Monday, August 13, 2007
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Why the New York City police should hire 100 social workers
Suppose, hypothetically, after an extreme case of police brutality made headlines in New York City, the Mayor ordered the city’s Department of Investigation to investigate community-police relations. But lets suppose the method he chose was to have DOI single out the nine most horrendous instances of alleged police abuse and see what lessons there are to be learned about the police department as a whole.
No doubt, the resulting report would be filled with broad-brush condemnations of how police “often” attacked innocent civilians, “regularly” trampled on civil liberties and “routinely” abused their power. After all, case after case – among those nine cases – revealed those problems. Indeed, DOI might well suggest that the NYPD hire, say, 100 social workers to accompany cops and aid them in learning how to properly deal with the communities they serve.
And everyone immediately would realize why the whole report was absurd.
But of course it doesn’t work that way with child welfare.
So when DOI, on orders from the Mayor, examined nine cases in which children “known to the system” were killed and filled the resulting report with “oftens” “regularlys” and “routinelys” every news organization accepted it at face value. And everyone seized upon DOI’s recommendation that the city’s Administration for Children’s Services hire 100 more people with law enforcement backgrounds, typically former police detectives, to assist its caseworkers.
Of course, it didn’t help that ACS meekly accepted the report and its recommendations.
One can only imagine what DOI would have recommended had it gotten a very different set of marching orders. Suppose the Mayor had said: Canvass the organizations providing defense counsel in child abuse cases, and those helping birth parents advocate for themselves in such cases, and ask them for the nine worst cases of taking children from innocent families they’ve seen in the past year. Then examine each case and generalize from it.
The resulting report would be all about how ACS often tears apart families for no reason, regularly confuses poverty with neglect and routinely distorts information presented to the court. It would, no doubt include a series of recommendations to curb the power of ACS, not add to it. But, of course, no political leader is ever likely to commission a report like that.
A clear example of how the skewed sample biased DOI’s findings concerns its contention that ACS workers “often” labeled cases as unfounded when they should have been substantiated. Perhaps they do. I’m not aware of any recent objective data on that. But older data suggest the opposite. First, the one time a national study second-guessed these decisions it found that workers were two to six times more likely to wrongly substantiate a case than they were to wrongly label a guilty parent innocent. And in New York, statewide, a class-action lawsuit in the early 1990s revealed that 75 percent of the time, when parents appeal a finding of substantiation, that finding is overturned – even though it’s an administrative hearing that applies the same standard of proof as the caseworker from the child welfare agency. (NCCPR’s Vice President was co-counsel for plaintiffs in that lawsuit.)
The only way to know what a child welfare agency does often, regularly, and routinely is to examine a random sample of cases – and have the examination done by experts with a track record for objectivity, or experts whose biases balance each other.
That’s what the first head of New Jersey’s Office of Child Advocate, Kevin Ryan, did. He recognized that making recommendations based solely on reviewing fatalities inherently distorts the process and gives an erroneous impression of what kinds of mistakes are routine, regular and happen often. So, at NCCPR’s suggestion, he audited a random sample of cases involving families under the supervision of the state child welfare agency. He found that caseworkers routinely, regularly and often made mistakes – in all directions. He also found a series of problems beyond those workers’ control. (Now, Ryan has the unenviable task of trying to solve the problem; he runs the state child welfare agency).
Similarly, Leroy Pelton, professor of social work at the University of Nevada – Las Vegas, and one of the most distinguished scholars in the field, recently completed a case reading of a random sample of cases in metropolitan Las Vegas.
Among his findings:
“case plans ordinarily consisted merely of sets of demands: ‘Father will complete drug treatment program…parents will obtain housing, attend parenting classes…’; ‘Mother will apply for housing; maintain adequate income’; ‘Father will complete parenting classes’; ‘(Mother) will obtain stable housing’; ‘Mother will complete a six week parenting class…will obtain and maintain stable housing and employment’; ‘Parents will obtain and maintain stable and adequate housing’; ‘Mother will maintain stable and appropriate housing.’ All of the foregoing quotations are from case plans in cases in which the parents were homeless.”
The study found that DFS workers seemed to have little concept of the enormous emotional trauma inflicted upon children when they are torn from everyone they know and love, institutionalized, and then moved from placement to placement.
Prof. Pelton found that some common practices by child welfare authorities are “breathtaking in their insensitivity to the safety and well-being of children” and wind up “creating a child protection problem” where none existed before. The study also documented errors in the other direction: two cases where children were left in dangerous homes when they should have been removed.
Like DOI, Prof. Pelton also recommended some new hiring. But instead of former police officers, he recommended hiring housing counselors whose one task would be to help families at risk of losing their children because of housing problems to get the housing they need.
It’s amazing what you find out when you look at cases at random.
In fact, having experienced law enforcement officers as a resource for child protective caseworkers makes sense – and not only for the obvious reasons. Having people around who understand concepts like “evidence” can help exonerate innocent families.
Even where the entire job has been turned over to law enforcement, the results haven’t been anything like what backers of a take-the-child-and-run approach had expected. In one state where investigations in several counties are handled by law enforcement there was little change in rates of removal, or quality of investigations. The investigator in charge of child abuse cases in one county law enforcement agency even called up NCCPR to describe how angry he was at the lack of discretion given his officers by the state’s child abuse hotline. Whereas his officers could ignore obviously false leads, crank calls and efforts to harass people in criminal cases, the child abuse unit had to pursue everything sent from the state hotline, no matter how absurd.
But it does not follow that hiring more ex-cops should be any child welfare agency’s top priority. ACS already has 18 former police detectives available to help its caseworkers (two more positions are vacant). Hiring 100 more would cost several million dollars. There are lots of things ACS could do with that money that would do far more to keep children safe – like pouring those funds into rent subsidies, day care, and other concrete help.
But the larger problem with the report is simply that it is one more document leaving the false impression that the errors go only one way. That – plus ACS’ dutiful response – makes it one more message to caseworkers that they can take away every child in sight and suffer no penalty. The only time they put themselves at risk is when they leave a child in her or his home and something goes wrong.
It’s one more reason to expect that just as the surge in removals of children might be slowing down, it’s going to start up again.
And that means more devastated families and a higher load for caseworkers – and overloaded caseworkers are the root cause of most preventable child abuse tragedies. Not always, of course, but often, regularly, and routinely.
No doubt, the resulting report would be filled with broad-brush condemnations of how police “often” attacked innocent civilians, “regularly” trampled on civil liberties and “routinely” abused their power. After all, case after case – among those nine cases – revealed those problems. Indeed, DOI might well suggest that the NYPD hire, say, 100 social workers to accompany cops and aid them in learning how to properly deal with the communities they serve.
And everyone immediately would realize why the whole report was absurd.
But of course it doesn’t work that way with child welfare.
So when DOI, on orders from the Mayor, examined nine cases in which children “known to the system” were killed and filled the resulting report with “oftens” “regularlys” and “routinelys” every news organization accepted it at face value. And everyone seized upon DOI’s recommendation that the city’s Administration for Children’s Services hire 100 more people with law enforcement backgrounds, typically former police detectives, to assist its caseworkers.
Of course, it didn’t help that ACS meekly accepted the report and its recommendations.
One can only imagine what DOI would have recommended had it gotten a very different set of marching orders. Suppose the Mayor had said: Canvass the organizations providing defense counsel in child abuse cases, and those helping birth parents advocate for themselves in such cases, and ask them for the nine worst cases of taking children from innocent families they’ve seen in the past year. Then examine each case and generalize from it.
The resulting report would be all about how ACS often tears apart families for no reason, regularly confuses poverty with neglect and routinely distorts information presented to the court. It would, no doubt include a series of recommendations to curb the power of ACS, not add to it. But, of course, no political leader is ever likely to commission a report like that.
A clear example of how the skewed sample biased DOI’s findings concerns its contention that ACS workers “often” labeled cases as unfounded when they should have been substantiated. Perhaps they do. I’m not aware of any recent objective data on that. But older data suggest the opposite. First, the one time a national study second-guessed these decisions it found that workers were two to six times more likely to wrongly substantiate a case than they were to wrongly label a guilty parent innocent. And in New York, statewide, a class-action lawsuit in the early 1990s revealed that 75 percent of the time, when parents appeal a finding of substantiation, that finding is overturned – even though it’s an administrative hearing that applies the same standard of proof as the caseworker from the child welfare agency. (NCCPR’s Vice President was co-counsel for plaintiffs in that lawsuit.)
The only way to know what a child welfare agency does often, regularly, and routinely is to examine a random sample of cases – and have the examination done by experts with a track record for objectivity, or experts whose biases balance each other.
That’s what the first head of New Jersey’s Office of Child Advocate, Kevin Ryan, did. He recognized that making recommendations based solely on reviewing fatalities inherently distorts the process and gives an erroneous impression of what kinds of mistakes are routine, regular and happen often. So, at NCCPR’s suggestion, he audited a random sample of cases involving families under the supervision of the state child welfare agency. He found that caseworkers routinely, regularly and often made mistakes – in all directions. He also found a series of problems beyond those workers’ control. (Now, Ryan has the unenviable task of trying to solve the problem; he runs the state child welfare agency).
Similarly, Leroy Pelton, professor of social work at the University of Nevada – Las Vegas, and one of the most distinguished scholars in the field, recently completed a case reading of a random sample of cases in metropolitan Las Vegas.
Among his findings:
“case plans ordinarily consisted merely of sets of demands: ‘Father will complete drug treatment program…parents will obtain housing, attend parenting classes…’; ‘Mother will apply for housing; maintain adequate income’; ‘Father will complete parenting classes’; ‘(Mother) will obtain stable housing’; ‘Mother will complete a six week parenting class…will obtain and maintain stable housing and employment’; ‘Parents will obtain and maintain stable and adequate housing’; ‘Mother will maintain stable and appropriate housing.’ All of the foregoing quotations are from case plans in cases in which the parents were homeless.”
The study found that DFS workers seemed to have little concept of the enormous emotional trauma inflicted upon children when they are torn from everyone they know and love, institutionalized, and then moved from placement to placement.
Prof. Pelton found that some common practices by child welfare authorities are “breathtaking in their insensitivity to the safety and well-being of children” and wind up “creating a child protection problem” where none existed before. The study also documented errors in the other direction: two cases where children were left in dangerous homes when they should have been removed.
Like DOI, Prof. Pelton also recommended some new hiring. But instead of former police officers, he recommended hiring housing counselors whose one task would be to help families at risk of losing their children because of housing problems to get the housing they need.
It’s amazing what you find out when you look at cases at random.
In fact, having experienced law enforcement officers as a resource for child protective caseworkers makes sense – and not only for the obvious reasons. Having people around who understand concepts like “evidence” can help exonerate innocent families.
Even where the entire job has been turned over to law enforcement, the results haven’t been anything like what backers of a take-the-child-and-run approach had expected. In one state where investigations in several counties are handled by law enforcement there was little change in rates of removal, or quality of investigations. The investigator in charge of child abuse cases in one county law enforcement agency even called up NCCPR to describe how angry he was at the lack of discretion given his officers by the state’s child abuse hotline. Whereas his officers could ignore obviously false leads, crank calls and efforts to harass people in criminal cases, the child abuse unit had to pursue everything sent from the state hotline, no matter how absurd.
But it does not follow that hiring more ex-cops should be any child welfare agency’s top priority. ACS already has 18 former police detectives available to help its caseworkers (two more positions are vacant). Hiring 100 more would cost several million dollars. There are lots of things ACS could do with that money that would do far more to keep children safe – like pouring those funds into rent subsidies, day care, and other concrete help.
But the larger problem with the report is simply that it is one more document leaving the false impression that the errors go only one way. That – plus ACS’ dutiful response – makes it one more message to caseworkers that they can take away every child in sight and suffer no penalty. The only time they put themselves at risk is when they leave a child in her or his home and something goes wrong.
It’s one more reason to expect that just as the surge in removals of children might be slowing down, it’s going to start up again.
And that means more devastated families and a higher load for caseworkers – and overloaded caseworkers are the root cause of most preventable child abuse tragedies. Not always, of course, but often, regularly, and routinely.
Sunday, August 5, 2007
Class and courage trump the Red Queen
This is a story about class and courage at a child protective services agency – in Florida, no less.
It doesn’t begin well, of course. It begins the way many stories begin with the death of a child “known to the system” in Palm Beach County, Florida, last year. The case was ambiguous; not one of those where the file had more “red flags” than a Soviet May Day parade. It’s clear the caseworker should have asked more questions. But there is nothing to indicate the worker’s supervisor, Michele Fuhrman, did anything wrong.
And Fuhrman, a 20-year veteran, was not your average supervisor. According to The Palm Beach Post:
DCF bosses regularly judged Fuhrman's work as outstanding. As an investigator, she routinely came to work at 6:30 a.m. to field calls and joined the rapid response team, which meant that she could be called in at any hour to investigate critical incidents of child abuse.
"Michele's honesty, caring attitude and excellent child safety assessment skills stand out the most," a supervisor wrote in 2002.
Over one 17-month period from 1999 to 2000, Fuhrman investigated 336 cases, many of them time-consuming and complex, according to her file. She volunteered to take the most difficult cases and often pitched in to help others with their own cases.
But child welfare agencies are firm believers in the Red Queen School of Management. And the aftermath of the death of a child “known to the system” is never complete without the Ritual Sacrifice of the Caseworker. So the Florida Department of Children and Families first demoted Fuhrman and then forced out of her job.
And there the story would have ended, if not for Alan Abramowitz. Abramowitz has become something of a trouble-shooter for DCF – and that makes him a very busy man in Florida’s now heavily-decentralized, heavily privatized child welfare system. He and the head of the privatized lead agency in Volusia and Flagler Counties, Ron Zychowski, played a key role in turning around that district. Then he led major changes in the Orlando area. About a month ago, he was sent to Palm Beach County as acting District Administrator there.
Some years ago, Abramowitz had been Deputy District Administrator in Palm Beach County. He knew Fuhrman and he knew her good work. So among his first acts as acting District Administrator: Offered Fuhrman her job back.
Fuhrman, in fact, had landed another, very good job. She was doing just fine. But she cared too much about the children to turn the offer down. So I don’t know which is more impressive: Abramowitz making the offer or Fuhrman, who had every reason to tell DCF exactly what it could do with its job, accepting.
Now, an injustice to one individual has been at least partially rectified. The children of Palm Beach County once again will benefit from Fuhrman’s experience, dedication and good judgment. And, for once, a child welfare agency is sending the right message to the frontlines: We’ll hold you accountable when it’s really your fault, but we’re not going to make you scapegoats.
A little class and a little courage can trump the Red Queen.
It doesn’t begin well, of course. It begins the way many stories begin with the death of a child “known to the system” in Palm Beach County, Florida, last year. The case was ambiguous; not one of those where the file had more “red flags” than a Soviet May Day parade. It’s clear the caseworker should have asked more questions. But there is nothing to indicate the worker’s supervisor, Michele Fuhrman, did anything wrong.
And Fuhrman, a 20-year veteran, was not your average supervisor. According to The Palm Beach Post:
DCF bosses regularly judged Fuhrman's work as outstanding. As an investigator, she routinely came to work at 6:30 a.m. to field calls and joined the rapid response team, which meant that she could be called in at any hour to investigate critical incidents of child abuse.
"Michele's honesty, caring attitude and excellent child safety assessment skills stand out the most," a supervisor wrote in 2002.
Over one 17-month period from 1999 to 2000, Fuhrman investigated 336 cases, many of them time-consuming and complex, according to her file. She volunteered to take the most difficult cases and often pitched in to help others with their own cases.
But child welfare agencies are firm believers in the Red Queen School of Management. And the aftermath of the death of a child “known to the system” is never complete without the Ritual Sacrifice of the Caseworker. So the Florida Department of Children and Families first demoted Fuhrman and then forced out of her job.
And there the story would have ended, if not for Alan Abramowitz. Abramowitz has become something of a trouble-shooter for DCF – and that makes him a very busy man in Florida’s now heavily-decentralized, heavily privatized child welfare system. He and the head of the privatized lead agency in Volusia and Flagler Counties, Ron Zychowski, played a key role in turning around that district. Then he led major changes in the Orlando area. About a month ago, he was sent to Palm Beach County as acting District Administrator there.
Some years ago, Abramowitz had been Deputy District Administrator in Palm Beach County. He knew Fuhrman and he knew her good work. So among his first acts as acting District Administrator: Offered Fuhrman her job back.
Fuhrman, in fact, had landed another, very good job. She was doing just fine. But she cared too much about the children to turn the offer down. So I don’t know which is more impressive: Abramowitz making the offer or Fuhrman, who had every reason to tell DCF exactly what it could do with its job, accepting.
Now, an injustice to one individual has been at least partially rectified. The children of Palm Beach County once again will benefit from Fuhrman’s experience, dedication and good judgment. And, for once, a child welfare agency is sending the right message to the frontlines: We’ll hold you accountable when it’s really your fault, but we’re not going to make you scapegoats.
A little class and a little courage can trump the Red Queen.
Sunday, July 29, 2007
The children wronged by "Children's Rights"
The organization with the breathtaking arrogance to name itself “Children’s Rights,” as though the adults who run it and their wealthy benefactors (corporate raider Carl Icahn once chaired the Board of Directors) are the only ones who stand up for children, and the only ones who know what those rights should be, has struck again.
By children’s rights be assured that Children’s Rights does not mean the right of children to be free from unreasonable search and seizure. It does not mean the right to be with the parents who love and cherish them but may be too poor to keep them out of the hands of a child welfare agency. And it certainly doesn’t mean the right to be free from the racial and class bias that has permeated child welfare for more than 150 years. On the contrary, CR’s founder, Marcia Lowry, has dismissed all that as a “liberal agenda” for which she has no time.
That, no doubt, endears her to New York City’s large community of neoconservatives, who dominated public policy during the Giuliani administration. But the neocons have done no better for the children of New York that they have for the children of Baghdad. And CR’s latest analysis of child welfare in New York is about as useful as a lesson on military strategy from Donald Rumsfeld.
The analysis purports to show that reabuse of children worsened during recent reforms in New York City, when the city was taking away fewer children.
But two huge problems stand out immediately:
1. The starting line
2. The finish line.
The report begins with 2000 and ends with 2005. There is no logical reason for this. Data for most indicators are available back to 1993 and reabuse data are available back at least to 1998. Data also are available for 2006. Nothing in particular happened in 2000. There was no reorganization of the city child welfare agency, no change in leadership. And including 2006 data is crucial in order to measure the impact of the huge increase in removals of children that occurred that year in the wake of the death of Nixzmary Brown.
But including data before and after CR’s arbitrary choice immediately undercuts any connection between an alleged decline in safety and a decline in removals.
To see the real trend, including data for every year available, have a look at NCCPR’s report on New York City child welfare, Don’t Turn Back. The stats can be found on page 19.
The first thing anyone who has both this document and CR’s will notice is that, except for fatality data, all our numbers differ from CR's even though we’re both using city sources. That’s probably because, except for fatality numbers, our data are for fiscal years, and the CR report uses calendar year data.
But beyond that, the bigger picture is different from that portrayed in CR’s report.
For starters, consider reabuse of children left in their own homes. Yes, it went up from 2000 through 2005, when removals were declining. But in FY 2006, when removals soared, it went up again. Yet CR seeks to link the increase to the decline in entries into foster care. CR also omits data for 1998, when removals were at their height and reabuse was much greater – though that figure does not come directly from the city, it comes from The New York Times.
So what is the longer-term trend?
In all the years for which data are available, reabuse was at its worst when the city was taking the most children. Reabuse fell sharply, then has slowly increased, both when fewer children were taken and when more children were taken.
More significant is how CR has left out context concerning the second key safety indicator, foster care recidivism - the proportion of children sent home from foster care who must be placed again within 12 months.
For starters, CR fails to acknowledge that this is a safety indicator, providing data on this indicator only in the context of another important outcome, permanence. In fact, it’s a very important safety indicator, since a child is unlikely to have to be returned to foster care unless the child welfare agency thinks that child is unsafe. (Whether the agency is right or whether this was, in fact, a failure to provide support for the family after reunification is another story; indeed, there are indications that often it is the latter, something discussed further below.)
Data on this measure are available all the way back to 1993. And they show significant improvement starting when removals of children started to decline. And this time, the fact is, the improvement continued during the 2006 surge. That may be because, as a far better report just released from the Center for an Urban Future notes, the city has begun a program to provide intensive help to reunified families.
Overall, the rate of foster care recidivism in 2006 is more than 33 percent lower than it was in 1998, when the city was taking almost twice as many children.
At least as disturbing, however, is the way CR spins its own more limited data on this measure. A pullquote on page 102 cites a “25 percent increase” in this figure from 2004 to 2005 – with the percentage going from 8 percent to 10 percent.
Well, yes. But the chart on the previous page shows that for each of the three previous years, the figure was nine percent. So the 2004 figure may well have been a fluke. One unusually low year, followed by one unusually high year tells us nothing. Taking the two years in isolation suggests a trend that may not exist.
The one figure for which CR couldn’t avoid mentioning the year 2006 is deaths of children previously known to the city child welfare agency, since, at least within the child welfare community, that figure is well-known.
But that created a huge problem in PR for CR. Such deaths, in fact, soared in 2006, to their highest level since 1993. Not exactly a testament to the safety of taking away huge numbers of additional children – particularly since the previous record for such fatalities, 36, was set in 1998, during the height of the foster-care panic that gripped the city after the death of Elisa Izquierdo.
Back then, CR’s solution was to highlight the fatalities but simply ignore the increase in removals. This time, they decided to simply reverse their previous position and say that fatalities are a lousy measure of system performance after all. According to the report:
“…the number of fatalities in a given year, and even fluctuations in this number between years, are not particularly good indicators of how well a child welfare system is performing. The number of child fatalities is extremely small, compared to the overall number of children involved with the child welfare system. ACS investigates more than 50,000 reports of suspected abuse and neglect each year and more than 40,000 children are in contact with ACS at any given time in preventive services and foster care cases. During the last decade, an average of 26 children per year who were previously known to ACS died as a result of child abuse and neglect. Fluctuations in such a small number from year to year are likely to be random and not due to the nature or quality of particular policy or service approaches being utilized by the child welfare agency.”
Good point. It should be. It’s a point NCCPR has been making for years – though we always add that as long as fatalities are the measure of choice for the media, we will continue to point out the one consistent pattern all over the country: The deaths go up in the wake of a foster-care panic.
But while we’re glad to see CR realize the limits of fatalities as a measure, we’re puzzled by the fact that they never noticed this before. A report issued by CR in 1999 took the opposite view. And during late 2005 and early 2006, when a New York Times reporter used almost every story she wrote about a child abuse death to note that the death “comes at a time when” or “raises questions about” efforts to keep families together, CR never sought to correct her. Only when deaths soared after the city took far more children did CR decide there is no connection.
That would be the same Times reporter who described the deaths as a “series” of fatalities when, in fact, there had been no change in the rate of such deaths. (“It was a series,” the reporter would say later, “but not statistically.”) Then, when such deaths really did soar to their highest level since 1993, the Times declined to report it.
Needless to say, CR knew exactly where to leak its report ahead of its formal release in order to be sure there would be a news story with no real critical scrutiny. The Times reporter, who previously ignored data on reabuse suddenly found that they were important when spun CR’s way. And the Times reporter, who previously had used fatalities to measure system performance, now finds those data are not even worth mentioning.
And finally, there’s one more number that may be the most important of all, even though it doesn’t come from New York City: 15,000.
That’s the number of children whose cases were examined in the new, landmark study comparing children placed in foster care to comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes, discussed in the July 8 Blog entry. On average, the children left in their own homes did far better on measures such as teenage pregnancy, juvenile arrests and youth unemployment.
When things are at their worst in New York City, in 1998, the city took 12,000 children from their parents. Even with the upsurge in removals in 2006, the average in the eight years since has been 7,540. Had the city been taking children at the 1998 rate, 35,680 more children would have been taken from 1999 through 2006. That means 35,680 children have been spared the sometimes-unbearable emotional trauma of placement, and the risk of abuse in foster care itself. Indeed, using the results of this new study, it may even be possible to estimate how many of those 35,680 children have been spared from arrest, unemployment, and teenage pregnancy because of the reforms CR wants to reverse.
Whatever the number of children spared this harm, it probably is not as high as it should be. It probably would be higher if not for the efforts of CR to reverse reform. So there are plenty of children wronged by “Children’s Rights.”
By children’s rights be assured that Children’s Rights does not mean the right of children to be free from unreasonable search and seizure. It does not mean the right to be with the parents who love and cherish them but may be too poor to keep them out of the hands of a child welfare agency. And it certainly doesn’t mean the right to be free from the racial and class bias that has permeated child welfare for more than 150 years. On the contrary, CR’s founder, Marcia Lowry, has dismissed all that as a “liberal agenda” for which she has no time.
That, no doubt, endears her to New York City’s large community of neoconservatives, who dominated public policy during the Giuliani administration. But the neocons have done no better for the children of New York that they have for the children of Baghdad. And CR’s latest analysis of child welfare in New York is about as useful as a lesson on military strategy from Donald Rumsfeld.
The analysis purports to show that reabuse of children worsened during recent reforms in New York City, when the city was taking away fewer children.
But two huge problems stand out immediately:
1. The starting line
2. The finish line.
The report begins with 2000 and ends with 2005. There is no logical reason for this. Data for most indicators are available back to 1993 and reabuse data are available back at least to 1998. Data also are available for 2006. Nothing in particular happened in 2000. There was no reorganization of the city child welfare agency, no change in leadership. And including 2006 data is crucial in order to measure the impact of the huge increase in removals of children that occurred that year in the wake of the death of Nixzmary Brown.
But including data before and after CR’s arbitrary choice immediately undercuts any connection between an alleged decline in safety and a decline in removals.
To see the real trend, including data for every year available, have a look at NCCPR’s report on New York City child welfare, Don’t Turn Back. The stats can be found on page 19.
The first thing anyone who has both this document and CR’s will notice is that, except for fatality data, all our numbers differ from CR's even though we’re both using city sources. That’s probably because, except for fatality numbers, our data are for fiscal years, and the CR report uses calendar year data.
But beyond that, the bigger picture is different from that portrayed in CR’s report.
For starters, consider reabuse of children left in their own homes. Yes, it went up from 2000 through 2005, when removals were declining. But in FY 2006, when removals soared, it went up again. Yet CR seeks to link the increase to the decline in entries into foster care. CR also omits data for 1998, when removals were at their height and reabuse was much greater – though that figure does not come directly from the city, it comes from The New York Times.
So what is the longer-term trend?
In all the years for which data are available, reabuse was at its worst when the city was taking the most children. Reabuse fell sharply, then has slowly increased, both when fewer children were taken and when more children were taken.
More significant is how CR has left out context concerning the second key safety indicator, foster care recidivism - the proportion of children sent home from foster care who must be placed again within 12 months.
For starters, CR fails to acknowledge that this is a safety indicator, providing data on this indicator only in the context of another important outcome, permanence. In fact, it’s a very important safety indicator, since a child is unlikely to have to be returned to foster care unless the child welfare agency thinks that child is unsafe. (Whether the agency is right or whether this was, in fact, a failure to provide support for the family after reunification is another story; indeed, there are indications that often it is the latter, something discussed further below.)
Data on this measure are available all the way back to 1993. And they show significant improvement starting when removals of children started to decline. And this time, the fact is, the improvement continued during the 2006 surge. That may be because, as a far better report just released from the Center for an Urban Future notes, the city has begun a program to provide intensive help to reunified families.
Overall, the rate of foster care recidivism in 2006 is more than 33 percent lower than it was in 1998, when the city was taking almost twice as many children.
At least as disturbing, however, is the way CR spins its own more limited data on this measure. A pullquote on page 102 cites a “25 percent increase” in this figure from 2004 to 2005 – with the percentage going from 8 percent to 10 percent.
Well, yes. But the chart on the previous page shows that for each of the three previous years, the figure was nine percent. So the 2004 figure may well have been a fluke. One unusually low year, followed by one unusually high year tells us nothing. Taking the two years in isolation suggests a trend that may not exist.
The one figure for which CR couldn’t avoid mentioning the year 2006 is deaths of children previously known to the city child welfare agency, since, at least within the child welfare community, that figure is well-known.
But that created a huge problem in PR for CR. Such deaths, in fact, soared in 2006, to their highest level since 1993. Not exactly a testament to the safety of taking away huge numbers of additional children – particularly since the previous record for such fatalities, 36, was set in 1998, during the height of the foster-care panic that gripped the city after the death of Elisa Izquierdo.
Back then, CR’s solution was to highlight the fatalities but simply ignore the increase in removals. This time, they decided to simply reverse their previous position and say that fatalities are a lousy measure of system performance after all. According to the report:
“…the number of fatalities in a given year, and even fluctuations in this number between years, are not particularly good indicators of how well a child welfare system is performing. The number of child fatalities is extremely small, compared to the overall number of children involved with the child welfare system. ACS investigates more than 50,000 reports of suspected abuse and neglect each year and more than 40,000 children are in contact with ACS at any given time in preventive services and foster care cases. During the last decade, an average of 26 children per year who were previously known to ACS died as a result of child abuse and neglect. Fluctuations in such a small number from year to year are likely to be random and not due to the nature or quality of particular policy or service approaches being utilized by the child welfare agency.”
Good point. It should be. It’s a point NCCPR has been making for years – though we always add that as long as fatalities are the measure of choice for the media, we will continue to point out the one consistent pattern all over the country: The deaths go up in the wake of a foster-care panic.
But while we’re glad to see CR realize the limits of fatalities as a measure, we’re puzzled by the fact that they never noticed this before. A report issued by CR in 1999 took the opposite view. And during late 2005 and early 2006, when a New York Times reporter used almost every story she wrote about a child abuse death to note that the death “comes at a time when” or “raises questions about” efforts to keep families together, CR never sought to correct her. Only when deaths soared after the city took far more children did CR decide there is no connection.
That would be the same Times reporter who described the deaths as a “series” of fatalities when, in fact, there had been no change in the rate of such deaths. (“It was a series,” the reporter would say later, “but not statistically.”) Then, when such deaths really did soar to their highest level since 1993, the Times declined to report it.
Needless to say, CR knew exactly where to leak its report ahead of its formal release in order to be sure there would be a news story with no real critical scrutiny. The Times reporter, who previously ignored data on reabuse suddenly found that they were important when spun CR’s way. And the Times reporter, who previously had used fatalities to measure system performance, now finds those data are not even worth mentioning.
And finally, there’s one more number that may be the most important of all, even though it doesn’t come from New York City: 15,000.
That’s the number of children whose cases were examined in the new, landmark study comparing children placed in foster care to comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes, discussed in the July 8 Blog entry. On average, the children left in their own homes did far better on measures such as teenage pregnancy, juvenile arrests and youth unemployment.
When things are at their worst in New York City, in 1998, the city took 12,000 children from their parents. Even with the upsurge in removals in 2006, the average in the eight years since has been 7,540. Had the city been taking children at the 1998 rate, 35,680 more children would have been taken from 1999 through 2006. That means 35,680 children have been spared the sometimes-unbearable emotional trauma of placement, and the risk of abuse in foster care itself. Indeed, using the results of this new study, it may even be possible to estimate how many of those 35,680 children have been spared from arrest, unemployment, and teenage pregnancy because of the reforms CR wants to reverse.
Whatever the number of children spared this harm, it probably is not as high as it should be. It probably would be higher if not for the efforts of CR to reverse reform. So there are plenty of children wronged by “Children’s Rights.”
Sunday, July 15, 2007
An Arizona newspaper's double standards are showing
Last May, I wrote about a reporter for the Arizona Daily Star who produced a front-page story condemning a tiny financial incentive to encourage caseworkers not to needlessly take children from their homes. The incentive was intended to balance the many huge incentives, financial and otherwise, to take children needlessly.
It didn’t work. Arizona is in a state of perennial foster-care panic. From October 2002 through September 2004, removals shot up 40 percent – and they’ve stayed at that high level ever since.
None of this mattered so the reporter. In explaining to me why he’d shut all dissent out of his story condemning the incentive, he wrote in an e-mail that:
“Those decisions should be made based strictly on the best interest of the children involved. Financial motivations, or even the perception someone could be swayed by financial motivations, are inappropriate.”
Unexplained was why the only “financial motivation” to interest him was the puny one favoring birth parents, not the huge ones favoring taking away children. But surely, if another story turned up where one of those other financial incentives was a key element, he’d raise just as much of a stink about it, right?
Not exactly.
The same reporter had another story on the front page of the Star Sunday. This one is something of an archetype: The adoptive parents who fill their home with lots and lots – and lots – of severely disabled children; they become the subject of any number of gooey feature stories at the local and sometimes national level – until it turns out all is not well behind the scenes.
The most notorious example recently is the case of the parents in Ohio who adopted 11 special needs children and then kept them in what prosecutors called cages.
Now it turns out that such a couple in Arizona also was the subject of one complaint after another alleging abuse, and that, at one point, all 16 of their foster and adoptive children had been removed from the home. The adoptive mother, who is separated from the adoptive father, says two since have been returned. (At one point, by the way, 19 children were living in the home.)
The children were not adopted from Arizona; the story doesn’t say where they came from.
But every state that placed a child in the home would have to have done a home study - which means they would have to know how many other children, all with severe disabilities, also were living there. So why didn’t anyone question whether it was a good idea to place a disabled child in a “home” with 15 other disabled children?
Probably because of the financial incentives.
States receive a bounty from the federal government for every finalized adoption of a foster child over a baseline number. The bounty can range from $4,000 to at least $8,000 per child, and the children in this house are likely to bring $8,000 bounties. If the adoption fails, states don’t have to give the bounties back; in fact, if they place the children again, they can collect another bounty for each one, as long as they exceed their baseline. This creates a huge incentive for quick-and-dirty, slipshod placements.
There’s also a non-financial incentive – the only time a child welfare agency gets good press is when it gets those adoption numbers up.
But apparently the Star reporter has decided that he can live with “financial motivations, or even the perception someone could be swayed by financial motivations” after all.
Because he never even raises the issue.
It didn’t work. Arizona is in a state of perennial foster-care panic. From October 2002 through September 2004, removals shot up 40 percent – and they’ve stayed at that high level ever since.
None of this mattered so the reporter. In explaining to me why he’d shut all dissent out of his story condemning the incentive, he wrote in an e-mail that:
“Those decisions should be made based strictly on the best interest of the children involved. Financial motivations, or even the perception someone could be swayed by financial motivations, are inappropriate.”
Unexplained was why the only “financial motivation” to interest him was the puny one favoring birth parents, not the huge ones favoring taking away children. But surely, if another story turned up where one of those other financial incentives was a key element, he’d raise just as much of a stink about it, right?
Not exactly.
The same reporter had another story on the front page of the Star Sunday. This one is something of an archetype: The adoptive parents who fill their home with lots and lots – and lots – of severely disabled children; they become the subject of any number of gooey feature stories at the local and sometimes national level – until it turns out all is not well behind the scenes.
The most notorious example recently is the case of the parents in Ohio who adopted 11 special needs children and then kept them in what prosecutors called cages.
Now it turns out that such a couple in Arizona also was the subject of one complaint after another alleging abuse, and that, at one point, all 16 of their foster and adoptive children had been removed from the home. The adoptive mother, who is separated from the adoptive father, says two since have been returned. (At one point, by the way, 19 children were living in the home.)
The children were not adopted from Arizona; the story doesn’t say where they came from.
But every state that placed a child in the home would have to have done a home study - which means they would have to know how many other children, all with severe disabilities, also were living there. So why didn’t anyone question whether it was a good idea to place a disabled child in a “home” with 15 other disabled children?
Probably because of the financial incentives.
States receive a bounty from the federal government for every finalized adoption of a foster child over a baseline number. The bounty can range from $4,000 to at least $8,000 per child, and the children in this house are likely to bring $8,000 bounties. If the adoption fails, states don’t have to give the bounties back; in fact, if they place the children again, they can collect another bounty for each one, as long as they exceed their baseline. This creates a huge incentive for quick-and-dirty, slipshod placements.
There’s also a non-financial incentive – the only time a child welfare agency gets good press is when it gets those adoption numbers up.
But apparently the Star reporter has decided that he can live with “financial motivations, or even the perception someone could be swayed by financial motivations” after all.
Because he never even raises the issue.
Sunday, July 8, 2007
The evidence is in
NCCPR long has argued that many children now trapped in foster care would be far better off if they had remained with their own families and those families had been given the right kinds of help.
Turns out that’s not quite right.
In fact, many children now trapped in foster care would be far better off if they remained with their own families even if those families got only the typical help (which tends to be little help, wrong help, or no help) commonly offered by child welfare agencies.
That’s the message from the largest study ever undertaken to compare the impact on children of foster care versus keeping comparably maltreated children with their own families. The study was the subject of a front-page story in USA Today. The full study is available here.
The study looks at outcomes for more than 15,000 children. It compares foster children not to the general population but to comparably maltreated children left in their own homes. The result: On measure after measure the children left in their own homes do better.
In fact, it’s not even close.
Children left in their own homes are far less likely to become pregnant as teenagers, far less likely to wind up in the juvenile justice system and far more likely to hold a job for at least three months than comparably maltreated children who were placed in foster care.
Implications
● The study examined cases in Illinois from 1990 through mid-2003. That means for most of the time, it was looking at the Illinois system before it reformed, when it was much like most of the rest of the country is today.
● The study uses the term “foster care” generically; it includes children placed in any form of substitute care. That’s important because whenever information like this comes out, people who want to warehouse children in orphanages try to use it to justify their schemes. But this study was not limited to family foster homes. And it takes three single-spaced pages just to list all the other studies documenting the harm of orphanages. (Those pages are available from NCCPR.)
● This does not mean that no child ever should be placed in foster care. But it means many fewer children should be placed in foster care.
The study excluded the most severe cases of maltreatment, a very small proportion of any child protective worker’s caseload, precisely because, horror stories that make the front page notwithstanding, these are cases where everyone with time to investigate would agree that removal from the home was the only alternative.
Rather, the study focused on, by far, the largest group of cases any worker sees, those that can best be called the “in-between cases” where the parent is neither all victim nor all villain; cases where there are real problems in the home, but wide disagreement over what should be done. As the study itself notes: “These are the cases most likely to be affected by policy changes that alter the threshold for placement.” They also, are, of course, the cases most likely to be affected by a foster-care panic – which also alters the threshold for placement.
Even among these cases, the figures are averages. Certainly there are some individual cases among the more than 15,000 studied in which foster care was the less harmful alternative. But what the data make clear is that foster care is vastly overused, damaging large numbers of children who would do better in life had they remained in their own homes, even with the minimal help most child welfare agencies offer to families.
This says less about how well child protection agencies do in helping families than it does about how enormously toxic a foster care intervention is. Anything that toxic must be used very sparingly and in very small doses.
● I expect that, from coast to coast, child welfare agencies will offer up a disingenuous response to this study along these lines: “Why yes, of course,” they’ll say. “This study just shows what we’ve always said ourselves: foster care only should be used as a last resort; of course we keep families together whenever possible.” But this study shows that agency actions belie their words. This study found thousands of children already in foster care who would have done better had child protection agencies not taken them away in the first place.
● The USA Today story quotes one deservedly well-respected expert as saying this is the first study to produce such results. But that is an error. Actually it’s at least the second in just the past year or so. A University of Minnesota study used a different methodology and measured different outcomes, but came to very similar conclusions. (Byron Egeland, et. al., “The impact of foster care on development” Development and Psychopathology, (Vol. 18, 2006, pp. 57–76)).
● Though the USA Today story says other “studies” go the other way, the one cited, with less than 1/100th the sample size of the new study, a shorter duration and at least one other serious flaw (omitting foster children in care for less than six months) is the only one we know of.
And of course that study also compared foster care only to typical “help” for families in their own homes, which generally is little or nothing. Providing the kinds of real help NCCPR recommends (See Eleven Ways to do Child Welfare Right) would likely change the result and, in the case of the two more recent and more rigorous studies, create an even wider gap in outcomes favoring keeping families together.
● Perhaps most intriguing, this study suggests it actually may be possible to quantify the harm of a foster-care panic, a huge, sudden upsurge in needless removals after the death of a child “known to the system” gets extensive news coverage.
Thanks to this study, we now have an estimate of how much worse foster children do on key outcomes compared with comparably maltreated children left in their own homes. It’s also usually possible to calculate how many more children are taken away during a foster-care panic. So it should be possible to estimate how many more children will wind up under arrest, how many more will become pregnant and how many more will be jobless as a result of a foster-care panic.
It also should be possible to estimate roughly how many children have been saved from these rotten outcomes in states and localities that have reformed their systems to emphasize safe, proven programs to keep families together.
This new study and the Minnesota study are in addition to the comprehensive study of foster care alumni showing that only one in five could be said to be doing well as a young adult – in other words, foster care churns out walking wounded four times out of five. (See NCCPR’s publication 80 Percent Failure for more on this study) and the mass of evidence showing that simply in terms of physical safety, real family preservation programs have a far better track record than foster care. (See NCCPR Issue Paper #1.)
The buzzword in child welfare lately is “evidence-based.” What that really means is: How dare proponents of any new, innovative approach to child welfare expect to get funding if they can’t dot every i and cross every t on evaluations proving the innovation’s efficacy beyond a shadow of a doubt? Old, non-innovative programs, however, are not held to this standard. If they were, child welfare would be turned upside down by the results of this new study.
Because now, more than ever, the evidence is in.
Turns out that’s not quite right.
In fact, many children now trapped in foster care would be far better off if they remained with their own families even if those families got only the typical help (which tends to be little help, wrong help, or no help) commonly offered by child welfare agencies.
That’s the message from the largest study ever undertaken to compare the impact on children of foster care versus keeping comparably maltreated children with their own families. The study was the subject of a front-page story in USA Today. The full study is available here.
The study looks at outcomes for more than 15,000 children. It compares foster children not to the general population but to comparably maltreated children left in their own homes. The result: On measure after measure the children left in their own homes do better.
In fact, it’s not even close.
Children left in their own homes are far less likely to become pregnant as teenagers, far less likely to wind up in the juvenile justice system and far more likely to hold a job for at least three months than comparably maltreated children who were placed in foster care.
Implications
● The study examined cases in Illinois from 1990 through mid-2003. That means for most of the time, it was looking at the Illinois system before it reformed, when it was much like most of the rest of the country is today.
● The study uses the term “foster care” generically; it includes children placed in any form of substitute care. That’s important because whenever information like this comes out, people who want to warehouse children in orphanages try to use it to justify their schemes. But this study was not limited to family foster homes. And it takes three single-spaced pages just to list all the other studies documenting the harm of orphanages. (Those pages are available from NCCPR.)
● This does not mean that no child ever should be placed in foster care. But it means many fewer children should be placed in foster care.
The study excluded the most severe cases of maltreatment, a very small proportion of any child protective worker’s caseload, precisely because, horror stories that make the front page notwithstanding, these are cases where everyone with time to investigate would agree that removal from the home was the only alternative.
Rather, the study focused on, by far, the largest group of cases any worker sees, those that can best be called the “in-between cases” where the parent is neither all victim nor all villain; cases where there are real problems in the home, but wide disagreement over what should be done. As the study itself notes: “These are the cases most likely to be affected by policy changes that alter the threshold for placement.” They also, are, of course, the cases most likely to be affected by a foster-care panic – which also alters the threshold for placement.
Even among these cases, the figures are averages. Certainly there are some individual cases among the more than 15,000 studied in which foster care was the less harmful alternative. But what the data make clear is that foster care is vastly overused, damaging large numbers of children who would do better in life had they remained in their own homes, even with the minimal help most child welfare agencies offer to families.
This says less about how well child protection agencies do in helping families than it does about how enormously toxic a foster care intervention is. Anything that toxic must be used very sparingly and in very small doses.
● I expect that, from coast to coast, child welfare agencies will offer up a disingenuous response to this study along these lines: “Why yes, of course,” they’ll say. “This study just shows what we’ve always said ourselves: foster care only should be used as a last resort; of course we keep families together whenever possible.” But this study shows that agency actions belie their words. This study found thousands of children already in foster care who would have done better had child protection agencies not taken them away in the first place.
● The USA Today story quotes one deservedly well-respected expert as saying this is the first study to produce such results. But that is an error. Actually it’s at least the second in just the past year or so. A University of Minnesota study used a different methodology and measured different outcomes, but came to very similar conclusions. (Byron Egeland, et. al., “The impact of foster care on development” Development and Psychopathology, (Vol. 18, 2006, pp. 57–76)).
● Though the USA Today story says other “studies” go the other way, the one cited, with less than 1/100th the sample size of the new study, a shorter duration and at least one other serious flaw (omitting foster children in care for less than six months) is the only one we know of.
And of course that study also compared foster care only to typical “help” for families in their own homes, which generally is little or nothing. Providing the kinds of real help NCCPR recommends (See Eleven Ways to do Child Welfare Right) would likely change the result and, in the case of the two more recent and more rigorous studies, create an even wider gap in outcomes favoring keeping families together.
● Perhaps most intriguing, this study suggests it actually may be possible to quantify the harm of a foster-care panic, a huge, sudden upsurge in needless removals after the death of a child “known to the system” gets extensive news coverage.
Thanks to this study, we now have an estimate of how much worse foster children do on key outcomes compared with comparably maltreated children left in their own homes. It’s also usually possible to calculate how many more children are taken away during a foster-care panic. So it should be possible to estimate how many more children will wind up under arrest, how many more will become pregnant and how many more will be jobless as a result of a foster-care panic.
It also should be possible to estimate roughly how many children have been saved from these rotten outcomes in states and localities that have reformed their systems to emphasize safe, proven programs to keep families together.
This new study and the Minnesota study are in addition to the comprehensive study of foster care alumni showing that only one in five could be said to be doing well as a young adult – in other words, foster care churns out walking wounded four times out of five. (See NCCPR’s publication 80 Percent Failure for more on this study) and the mass of evidence showing that simply in terms of physical safety, real family preservation programs have a far better track record than foster care. (See NCCPR Issue Paper #1.)
The buzzword in child welfare lately is “evidence-based.” What that really means is: How dare proponents of any new, innovative approach to child welfare expect to get funding if they can’t dot every i and cross every t on evaluations proving the innovation’s efficacy beyond a shadow of a doubt? Old, non-innovative programs, however, are not held to this standard. If they were, child welfare would be turned upside down by the results of this new study.
Because now, more than ever, the evidence is in.
Sunday, June 24, 2007
Another effort to silence an advocate
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.
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.
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