlements actually are worse than those it negotiated in previous years.  Most notorious is Michigan, where the settlement has made the child welfare system worse.  Among other things, the settlement has led to the expulsion of nearly 1,800 children from the homes of grandparents and other relatives.   It’s also led to a foster care worker / child abuse investigator hiring binge – funded by cutting prevention and family preservation.

Texas tried that back in 2005.  The result: The same lousy system, only bigger.  More hiring only works when it’s part of a comprehensive reform plan that emphasizes safe, proven programs to keep families together. 

As always with a CR suit, there is a deafening silence on the issue of keeping children safely out of foster care in the first place.

That is all the more astounding in light of what happened to some of the named plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

In the case of A.M., for example, (Complaint, p. 15) all the horrors she endured in foster care began when she was taken from her mother, not because the mother abused or neglected her, but because the witnessed domestic violence – a fight among her mother and the mother’s current and former boyfriends.

But while witnessing domestic violence can be harmful to children, tearing them away from their mothers is far, far worse.  That was documented in detail in a class-action lawsuit that banned the practice of taking away children in these cases in New York City.  The section of the judge’s decision summarizing the research, with a link to the full decision, is on our website here. (Of course this lawsuit was not brought by CR.  My organization’s volunteer vice president was co-counsel for the plaintiffs.)

One expert called taking away a child under these circumstances “tantamount to pouring salt into an open wound.”  In Texas, it seems, as in much of the country, the policy in these cases boils down to “please pass the salt” – and this lawsuit does absolutely nothing about it.

Read the Complaint to see all of the horrors that befell A.M. after she was needlessly removed – including, by the way, repeatedly witnessing domestic violence in one of her foster homes.  Only unlike in the home or her own mother, in the foster home, A.M. was abused as well.

CR proposes to do nothing about this – even as the Houston Chronicle is reporting on how a judge blasted Texas CPS for an egregious case of wrongful removal and misleading the court, and the Dallas Morning News has a huge story (behind its paywall) about the harm done to families by the state’s central registry of alleged child abusers.

Fighting the lawsuit also is the wrong answer.  While someone quoted in the Dallas Morning News story about the lawsuit was wrong in claiming CR has never lost, (and the News reporter never checked) they rarely lose.  But they don’t really win either.  They settle.  And the hyperbureaucratic, hypertechnical settlements often drag on for years, sometimes decades with little improvement and, as noted above, sometimes the settlements make things worse.

The other problem with the people at CR is their love of bureaucracy.  More forms!  More paperwork!  More training manuals! Move more boxes around on tables of organization!  A columnist in Connecticut reported that CR’s settlement there (which hasn’t fixed that system in 20 years) included creation of training manuals including one specifying that classrooms where training takes place have wastebaskets.   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 the only hope for Texas children is if the state is smart enough to hold out for a better settlement than usually is negotiated with CR – one that emphasizes safe, proven alternatives to taking away children.

Such settlements turned Illinois and Alabama into, relatively speaking, national models for keeping children safe.  (Another volunteer NCCPR Board member was co-counsel for plaintiffs in the Alabama suit).  There are many posts about CR and its failures on NCCPR’s Child Welfare Blog.  They’re grouped here  And there’s an overview of CR’s failed approach on our second report on Michigan child welfare.  See the section called “The children wronged by Children’s Rights” starting on page 30.


UPDATE 7:09PM:

A few other notes from the lawsuit Complaint:

● Buried at the very end is something that should scare every grandparent in Texas who is serving as a kinship foster parent: CR wants the court to force all such grandparents, and other relatives, to become licensed.  That, of course, is exactly what caused the disaster in Michigan.

● In spite of the facts concerning one of their own named plaintiffs, A.M., CR refuses to acknowledge that any foster child anywhere in Texas was wrongfully removed.  The Complaint falsely claims that all Texas foster children were abused or neglected.  According to the Complaint, the children “have been doubly traumatized: first by the abuse and neglect that brought them into foster care, and second by their treatment at the hands of their state custodians.”  Abuse in foster care is referred to as “further maltreatment” and “further trauma.”

That is a betrayal of A.M. and all the other Texas children who were abused and neglected only by “their state custodians.”

● CR also makes clear its priorities for what should happen to children after they are removed.  The word “reunification” appears seven times in the Complaint.  The word “adoption” appears 47 times, and gets its own subsection.

Foster care in New York: Two views from the frontlines

On Friday, the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School in New York City, which publishes Child Welfare Watch, sent out excerpts from an interview with a caseworker for New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services.

It was pretty much what you’d expect, and pretty much like dozens of other such stories that have appeared all over the country.  The caseworker talked about the enormous stress of the job and the constant fear of having something go terribly wrong with one of the cases on her caseload.

It begins this way:

I always wanted to work here and now that I'm here I'm like, "You've gotta be kidding." When the school year picks up, we just get case after case, and once a case is generated the clock is ticking. It's like a ticking time bomb. It's a juggling act. It's like that guy in the circus spinning those plates, and that's how I feel, I'm spinning those plates, and I can't drop one because that means a kid could be dead or a kid could be hurt.

As I read it, I was reminded of another perspective from an ACS worker.  The worker herself wrote it, more than ten years ago, for City Limits magazine.  This was not the typical “life of a caseworker” story.  Rather, it was what really went on at the time.  Some excerpts:

To the manager … who makes the fateful decision to remove a child and the judge who approves it, a child exists only on a piece of paper, alongside a list of disturbing circumstances.  They don’t see a child having a panic attack at 3 a.m. because he is suddenly alone in the world.  Or slamming his head against the wall out of protest or desperation.  The good intentions that go into the decision to remove a child often have little to do with the sometimes brutal outcomes of that choice. … Unlike fatalities, the trauma a child endures from being wrongly removed, followed by years of difficulty growing up in foster care, are not measurable.

A manager or supervisor has no one to answer to if a child who shouldn’t be in foster care is removed from home anyway.  There is no penalty for the wrongful taking of a child.

At moments of uncertainty, the mantra was ‘Cover your ass’ – a phrase heard often around the office. … The obsessive concern with liability at the field offices quickly overshadows the reasonable criteria [workers] have been taught for identifying abuse and neglect. Most quickly learn to abandon their training and to do what it takes to survive.

One week after the investigation begins, caseworkers have to file an electronic report.  The computer offers two options: ‘safe’ and ‘unsafe.’  But my manager accepted only one.  Any time I determined a child to be ‘safe’ my manager rejected it and returned it to me.  The first step to protect yourself, I quickly discovered, is to determine that a child is ‘unsafe’ from the outset of an investigation.

Any caseworker can tell you that they have done removals that they did not personally agree with. But they rarely complain to management, since they will never get in trouble for removing a child under supervisors' orders. Caseworkers are also quiet about unnecessary removals because doing a removal and then transferring a case to foster care takes them a lot less time than keeping it and trying to work with a family. Keeping a case obligates a worker to do regular home visits and follow-ups to make sure a family is getting preventive services. It also means dealing with anything that may go wrong and continuing to be responsible for the children's safety.

By the time I resigned, I felt strongly that the system was working against children instead of for them. [Emphasis added.]

The full story is still available on the City Limits website.

Back when it was written, New York City was taking away even more children than it takes now.  Gradually, the culture changed.  Removals steadily declined.  Workers no longer had to be constantly on the defensive about choosing the best option for the overwhelming majority of children the overwhelming majority of the time: leaving them in their own homes.

But then came Nixzmary Brown and a new surge in removals.  Today, the rate of removal in New York City still is lower than it was in 2000, when this caseworker told her story.  But now a grandstanding D.A. has responded to the death of a child “known to the system” by bringing charges of criminally negligent homicide against a caseworker and his supervisor. How much longer will it be until the CYA, take-the-child-and-run mentality this worker described once again is the norm at the Administration for Children’s Services.