Foster care in Rhode Island: The seduction of Kevin Aucoin

Here’s the thing about children’s “shelters” – those exercises in adult self-indulgence and adult self-delusion that turn real flesh-and-blood children into human teddy bears; those places where some communities dump children as soon as they are taken from their homes, supposedly to be examined and “assessed” by “trained staff” in order to prepare them for exactly what they would have gotten without the shelters – usually a succession of foster homes:

They can be oh, so seductive.

Sure, as discussed in a previous post to this blog, the research is overwhelming that children suffer enormously when they are cared for by rotating shift staff.  Sure, a comprehensive study specific to shelters showed that the outcomes for children who went through them were worse even than those for children shipped straight into foster care.

But, well, they usually look so nice, with pretty pictures on the walls, lots of toys and a staff that really does care about the kids.  And the behavior of the children themselves can disguise a shelter’s failure as success. Call it the “Mr. Lou” effect, after someone who used to run what was, a few years ago, one of the very worst such places, Child Haven in Las Vegas.

He told a local television station that he loved coming to work at Child Haven because babies and toddlers "grab my leg. They call me Mr. Lou. They tell me they love me."

But when a young child grabs the legs of anyone who will pay him a little attention and tells him "I love you" he's not getting better – he's getting worse. He is losing his ability to truly love at all, because every time he tries to love someone, that person goes away. It's even worse than the well-known problem of children bouncing from foster home to foster home. We are setting some of these children up to become adults unable to love or trust anyone.

30 DAYS OF SHIFT STAFF

It’s bad enough when this goes on for a few days or a week.  It’s even worse when the children have to change caretakers every eight hours during the week and with still other caretakers on weekends for 30 days or more.

Yet that is the norm at the Washington Park Children’s Shelter, one of three such places in Rhode Island.

One of the last moves of the outgoing leadership at the state Department of Children Youth and Families was one of the few things they did right: they announced they would close the shelters in early January. But shelter owners always have the ear of politicians and the press.  They spread the usual horror stories of what would happen without them, citing a “shortage” of foster homes.  But that shortage exists only because Rhode Island tears apart families at one of the highest rates in the country.

Shelter operators also are good at using their good intentions (I don’t doubt they’ve convinced themselves that their life’s work helps kids, research notwithstanding) to deflect attention from all the harm shelters do.   So while it was disappointing, it wasn’t surprising when new governor, Lincoln Chafee, promptly gave in and ordered the shelter contracts extended through February 28.

According to the Providence Journal, Chafee’s interim DCYF director, Kevin Aucoin was scheduled to visit the Washington Park shelter on January 18. I don’t know whether he got there, or whether during any such visit, he had any “Mr. Lou” moments.

           

What I do know is the Journal story gave a new indication of just how low shelter operators will sink to keep their human teddy bears. 

The story quotes Carole Shauffer, executive director of the Youth Law Center which has sued states over the misuse and overuse of shelters:

No matter how well run a shelter is, Shauffer said, studies show that residential care facilities with multiple caregivers working in shifts cannot provide for the emotional needs of children, especially those under age of 6. Those children, she said, need one or two people whom they can attach to who will care for them regularly. That’s not possible, she said, when their caregivers change every eight hours.

“They [caregivers] can be good people. They can be doing the best job they possibly can,” Shauffer said. “But they’re dealing with a model that doesn’t work because that’s not how babies were born to be raised.”

And what did the co-founder of the Washington Park shelter, Frances Murphy, do to rebut the research?  She slimed all working parents who send their kids to day care.

The DCYF pays its foster care providers $15 a day, Murphy said, so those foster parents usually have jobs outside their homes and the children are placed in daycare. “Where’s the bonding taking place there?” she said.

Oh, right.  So being taken to day care by foster parents (or, presumably parents, period) and coming home to the same foster parents every night, and spending all weekend with those same foster parents, is just like being cared for by rotating shift staff 24/7.

And that assumes the only alternative to shelters is foster parents.  Particularly in a state with the kind of sky-high rate of removal seen in Rhode Island, the alternative often could be never taking away the children at all.

TRUST US, WE'RE BOYS TOWN

Boys Town also runs a shelter in Rhode Island.  Their executive director, William Reardon, wrote an op ed column responding to one I’d written supporting shutting the shelters down.  He said all those things shelter operators always say about “assessing” and “planning” etc.  (He also said his shelter uses so-called “house parents” instead of shift staff, but that still means the child needs to endure another placement and adjust to a whole new setting again, when the time in the shelter ends.)

And at a time when the buzzword in child welfare is “evidence-based” Reardon offers not a shred of evidence to show that his model actually helps children.  That’s because he can’t.  Exactly the same rationale – the same blather about assessing the children, making a plan, etc. - was offered for setting up a comprehensive network of shelters in Connecticut.  

But unlike Rhode Island, Connecticut actually funded an evaluation, by Yale University.  The evaluation found that the children placed in the shelters fared worse than those sent directly to foster care.  (Unfortunately, shelter operators have the same kind of political clout in Connecticut as in Rhode Island so not only are the shelters still open, the Connecticut Department of Children and Families took the study off its website – so I’ve posted it on ours.)

And excuse me if I’m not inclined to take the word of Boys Town for anything, in light of the problems at their flagship campus in Nebraska, as reported in the trade journal Youth Today.

So of course instead of providing actual evidence Reardon does what shelter operators always do -  invite people for a carefully-guided tour so they can see those pretty grounds and well-meaning staff.    

CUTE KIDS ONLY, PLEASE

But here’s the biggest giveaway that shelters exist to benefit the people who run them, staff them and volunteer at them, rather than for the children: Everyone in child welfare knows that the children for whom it is hardest to find a home are teenagers.  But Reardon’s shelter won’t take teenagers.  Neither will the others in Rhode Island.  They all take only children under age 12. 

That’s common across the country.  And it’s not hard to figure out why. As I noted in that previous post about shelters, a teenager who's been through removal from his or her parents is as likely to spit in your face as to throw his arms around you.  They don’t make good human teddy bears.  So the shelters only take the very children for whom it’s easiest to find a better alternative – the ones who are still cute.     

Adding to the obscenity of all this is the cost.  The Washington Park shelter costs $185 per child per day.  That’s an average of $5,550 to $8,325 per child.  For that kind of money, an Intensive Family Preservation Services intervention can keep all the children in a family from ever having to enter foster care in the first place.  That kind of money also could buy a year of rent subsidies so children aren’t taken because their parents can’t afford decent housing - or a year of subsidies for yes, day care, so families aren’t separated on lack of supervision charges.

Or Rhode Island can keep using the money to damage kids in order to make the people who run shelters feel like they are doing something useful.  At the moment it all depends on whether Kevin Aucoin does what research says is best for kids, or is seduced by those “Mr. Lou” moments at the shelter.

GUEST BLOG: Foster care in Maine: More on one state’s transformation

UPDATE, JAN 28: The Associated Press also has an excellent story on the Maine reforms.


In a previous post to this Blog concerning the enormous progress in the state of Maine, I wrote that: “An independent office of child welfare ombudsman was created, under the auspices of a leading state child advocacy group, the Maine Children’s Alliance.”

The ombudsman has asked me to share with you his perspective on the changes.  Here’s his comment:

Dear NCCPR,

Thank you for voicing your concern for the well-being of children in Maine who are involved in the child welfare system in the recent NCCPR blog “Foster Care in America: The Day Child Welfare Changed? (Part Two).” We appreciate that you recognize the work that the Maine Children’s Alliance’s ombudsman program has done to help improve the system.

Since 2003, the Maine Child Welfare Services Ombudsman Program has worked closely with the

Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), reviewing department decisions when callers raise concerns and providing recommendations on ways the department can streamline and improve practices. We are always looking for better situations for children and families, and more cost-savings and efficiency within the system to re-invest in community support and early intervention.

As you have noted, it is in the best interest of a child to keep him/her in the home and with the family whenever possible and safe to do so. Caseworkers now emphasize this goal as they work closely with families, ensuring they receive the supports and services necessary to keep the child safe and the family intact. Reducing the rate of children who are placed in state care or custody has been a significant achievement of our program. In December 2004, there were 2,590 Maine children in DHHS state care or custody. In December 2009, the number in care or custody dropped to 1,650. During this time period, Maine saw a 38.3 percent decrease in the rate of children in DHHS care or custody.

Kinship Care placements enable children to live with people they know and trust, creating a sense of stability and continuity. Over the last six years, Kinship Care has become a preferred placement practice of DHHS. The steady increase in Kinship Care placement is a notably positive trend. In 2004, of the 831 initial placements of children into state care or custody, 146 (17.6%) were Kinship Care. In 2009, of the 777 initial placements of children into state care or custody, 302 (38.9%) were Kinship Care. Not only is Kinship Care placement less disruptive to the child, it is also less costly to the system. There has been a dramatic decline in Residential Care costs for children in state custody from 2004 to 2010, with the state share of residential care costs declining by 86 percent.

For more information about the Ombudsman Program, I encourage you to visit the Maine Children’s Alliance website at www.mekids.org.

Dean Crocker

President/CEO and Ombudsman

Maine Children’s Alliance

Foster care in DC: As a matter of fact, most foster parents ARE middle class…

…AND IT TAKES QUITE AN ACT OF STATISTICS ABUSE TO PRETEND OTHERWISE

The previous post to this Blog dealt with a response to an op ed column I wrote for The Washington Post.  The response came from Marcia Lowry, executive director of the group that so arrogantly calls itself “Children’s Rights.”

Of all the things I wrote, the item that seemed to upset Marcia the most was a line at the very end in which I referred to the highest-in-the-nation pay rates for foster parents in D.C. (From $10,000 to more than $11,000 per child per year, tax free) as giving “middle-class foster parents … more than they need.”

Marcia insists foster parents really aren’t middle-class. She writes:

A recent survey in Illinois found that the average wage income for foster parents was just $35,500 a year and was $28,600 a year for relative caregivers.

Thus, she makes it sound like relatives earn $28,600 and strangers get $35,500.

But it’s not true.

I went back and took a look at the actual study.

Turns out, the $35,500 figure is the average income for all foster parents, kin and stranger combined. And the study in question was done in Illinois, which has one of America’s most progressive policies of placing children with relatives, so the unusually high proportion of kinship care parents brings down the average.

When you look only at what should best be called “stranger-care” parents, the average income is $41,220. That’s just short of what the same study said was the median family income in Illinois, $44,459. (Before anyone says “Hey, you switched from a mean (average) to a median,” that’s what the study did, you’d have to ask the authors why they felt it was the fairest comparison.  And it’s Marcia Lowry who cited the study in the first place.)

As for kinship care parents, NCCPR long has noted that they do, indeed, tend to be poor. And that’s precisely why it’s such a tragedy that Marcia Lowry runs around the country fanatically demanding that they comply with precisely the same licensing requirements as those middle-class strangers. Having waged a war against grandparents that forced at least 1,800 children out of such kinship homes in Michigan as a result of imposing such requirements, Marcia is in no position to pose as a champion of such parents. And to really see how much harm this licensing fanaticism can do in DC, just check out Jason Cherkis’ story in Washington CityPaper

Marcia would argue that she demands licensing because when grandparents are licensed state and local governments have to pay them the same amount as strangers, and the federal government reimburses states for part of those costs at the same rate as for foster care with strangers.

Those are good reasons to demand that states streamline licensing requirements for everyone, limiting them to those genuinely essential for health and safety and eliminating those geared to middle-class creature comforts.  They are good reasons to encourage kinship care parents to become licensed and help them to meet licensing requirements.  They are not good reasons to demand that impoverished grandparents comply with requirements that are far more onerous if you happen to be poor – or risk having their grandchildren taken away.

It is particularly disingenuous to hide behind kinship care parents when talking about the lavish pay for foster parents in Washington D.C.  The District does a particularly poor job of placing children with relatives.  The most recent data, from 2006, show that only 16 percent of D.C. children are placed with relatives, compared to a national average of 25 percent.  (In Illinois it’s 35 percent).

The way to help kinship care parents is, as noted above, to streamline licensing requirements for all foster parents and then provide kinship care parents with extra assistance.  Marcia, however, apparently prefers a “trickle down” approach in which $10,000 per year per child tax free, is lavished on, yes, middle-class strangers, just because it also will trickle down to the grandparents and other kinship foster parents.

We can do better than that.  And we would, if things like Marcia Lowry’s ill-conceived lawsuit settlements didn’t keep getting in the way.

Foster care in DC: An unflattering view of foster parents from a surprising source

 I’m sure Marcia Lowry, executive director of the group that so arrogantly calls itself “Children’s Rights” (CR) would insist she’s the last person to believe most foster parents are in it for the money.  But a recent op ed column she wrote for The Washington Post raises questions about how she really views the motives of foster parents.

As I noted in a previous post to this Blog, back in December, I wrote an op ed column for the Post decrying the fact that the D.C. Council was pitting programs to help keep children out of foster care against programs to help kids already in foster care, while ignoring far better places to cut.  Such places include D.C.’s overuse of group homes and institutions (like the residential treatment centers exposed by Washington CityPaper’s Jason Cherkis in an excellent story last week) and the lavish pay rates for foster parents - the highest such rates in the nation.

Specifically, D.C. pays at least $10,428 per year per child.  For older children, it’s more than $11,280 per year per child.  The money is tax free.  The government also covers foster children’s health insurance through Medicaid.

           

CR itself admits, in its own study, that this is more than enough to cover not only the basics for foster children but also every toy, game, after school activity, movie ticket, amusement park ride, etc.  In short, all of the things foster children (and children in general) should have.  (Check out CR’s “technical report” for the study so see all the things CR believes the government should reimburse.)

But Marcia Lowry seems to think that unless foster parents are reimbursed by the government for every penny they expend on these items, the foster children won’t get them.

In a response to my op ed column Lowry wrote that

 In his commentary [Wexler] went on to suggest that the District has “lavish[ed] . . . money on foster parents” and that it should consider cutting the “fat pay raises” for families willing to give abused and neglected children a safe home — and perhaps a few small pleasures of childhood, such as a toy, game or amusement park ride.

So, tell me Marcia: Do you really believe that D.C. foster parents are so greedy that if they were paid less than $10,000 per year per child, tax free, and actually had to dip into their own pockets to buy a foster child a teddy bear they wouldn’t do it?  Would they really deny foster children they say they love and treat as their own “a few small pleasures of childhood” if those pleasures are not government-subsidized?  And if that is what you believe, do you really think it’s a good idea to place children with people like that?

Are you not at all concerned that these lavish payments might attract foster parents who whine at great length even at the prospect of paying for a foster daughter’s sanitary napkins?  (That’s not a hypothetical – it really happened).

Maybe you hold foster parents in such low regard, Marcia, but I don’t. I think the overwhelming majority are not in it for the money, and some are true heroes.  I think they have no problem dipping into their own pockets a little for children they sincerely try to treat as their own – just as people who, say, volunteer to tutor inner-city children may buy some supplies themselves and don’t expect to be reimbursed for the mileage getting to and from the school.  The whole issue of our “social contract” with foster parents is one that CR regularly avoids.

Marcia continues:

… it is the availability of foster parents that keeps children out of costly, ineffective and often harmful group homes and institutions. 

That’s partially true.  But it doesn’t follow that lavish reimbursement is required to get people to volunteer to open their homes to children.  Indeed, when foster parents are surveyed about why they quit, money ranks low on the list.  Ill-treatment and lack of respect from child welfare agencies ranks much higher.  (That’s why, when speaking to foster parents, I always ask: If that’s how they treat you, imagine how they’re treating the birth parents.)

To the extent that there are “shortages” of foster parents, it’s almost always an artificial shortage, created by states taking too many children needlessly in the first place.  Get those children back into their own homes and there will be plenty of room for children in real danger, without having to institutionalize them.

In addition, more and more states are finding that, using everything from Wraparound programs to “extreme family finding” institutionalized children can be returned directly to their own homes or the homes of relatives, bypassing what should properly be called “stranger care” homes entirely.  So, in fact, lavishly-paid foster parents are not the only alternative to institutionalization.

It also is flatly wrong to imply that all foster children were “abused and neglected” before the foster parents took them in.  In fact, children can be trapped in foster care for months before a judge ever decides if they actually were abused or neglected.  The status of these children is roughly analogous to that of poor people who remain in jail before trial because they can’t make bail.  (This distortion actually is at the root of a huge campaign by CR, something I hope to get to in a future post.)

Marcia goes on to argue that

…birth parents, foster families and relatives all need support when caring for a child, and they should not be pitted against one another as funding decisions are made. 

Nice thought.  It would be nicer, however, if CR’s lawsuit settlements didn’t constantly pit these very groups against each other.

Marcia’s Georgia settlement has led to diversion of funds to help alleviate the worst effects of poverty.  In Michigan, her settlement has led to slashing of programs to help keep children safely out of the system in order to fund a foster care worker/child abuse investigator hiring binge.  And, of course, Michigan is where CR’s war against grandparents has led to the expulsion of at least 1,800 children from the homes of grandparents and other kinship care foster parents – because they couldn’t comply with ten pages of hypertechnical licensing requirements.  (That CityPaper story I mentioned also illustrates the harm of the licensing obsession, by the way.)

Marcia also hides behind kinship parents in order to propound another myth, the myth that foster parents are barely getting by.  In fact, foster parents typically are middle-class.

More on that next week.

On our Blog at Youth Today: Another child welfare success story

Much like Maine, child welfare in Florida has undergone a transformation – the good kind.  Of course, rather than learn from this success, expect America’s foster-care industrial complex to try desperately to “Yes, but…” to death attempts to let the rest of the nation do what Florida did.

We review Florida’s success on this installment of our monthly Blog at Youth Today.  It all boils down to strong leadership, and a smart waiver.

UPDATED, JANUARY 19: Even Florida's big private agencies have learned that if they adapt to helping families they can thrive in a system that emphasizes keeping children safely in their own homes.  Read how one of the largest, the Children's Home Society, favors the waiver in this Miami Herald op ed.

In honor of Martin Luther King day…

…The NAACP asked Twitter users to use the hashtag #IHaveADream to answer the question “What’s your dream?” Here’s my answer:

#IHaveADream that one day no child will be taken from his parents because family poverty was confused with “neglect.”

Foster care in America: The day child welfare changed? (Part two)

On Monday, I wrote that we are approaching the tenth anniversary of what might come to be known as the day child welfare changed.

It was the day a five-year-old girl named Logan Marr died, killed by her foster mother, a former caseworker for the Maine child welfare agency.

At first the response to the death of Logan Marr was what it usually is when a child dies in foster care: The press focused on issues like whether there were enough visits by caseworkers to foster homes, were the licensing standards good enough, were background checks adequate, etc. Those are reasonable questions, and it’s understandable that they are the first to pop into people’s heads.

But whether a system will reform in the wake of a foster-care tragedy depends on whether journalists get beyond that and move on to the real problems. In Maine, that meant confronting a culture of child removal embedded in the child welfare agency. At the time Logan died, the proportion of children trapped in foster care in Maine was among the highest in the nation. 

And in Maine, it seemed, the assaults on families always were accompanied by an extra helping of meanness. – for every injury, the Maine Department of Human Services was determined to add an insult. 

The head of DHS at the time, Kevin Concannon, would not even tell Logan Marr’s mother he was sorry for what happened to her little girl – until after she went public with his refusal (at which point he wrote a very nice letter).  On another occasion Concannon, who would, of course, hide behind confidentiality when it suited him, persuaded a newspaper to print an entire court decision terminating parental rights in a case where the family had dared to challenge him publicly.  There was no warning to the family.  They just woke up to find it in their morning paper.  Remember, Concannon did this after his agency had “won.”  (I’m not opposed to newspapers publishing things like this, though the courtesy of a warning from Concannon to the family, so they would have had a chance to respond at the same time, would have been nice.)

NCCPR began raising these larger questions – within weeks of Logan’s death we were in  Maine to meet with journalists and issue a report on the system - and the state’s newspapers began pursuing them. (In part, I think, they were willing to listen because, even before Logan’s death, that other family, the one Concannon picked on, had bravely gone public and made a compelling case – so some seeds of doubt about DHS already had been planted.  It was that family that first put Maine on my radar.  We all owe that family a debt of gratitude.)

Story after story and editorial after editorial zeroed-in on the high numbers of children trapped in foster care.  Two legislative committees held hearings, and NCCPR’s testimony received prominent coverage.  An independent office of child welfare ombudsman was created, under the auspices of a leading state child advocacy group, the Maine Children’s Alliance.  And unlike most such offices, which often do more harm than good, this one took seriously the mandate to look at errors in all directions.

At about the same time, two other things happened.

First, producers working for the PBS series Frontline contacted NCCPR.  They said they were interested in doing a documentary about child welfare and were looking for ideas.  “You can always go to Florida,” I said, “something’s always happening there.  But if you want to look at something that’s not on anyone’s radar, take a look at the case of Logan Marr in Maine.”  I mentioned that, among other things, there was video of Logan complaining about being abused in her foster home, just weeks before she died. 

NCCPR provided extensive briefing material to the Frontline producers, and we were in touch several times over the following year-and-a-half.

A FOSTER PARENT SPEAKS OUT

Even more important, a very good foster parent got fed up. Mary Callahan kept finding that the children placed with her could have remained in their own homes if only the birth parents had gotten the kind of aid she received as a foster parent. Already a published author, she decided to write a book about her experiences. It’s called Memoirs of a Baby Stealer (Pinewoods Press, 2003). She organized the Maine Alliance for DHS Accountability and Reform, a grassroots organization that demanded systemic change.   And when NCCPR released the second of our two reports on Maine child welfare, Callahan joined us, and spoke at the news conference. 

Others also got fed up. A state legislator organized a four-day 80 mile march to the State Capitol – in the middle of a Maine winter - to protest the policies of DHS.

Concannon began feeling the heat.  Once NCCPR and the local advocates “kicked down the door” he had to let other reformers walk through.  So having once scorned the success of states that took away fewer children because they were “southern states” (and if you’re in Maine, pretty much every place else is a southern state) Concannon turned for help to the Child Welfare Policy and Practice Group, an organization founded by the reformer who transformed child welfare in Alabama.  DHS also brought in the Annie E. Casey Foundation.  But, as a Casey publication about the Maine reforms makes clear, albeit in a genteel sort of way, things didn’t really start to change until Concannon and his old guard were out of the way.

As Casey put it:

Without the right players in the right places at the right time, large scale change in any organization is often doomed. By 2004, a new group of leaders moved into key positions in Maine, people who would be absolutely essential to putting the state on an entirely new child welfare path.

That required a new governor.  Fortunately, in January, 2003, Maine got one.  Gov. John Baldacci saw immediately what the problems were. He got rid of Concannon and brought in that new leadership team.  (Concannon, alas, proved to be a classic example of “failing up” – he wound up with the same job in Iowa and now he’s in charge of the entire U.S. Food Stamp program). 

When a committee was formed to reorganize the Maine human services agency, each member of the group found a copy of Callahan’s book at her or his place at the table. Her presentation to the committee is on NCCPR’s website.

A lot more committee work, and much frustration followed. But the change has been remarkable and, by child welfare standards, remarkably swift.

● Since 2001, the number of children taken from their homes has dropped by 30 percent, and the number of children in foster care on any given day has been cut in half.

● Under Concannon, Maine workers used to brag about their hostility to placing children with relatives instead of strangers.  As Casey’s report put it: “Adding to the overall misery in Maine’s child welfare system was a clear institution-wide prejudice against placing children with relatives.”   But now, Maine has nearly tripled the proportion of children placed with relatives; Maine now exceeds the national average.


And the progress continues.  Just this week, Time Magazine reports in its print edition that the Maine division of Casey’s direct services arm, Casey Family Services, has launched an “extreme recruitment” program to find relatives to take in foster children.  The program was pioneered in Missouri, and the story of how it works is beautifully told in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

● Most remarkable: The proportion of Maine foster children who are institutionalized has been cut by at least 73 percent.

In November, 2003, Maine had 28 percent of its foster children in group homes and institutions and only ten percent with relatives (and even that ten percent was an improvement over the Concannon era, when it was only four percent).  By now that’s reversed – 30 percent are with relatives and only ten percent are in so-called “congregate care” – making Maine one of the best in the nation at avoiding such placements.

The independent child welfare ombudsman has found that the reduction in substitute care has come with no compromise of safety. He strongly supports the reforms.

It all prompted Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government to make the transformation of child welfare in Maine a finalist for its prestigious Innovations in American Government awards.

CHANGE ACROSS THE COUNTRY

But it isn’t just Maine that has changed.  Things are starting to get a little better in much of the country, though there is, of course, a long, long way to go.  And I think the progress has a little bit to do with something else that happened in January, 2003: The Frontline programs aired -  three hours in all.  NCCPR contributed an essay to the Frontline website.  There was a lot wrong with the programs, and a lot wrong with how the producers dealt with some of us – so much so that when, a few months ago, they came back to NCCPR and asked for ideas for another program, I declined to help.

But that doesn’t change one simple fact: Logan Marr was a very charismatic child, and Logan’s mother made her own case with enormous power.  They simply overwhelmed any master narrative that anyone, be it Maine DHS or the Frontline producers, tried to impose.

As a result, these programs became the first time in well over a decade that a big national news organization created a work of journalism that called into question the conventional media wisdom about child welfare – the false claims that the system supposedly bends over backwards to give too many chances to sadists and brutes who torture their children. 

For those who weren’t following child welfare then, it’s hard to conceive of just how bad it was.  But imagine that the worst of the recent reporting in the Los Angeles Times was the norm, repeated over and over anywhere and everywhere, and you get some idea.

Looking back now, I think the Frontline programs are where that started to change nationwide.   And that’s why January 31, 2001, just might have been the day child welfare changed.

WHEN PRAISE HURTS

There is always a dilemma in praising a system that has reformed.  It’s important to acknowledge improvement wherever it can be found, in order to encourage more improvement.  At the same time, this can wind up rubbing salt in the wounds of those who were horribly harmed by that system and never benefitted from the changes.  It can do the same to families who suffer right now because there is so much that still needs to change.

The changes in Maine came too late for the family that first took on Kevin Concannon.  And, of course, they came too late for Logan Marr.

Here’s how Mary Callahan sums it up:

There is one more person the reforms would never have happened without and that is a five year old girl named Logan Marr. Long before her death at the hands of her foster mother people had been trying to call attention to the fact that DHS was out of control. Her death made lawmakers listen. Her beautiful face made the public care.


I know her family would rather have her back than hear how important she was to the state of Maine but no one can do that for them. All we can do on the 10^th anniversary of her death January 31 is thank them for their dignity and say we are sorry.