Several weeks ago, I wrote about Robin Scoins, a parent from Arizona whose children were needlessly taken away. After getting the children back, she formed the Arizona Family Rights Advocacy Institute. The organization has no paid staff, and no budget, Ms. Scoins runs the group herself and uses her own meager funds. At times she could be reached by phone or by e-mail but not both because she can’t afford to pay for both.
But in an act that virtually defines bullying, a state legislator who strongly opposes Ms. Scoins’ views, Rep. Pete Hershberger, sought to silence Ms. Scoins by demanding that she register as a lobbyist. He sent an intimidating letter to the state Attorney General demanding an investigation.
The result: Ms. Scoins still can speak out, but only as a private citizen. If she invokes the name of her organization, which is how she sought to speak out for others who have asked her to speak on their behalf because they are afraid to come forward, she risks fines and prosecution.
And through it all, almost every newspaper in the state, which will drop everything to crusade for the First Amendment when it’s their privileges at stake, remained silent. There were no editorials on Scoins’ behalf, and only one daily, the Arizona Daily Star wrote about it (the stories were by a reporter in the paper’s Capitol bureau, not the reporter who covers child welfare) – after the story appeared in the Phoenix alternative weekly, New Times.
Now, there’s another effort to silence an advocate for families, this time in Texas. Texas is in the midst of its second foster-care panic in less than a decade. Every day brings another horror story, the most recent: Hundreds of children forced to sleep in offices because there is no place else to put them; just the kind of crisis predicted by NCCPR when we released our Texas report more than two years ago.
About the only thing Texas has going for it is that at least court hearings in that state are open. Unless, it seems, you’re an advocate for families and the judge doesn’t like you.
And that brings me to the story of Johana Scot and the Parent Guidance Center in Conroe, Texas, not far from Houston.
Ms. Scot did not lose a child to the system. In fact, her introduction to the system was as a Court-Appointed Special Advocate (CASA). There is no more sacred cow in child welfare, which is too bad since the most comprehensive study of CASA ever done, a study commissioned by the National CASA Association itself, found that pretty much the only thing CASA accomplishes is to prolong foster care and reduce the chances children will be placed with relatives, while doing nothing to improve child safety. One of the few clear-eyed looks at the program is this story from the excellent trade journal, Youth Today.
Ms. Scot saw the harm that CASA was doing, got fed up, and formed the Parent Guidance Center to provide real help to families caught up in the child welfare system. This organization has a real staff and budget, although both are very small. But like Robin Scoins, Johana Scot apparently has made some powerful enemies.
Because last week, Ms. Scot was thrown out of court in Montgomery County, Texas, during a hearing concerning whether the children of two impoverished parents she’d been helping would be placed with their uncle.
Scot had not shouted at the judge or other participants. She had caused no disturbance at all. She was sitting, silent, in the courtroom, there only to offer moral support to the parents, when Judge Joseph Ann Ottis invited lawyers for the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services and the children’s law guardian to move to have Scot expelled, because, the judge said, she was not allowed to do it on her own. The law guardian promptly made the request and the judge promptly granted it.
Ms. Scot explains that it all happened after a closed-door meeting between the judge, the DFPS lawyer, the CASA and the children’s law guardian. The parents have no lawyer, so no one representing the parents was at the meeting. After the meeting, the parents were questioned about why they had changed their minds about surrendering rights to their children forever. The reason was simple: Originally, the parents thought that if they agreed to the surrender, the uncle would get the children. In fact, there was no guarantee the four children would not be consigned to the Texas foster care system.
It was Johana Scot who had warned them about this.
That appears to be the only reason she was expelled – leaving the parents entirely on their own to face the power of DFPS, the law guardian, and the judge.
And Judge Ottis went further. She forbade other parties involved in the suit including CPS caseworkers, CPS program directors, CASA advocates, and attorneys, from so much as speaking to Ms. Scot.
“It is unfortunate that I have been forced to retain my own legal counsel because of the inflammatory, statements and insinuations that were made about me during a volatile questioning of my indigent clients who were unrepresented by legal counsel themselves,” Ms Scot said. “Had they been represented, I feel confident an attorney would have objected to the unwarranted line of questioning about their family advocate. Apparently, the court wanted on record who had given these parents accurate information about relinquishment of parental rights.
“Parent Guidance Center believes that families involved with CPS deserve accurate information about the child welfare process. Without knowing all the options, outcomes, and possibilities, both positive and negative in their cases, CPS clients cannot appropriately make a life changing decision, such as relinquishment of parental rights.”
Hardly a radical proposition – but apparently more than a Texas judge could handle.
As I’ve noted before on this blog, when some CASAs were thrown out of a courtroom in Georgia, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution threw a fit. The newspaper was right; I even gave them a quote. So, how did Houston media respond when a former CASA who takes a less popular position was thrown out of a courtroom? So far, with silence. A couple of good reporters elsewhere in the state have shown some interest, but because they’re far from Houston, it’s not likely they’ll be able to do a story. And those who are able, seem to have no interest; even though if a judge can throw an advocate out today, odds are she can throw a reporter out tomorrow.
Sunday, June 24, 2007
Sunday, June 17, 2007
What do hospitals know that most child welfare agencies don't?
On April 8, Julia Steiny, a columnist for the Providence Journal began one of her columns with a lesson from medicine in the 19th Century that has profound implications for child welfare today. Steiny wrote:
“Before understanding the role of germs or microbes in causing disease, hospitals had a well-deserved reputation for killing patients more reliably than curing them. But toward the end of the 19th century, hospitals began to implement sanitary protocols that increasingly prevented the transfer of germs. As a result, hospitals became more effective at healing the sick. Except in the case of children. The rates at which children died actually rose, and dramatically.
“Sick children who went to the most up-to-date hospitals were well-tended - kept fed, warm, safe and clean - and forbidden to see their germ-ridden family. Hospital workers wore gowns, masks and gloves when handling babies and children. Institutions that permitted brief visits by relatives found the visits to be hugely troublesome, brimming with emotions and trauma at each separation. Most hospital officials thought such visits were counterproductive to healing.
“By the second year of a hospital stay, children's death rates in the sterile nurseries ran over 75 percent.”
The column wasn’t about child welfare, however. It soon veered off into a generalized plea to spend more on children and make schools better. (Steiny is a former member of the Providence School Board.) Which means even she missed the point.
In the late 20th Century, as I’ve noted before on this Blog, researchers made a similar discovery about children in the child welfare system.
University of Florida Medical Center researchers studied two groups of infants born with cocaine in their systems. One group was placed in foster care, the other with birth mothers able to care for them. After six months, the babies were tested using all the usual measures of infant development: rolling over, sitting up, reaching out. Consistently, the children placed with their birth mothers did better. For the foster children, being taken from their mothers was more toxic than the cocaine. That doesn’t mean we can simply leave children with addicts – it does mean that drug treatment for the parent is almost always a better first choice than foster care for the child.
In the early 21st Century, Minnesota researchers discovered that, on average, children placed in foster care fared worse than equally maltreated children left in their own homes, even when the birth parents got little or no help.
None of this means that no child ever should be taken from her or his home. (I always think that’s obvious, but almost every time I talk to reporters they seek reassurance on this point). But for decades, Child Protective Services agencies have tried to “sterilize” our children’s environment. They’ve decided that parents are just so “dirty,” sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively, as in so deeply troubled, that the children would simply have to be better off in a “cleaner” environment.
A long time ago, hospitals figured out what they were doing wrong. They stopped keeping the children away from their parents. For some reason, much of American child welfare has yet to get the message.
“Before understanding the role of germs or microbes in causing disease, hospitals had a well-deserved reputation for killing patients more reliably than curing them. But toward the end of the 19th century, hospitals began to implement sanitary protocols that increasingly prevented the transfer of germs. As a result, hospitals became more effective at healing the sick. Except in the case of children. The rates at which children died actually rose, and dramatically.
“Sick children who went to the most up-to-date hospitals were well-tended - kept fed, warm, safe and clean - and forbidden to see their germ-ridden family. Hospital workers wore gowns, masks and gloves when handling babies and children. Institutions that permitted brief visits by relatives found the visits to be hugely troublesome, brimming with emotions and trauma at each separation. Most hospital officials thought such visits were counterproductive to healing.
“By the second year of a hospital stay, children's death rates in the sterile nurseries ran over 75 percent.”
The column wasn’t about child welfare, however. It soon veered off into a generalized plea to spend more on children and make schools better. (Steiny is a former member of the Providence School Board.) Which means even she missed the point.
In the late 20th Century, as I’ve noted before on this Blog, researchers made a similar discovery about children in the child welfare system.
University of Florida Medical Center researchers studied two groups of infants born with cocaine in their systems. One group was placed in foster care, the other with birth mothers able to care for them. After six months, the babies were tested using all the usual measures of infant development: rolling over, sitting up, reaching out. Consistently, the children placed with their birth mothers did better. For the foster children, being taken from their mothers was more toxic than the cocaine. That doesn’t mean we can simply leave children with addicts – it does mean that drug treatment for the parent is almost always a better first choice than foster care for the child.
In the early 21st Century, Minnesota researchers discovered that, on average, children placed in foster care fared worse than equally maltreated children left in their own homes, even when the birth parents got little or no help.
None of this means that no child ever should be taken from her or his home. (I always think that’s obvious, but almost every time I talk to reporters they seek reassurance on this point). But for decades, Child Protective Services agencies have tried to “sterilize” our children’s environment. They’ve decided that parents are just so “dirty,” sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively, as in so deeply troubled, that the children would simply have to be better off in a “cleaner” environment.
A long time ago, hospitals figured out what they were doing wrong. They stopped keeping the children away from their parents. For some reason, much of American child welfare has yet to get the message.
Sunday, June 10, 2007
When the foster care debate goes to the dogs
Last week’s post to this Blog dealt with the issue of reimbursement for foster parents. At the end of that post, I wrote that it seemed as though every story I’ve ever read about this issue included the same false analogy, almost always presented in the same terms of shock and outrage. And sure enough, when the issue of raising foster-parent reimbursement arose in California last month, there was this from Capital Public Radio:
“The average Californian pays more to kennel their dog than our state pays to support the care of foster children.”
And this from the San Jose Mercury News:
"The average kennel charges you $620 a month for taking care of a dog," said the measure's author, Assemblyman Jim Beall, D-San Jose, "so our kids don't even get as much money as a dog."
And this from the Orange County Register:
“[Payments to foster parents] average “$126 less than the average kennel charges to house a dog…”
And this from a San Francisco Chronicle editorial:
That rate isn't even fit for dogs, and the state knows it: it spends $7,440 per year to house a dog in a kennel.
The appeal of this, uh, dogma, is not limited to California. In Florida in just 2 years, the same advocate managed to get his dog kennel soundbite into at least five stories in at least four different newspapers.
Some reporters found this so shocking that they actually did their own survey of kennels just to be sure.
And the whole thing is rubbish.
I certainly don’t claim to know a lot about the economics of boarding dogs, but I know this much: A kennel is a profit-making enterprise, a foster home is not – or at least it’s not supposed to be. More important, kennel fees go to pay all sorts of costs that are already covered in foster homes:
● Kennels have staff who must be paid salaries. Foster homes are run by volunteers. Foster care payments are only supposed to cover expenses specific to adding a foster child to the home, not the entire cost of maintaining the home and making a living.
● Kennels have to pay for their entire physical plant through fees. A foster home’s mortgage, furniture etc. are covered by the foster parents’ regular jobs. A foster child’s food is covered by reimbursement, but the refrigerator already should be paid for. More important, a foster home is supposed to be big enough to accommodate the children when it is licensed, so what is likely to be the biggest cost in the household, the mortgage, already is covered.
● Kennel fees have to cover veterinary services if dogs get sick while there. Foster children’s health care is covered by Medicaid.
And so on and so on. So the notion that paying less to foster parents somehow reflects treating children worse than dogs is hogwash.
The right analogy would be the cost of a kennel versus the cost of a business (for-profit or otherwise) that is built, is run, and has salaried staff, all specifically for the care of children: a group home or an institution. In California, the low end of the cost continuum for those kinds of places is $82 per day. The high end can be $300 a day or more.
On the other hand if someone wants to suggest that, despite this enormous cost, children in some group homes and institutions get worse care than dogs in a kennel, they’ll get no argument from me.
“The average Californian pays more to kennel their dog than our state pays to support the care of foster children.”
And this from the San Jose Mercury News:
"The average kennel charges you $620 a month for taking care of a dog," said the measure's author, Assemblyman Jim Beall, D-San Jose, "so our kids don't even get as much money as a dog."
And this from the Orange County Register:
“[Payments to foster parents] average “$126 less than the average kennel charges to house a dog…”
And this from a San Francisco Chronicle editorial:
That rate isn't even fit for dogs, and the state knows it: it spends $7,440 per year to house a dog in a kennel.
The appeal of this, uh, dogma, is not limited to California. In Florida in just 2 years, the same advocate managed to get his dog kennel soundbite into at least five stories in at least four different newspapers.
Some reporters found this so shocking that they actually did their own survey of kennels just to be sure.
And the whole thing is rubbish.
I certainly don’t claim to know a lot about the economics of boarding dogs, but I know this much: A kennel is a profit-making enterprise, a foster home is not – or at least it’s not supposed to be. More important, kennel fees go to pay all sorts of costs that are already covered in foster homes:
● Kennels have staff who must be paid salaries. Foster homes are run by volunteers. Foster care payments are only supposed to cover expenses specific to adding a foster child to the home, not the entire cost of maintaining the home and making a living.
● Kennels have to pay for their entire physical plant through fees. A foster home’s mortgage, furniture etc. are covered by the foster parents’ regular jobs. A foster child’s food is covered by reimbursement, but the refrigerator already should be paid for. More important, a foster home is supposed to be big enough to accommodate the children when it is licensed, so what is likely to be the biggest cost in the household, the mortgage, already is covered.
● Kennel fees have to cover veterinary services if dogs get sick while there. Foster children’s health care is covered by Medicaid.
And so on and so on. So the notion that paying less to foster parents somehow reflects treating children worse than dogs is hogwash.
The right analogy would be the cost of a kennel versus the cost of a business (for-profit or otherwise) that is built, is run, and has salaried staff, all specifically for the care of children: a group home or an institution. In California, the low end of the cost continuum for those kinds of places is $82 per day. The high end can be $300 a day or more.
On the other hand if someone wants to suggest that, despite this enormous cost, children in some group homes and institutions get worse care than dogs in a kennel, they’ll get no argument from me.
Sunday, June 3, 2007
What is our "social contract" with foster parents?
Two recent stories from California, both about the state budget, raise a question that child welfare systems usually avoid: What is our “social contract” with foster parents?
The first story ran in the Contra Costa Times on May 21. It is a thorough examination of proposals to cut off welfare benefits to children in families where the parents don’t dot every I and cross every t on welfare-to-work rules. (Footnote: Back when Rudy Giuliani was racing to throw families off welfare in New York City, at any given time, according to some news accounts, about 10 percent of all recipients were sanctioned off the welfare rolls due to bureaucratic error. Does California do better?)
In any event, since the biggest cause of foster care is the confusion of poverty with neglect, the cuts are likely to increase the number of impoverished children placed in foster care.
According to the story:
In urban areas, 80 percent of the children involved in the foster care system come from impoverished families, said Chet Hewitt, director of Alameda County Social Services. In most cases, children are removed from their homes for neglect, especially lack of food and medical care.
By cutting CalWorks benefits, "you raise the specter of putting poor families in the case of being more likely to not meet the needs of their children," Hewitt said. "Of not being able to keep food in the refrigerator or pay fare for buses or cabs to get to the medical treatments."
The story was greeted with a collective yawn by media and politicians. If any other newspapers ran anything like it, or followed up with outraged editorials, I missed it.
The very next day came a long story in the Sacramento Bee about another constituency affected by the proposed budget. They weren’t being cut, but they were fighting mad over not getting a raise.
This story got picked up all over the state, politicians vented their fury, and at least two newspapers rushed to offer outraged editorials.
But then, this was a constituency with whom journalists and politicians can identify; this was a constituency made up of people they might know personally as something other than story subjects:
Foster parents.
Why is it, exactly, that when a birth parent wants a little help to raise her own child she’s a “welfare queen” but when her child is taken away, placed in foster care, and the foster parent wants significantly more money than the birth parent ever got, the foster parent is a hero?
Raising this issue does not mean that I think most foster parents are “in it for the money.” But when foster parents defend themselves against that claim (which, oddly, almost always is raised by the foster parents themselves, not by others) their main argument is that they can’t be in it for the money because there’s not enough money. But that also means the more they succeed at raising reimbursements, the more they undercut that claim.
In most cases, reimbursement for foster parents isn’t as bad as most news stories make it sound. For starters, stories typically focus on the base rate - the lowest rate a state ever pays. But most states have a sliding scale of rates, with reimbursement increasing if the child is considered to have more severe problems. (That creates issues of its own, such as a built-in incentive to claim that foster children are as sick and as difficult as possible.)
In Maine, which is very much at the high end, a foster parent who takes a child at the highest “level of care” can get as much as $27,000 per child per year.
Most foster parents don’t get anything like that. But whatever they get, since it is considered reimbursement, not salary, it is generally tax-free. The child’s health insurance is provided through Medicaid, and there may be a clothing and other allowances as well.
At the base rate, none of this makes foster parenting profitable, or easy, -- not for good foster parents. (Paradoxically, if you want to be a rotten foster parent, you may, in fact, be able to make money on the deal.) But few foster parents are rotten; many foster parents really are heroes.
I also believe that some reimbursement for foster parents is reasonable. It’s unrealistic to expect people to go deep into their own pockets to care for a stranger’s children, children the foster parents don’t even know until they walk in the door, and who may walk about again at any time. So it’s fair for the state to help out with the costs.
But do we really want those costs covered completely? Isn’t foster care an act of charity that comes from the goodness of the heart, for which the primary satisfaction should be psychic? If you volunteer to, say, tutor children at an after school program, you may have to dig into your own pocket a little. You’re not going to be reimbursed for mileage, and you may have to purchase some supplies. But, presumably, it’s worth it for the psychic satisfaction of helping someone in need.
So shouldn’t we be worried about middle-class people who volunteer to be foster parents but who are not willing to pitch in financially, at least a little?
And what if a foster parent says that, on the contrary, she can and does love the children who come through the door, from day one, exactly as if she’d given birth to them? Like most such stories, the Sacramento Bee story begins by profiling a saintly, model foster parent who says, at one point:
"I feel like they're mine. I never see them as my foster kids. We always tell them, 'You're our sons.' "
Leaving aside the fact that this may not, in fact, be good for a child who desperately wants to return to her or his birth parents, does that not also raise a question as to why the foster parent needs to be paid more than she would get if, say, she were a birth mother on welfare?
In fact, the intersection of love and money is a minefield, raising all sorts of uncomfortable questions. For instance, what if the foster parent who comes forward is the child’s grandmother? The former head of the human services agency in one state used to say that her agency wouldn’t help grandparents at all because it’s simply a family’s obligation to take care of their own. Did this same state official return her own parents’ Social Security checks on grounds that she should be picking up the costs of their retirement? I doubt it.
In fact, if any foster parent has a case for supplementing love with money it’s a grandparent who, like the parent, is likely to be poor. But though kinship foster parents usually are much poorer than strangers, they almost always get far less than strangers, unless the kinship parents manage to become licensed foster parents. The problem there is that licensing standards often revolve around middle-class creature comforts like having a bedroom for every foster child rather than just issues of health or safety.
And then there is the argument that, in fact, all parents should receive some sort of pay for being parents, otherwise work that is still done predominantly by women is devalued compared to the work of men.
But we don’t have to stroll through this entire minefield now. The question of the moment is: What is the best way to spend scarce dollars to help children? Help their impoverished birth parents or raise reimbursement for more-likely-to-be-middle-class foster parents?
In endorsing the raise for foster parents, the San Francisco Chronicle writes that “raising rates would help to attract and retain quality foster parents…” Would it? Isn’t one measure of the quality of any parent the willingness to sacrifice a little, financially, for the children in their care?
Similarly, it’s argued that “low” rates are contributing to the loss of foster homes. But is that all bad? Are low rates, in fact, weeding out foster parents who otherwise would go into foster care for the wrong reasons?
The Sacramento Bee story quotes Frank Mecca, executive director of the County Welfare Directors Association, who says: “If they were our children, we'd never treat them this way.”
But the state of California (and every other state) treats children living with impoverished birth parents far worse – witness the proposal to cut welfare benefits which, in every state, already are far lower than payments to foster parents.
And, like so many other such stories, the Bee story ends with this quote from the foster parent profiled:
"It's not like regular work. We never have vacation."
In fact, being a parent of any kind may be the world’s most rewarding combination of work and play, pleasure and frustration. But shouldn’t we worry about the children of any parent who views every moment with them as a chore?
A wonderful foster parent in Maine, Mary Callahan, responded to the 24/7 argument in an op ed column arguing in favor of a cut in reimbursement for foster parents in that state who receive the highest rates of reimbursement. Callahan wrote:
“I am not working when I am sitting around the dinner table with my children talking about the day. Or when we are in front of the television watching our favorite show -- "Lost." Or when we are driving down the road and singing to the oldies.
“Some foster parents might see this as work, but most of the time I am just living my life -- the one I chose -- with my favorite people.
“I never want to give my foster children a reason to doubt that.”
Isn’t that the kind of foster parent any state would want to “attract”?
One postscript: the Bee story and almost every other about the demand for a reimbursement raise included a false analogy. In fact, it sometimes seems that almost every story ever written about foster parent reimbursement includes this analogy, always written with the same tone of shock and outrage. I’ll discuss it next week. One hint, though: It’s a false analogy that has dogged coverage of child welfare for decades.
The first story ran in the Contra Costa Times on May 21. It is a thorough examination of proposals to cut off welfare benefits to children in families where the parents don’t dot every I and cross every t on welfare-to-work rules. (Footnote: Back when Rudy Giuliani was racing to throw families off welfare in New York City, at any given time, according to some news accounts, about 10 percent of all recipients were sanctioned off the welfare rolls due to bureaucratic error. Does California do better?)
In any event, since the biggest cause of foster care is the confusion of poverty with neglect, the cuts are likely to increase the number of impoverished children placed in foster care.
According to the story:
In urban areas, 80 percent of the children involved in the foster care system come from impoverished families, said Chet Hewitt, director of Alameda County Social Services. In most cases, children are removed from their homes for neglect, especially lack of food and medical care.
By cutting CalWorks benefits, "you raise the specter of putting poor families in the case of being more likely to not meet the needs of their children," Hewitt said. "Of not being able to keep food in the refrigerator or pay fare for buses or cabs to get to the medical treatments."
The story was greeted with a collective yawn by media and politicians. If any other newspapers ran anything like it, or followed up with outraged editorials, I missed it.
The very next day came a long story in the Sacramento Bee about another constituency affected by the proposed budget. They weren’t being cut, but they were fighting mad over not getting a raise.
This story got picked up all over the state, politicians vented their fury, and at least two newspapers rushed to offer outraged editorials.
But then, this was a constituency with whom journalists and politicians can identify; this was a constituency made up of people they might know personally as something other than story subjects:
Foster parents.
Why is it, exactly, that when a birth parent wants a little help to raise her own child she’s a “welfare queen” but when her child is taken away, placed in foster care, and the foster parent wants significantly more money than the birth parent ever got, the foster parent is a hero?
Raising this issue does not mean that I think most foster parents are “in it for the money.” But when foster parents defend themselves against that claim (which, oddly, almost always is raised by the foster parents themselves, not by others) their main argument is that they can’t be in it for the money because there’s not enough money. But that also means the more they succeed at raising reimbursements, the more they undercut that claim.
In most cases, reimbursement for foster parents isn’t as bad as most news stories make it sound. For starters, stories typically focus on the base rate - the lowest rate a state ever pays. But most states have a sliding scale of rates, with reimbursement increasing if the child is considered to have more severe problems. (That creates issues of its own, such as a built-in incentive to claim that foster children are as sick and as difficult as possible.)
In Maine, which is very much at the high end, a foster parent who takes a child at the highest “level of care” can get as much as $27,000 per child per year.
Most foster parents don’t get anything like that. But whatever they get, since it is considered reimbursement, not salary, it is generally tax-free. The child’s health insurance is provided through Medicaid, and there may be a clothing and other allowances as well.
At the base rate, none of this makes foster parenting profitable, or easy, -- not for good foster parents. (Paradoxically, if you want to be a rotten foster parent, you may, in fact, be able to make money on the deal.) But few foster parents are rotten; many foster parents really are heroes.
I also believe that some reimbursement for foster parents is reasonable. It’s unrealistic to expect people to go deep into their own pockets to care for a stranger’s children, children the foster parents don’t even know until they walk in the door, and who may walk about again at any time. So it’s fair for the state to help out with the costs.
But do we really want those costs covered completely? Isn’t foster care an act of charity that comes from the goodness of the heart, for which the primary satisfaction should be psychic? If you volunteer to, say, tutor children at an after school program, you may have to dig into your own pocket a little. You’re not going to be reimbursed for mileage, and you may have to purchase some supplies. But, presumably, it’s worth it for the psychic satisfaction of helping someone in need.
So shouldn’t we be worried about middle-class people who volunteer to be foster parents but who are not willing to pitch in financially, at least a little?
And what if a foster parent says that, on the contrary, she can and does love the children who come through the door, from day one, exactly as if she’d given birth to them? Like most such stories, the Sacramento Bee story begins by profiling a saintly, model foster parent who says, at one point:
"I feel like they're mine. I never see them as my foster kids. We always tell them, 'You're our sons.' "
Leaving aside the fact that this may not, in fact, be good for a child who desperately wants to return to her or his birth parents, does that not also raise a question as to why the foster parent needs to be paid more than she would get if, say, she were a birth mother on welfare?
In fact, the intersection of love and money is a minefield, raising all sorts of uncomfortable questions. For instance, what if the foster parent who comes forward is the child’s grandmother? The former head of the human services agency in one state used to say that her agency wouldn’t help grandparents at all because it’s simply a family’s obligation to take care of their own. Did this same state official return her own parents’ Social Security checks on grounds that she should be picking up the costs of their retirement? I doubt it.
In fact, if any foster parent has a case for supplementing love with money it’s a grandparent who, like the parent, is likely to be poor. But though kinship foster parents usually are much poorer than strangers, they almost always get far less than strangers, unless the kinship parents manage to become licensed foster parents. The problem there is that licensing standards often revolve around middle-class creature comforts like having a bedroom for every foster child rather than just issues of health or safety.
And then there is the argument that, in fact, all parents should receive some sort of pay for being parents, otherwise work that is still done predominantly by women is devalued compared to the work of men.
But we don’t have to stroll through this entire minefield now. The question of the moment is: What is the best way to spend scarce dollars to help children? Help their impoverished birth parents or raise reimbursement for more-likely-to-be-middle-class foster parents?
In endorsing the raise for foster parents, the San Francisco Chronicle writes that “raising rates would help to attract and retain quality foster parents…” Would it? Isn’t one measure of the quality of any parent the willingness to sacrifice a little, financially, for the children in their care?
Similarly, it’s argued that “low” rates are contributing to the loss of foster homes. But is that all bad? Are low rates, in fact, weeding out foster parents who otherwise would go into foster care for the wrong reasons?
The Sacramento Bee story quotes Frank Mecca, executive director of the County Welfare Directors Association, who says: “If they were our children, we'd never treat them this way.”
But the state of California (and every other state) treats children living with impoverished birth parents far worse – witness the proposal to cut welfare benefits which, in every state, already are far lower than payments to foster parents.
And, like so many other such stories, the Bee story ends with this quote from the foster parent profiled:
"It's not like regular work. We never have vacation."
In fact, being a parent of any kind may be the world’s most rewarding combination of work and play, pleasure and frustration. But shouldn’t we worry about the children of any parent who views every moment with them as a chore?
A wonderful foster parent in Maine, Mary Callahan, responded to the 24/7 argument in an op ed column arguing in favor of a cut in reimbursement for foster parents in that state who receive the highest rates of reimbursement. Callahan wrote:
“I am not working when I am sitting around the dinner table with my children talking about the day. Or when we are in front of the television watching our favorite show -- "Lost." Or when we are driving down the road and singing to the oldies.
“Some foster parents might see this as work, but most of the time I am just living my life -- the one I chose -- with my favorite people.
“I never want to give my foster children a reason to doubt that.”
Isn’t that the kind of foster parent any state would want to “attract”?
One postscript: the Bee story and almost every other about the demand for a reimbursement raise included a false analogy. In fact, it sometimes seems that almost every story ever written about foster parent reimbursement includes this analogy, always written with the same tone of shock and outrage. I’ll discuss it next week. One hint, though: It’s a false analogy that has dogged coverage of child welfare for decades.
Monday, May 28, 2007
Unjust Desserts from Pew
Suppose someone set before a group of young children four bowls of food, and asked them to choose one. One bowl contained broccoli, one contained celery, one contained spinach – and one had ice cream. Which would they choose?
The Pew Charitable Trusts just did something similar with another group that has both a low tolerance for delayed gratification and a tendency to like doing what’s easy: Congress.
One of the many “shell groups” Pew has formed to push its agenda issued a report last week on the serious and real problem of children aging out of foster care.
The report then offered four recommendations. Three of them would really help children: Make child welfare funding flexible, fund subsidized guardianships, and allow states to keep savings from reducing foster care. But the latter two would cost more money, and the first one is furiously opposed by the “foster care industrial complex,” that network of big powerful agencies, led by their trade association, the Child Welfare League of America, that lives off a steady supply of foster children. So none of these three is terribly appetizing politically.
But then Pew offered the ice cream: Recommendation four calls for doing no more than repealing the “eligibility lookback,” something described in detail on this Blog on February 6 and February 12. In summary, the lookback is the only remaining restriction on an absolute open-spigot of never-ending entitlement funding for every child placed in foster care for as long as that child is in foster care. Its existence has very, very slowly reduced the proportion of children whose foster care is subsidized by the federal government. It is the one and only pressure point reducing, slightly, the enormous financial incentive in favor of foster care. While simply getting rid of it would increase costs, getting rid of it and reducing the rate of reimbursement per child would be cost neutral. And it would thrill CWLA and its allies. Only the children would be hurt.
So why is Pew jumping on this bandwagon, even though repeal of the lookback was not recommended by Pew’s own Commission on Foster Care? Probably because Pew is run more like a corporation than a philanthropy; the people who run each initiative are expected to produce results. So far, Pew’s big push into child welfare financing reform has produced zero. Its moderate compromise proposal ran into a wall of opposition from the foster care-industrial complex. So now they’ve jumped behind the one change that actually stands a real chance of passage - after which, you can bet they will rush to claim a “victory” – all at the children’s expense.
This is not to say that Pew doesn’t genuinely favor the other three recommendations as well. But the people at Pew know full well what happens if you let a child have his desert before he eats his vegetables.
What makes this even more disturbing is the fact that Pew has enlisted a large number of former foster children, usually college students or a little older, to push its agenda, based on the premise that supporting Pew’s agenda will make it less likely that future generations will have to endure what happened to them. Some of these young people, I am sure, understand the implications of all of these recommendations and genuinely support repeal of the lookback, even if nothing else changes. But I wonder if all of them know that, as long as repeal of the lookback is on the table, this one recommendation, the one that provides more money for foster care, and nothing else, is the only one likely to pass, and everything else is window-dressing?
The recommendations aside, the report on aging out included some important data. It noted that since 1998, the number of children “aging out” of foster care - - that is, thrown out of the system at age 18 with no home of any kind -- has soared by 41 percent.
But, of course, the report made no mention of the principal reason for this tragedy: The so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997.
ASFA pays states a bounty for every finalized adoption over a baseline number. It also encourages states to abandon safe, proven programs to keep families together in favor of responding to every family problem with an approach that boils down to “take the child and run.” So even as the number of children in foster care on any given day dropped slightly, from 520,000 in 1997 to 513,000 in 2000, the number of children taken from their parents each year increased, setting a record of more than 310,000 in 2005.
The lure of adoption bounties prompts states to rush to terminate parental rights. But terminations consistently outrun actual adoptions, creating a generation of legal orphans with no ties to birth parents, but little hope of adoption either. It’s one of many financial incentives promoting either prolonged foster care or adoption at the expense of keeping children out of foster care in the first place or returning them safely to their own homes.
The most effective way to curb the tragedy of children “aging out” of foster care is to keep them from ever “aging in” to the system in the first place. And that’s why we need to make sure Congress eats its vegetables before it gets dessert.
The Pew Charitable Trusts just did something similar with another group that has both a low tolerance for delayed gratification and a tendency to like doing what’s easy: Congress.
One of the many “shell groups” Pew has formed to push its agenda issued a report last week on the serious and real problem of children aging out of foster care.
The report then offered four recommendations. Three of them would really help children: Make child welfare funding flexible, fund subsidized guardianships, and allow states to keep savings from reducing foster care. But the latter two would cost more money, and the first one is furiously opposed by the “foster care industrial complex,” that network of big powerful agencies, led by their trade association, the Child Welfare League of America, that lives off a steady supply of foster children. So none of these three is terribly appetizing politically.
But then Pew offered the ice cream: Recommendation four calls for doing no more than repealing the “eligibility lookback,” something described in detail on this Blog on February 6 and February 12. In summary, the lookback is the only remaining restriction on an absolute open-spigot of never-ending entitlement funding for every child placed in foster care for as long as that child is in foster care. Its existence has very, very slowly reduced the proportion of children whose foster care is subsidized by the federal government. It is the one and only pressure point reducing, slightly, the enormous financial incentive in favor of foster care. While simply getting rid of it would increase costs, getting rid of it and reducing the rate of reimbursement per child would be cost neutral. And it would thrill CWLA and its allies. Only the children would be hurt.
So why is Pew jumping on this bandwagon, even though repeal of the lookback was not recommended by Pew’s own Commission on Foster Care? Probably because Pew is run more like a corporation than a philanthropy; the people who run each initiative are expected to produce results. So far, Pew’s big push into child welfare financing reform has produced zero. Its moderate compromise proposal ran into a wall of opposition from the foster care-industrial complex. So now they’ve jumped behind the one change that actually stands a real chance of passage - after which, you can bet they will rush to claim a “victory” – all at the children’s expense.
This is not to say that Pew doesn’t genuinely favor the other three recommendations as well. But the people at Pew know full well what happens if you let a child have his desert before he eats his vegetables.
What makes this even more disturbing is the fact that Pew has enlisted a large number of former foster children, usually college students or a little older, to push its agenda, based on the premise that supporting Pew’s agenda will make it less likely that future generations will have to endure what happened to them. Some of these young people, I am sure, understand the implications of all of these recommendations and genuinely support repeal of the lookback, even if nothing else changes. But I wonder if all of them know that, as long as repeal of the lookback is on the table, this one recommendation, the one that provides more money for foster care, and nothing else, is the only one likely to pass, and everything else is window-dressing?
The recommendations aside, the report on aging out included some important data. It noted that since 1998, the number of children “aging out” of foster care - - that is, thrown out of the system at age 18 with no home of any kind -- has soared by 41 percent.
But, of course, the report made no mention of the principal reason for this tragedy: The so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997.
ASFA pays states a bounty for every finalized adoption over a baseline number. It also encourages states to abandon safe, proven programs to keep families together in favor of responding to every family problem with an approach that boils down to “take the child and run.” So even as the number of children in foster care on any given day dropped slightly, from 520,000 in 1997 to 513,000 in 2000, the number of children taken from their parents each year increased, setting a record of more than 310,000 in 2005.
The lure of adoption bounties prompts states to rush to terminate parental rights. But terminations consistently outrun actual adoptions, creating a generation of legal orphans with no ties to birth parents, but little hope of adoption either. It’s one of many financial incentives promoting either prolonged foster care or adoption at the expense of keeping children out of foster care in the first place or returning them safely to their own homes.
The most effective way to curb the tragedy of children “aging out” of foster care is to keep them from ever “aging in” to the system in the first place. And that’s why we need to make sure Congress eats its vegetables before it gets dessert.
Monday, May 21, 2007
Piling on in Arizona
Arizona Republic columnist Laurie Roberts wrote another column on the case discussed in last week’s blog, this time mostly to gloat about all the outraged reaction the first column produced. But she also implied that, for all the talk of change at the Arizona child welfare agency over the past four years, nothing has really improved.
She’s right, of course. She just got the reasons wrong. Things haven’t improved because Roberts helped set off a foster-care panic in Arizona four years ago, and even as others wised up, she’s done everything she can to keep it going. So workers remain overwhelmed with cases and they keep on making bad decisions, in both directions.
Roberts also writes that “Last Friday, this newspaper sued CPS, seeking records on three Tucson children who have recently turned up dead on the agency's watch.” Good idea. But Roberts doesn’t explain why the Republic showed no similar interest when two Tucson children died in foster care in rapid succession in 2005. Nor does she explain why she’s never written about those cases, even though the trial of one foster parent took place just last week.
Similarly, an editorial today in the Tucson Citizen, the smaller of the two dailies in that city, says of the recent deaths: “These cases need to be investigated in detail, not only by CPS, but by other authorities working independently from the child-welfare agency.” The editorial notes that had the children been taken from their parents “such moves may have saved their lives.” But the newspaper makes no call to investigate the deaths of the foster children, whose lives might have been saved had they been left in their own homes.
Clearly some children count more than others.
Meanwhile, whoever leaked the file on the Arizona CPS caseworker who wound up as the paramour of a parent she had once investigated had a hefty budget for photocopies. The same case became the lead story in the Citizen last week; and that story found a way to turn one caseworker’s blatant conflict of interest into an attack on all efforts to keep families together. Tucson’s alternative weekly also got the documents, and ran a story pretty much like everybody else’s story.
All of which had to be galling to the editors at the Arizona Daily Star, the other daily in Tucson. When you’ve been beaten by just about everybody, there is enormous pressure to find some way to “advance” the story – or at least look like you have done so.
And that might explain the front-page story in the Star on Saturday, which purported to find two more cases of misbehavior by Arizona CPS workers. And since that totals three, it must, of course, be a pattern.
One of the cases found by the Star reporter (the same one who wrote the highly-selective story about financial incentives discussed in NCCPR’s May 7 Blog, by the way) was, indeed, very serious. It involved a caseworker who was “investigated by police for an inappropriate romantic relationship with one of his teen-age charges in 2003.”
If such charges are true, a worker should be fired. Unless, of course, he’s already on sick leave and quits right after the investigation is completed – as happened in this case. Further punishment becomes a police matter, but, according to the Star story, police did not bring charges because the teenager did not cooperate.
And all of this happened three-and-a-half years ago.
If anyone would appear to be culpable here it is the staff at the group home where the teenager lived. The Star story is not entirely clear, but it appears they waited 11 months before reporting their suspicions to CPS. But group homes are not this reporter’s target, efforts to keep families together are.
The second case involves a 28-year veteran of the agency, who now works as a court liaison. The man’s record apparently was unblemished for the first 23 of those years. Then, according to the Star story:
“…he was charged with domestic violence after throwing something at a young relative during an argument with his wife, police reports and court records show. The charges were dismissed after he completed a treatment plan that included counseling and attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.”
And that’s it. No known problems before, none since. And it happened more than four years ago, in November 2002. But now, since the Star named the man, he and his family can relive all the anguish. I rarely agree with the people who run child welfare agencies, but this time, Ken Deibert, deputy director of the Arizona Department of Economic Security got it right:
"Child-welfare workers can't have problems in their lives?" Deibert told the Star. "It seems like if somebody has a rough spot in their life, they get help, they get services, they get their lives together. What's wrong with that?"
Both the “newly-revealed” incidents occurred before the current leadership team was in place at the child welfare agency. And while I’m glad to blame a lot of what’s wrong with Arizona child welfare on the current Governor, the second incident even predated her taking office.
None of which mattered to the Star reporter, who spun the three cases into still another cheap shot at keeping families together, and a lead describing the incidents as “several cases coming to light in which CPS caseworkers’ personal actions appear to have been in conflict with their professional responsibility.” (Various dictionaries disagree over whether three qualifies as “several,” by the way.) The Star copy desk went the reporter one-better, slapping on the story a headline that read: “Caseworkers’ acts often seem at odds with their CPS jobs,” [emphasis added.]
A lot of caseworkers are likely to complain to Star editors about that, and you can bet they’ll go the other extreme, and assign what I’ve come to call the “national model worker story,” (See the June 12, 2006 Blog entry for a discussion of this genre) in which a CPS worker of the agency’s choosing is followed around and gets to complain about being “damned if we do and damned if we don’t.” That kind of story is equally misleading. Particularly since, when it comes to taking away children, caseworkers are only damned if they don’t.
And then what? The foster-care panic surges on, the children keep on dying, and it is left to others to clean up the mess.
She’s right, of course. She just got the reasons wrong. Things haven’t improved because Roberts helped set off a foster-care panic in Arizona four years ago, and even as others wised up, she’s done everything she can to keep it going. So workers remain overwhelmed with cases and they keep on making bad decisions, in both directions.
Roberts also writes that “Last Friday, this newspaper sued CPS, seeking records on three Tucson children who have recently turned up dead on the agency's watch.” Good idea. But Roberts doesn’t explain why the Republic showed no similar interest when two Tucson children died in foster care in rapid succession in 2005. Nor does she explain why she’s never written about those cases, even though the trial of one foster parent took place just last week.
Similarly, an editorial today in the Tucson Citizen, the smaller of the two dailies in that city, says of the recent deaths: “These cases need to be investigated in detail, not only by CPS, but by other authorities working independently from the child-welfare agency.” The editorial notes that had the children been taken from their parents “such moves may have saved their lives.” But the newspaper makes no call to investigate the deaths of the foster children, whose lives might have been saved had they been left in their own homes.
Clearly some children count more than others.
Meanwhile, whoever leaked the file on the Arizona CPS caseworker who wound up as the paramour of a parent she had once investigated had a hefty budget for photocopies. The same case became the lead story in the Citizen last week; and that story found a way to turn one caseworker’s blatant conflict of interest into an attack on all efforts to keep families together. Tucson’s alternative weekly also got the documents, and ran a story pretty much like everybody else’s story.
All of which had to be galling to the editors at the Arizona Daily Star, the other daily in Tucson. When you’ve been beaten by just about everybody, there is enormous pressure to find some way to “advance” the story – or at least look like you have done so.
And that might explain the front-page story in the Star on Saturday, which purported to find two more cases of misbehavior by Arizona CPS workers. And since that totals three, it must, of course, be a pattern.
One of the cases found by the Star reporter (the same one who wrote the highly-selective story about financial incentives discussed in NCCPR’s May 7 Blog, by the way) was, indeed, very serious. It involved a caseworker who was “investigated by police for an inappropriate romantic relationship with one of his teen-age charges in 2003.”
If such charges are true, a worker should be fired. Unless, of course, he’s already on sick leave and quits right after the investigation is completed – as happened in this case. Further punishment becomes a police matter, but, according to the Star story, police did not bring charges because the teenager did not cooperate.
And all of this happened three-and-a-half years ago.
If anyone would appear to be culpable here it is the staff at the group home where the teenager lived. The Star story is not entirely clear, but it appears they waited 11 months before reporting their suspicions to CPS. But group homes are not this reporter’s target, efforts to keep families together are.
The second case involves a 28-year veteran of the agency, who now works as a court liaison. The man’s record apparently was unblemished for the first 23 of those years. Then, according to the Star story:
“…he was charged with domestic violence after throwing something at a young relative during an argument with his wife, police reports and court records show. The charges were dismissed after he completed a treatment plan that included counseling and attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.”
And that’s it. No known problems before, none since. And it happened more than four years ago, in November 2002. But now, since the Star named the man, he and his family can relive all the anguish. I rarely agree with the people who run child welfare agencies, but this time, Ken Deibert, deputy director of the Arizona Department of Economic Security got it right:
"Child-welfare workers can't have problems in their lives?" Deibert told the Star. "It seems like if somebody has a rough spot in their life, they get help, they get services, they get their lives together. What's wrong with that?"
Both the “newly-revealed” incidents occurred before the current leadership team was in place at the child welfare agency. And while I’m glad to blame a lot of what’s wrong with Arizona child welfare on the current Governor, the second incident even predated her taking office.
None of which mattered to the Star reporter, who spun the three cases into still another cheap shot at keeping families together, and a lead describing the incidents as “several cases coming to light in which CPS caseworkers’ personal actions appear to have been in conflict with their professional responsibility.” (Various dictionaries disagree over whether three qualifies as “several,” by the way.) The Star copy desk went the reporter one-better, slapping on the story a headline that read: “Caseworkers’ acts often seem at odds with their CPS jobs,” [emphasis added.]
A lot of caseworkers are likely to complain to Star editors about that, and you can bet they’ll go the other extreme, and assign what I’ve come to call the “national model worker story,” (See the June 12, 2006 Blog entry for a discussion of this genre) in which a CPS worker of the agency’s choosing is followed around and gets to complain about being “damned if we do and damned if we don’t.” That kind of story is equally misleading. Particularly since, when it comes to taking away children, caseworkers are only damned if they don’t.
And then what? The foster-care panic surges on, the children keep on dying, and it is left to others to clean up the mess.
Sunday, May 13, 2007
Doublethink in the desert
Last week’s Blog noted that Arizona has descended into a state of perennial foster-care panic. Between October 2002 and October 2004, removals of children soared 40 percent. They’ve stayed at that same level ever since. And, of course, instead of making children safer, it only further overwhelmed workers. Deaths of children previously “known to the system” set a record in 2005.
One reason the panic has never been allowed to abate is that one of the state’s more powerful media voices has never allowed it to abate. Almost everyone who encouraged the panic back in 2002 and 2003 soon realized it was a mistake (they don’t acknowledge this, but by about May of 2003 their rhetoric had changed dramatically). But one columnist still thinks the answer to every child welfare problem is “take the child and run.”
So every time there’s a chance the panic might calm down, Arizona Republic metro columnist Laurie Roberts finds a way to help keep it going. She’s written dozens of columns, all with the same theme: Arizona Child Protective Services is not aggressive enough about taking away children.
It’s never hard to find horror stories to bolster that particular false premise. Child welfare systems tend to be arbitrary, capricious and cruel. They make horrible mistakes in both directions – leaving some children in dangerous homes, even as other children are taken from homes that are safe or could be made safe with the right kinds of help, only to face the terrors of foster care.
And if there’s a horrible mistake, Laurie Roberts wants to hear about it – so long as it’s only the first kind. Any CPS worker who wants to resist the state’s feeble efforts to turn the tide and do more to help families knows that all she has to do is feed information about the latest God-awful screw-up to Roberts and there’ll be a column, or two, or three, to scare workers away from keeping families together. (These workers would not have such power, of course, if CPS agencies weren’t so obsessive about secrecy.)
But it’s not the columns Roberts writes that are the problem - when an agency screws up, its failings need to see the light of day - it’s the columns she doesn’t. You’ll never find a Laurie Roberts column about, say, Patrick Traufler, or Emily Mays or Dwight Hill – because they had the temerity to die in foster care. And impoverished birth parents can write and call and e-mail forever, asking her to please look into their claims of wrongful removal. It’s not going to happen. The one and only time I know of where she did write about such a case was on one of the very rare occasions when the injustice reached into the kind of middle-class family with whom journalists can identify.
Sadly, this is not all that unusual among reporters and columnists. But I would have thought Roberts’ most recent column might have made her wonder.
It involved a caseworker’s dealings with a father who had a long record of trouble with the law and with CPS. In 2002, she recommended reuniting the father and his children; he’d lost them to a neglect charge in 2000. Four months later, the same father allegedly beat one of his children. Six weeks later, that case was closed. In 2004, the youngest child allegedly suffered serious physical abuse at the hands of the father – who, by that time was romantically involved with the caseworker from the 2002 cases.
CPS found nothing wrong with this because the caseworker said she did not become romantically involved with the father until a year after the 2002 cases were closed. Not only was the caseworker not sanctioned, she was promoted.
Ironies abound here. First, in suggesting that the caseworker-turned-paramour had a role in closing the second case in 2002, Roberts writes this: “While a judge would have had to approve the plan, CPS workers tell me that judges rely heavily on the case manager's input and that it would be rare for such a thing to happen without the case manager's OK.”
That is true. But you almost never hear caseworkers admit that they are the ones with the real power. On the contrary, ask them about wrongful removal and they’ll make absurd claims about “checks and balances” that don’t really exist, and then piously proclaim that “we don’t take away children, only a judge can do that.” And journalists like Roberts tend to be the first to buy it.
Even more striking, however, are the overall allegations against the caseworker. They bear a remarkable resemblance to things often said by those claiming their children were wrongfully taken. Often these parents allege that caseworkers behaved unethically, threatened them, retaliated against them for going public or just plain lied in their reports to superiors and to the courts. Or, as a far more open-minded columnist wrote years ago, quoting a mother who had strong evidence for such behavior: “They lie, they lie, they awfully lie.”
But that columnist was exceptional. More often, when an accused birth parent says it, the Laurie Roberts’ of the world roll their eyes, and send the e-mails and letters into the circular file.
In fairness to the overwhelming majority of caseworkers who try their best in an often-impossible job, outright lying probably is rare - though not quite as rare as romantic relationships with accused child abusers. The more common problem is rooted in human nature: We all tend to hear what we want to hear or expect to hear. That’s one reason the pervasive secrecy surrounding CPS is so dangerous and it’s why all interviews conducted by CPS workers should be tape-recorded.
But it takes more than human nature to believe that when workers allegedly behave unethically it is only in the direction of keeping children with abusers, and the same workers never, ever stretch the truth to take away a child.
Believing that takes a willful act of denial.
One reason the panic has never been allowed to abate is that one of the state’s more powerful media voices has never allowed it to abate. Almost everyone who encouraged the panic back in 2002 and 2003 soon realized it was a mistake (they don’t acknowledge this, but by about May of 2003 their rhetoric had changed dramatically). But one columnist still thinks the answer to every child welfare problem is “take the child and run.”
So every time there’s a chance the panic might calm down, Arizona Republic metro columnist Laurie Roberts finds a way to help keep it going. She’s written dozens of columns, all with the same theme: Arizona Child Protective Services is not aggressive enough about taking away children.
It’s never hard to find horror stories to bolster that particular false premise. Child welfare systems tend to be arbitrary, capricious and cruel. They make horrible mistakes in both directions – leaving some children in dangerous homes, even as other children are taken from homes that are safe or could be made safe with the right kinds of help, only to face the terrors of foster care.
And if there’s a horrible mistake, Laurie Roberts wants to hear about it – so long as it’s only the first kind. Any CPS worker who wants to resist the state’s feeble efforts to turn the tide and do more to help families knows that all she has to do is feed information about the latest God-awful screw-up to Roberts and there’ll be a column, or two, or three, to scare workers away from keeping families together. (These workers would not have such power, of course, if CPS agencies weren’t so obsessive about secrecy.)
But it’s not the columns Roberts writes that are the problem - when an agency screws up, its failings need to see the light of day - it’s the columns she doesn’t. You’ll never find a Laurie Roberts column about, say, Patrick Traufler, or Emily Mays or Dwight Hill – because they had the temerity to die in foster care. And impoverished birth parents can write and call and e-mail forever, asking her to please look into their claims of wrongful removal. It’s not going to happen. The one and only time I know of where she did write about such a case was on one of the very rare occasions when the injustice reached into the kind of middle-class family with whom journalists can identify.
Sadly, this is not all that unusual among reporters and columnists. But I would have thought Roberts’ most recent column might have made her wonder.
It involved a caseworker’s dealings with a father who had a long record of trouble with the law and with CPS. In 2002, she recommended reuniting the father and his children; he’d lost them to a neglect charge in 2000. Four months later, the same father allegedly beat one of his children. Six weeks later, that case was closed. In 2004, the youngest child allegedly suffered serious physical abuse at the hands of the father – who, by that time was romantically involved with the caseworker from the 2002 cases.
CPS found nothing wrong with this because the caseworker said she did not become romantically involved with the father until a year after the 2002 cases were closed. Not only was the caseworker not sanctioned, she was promoted.
Ironies abound here. First, in suggesting that the caseworker-turned-paramour had a role in closing the second case in 2002, Roberts writes this: “While a judge would have had to approve the plan, CPS workers tell me that judges rely heavily on the case manager's input and that it would be rare for such a thing to happen without the case manager's OK.”
That is true. But you almost never hear caseworkers admit that they are the ones with the real power. On the contrary, ask them about wrongful removal and they’ll make absurd claims about “checks and balances” that don’t really exist, and then piously proclaim that “we don’t take away children, only a judge can do that.” And journalists like Roberts tend to be the first to buy it.
Even more striking, however, are the overall allegations against the caseworker. They bear a remarkable resemblance to things often said by those claiming their children were wrongfully taken. Often these parents allege that caseworkers behaved unethically, threatened them, retaliated against them for going public or just plain lied in their reports to superiors and to the courts. Or, as a far more open-minded columnist wrote years ago, quoting a mother who had strong evidence for such behavior: “They lie, they lie, they awfully lie.”
But that columnist was exceptional. More often, when an accused birth parent says it, the Laurie Roberts’ of the world roll their eyes, and send the e-mails and letters into the circular file.
In fairness to the overwhelming majority of caseworkers who try their best in an often-impossible job, outright lying probably is rare - though not quite as rare as romantic relationships with accused child abusers. The more common problem is rooted in human nature: We all tend to hear what we want to hear or expect to hear. That’s one reason the pervasive secrecy surrounding CPS is so dangerous and it’s why all interviews conducted by CPS workers should be tape-recorded.
But it takes more than human nature to believe that when workers allegedly behave unethically it is only in the direction of keeping children with abusers, and the same workers never, ever stretch the truth to take away a child.
Believing that takes a willful act of denial.
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