A setback for California’s vulnerable children

 A top official of a group that has been California’s leading foster-care apologist is about to oversee child welfare in the state

File this under: What were they thinking????

In California, it would be hard to find a group that has done more to impede real reform of child welfare than the so-called Alliance for Children’s Rights.  They are classic practitioners of what has been aptly called “health terrorism.” 

As I explained in this post last year, about an Alliance PowerPoint presentation: 

Were there a hotline to which one could report statistics abuse, the authors of the PowerPoint presentation would have their rights to their pocket calculators terminated.  The PowerPoint packs into one presentation almost every common misuse of data to leave the false impression that children are not needlessly torn from their parents, there’s no such thing as confusing poverty with neglect and, in any event, child abuse is rampant. 

In the process, the presentation dredges up ugly stereotypes about poor people and demeans the lived experience of thousands of foster children.  The presentation also repeatedly uses the term “bio parent” for children’s parents – a pejorative term that suggests someone no more important to a child than a test tube. 

You can read all the details in that earlier blog post. 

Speakers at the event where this presentation was given included the Alliance’s Vice President of Policy and Advocacy, Angie Schwartz. 

Then there was the column, co-authored by Schwartz, in which, as we noted at the time, the authors sought to “stand reality on its head, leaving both a written and visual impression of vast sums of money for prevention dwarfing a tiny amount for foster care.” 

And when it comes to permanently tearing apart families in Los Angeles – overwhelmingly families of color - by terminating children’s rights to their parents (a more accurate term than termination of parental rights) – the Alliance leads the way, and celebrates it. Yes, the Alliance leads L.A.’s celebration of what should be called National Child Welfare Hypocrisy Day. 

So, guess who the Director of the California Department of Social Services just chose to run the Department’s  Children and Family Services Division: Yep: Angie Schwartz. 

How much damage? 

In California, counties run child welfare with state oversight, so it’s not clear how much damage this appointment will do.  But there are all sorts of ways a state agency can exert pressure on local governments. 

So, under Schwartz’s leadership: 

● Will California’s painfully slow 22-year statewide reduction in the number of children torn from their families come to an end? 

● Will the division issue “scathing audits” of counties that make big moves to safely curb needless foster care, and praise counties, such as Yolo, which embrace a take-the-child-and-run approach? (Even as Yolo County itself seems to be having second thoughts.) 

● Will the division claim that there is no such thing as confusing poverty with neglect, no such thing as a child needlessly taken from her or his parents, and no way to reduce entries into care? 

● Will the division take substantive steps to curb racism in child welfare, or just offer the usual “racism is a really bad thing” platitudes? 

● Will the division pressure counties to rush even faster to terminate children’s rights to their parents? 

● Will the division seek to pressure Congress to more than double federal funding for foster care by eliminating the only real brake on such funding? (That’s something else Schwartz is on record as favoring.) 

Of course, a key tenet of the family preservation movement is that people can change, and no one doubts Schwartz’s good intentions.  The same is true of organizations.  The Alliance has joined other groups, including NCCPR, in a campaign led by Black Lives Matter Los Angeles to end partnerships between the county Department of Children and Family Services and law enforcement. 

But just last month, the Alliance put out a position paper suggesting all children taken from their parents are “abused and neglected” and all of their parents are “unfit.” 

So in California, it looks like the fight to protect one of children’s most important rights – the right to live safely in their own homes – just got harder.

NCCPR in Fort Myers News-Press: Institutions are the worst option for Florida foster kids

 It’s often said that if your only tool is a hammer, you view every problem as a nail. Perhaps that’s why Bill Frye, who runs a bunch of institutions, the Florida Sheriffs Youth Ranches, found a way to look at the USA TODAY Network’s searing stories about children needlessly torn from everyone they know and love, and conclude that the solution is to put even more children into institutions.

 Yes, they are institutions.  It doesn’t matter if the grounds are pretty, the staff are called “house parents” and the dorms are called “cottages.”  When children are torn from their homes and forced to live with strangers and staff, that place is an institution.

Read the full column in the Fort Myers News-Press

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending February 2, 2021

● Prof. Shanta Trevedi, a clinical teaching fellow at the Georgetown University Domestic Violence Clinic, writes in The Imprint about why a top child welfare priority for the Biden Administration should be urging Congress to repeal the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act: 

We still have a system that favors family destruction despite clear data that, even when parents have not been perfect, children are irreparably damaged when they are separated from them. We continue to prioritize a system that we know leads to worse outcomes for those children, because we have created an entire industry that is financially dependent on taking children from their parents. ASFA is primarily to blame, and it’s got to go. 

NCCPR has additional context about ASFA here. 

● Shira Shoenberg of CommonWealth Magazine reports on how, in Massachusetts, children sometimes are needlessly torn from their families and trapped in foster care because the families and the state family police agency literally don’t speak the same language. 

● Once again there’s an effort to push the false narrative that COVID-19 is leading to a pandemic of child abuse.  This time it’s coming from Alaska.  But, as is discussed in this NCCPR blog post, there are questions about both the message and the messenger. 

● There is a lot of debate about what kinds of services should be provided to prevent child abuse and who should provide them.  There is less debate over the fact that they should not simply be cut arbitrarily – as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo proposes.  But opponents of the cuts appear unwilling to seize this challenge and use it as an opportunity. Predictably, they’re talking about cuts across the board, instead of seeing this as a chance to curb programs that mostly help the helpers, like useless “counseling” and “parent education” and focus on what really works. 

● Speaking of what really works: Add one more to the long list of studies documenting the transformative power of cash.  The new study documents how increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit reduces reports of what family policing agencies call “neglect.” 

● In Philadelphia, the City Council’s Special Committee on Child Separations heard from Prof. Kara Finck of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and representatives of DHS-Give Us Back Our Children.  You can see the video here.

And finally …

 ● The New York Times has a story about the fact that Black parents are far more skeptical than white parents about sending children back to schools.  Among the reasons:

Education experts and Black parents say decades of racism, institutionalized segregation and mistreatment of Black children, as well as severe underinvestment in school buildings, have left Black communities to doubt that school districts are being upfront about the risks.

But here’s one more possible reason: For nearly a year, one news story after another has pounded home to teachers that false (and racist) narrative mentioned earlier about COVID-19 and child abuse. Teachers have been told over and over that while they weren’t looking, those Black children were victims of a “pandemic of child abuse” -- so they’d better look real closely at those kids as soon as they’re back in class and call child abuse hotlines when they have the slightest suspicion.  (By the way, the Times has been among the worst offenders.)

That seems like one more reason Black parents might be wary about sending the kids back to school.

Child abuse and COVID-19 in Alaska: The message and the messenger

It should be a basic rule of journalism – if someone points with alarm to a huge change in the percentage of something – but you don’t have the actual numbers – ask more questions.  That is just one reason to be concerned about Alaska’s version of that big local journalism trend story of the past year: The story warning, despite a mass of evidence to the contrary, that COVID-19 supposedly is leading to a hidden pandemic of child abuse.

 The other reason to ask more questions involves who it is that’s pushing this kind of narrative in Alaska.

 It began with a story from Alaska Public Media claiming that severe cases of child abuse seen by the state’s largest “child advocacy center” had “skyrocketed by 220% in the last year.”  According to the story: 

“The cases that are presenting are presenting inpatient, and it’s the big and the bad,” the center’s medical director, Dr. Barbara Knox, said.

 

A later Associated Press story reports that Knox’s center, Alaska Child Abuse Response and Evaluation Services, corrected the estimate to 173% after noting that the 2019 figure was missing four cases.  That makes it possible to at least guess the raw numbers underlying those huge percentage changes.  And Knox’s center appears to handle about 44 percent of all cases seen by child advocacy centers across the state.*

 Put all that together and it appears that, even with the pandemic, at least 99.9 percent of Alaska children were not found to be victims of “the big and the bad” over the past year.

 Once again: Yes, we DO need to “quibble about numbers”

 This is where some defenders of an approach some of them have themselves labeled “health terrorism” will say: “How dare you quibble about numbers! Children are being horribly hurt, sometimes dying!  Even one case is too many!” 

The second two sentences are, of course, correct.  But that is precisely why we do need to quibble about numbers. 

COVID has put more stress on everyone, and that stress can cause a small number of people to lash out horribly (though, paradoxically, in some communities, the lack of omnipresent surveillance by what should properly be called the family police may be easing stress).  So it is reasonable to suspect that the number of such cases may have risen from infinitesimal to slightly less infinitesimal.  But if we don’t quibble about numbers, we wind up reducing the chances of reducing the number from infinitesimal to zero. 

We need to quibble about numbers for all of the reasons discussed in our report, Child Welfare’s Pandemic of Fear.  Isolated percentage figures about “skyrocketing” severe child abuse may panic people into calling in false reports, inflicting needless trauma on children (trauma ranging from the investigation itself all the way to needless placement in foster care) increasing the risk of spreading COVID among families and caseworkers alike and diverting resources from finding that one-tenth-of-one-percent of the child population who may be in serious danger. 

Using numbers without their full context also risks creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.  With
teachers told over and over that while schools were closed, severe child abuse “skyrocketed,” then once schools reopen, they may see that abuse whether it is there or not. 

Spreading this kind of fear is bad everywhere, but it’s worse in Alaska.  Even before the pandemic, year after year after year, Alaska tore apart families at one of the highest rates in the nation.  So the claims about “skyrocketing” child abuse come in a state that already has a hair-trigger for taking children from their homes.

The doctor’s track record 

The other reason to view the Alaska figures with caution involves the source.  Knox has devoted her professional life to protecting children from abuse as she sees it.  Her dedication and intentions are not in question. 

Knox is a child abuse pediatrician, a specialty that has come under increasing scrutiny amid report after report of some such pediatricians allegedly jumping to conclusions and doing enormous harm to families.  Of course, that is not true of all child abuse pediatricians. 

But when Knox came to Alaska in October, 2019 it was three-and-a-half months after she was placed on paid administrative leave by her previous employer, American Family Children’s Hospital in Madison, Wis., a part of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Dr. Knox was head of the hospital’s child protection program. She also was a professor of pediatrics. 

According to an in-depth investigative report by Wisconsin Watch, the publication of the nonprofit Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, published on Feb. 29, 2020: 

The University of Wisconsin placed her on paid leave in mid-2019 after colleagues inside and outside of the hospital accused her of intimidation or retaliation, an internal letter shows. 

Dr. Ellen Wald, chairwoman of the Department of Pediatrics at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, wrote to Knox on July 5, saying the administrative leave involved concerns about “your workplace behavior, including unprofessional acts that may constitute retaliation against and/or intimidation of internal and external colleagues.” … 

UW Health spokesman Tom Russell said the hospital took “appropriate action” after investigating the allegations against Knox but declined to specify what that was. 

In one of the cases at the center of the Wisconsin Watch story 

Surgical scars on [an infant] were listed as bruises. Demonstrably false information was inserted into his medical record. And Knox allegedly misrepresented herself as a specialist in an attempt to convince the family to approve additional medical testing. 

Police instantly dismissed the abuse allegation. Child welfare officials would clear the couple after two months. But the episode left [the mother] “petrified” of seeking emergency medical care for their children … 

Three days later when the Anchorage Daily News followed up, they reported that already, “dozens of people” had contacted Wisconsin Watch about their own interactions with Knox. 

Knox did not respond to requests for comment from Wisconsin Watch.  But when the Anchorage Daily News inquired, her clinic expressed full confidence in her, and released a second “To Whom It May Concern” letter from Dr. Wald, dated October 14, 2019, which was when Knox voluntarily left her Wisconsin job to take the job in Alaska.  

The one-paragraph letter said no disciplinary action was taken against Knox.  The letter also said that “The reason she was placed on leave did not relate to dishonesty, clinical skills, medical diagnostic abilities, or incorrect medical diagnoses.” 

*-The state association of Child Advocacy Centers says on its website that the centers saw 2,267 children in 2017.  The Anchorage Daily News reports that Dr. Knox’s center alone sees about 1,000 children per year.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending January 26, 2021

● Last week’s round-up began with this photo at the site of a Martin Luther King Day rally against the oppression of families by New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services.  

 I noted at the time that I had not yet seen a story about the rally.  Here’s the story, from The Imprint.  Perhaps most notable are the comments of a supervisor for ACS. 

One rally attendee who has worked at ACS for more than a decade said that agency workers use parents’ fear of having their children taken away to gain their cooperation and get access to information for the investigation. 

“We take advantage of families’ ignorance,” said Robert, an assistant supervisor in Brooklyn, who asked to be identified only by his first name to avoid reprisal at work. “If I knock on your door and you won’t let me in, I’ll say you have a right to do that, but most of my co-workers paper over that fact to get their job done.” 

Robert argued that meaningful reform can only be achieved through policy changes, rather than through efforts like implicit bias training that focus on changing workers’ attitudes. For example, he said, if child protective investigators had to get a warrant from family court every time they wanted to enter a home, “that would bring the system to face a crisis of legitimacy and have the rebuilding of it to be a caring system and not a policing system.” 

● Whether it’s in the context of the police in blue uniforms or the family police, say the word “abolition” and people understandably worry about what should be done instead.  The writers and editors of Rise have some excellent answers in this column for the federal government’s Children’s Bureau Express.  The column serves another useful purpose: Multiple news organizations have debunked the false, racist myth that the lack of mostly white professionals constantly watching mostly nonwhite kids would lead to a “pandemic of child abuse.”  The Rise story helps explain why that didn’t happen, and why no one ever should have expected it to happen. 

In the same issue of Children’s Bureau Express: 

-- Jey Rajaraman, chief counsel for Legal Services of New Jersey, writes about why “Securing and Restoring the Family Is in the Child’s Best Interests.” 

She quotes a former foster youth who … 

… identified how not having the "perfect house" delayed reunification and that the agency would not financially assist her mother to locate a home for her and her siblings. Why can't state agencies provide direct funding for concrete services to assist in reunification? In New Jersey, statutes provide and fully empower the agency to assist with housing for parents and other needs to expedite reunification. However, this does not occur in practice because there is no shift to make securing the entire family a priority. 

-- David Kelly, special assistant to Jerry Milner, who ran the Children’s Bureau under the previous administration, writes about how the key to preventing the problem of children “aging out” of foster care is to prevent so many from ever aging in.  He writes:

 It's time to aggressively interrogate the option of aging out. It's time to examine deeply the root causes of how we reach the point where a young person's best or only option is to leave care for life on their own. It's time to interrogate how we've arrived at a place where programs such as Chafee [which helps support independent living programs for youth who age out] are needed in the first place.

 Rather than interrogate aging out, we've institutionalized it. …

 In our hubris, we have believed systems can do better for children than their own families can. In our myopia, parents are too often viewed as the problem. In our thoughts and actions, families are too often viewed as replaceable. … 

That we have a higher percentage of young people who age out than go to live permanently with other relatives is abhorrent; it is a tragedy. … We should incentivize family preservation, reunification, kinship care, and guardianship instead of adoption alone. 

To accept aging out as an unavoidable byproduct of the foster care industry is to perpetuate injustice. … To accept our failure to find permanence and connection for young people—after we have taken it from them and promised better—is unforgivable. 

Like all political appointees, Kelly’s boss, Milner, had to submit his resignation.  But the job of running the Children’s Bureau remains open – and if you’d like to see the Biden Administration bring back one of the most progressive leaders in the Bureau’s history, there’s a petition you can sign here. 

● Even when children are not taken from the home, or after a family has been reunified, child welfare systems make family problems worse by needlessly blacklisting parents on “central registers” of alleged child abusers based on little more than a caseworker’s guess.  The listing can bar the parents from employment in many jobs – often among the few jobs open to low- income families. 

As Saadiqa Kumanyika and Jamie Gullen of Community Legal Services of Philadelphia explain in The Imprint 

Blocking off the ability of parents and caregivers to access employment in high-growth fields only serves to hurt the very children the child abuse registry is supposed to protect in the first place. The child abuse registry thus exacerbates child poverty and places vulnerable families in even more precarious circumstances. 

They explain what the Biden Administration can do about it. 

● Sharon McDaniel, founder, president and CEO of A Second Chance, Inc. also has a child welfare agenda for the Biden Administration, one geared to finally coming to grips with the racism that has been a part of American child welfare since before there was even an America. 

●Something else the federal government could do (but almost certainly won’t): cut off all grants to Court-Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) programs.  Still another report, this time from Florida, adds to the mountain of evidence that these programs harm children. I have a post about it on this blog.

The clueless CASA program of Florida

A new report paints a picture of Florida's CASA program that is as detailed 
as it is damning. So there's a danger of not seeing the forest for the trees.

● A legislative audit confirms they have no evidence the program is doing any good; the data range from unreliable to nonexistent. 

 ● The audit reviewed the scholarship on CASA and found what anyone who looks objectively at the literature is likely to find.

● Lawyers surveyed found what you almost always find with CASA programs: a profound bias against families that harms the children such programs are intended to help.

● It all echoes a study of the same program done nearly two years ago which produced similarly dismal findings.

 In the closing days of 2020, the Florida Legislature’s equivalent of the federal Government Accountability Office issued a report on Florida’s CASA program. (In Florida, it’s called a Guardian ad Litem (GAL) program, but it is, in fact, a CASA program.) 

 CASA is the program in which overwhelmingly white middle-class amateurs – volunteers whose only real “qualification” is their race and their class – march into the homes of overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately nonwhite families to pass judgment upon those families. They recommend what hoops parents will have to jump through to have any hope that their children will get to live with them again.  They recommend if the parent/child bond should be legally severed forever.  Judges often are quick to rubber-stamp their advice.

 What could possibly go wrong? 

CASAs could play a useful role as mentors for foster children and in finding extended family members when children really can’t remain in their own homes.  But they should not be allowed to “investigate” families let alone tell courts whether or not to destroy them forever. 

The new report is particularly important because the Florida program has sunk lower even than most other CASA programs in trying to justify its existence through a fear and smear campaign not only against families but against better alternatives. 

The new report from the Florida Legislature’s Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability (OPPAGA) is so damning in so many ways that there’s a risk of losing the forest for the trees.  Prof. Robert Latham, associate director of the University of Miami School of Law Children and Youth Law Clinic, has a detailed analysis of both on his excellent Florida child welfare blog. 

The forest

 The best view of the forest comes from the report’s survey of judges and lawyers.  The judges were generally fine with the program.  The lawyers, not so much. 

According to the report: 

[D]ependency attorneys expressed several concerns with the program. Concerns included …  GALs [remember, in Florida CASAs are called GALs] often reiterating [Department of Children and Families] recommendations; and lack of volunteer expertise.  Some also stated the program seems biased against and often delays reunification.  Attorneys and one judge expressed concern that volunteers’ personal experiences and biases may lead them to confound the safety of the parents’ home with what they think is a better home environment with a foster parent, resulting in more frequent recommendations for termination of parental rights. 

Many of these attorneys also reported issues with  GAL efficiency, including …
irrelevant court filings by the  GAL  (such as requests for parent to undergo a psychological evaluation when there is no history of mental health issues)… 

Some attorneys would like more training on family reunification as the primary goal in dependency.  This could include increased awareness of the benefits of preserving the family,  consequences of terminating parental rights,   realities of foster care,   and difficulties faced by disadvantaged parents. Six of the attorneys also reported that volunteers need more training on what actions or options are legal within the dependency system. 

Notwithstanding its genteel, measured language, the OPPAGA report confirms once again what an increasing body of research has found - that, in the words of a comprehensive law review article, CASA is “an exercise of white supremacy.” 

The research shows that, compared to children not burdened with a CASA on the case, foster children with CASAs were: 

● Less likely to be reunified with their own parents.

● Less likely to find permanence in the form of guardianship by a relative.

● More likely to “age out” of foster care with no home at all. 

More “training” won’t fix it; the bias is baked in.  

As for representing children in court – CASAs don’t actually do that. A CASA’s mandate is to tell the court what the CASA thinks is “best” for the child. If the child disagrees, the child is effectively silenced. 

A far better approach is for the child to have a lawyer who advocates for what the child wants – not because that’s always best, but because the only way a judge can make a truly informed decision about what is best is if all parties have strong advocates making the case for their clients’ desired outcome. 

As for children who are too young to express a rational preference – or even too young to speak (a prime focus of the Florida program’s fearmongering) -- there’s actually a better option than CASAs for them, too, as is explained in this excellent article from Family Law Quarterly. 

This kind of representation has another advantage: It qualifies for 50 percent federal reimbursement for every eligible case (the formula is complicated, but on average somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of cases probably would be eligible). 

An earlier report 

The OPPAGA report is not the first to point out the failures of the Florida CASA program.  Prof. Latham got there first. About a year-and-a-half ago, I wrote about his large-scale analysis of Florida CASA program data. As I wrote at the time: 

The study found that, even after pouring $600 million in taxpayer funds into the program over 15 years, using the criteria the program itself uses to claim success, there actually is no evidence that the program does any good – and some limited evidence that it might be doing harm. … [Prof. Latham] is not a CASA-basher. On the contrary, he worked in the Florida GAL program, began his excellent blog with posts defending that program and, as recently as 2016, received the program’s Excellence in Advocacy award. 

But what started him wondering about the program’s effectiveness was the depths to which it has sunk to try to keep itself in business and prevent the establishment of a better way to represent children.  The “better way” part is my conclusion. Prof. Latham sees room for both. 

You can read all about that earlier study, and the ugly tactics the Florida CASA program uses to try to justify its existence in that 2019 post.  I particularly hope people will read about those tactics because, I suspect, they will be on display Monday when the director of the Florida CASA program, Alan Abramowitz, testifies before a legislative committee. 

Enter OPPAGA 

He’ll be testifying about the OPPAGA report.  At the start of this post, I discussed the most important part – what the lawyers who actually have to work with the CASA amateurs found.  But there is more. 

Let’s start with the good news: 

Even as the program added lots more paid staff, it’s “serving” fewer children.  While lawmakers might see this as a waste of money, actually it’s a sound investment.  In fact, if the pattern were to continue, and the legislature lavished so much money on the program that they didn’t “serve” any children, this would significantly improve the lives of many of those children. 

Now the bad news: 

The worst news is “the forest” – the confirmation of the profound bias against families.  But there’s also bad news about the trees: 

● The report spends a lot of time on the data the CASA program uses to justify its existence.  Prof. Latham discusses this in great detail so I’ll just boil it down: Florida CASA doesn’t have a clue about what Florida CASA does or does not accomplish. 

● What we do know, however, is that there is enormous variation within Florida concerning outcomes for children – a further indication of CASA bias.  While the data are so poor one can’t be certain, it appears that in one region, for example, 51 percent of cases with a CASA ended with reunification while in two other regions it was only 37 percent.  Nearly half of all cases in one region ended with children’s rights to their parents terminated and the children adopted; in another region it was 19 percent. 

In fact, the Florida CASA program seems to be so wrapped up in playing God that it even opposed legislation to create a foster children’s bill of rights – and they were very basic rights.  The program’s attitude seems to be: We decide if you have rights, we decide where you will live, we decide if you will ever live with your family again. Because only we know what’s “best.” 

The exception 

Of course, not every Florida CASA behaves that way. Consider one of the many heartbreaking cases documented by USA Today Network reporters involving children needlessly torn from parents whose only crime was to be, themselves, victims of domestic violence. In one such case, the CASA, Brooke Robertson, fought hard to keep the family of Marion Phillips together for as long as she could.  According to the story: 

The case still haunts Robertson, who grew up poor herself and said Marion’s five-year struggle highlights an uncomfortable truth for child welfare workers: Often, their job is weighing whether to take a child from a loving but flawed family and put them in the arms of wealthy strangers. 

“Yes, they would have sushi and hummus and trips to the museum, instead of Mountain Dew and wrestling matches,” Robertson said. But she couldn't help but wonder what would have happened if the state had given a fraction of the stipend they pay to foster parents – more than $400 per child per month – to Marion. 

Robertson imagined Marion with a fine apartment, a safe neighborhood, professional babysitters, after-school tutors, a car with room for the kids, a private attorney. 

“It will break your heart,” Robertson said. “It will break your brain.” 

But that kind of CASA doesn’t seem to be welcome in Florida. After she was off the case, she looked up the case in a child welfare database. 

For that, USA Today reports, she was forced to resign.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending January 19, 2021

I haven't seen a news story about this yet, but 
this billboard, at 125th St. and 2nd Ave. in New York,
the scene of a Martin Luther King Day protest led by
Joyce McMillan of JMacForFamilies, 
seems like a good way to start the week in review. 
UPDATE: Here's the story.

● Toward the start of the pandemic, several major news organizations challenged the racist myth that as soon as the eyes of overwhelmingly white middle-class professionals no longer were on overwhelmingly poor disproportionately nonwhite children, their parents would unleash upon those children a “pandemic of child abuse.”  Now, one of those organizations, the Associated Press has revisited the issue.  

● Tomorrow many parts of the federal government will have new leadership.  But a lot of progressive advocates in child welfare hope the Biden Administration will keep one leader on the job: Jerry Milner, who ran the Department of Health and Human Services Children’s Bureau.  This story from The Imprint explains why.  And if you agree, you can sign this petition. 

● Thanks to outstanding reporting by USA Today Network reporters, Florida journalism is beginning to come to grips with the foster-care panic that has swept though that state. But Florida lawmakers have not. 

● Speaking of failure in Florida, Robert Latham, associate director of the Children & Youth Law Clinic at the University of Miami Law School has an in-depth analysis on his blog of a new report on the Florida CASA program.   

● Prof. Vivek Sankaran, director of the Child Advocacy Law Clinic and the Child Welfare Appellate Clinic at the University of Michigan Law School argues that in helping children achieve permanency we need to aim for real permanency – relational permanency – instead of what amounts to paper permanency. He writes: 

As we embark on a new year within the child protection system, might we flip the script and adopt a new prevailing narrative – that we identify what relationships matter to the child, unequivocally support them, and then use our legal tools to allow the child to benefit from those relationships. Might we better serve families by refusing to permanently destroy relationships between children and their parents that are important to children? 

● The Arizona Republic reports that Arizona’s family police agency (a more accurate term than child welfare agency) will be subject to two years of federal monitoring as a result of complaints that it did all sorts of awful things to families whose first language isn’t English. 

Among other things: The Arizona Department of Child Safety (DCS) failed to provide documents about what parents had to do to get their kids back in a language the parents actually could read.  Also, according to Sylvia Herrera of the Barrio Defense Committee, which gathered many of the complaints cited by the Office of Civil Rights in the federal Department of Health and Human Services:

Parent aides, who supervise visits between parents and their children, would bar parents from talking to their children in Spanish, out of concern the parents might say something inappropriate that the aide could not understand … 

Herrera said she was heartened that the agreement requires the civil-rights office to monitor DCS' language services for the next two years. "However, it does not address the fact that hundreds of families were destroyed by DCS practices that lead to foster care and eventual adoption to non-relatives instead of family reunification," she said. 

No agreement, she said, can undo the harm that has already been caused because a family didn't get the help it needed to navigate the system.

No word on whether this means, from now on, “Professional Kidnapper” t-shirts will have to be translated.