JERSEY GALL: How the latest example of one group’s crusade against families, and refusal to admit error, jeopardizes child welfare reform in New Jersey

The group is behind the usual response to a child welfare tragedy: lousy legislation.  But how did they forget to call it “Christiana’s Law?”

Just one day after Judith Meltzer, the independent monitor of New Jersey’s child welfare consent decree said the four reports on Christiana Glenn were correctly labeled unfounded, it seems the State Legislature is barreling ahead with a bad law based on the premise that those findings were wrong.

The bill would add a third category, “not substantiated” to the current options workers have when investigating a case, “substantiated” and “unfounded.”  And it responds to the strong evidence that reform has made New Jersey’s children safer by changing the measurement of safety to conform to the biases of one of reform’s leading opponents.

Both bad ideas come from the state’s best-known advocacy group on children’s issues, Advocates for Children of New Jersey.  It’s a group whose longtime leader has been strongly opposed to any reform that does more to keep families together, and a group whose track record for bad judgment and, in some cases, outright factual error may be the worst of any similar group in the country - something I will discuss in detail on this Blog tomorrow.

As for the bill now racing through the Legislature, the whole mess is so typical of how lawmakers grandstand after tragedies that only one thing surprises me: How could they have forgotten to name this travesty “Christiana’s Law?”

THE FIRST PART OF THE BILL IS BAD

According to The Star Ledger:

The new category proposed by the bill, "not substantiated," means the investigation did not turn up the high level of evidence required for the state to take action, but it leaves the door open on the case if investigators get further information.

           

There are several problems with this:

● Substantiating a case does not require a “high level of evidence” – it requires virtually no evidence.    In New Jersey, as in most states, a case can be substantiated if a caseworker, entirely on her own authority, believes there is slightly more evidence than not that maltreatment occurred.  There is no independent review of any kind before this determination is made.

So it is no wonder that, in the only study I know of anywhere in the country that tried to second guess these decisions, workers were found to be two to six times more likely to wrongly label a case “substantiated” than to wrongly label a case “unfounded.”

● Labeling a case unfounded does not shut the door if workers get further information, as sponsors of the New Jersey bill seem to believe.  In the case of Christiana, when a new report came in nine days before her death, the hotline worker either never checked or failed to follow correct procedures to find out that any prior reports existed at all.  The fact that those reports were labeled unfounded would not in any way have stopped further investigation.  Their mere existence, combined with the nature of the more recent report, easily would have been enough to trigger another investigation, while not prompting the caseworker to automatically assume guilt.

● As noted above, and discussed in more detail in the previous post to this blog, the independent monitor’s own assessment indicates that, even had a third category existed when the reports on Christiana were investigated, that would have been the wrong category to use in those cases.  Those reports really should have been labeled unfounded. 

So while the Star Ledger story quotes legislators piously proclaiming this third category would have stopped a case like Christiana’s from falling through the cracks, it would have done nothing of the kind.

But this new category has significant potential to do harm.

● It reinforces the notion that anyone accused of child abuse is guilty until proven innocent. Indeed, the sponsor of the bill practically said as much, arguing that, as the Star Ledger put it: “the term [‘unfounded’] should be reserved for reports with no merit whatsoever.”

But that harms families for precisely the reason many in child welfare like it: It keeps those families highly suspect in case something else comes up, even when the something else is nothing more than harassment by someone with a grudge.

Defenders of assuming everyone accused is guilty like to claim that “where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” But in child welfare, where there’s smoke there’s often nothing but smoke.  This third category simply encourages neighbors with a grudge or vindictive ex spouses to keep phoning in reports.  If enough people “blow smoke” in the form of such reports, in which the accused can’t prove herself or himself innocent, eventually caseworkers are likely to simply take the children, bringing on all the well-known harms of needless foster care.  (To see, literally, what a fanatical presumption of guilt ultimately can do to a child, check out this previous post to the Blog.  And for a classic example of authorities carried away by their own “smoke” see the series running this week in the Detroit Free Press.)

● In addition, as the Star Ledger story points out, the in-between category was abolished in the first place because it was becoming a catch-all for workers who couldn’t make up their minds.  More likely those workers were too afraid of what would happen to them if they declared a case unfounded, even when it was unfounded, and then, later something they could never have foreseen happened to the child. (I can’t imagine why they’d be afraid of anything like that).

So it’s no wonder that a majority of states use only two categories.

THE SECOND PART IS WORSE

The second provision is nothing more than a dangerous tribute to ACNJ’s desperate effort to vindicate years of poor judgment, including opposing the lawsuit that led to the New Jersey reforms.  That’s something I’ll discuss in detail tomorrow.

As noted above, the independent monitor says the reforms have improved child safety.  Even the group that brought the lawsuit, the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children’s Rights - a group that certainly is no friend of family preservation - does not dispute this.  According to their associate director:  “In spite of the shocking news about Christiana Glenn, it is evident that New Jersey’s foster care system has transformed from the system it was just a few years ago.” 

The monitor’s finding is based on a more rigorous version of the standard measure used by the federal government in every state to determine child safety.  Now that this measure shows safety has improved under reform plans ACNJ didn’t like, thanks to a lawsuit ACNJ opposed, what is ACNJ’s response? Change the measure!

The federal government measures progress on child safety by requiring states to report the proportion of children who are substantiated victims of maltreatment who are reabused within six months.

The New Jersey measure goes further – it zeroes in on cases in which the children are left in their own homes, and it watches for reabuse for 12 months instead of six.

But at ACNJ’s urging, the new bill demands what should best be called the Doctrine of Psychic Powers.  The ACNJ proposal says: Measure the proportion of unfounded cases in which, at some future point, a child really is abused.

The problem with this approach is aptly illustrated by the Christiana Glenn case itself.  In that case four reports were declared unfounded and, later, she was, of course, horribly abused. 

But if news accounts are correct that’s because, in the intervening years, a man entered the family’s life who persuaded Christiana’s mother that starving the girl and denying her medical care were bizarre religious rituals.

Exactly how were the caseworkers who investigated this case in 2006 and 2008 supposed to know that was going to happen?  Similarly, if a child is safe during prosperous times, but then Dad is laid off in a recession and, in a fit of anger, throws his toddler against a wall, is that something child welfare workers should have predicted years later?  

WORST OF ALL: THE OVERALL MESSAGE

            worse than any specific provision is the overall message the legislature is sending: Presume every family guilty – and if every family is guilty we all know what workers are supposed to do with every child they encounter: Take the child and run.

            For starters, that’s going to undermine what is needed most to protect the next Christiana, building trust in the impoverished communities where child welfare agencies spend most of their time.

            Citing monitor Judith Meltzer, The Record put it well in a wise editorial today:

"Something happened in this family between 2008 and 2011 when Christiana died," Meltzer said. The child welfare agency must "reach out to community and neighborhood leaders to understand why neighbors, relatives and citizens are frequently reluctant to alert the child protection system when they have concerns."

We agree. A neighborhood knows a child best, and sees how that child is treated away from the eyes of a caseworker. The state must work hard to gain the trust of the communities in which troubled families live, so that if one call to a child-abuse hotline falls through, someone else follows up. Residents must make enough noise to get attention.

            Instead of encouraging residents to make noise, the ACNJ bill, with its demand that everyone in those communities who is the subject of such noise should be presumed guilty, is likely to terrify them into silence.

            And, of course, the bill is one more goad to another foster-care panic in New Jersey.  If that happens, ACNJ will probably respond exactly as they did to the foster care panic following Faheem Williams death in 2003 – when they misread the data and put out a report wrongly claiming there was no evidence of such a panic.

It’s all part of a reign of error that dates back more than a decade, error that impedes reform in New Jersey to this day.  That story tomorrow.

UPDATED, 5:25PM: Foster care in New Jersey: Child safety continues to improve

Monitor’s statement is rebuke to those seeking a return to the days of “take the child and run”


Judge overseeing class-action suit also praises agency

            The latest state to see the take-the-child-and-run crowd try to roll back a successful reform is New Jersey. As usual, they’re trying to exploit a tragic death.

But this time a reform effort that has significantly reduced entries into care and improved child safety has two strong defenders – the independent monitor overseeing a class-action lawsuit settlement, and the judge who has the final word on that settlement.

            In unusually-strong language for this kind of document, monitor Juith Meltzer of the Center for the Study of Social Policy issued a special statement along with the regular monitoring report released today.  In that statement she strongly defended both the reforms in general and the handling of the recent tragedy.

            That tragedy is the death of Christiana Glenn, who was allegedly starved and denied medical care by her mother.  According to news accounts, this allegedly occurred after the mother came under the sway of a boyfriend involved in what he persuaded her were religious rituals.

As is always the case with statements from child welfare court monitors, the language is measured, even genteel.  That’s because a monitor’s role also is to serve as a de facto mediator between the state and whoever is suing the state.  So by the standards of such documents, this statement amounts to a stinging rebuke to those who have tried to exploit the Glenn case to roll back reform and return to the take-the-child-and-run approach that dominated the system before reform.

            In general, “New Jersey’s child welfare system is …doing a better job protecting and supporting New Jersey’s children and families,” than before the reforms, Meltzer said.

            She went on to address specifically, the case of Christiana Glenn. 

            New Jersey’s Department of Children and Families and its Division of Youth and Family Services (DYFS), investigated four previous reports about the family and determined that all of them were unfounded.  That prompted those who have opposed reform from the start to “raise questions” about whether too many cases are labeled unfounded and more children should be torn from their homes.

EARLIER REPORTS REALLY WERE UNFOUNDED

            But Meltzer concluded that the reason these four reports were declared unfounded is because they were, in fact, unfounded.  The reports were received between 2006 and 2008, well before the boyfriend entered the picture.  At the time, Meltzer wrote, “none of the activities and behaviors that were associated with the children’s abuse and Christiana’s death were observable by the DYFS worker” nor were they reported to that worker by the family’s only neighbor, a day care worker or the children’s pediatrician.

            Workers for agencies like DYFS are expected to be many things.  But they are not expected to be psychic.  Sometimes children “known to the system” die and it’s not the child welfare agency’s fault.

            That means even looking only at this case, there is nothing to indicate the reforms have compromised safety or that New Jersey needs to return to taking away more children.

            Using a more reliable measure than the latest horror story, the overall rate of reabuse of children left in their own homes after a substantiated report of maltreatment, the monitor found that the reabuse rate remains well below the level required to meet the terms of the consent decree, and, of course, well below where it was when New Jersey was taking away far more children.

            Indeed, to the extent that there was any failing it was that DYFS was not able to persuade the mother to accept enough voluntary help. 

            This echoes a theme in previous monitoring reports on New Jersey: that the biggest failings involve prevention and family preservation, not investigations or failure to be aggressive about removing children.

            The monitor’s comments do not address the issue of a newly-discovered fifth report received days before Christiana’s death, a call which a hotline operator did not refer for investigation.  Based on news accounts, it appears that the person calling was anonymous, he had an address but no name for the family and his concerns were vague.

If that is the case, had this been the only report on this family, it would have been the right decision.  The apparent failure on the part of the hotline operator was a failure to link the address given by the anonymous reporter to the address of Christiana.  So the operator apparently was unaware of the family’s history.

            Unfortunately, in any system that responds to tens of thousands of calls every year, operators sometimes will screw up, and sometimes that will have tragic results. That may well be what happened here.  It does not follow, however, that the hotline regularly is failing.


The state's handling of the investigation into the Glenn case won praise from the judge in charge of the consent decree.


According to the Newark Star-Ledger:


"This is not an agency that went into a bunker mentality," Judge [Stanley R.] Chesler said, in praising DCF for working closely with Meltzer, the federal monitor, as she has sought in recent weeks to review DYFS's investigation of the Glenn family in 2006 and 2008. In expressing further approval of the agency's handling of its investigation into Christiana Glenn's brutal death, he said DCF had "presented this situation indeed transparently."

            The monitor’s report also is notable in other respects.  While New Jersey still has a very long way to go, few systems under consent decrees have come so far so fast.  To cite just one example: New Jersey went an entire year without placing even one child under age 13 in a parking place “shelter” -  one of the worst forms of placement.  That is a record almost any state would envy, whether under a consent decree or not. 

And that helps explain why Judge Chesler said that, compared to when he first started overseeing the New Jersey child welfare system, that system has improved "drastically."

            What makes this all so important is the urgent need to avoid a repeat of the foster-care panic - the huge spike in needless removals of children - in the immediate aftermath of a horrendous case that made headlines in January, 2003, the death of Faheem Williams. 

            That case led to a foster care panic in a state that already had been wedded to a take-the-child-and-run approach for several years.  It also forced the state to settle the lawsuit.  And even though the suit was brought by the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children’s Rights, the settlement came during a time when CR was willing to listen to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a former funder of NCCPR, and so was more progressive than most.

            The result: A reversal of the take the child and run approach, a significant reduction in entries into foster care and safer children.

            That’s what’s under attack right now – and fortunately, that’s what the independent monitor has come forward to defend.

Foster care in Los Angeles: Using another tragedy to push a take-the-child-and-run agenda

Presumably, Los Angeles Times reporter Garrett Therolf flunked his tryout as a foreign correspondent* because he’s back doing what he does best – using tragedy to smear efforts to keep families together.

Therolf built his latest story around a letter he obtained from the founder of what in California is known as a Foster Family Agency (FFA). These are private agencies that recruit and train foster parents and oversee foster homes. FFAs are paid for every day they hold children in foster care.

The founder of this FFA, Linda Kontis, sent the letter to Michael Nash, the presiding judge of the Los Angeles Juvenile Court, deploring the reunification of Vyctorya Sandoval with her parents and warning that the reunification was unsafe. The letter was courteous, respectful and, apparently heartfelt.  And Kontis was absolutely right.  A few months later, the child was dead.  The parents are under investigation.

This was, in fact, one of those cases with more “red flags” than a Soviet May Day parade. 

But instead of just seeking a review of the case before it was too late, Kontis also sought to scapegoat all efforts to keep families together.  That, of course, is red meat for Therolf, whose willingness to distort facts to push that same agenda has been documented repeatedly on this Blog and elsewhere.

So that became the theme of Therolf’s story as well.  Once again it was up to Celeste Fremon at WitnessLA to set the record straight.  Writes Fremon:

The implication in the letter and in Therolf’s story is that the Department of Children and Family Services now has such a blindly strong prejudice toward keeping families together that it is endangering children’s lives—in some cases with deadly results.

However the details in the letter, if accurate, paint a picture more of reckless incompetence.  [Emphasis added.]

Exactly.  And in these egregious cases, the real roots of tragedy almost always can be found either in such incompetence or in caseworkers too overloaded with false allegations and trivial cases to investigate any case properly.  Those also almost always are the reasons behind the many cases in which children are needlessly torn from everyone they know and love. But Garrett Therolf refuses to report on those cases.

L.A. IS REUNIFYING FEWER FAMILIES

Further support for Fremon’s take can be found in the data. 

I have emphasized data on entries into care – that is, the number of children taken from their parents over the course of a year – and how those entries increased because of Therolf’s shoddy reporting.  But data also are available on exits from care, that is, the number of children released from foster care over the course of a year.

Rather than a mad rush to reunify, the number of children reunified with their parents actually declined from the year ending October 2008 through the year ending October, 2010, the most recent year for which data are available.  Reunifications that year were at their lowest point since the end of 2006.  (Too see the data Therolf either didn’t include in his story, click here and follow the instructions for creating a table.)

Meanwhile, entries into care increased during the first full year after the Los Angeles County foster-care panic.  And on October 31, 2010, the most recent date for which data are available, the number of children in foster care in Los Angeles County actually increased over three months earlier – the first time that’s happened in Los Angeles in more than a decade.

In short, all the trends are going Garrett Therolf’s way, and yet, somehow, Vyctorya Sandoval still died.  While I think incompetence is the most likely explanation, it’s possible that it was system overload, in which case Vyctoria Sandoval died in part because all the trends are going the way Garrett Therolf wants them to go.

And, of course, Therolf gives readers no inkling of the fact that people who run FFAs have a vested interest in scapegoating efforts to keep families together.

Sadly, that very vested interest might even be why Kontis’ letter didn’t get the attention it deserved.  Since FFAs have a vested interest in opposing reunification in every case, Judge Nash may have thought Kontis was crying wolf.  In fact, her concerns were entirely justified.

DISTORTING THE OPEN COURTS ISSUE

Therolf even managed to distort the issue of opening court hearings in these cases.  He wrote that legislation to open the hearings in California was put on hold “partly because of opposition from the union representing many county social workers.”

That’s true, and it’s deplorable – but it’s also grossly incomplete.  The union opposed such legislation in past years and this year as well. But so has “management” in the form of the California Welfare Directors Association.  And this year, it looked like the bill had a good shot at passage anyway - until the California Youth Connection, a group of current and former foster children, opposed it, something discussed in detail in these posts to this Blog.

Yet Therolf doesn’t mention CYC or any group opposing the bill except the union.  Apparently the union has joined family preservation and family reunification on Therolf’s Most Favored Scapegoats list.

*Actually, I have no idea if Therolf flunked a tryout.  It may be that his assignment in Egypt was meant to be strictly temporary all along.  I simply decided to apply Los Angeles Times journalistic standards and “presume” that he failed.  Just as Times Assistant Managing Editor David Lauter declared that “presumably” anyone who doesn’t like their child welfare coverage doesn’t want news organizations to cover “mismanagement or poor execution of policies” and just as Lauter declared that a group criticizing the newspaper’s failed attempt to rate teachers wants information about teacher performance kept secret.

Since I am applying the Times’ own standards here, presumably Garrett Therolf won’t mind a bit.

Foster care in Michigan: How Marcia Lowry helps to make poor people poorer

Two stories starkly illustrate why Marcia Lowry and the group she runs, the group that so arrogantly calls itself “Children’s Rights” (CR) may be one of the most harmful forces in American child welfare, and a threat to poor people across the country.

 The first story, from the Detroit News, is one of many about a foster care worker / child abuse caseworker hiring binge in Michigan as a result of the dreadful consent decree the state entered into with CR.  The hiring binge and other settlement requirements are going to cost the state $70 million this year.  (Of the many stories, this is the only one to raise any questions about priorities.)

And how does a state that was among the hardest hit by the recession propose to pay for all this?  In part by throwing 12,600 people off the welfare rolls. If the plan becomes law, the expulsions will be immediate, there will be no time for those kicked off to even try to find some other way to support their families.  This comes on top of years of cuts in prevention and family preservation programs in order to finance the settlement and a rate increase for “residential treatment” centers.  Details are in our reports on Michigan child welfare.

Jackie Doig of the Center for Civil Justice in Saginaw asked will happen when the parents thrown off welfare can’t afford to feed or house their children: “Are they just going to remove the children and put them into foster care?”

Yep.

And 700 newly-minted caseworkers will be ready to come and get them.

Because while Marcia loves to negotiate settlements that call for spending more on child abuse investigations and foster care, the settlements never specify that states can’t get the money by cutting prevention family preservation and other help for impoverished families. So of course, governments go after those least able to fight back.  After all these years, surely Marcia could have figured that out.

Still, you’ve got to give Marcia credit for salesmanship.  While the left will blast the welfare cuts, lots of liberals love Marcia and her group, taking no notice of her role in those cuts.

But Marcia does not love liberals back. Marcia’s group used to be a project of the American Civil Liberties Union.  But Marcia told the Chronicle of Philanthropy that she left the ACLU in part because too much of what that group did was tied to a “liberal agenda.”  (Of course, leaving the ACLU also may have made her more appealing to Carl Icahn, the corporate raider who once chaired her Board of Directors).

So Marcia keeps on suckering liberal donors, and then using their money to win settlements that harm poor people.

CR’S ARROGANCE ON DISPLAY IN TEXAS

As for why I keep referring to her group as arrogant, for one reason, just check out what was revealed at the first court hearing in connection with their suit in Texas.

Children cannot bring civil lawsuits on their own; it has to be done by someone known in legal jargon as a “next friend” – meaning someone deemed knowledgeable enough and caring enough to act in the child’s best interests.

In the Texas suit two of the next friends don’t even know the children they “represent.”  The rest were the children’s guardians ad litem in their individual cases.  But while in most cases CR’s Complaint specifies that the “next friends” have visited their clients, in three cases the Complaint makes no such claim – which raises an obvious question.

At the first hearing on the suit it was revealed that at least two of the “next friends” have not even bothered to tell the children they “represent” that they have brought suit on their behalf – even though these children are old enough to understand and to have a say in whether they want to be a part of the lawsuit.

And this isn’t the first time issues like this have arisen in connection with a CR suit.

This is one more indication of the dehumanizing, bureaucratic mentality that characterizes CR.  It’s hard to imagine an organization that saw children as flesh-and-blood human beings treating them this way. But it’s easy to see how that can come from a group that sees children only as numbers and case files.

That helps explain why it’s so easy for CR to accept funding its settlements by taking the money out of poor people’s pockets. 

Foster care in America: Then and now

My daughter found this on YouTube.  It's from the 1927 Clara Bow film "It"

If anyone wants to see the rest of the film, it's available here thanks to a YouTube user who goes by the name "Silver Light Special"

Foster care in New York: John Mattingly’s broken promise, and the children hurt by it

The New York Daily News ran an excellent story Monday about schools using “educational neglect” charges to harass families, or simply to protect themselves, not the children.   The story documents case after case of children needlessly harmed by trumped-up charges. One school practically admits that the people reporting these families know that a lot of the reports aren’t really necessary:

"If we don't make a call when a student has been absent an excessive amount and something happens to the student when they should have been at school, then it will come back to us," said Achievement First [school] spokesman Mel Ochoa.

Then comes the usual boilerplate from the city child welfare agency, the Administration for Children’s Services:

 “ACS is appropriately required to investigate concerns of educational neglect when a parent is not making sure that a child is going to school, particularly when the concerns involve younger children."  

The best that can be said about this is that the flak who said it, Elysia Carnevale Murphy, is too new to the job to know better.  At least I hope that’s the explanation. Because she is flat wrong.

 ACS has to do something. While half the states are wise enough not to include “educational neglect” in the mandate of their child welfare agencies at all, New York State is not one of them. 

But New York City and the county agencies that handle child abuse allegations in the rest of the state no longer have to launch full-scale investigations.  They have the option of using an approach called “differential response.”

As I’ve noted in previous posts to this blog, more than a year ago ACS Commissioner John Mattingly promised to try “differential response” in some “educational neglect” cases  – as recommended in a report from the Vera Institute of Justice.  Then, Mattingly reneged. 

The Daily News story gives some idea of the suffering Mattingly’s broken promise has caused for New York City children.

ON MONDAY: How much has child welfare really changed in 84 years?

Lighting a candle for institutionalized children

            For the second year in a row, Lumos, the British charity that works to get children out of orphanages in Eastern Europe is commemorating International Children’s Day with an ingenious campaign to raise funds and illustrate their plight – a campaign I wish would gain traction here.  Details are in our post from a year ago.


TOMORROW: The head of the New York City child welfare agency breaks a promise.  Meet some of the children hurt as a result.