News and commentary round-up, week ending Oct. 1, 2019

Having been away for most of September, I’m sure I missed a lot, but here are a few excellent recent stories – and one outstanding law review article.

● How many times are children taken from their parents each year? Officially, about 269,000. In reality it’s probably more than half a million.  That’s one of the important findings in a law review article by Prof. Josh Gupta-Kagan of the University of South Carolina School of Law, called America’s Hidden Foster Care System.  

By its very nature it’s hard to measure, but Prof. Gupta-Kagan has pulled together the available data and credibly estimates that the “hidden” system is about as big as the one we all know. In the hidden system children have even less protection from needless removal than in the system we know.  And the vastly overhyped Family First Act, which is supposed to prevent needless foster care, actually may make this problem worse.

Some of these concerns are not new.  I first wrote about what I called the foster care Twilight Zone in 2009.  And I discussed the problems in detail in this column for Youth Today in 2016.  But Prof. Gupta-Kagan has done an outstanding job of explaining the issue, adding new information about its scope, and recommending solutions.

● What happens when a profession not known for humility is granted enormous power by another profession steeped in secrecy with no accountability?  As the Houston Chronicle and NBC News reveal in their joint investigation, pretty much what you’d expect.  And, as noted in this previous post, child abuse pediatricians, whose failures are exposed in the story, are grasping for even more power – and demanding that their colleagues do less thinking.

● The previous round-up includes a link to a story by Delia Goncalves of WUSA-TV in Washington D.C. about how D.C. public schools sometimes call the child protective services agency to pick up children when parents are late to get them after school.  On Sept. 2, the station  broadcast a follow-up story, including NCCPR’s perspective.

● On the Rethinking Foster Care blog, Vivek Sankaran argues that the almost universally-invoked standard “best interests of the child” is profoundly dangerous because it is so subjective.  He writes: “…[c]hild welfare cases are really about who gets to decide what they think is best for a child. Before a parent is found to be unfit, they get to decide. While a child is in foster care, a court or a child welfare agency might get to decide. If a child has achieved permanency with an adoptive parent, or a guardian, they get to figure this out.”

And there are several important stories from New York:

● Whenever you think the child welfare system can’t get any uglier, someone turns over another rock and a whole new batch of ugly turns up.  Writing in The New York Times, Eli Hager of The Marshall Project exposes a law in New York State that allows child protective services agencies to take away the children of unwed fathers, even when there is not even an accusation that those fathers hurt their children.  The children can be taken away permanently if they are taken from their mothers, and the fathers don’t pay “child support” – or, as it should properly be called, ransom -- to the foster care agency holding the child. (And, even if the fathers could afford this, and even if it were a good idea, there isn’t even a mechanism to make the payments.) Eleven other states have similar laws.

● City and State New York has a story about a bill that would enact modest reforms to New York’s central registry of alleged child abusers, and slightly raise the standard caseworkers must use before checking off the box on the form that can wrongly list someone on that registry.

● WNYC Public Radio has a story about bills before the New York City Council that attempt to reduce needless removal and racial bias in the City child welfare system.

● And the Chronicle of Social Change follows one case that illustrates the value of New York City’s system of high-quality defense counsel for families.

NCCPR in the Everett, Wash. Herald on the Snohomish County CASA scandal

Thanks to The Herald and reporter Noah Haglund for the comprehensive account of the scandal engulfing the Snohomish County Court Appointed Special Advocates (formerly Vollunteer Guardian Ad Litem) program (“Lying, spying and destroying evidence spur guardian reforms,” The Herald, Aug. 18).

In some ways, the most damning revelation about the program isn’t that its staff and volunteers as the story put it, “repeatedly crossed legal and ethical lines.” It’s not the “lying, spying, [and] withholding and destroying evidence” that the trial judge found “pervasive and egregious.”

The most telling revelation comes in the form of one step that the Snohomish County Superior Court felt the need to take in order to claim it was “fixing” the program.

Read the full column here.

And there's more about the Snohomish County CASA scandal here.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending Sept. 1, 2019

● First up, two items on the Snohomish County CASA scandal.  Just one day after the law firm that exposed the scandal asked a key funder of CASA to investigate, that funder, the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, said it is looking into the issues raised by the scandal.  I have a blog post on it, and a summary of the issues in this op-ed for The (Everett, Wash.) Herald.

● Just in time for back-to-school, school districts are ramping up their use of child protective services to harass families.  WUSA-TV exposed a particularly egregious example in Washington, D.C.  I have a blog post about it, including a link to WUSA’s story.

● One year ago, a British online news site, The Tortoise held what it calls a “ThinkIn” in the Bronx.  But let the reporter explain:

It was about masculinity and the issues facing the city’s young men. A civil rights lawyer made an intervention in the kind of tone that cuts through the noise. People weren’t so scared of the police knocking on the door, she said. What families in the Bronx most feared was a different wing of the state; it was child protection workers, because that’s when you might face the worst and lose your children.

Not only did this lawyer’s comment lead to a very good story about child welfare in New York, it led to several good stories about the depressingly-similar problems in the British system.  All of the stories are here.

● A federal appeals court ruled against a mother wrongly placed in Hawaii’s central registry of alleged child abusers.  The statute of limitations for appeals had expired – but only because the mother never knew she was in the registry in the first place, and the state never bothered to tell her.  Though the court felt it was forced to rule against the mother, one judge issued a scathing opinion blasting the state for the ultimate Catch-22.  Honolulu Civil Beat has the story.

● More than a year ago, the Associated Press exposed the use of coerced “voluntary” foster-care placements arranged by a county child protective services agency in North Carolina.  These are off-the-books placements in which child protective services says if you don’t place your child “voluntarily,” usually with a relative, they’ll take you to court and place the children with strangers.  It’s actually a common practice all over the country – but in Cherokee County, NC, it was so egregious that the state actually took over the county agency for a while.

Now, Carolina Public Press has dug even deeper and found that things were actually even worse; including a possibly illegal rush to terminate parental rights, and the state knew what was going on for months before acting.  The story is a bit confusing; it’s easier to follow if you read the AP stories first.

● Even as that was being exposed, the North Carolina Legislature actually was considering legislation to further run roughshod over the rights of children to live with their own families.  I discuss that bill in this blog post

● And a lawsuit in Vermont highlights the issue of wrongful removal in that state, which takes away children at one of the highest rates in the country.  VTDigger reports.

Weaponizing CPS: In DC, if you’re late to pick up your child from school, you may have to pick him up from Child Protective Services (assuming they let you have him back)

UPDATE, SEPT. 30: See NCCPR's perspective in this follow-up story from WUSA9

Remember the school district that got national attention for threatening to turn families in to child protective services if they couldn’t afford to pay for their children’s school lunches?

It turns out it’s not just one school district.  The Philadelphia Inquirer found that in Southern New Jersey alone, at least eight school district that have policies allowing schools to do the same thing.

In New Jersey, as in Luzerne County, Pa., where the practice first came to light, the child protective services agency made clear schools should never do that, calling such threats “a misuse and misrepresentation” of the agency.

But in Washington, D.C., the CPS agency gave a disturbing non-answer when asked about a practice in the District that is as bad or worse: turning in parents for alleged neglect if they’re so much as a minute late picking their children up from school.

The practice was revealed by WUSA-TV, after they heard from a parent.  

She, and other parents at Paterson ElementarySchool, received a “welcome back” to school letter from the school principal that is anything but welcoming.  It is so dripping with condescension and filled with boldfaced, underlined, all-caps finger-wagging admonitions that one can only wonder: If this is how they treat the parents, what is it like to be a student there?

But one threat is particularly disturbing:

If you choose not to have your child remain in the Afterschool Program, then he/she MUST be picked up promptly at 3:15 p.m. For those students that are not picked up on time (3:15pm) the Child and Family Services Agency (CFSA) will be contacted, and parents will be required to pick their child up from their office." [Emphasis most definitely in the original]

Notice the part about the afterschool program.  It’s not as if the school would be empty by 3:30.  On the contrary, when a parent is simply stuck in traffic, or has some kind of emergency, or just thought it was someone else’s turn to pick up the child, presumably the school could simply allow the child to sit in at the afterschool program.  (And if, by some chance there’s some stupid bureaucratic rule prohibiting this, then surely there are adults who could stay a little later to watch the child.)

This cruel policy appears rooted either in making things more convenient for the school or contempt for the families who send children to Patterson Elementary School.

Guess who goes to Patterson Elementary

If you haven’t already guessed, the student population is 99 percent Black.  The other one percent is Hispanic/Latino.  One hundred percent are listed as economically disadvantaged.  These are precisely the parents who generally have the most stress in their lives, and are likely to find it hardest to always get to the school at precisely 3:15pm.

Officially, this appalling infliction of trauma on children is district-wide policy – but do you really think they’d get away with this at a school in tony Georgetown?

Worse than the threatening letter is the fact that schools in the District have, in fact, been carrying out the threat, and CFSA has been going along with it. 

Back when the Pennsylvania school lunch story broke, and the county child welfare agency responded the right way, I wrote this:

I suspect that, while most CPS agencies wouldn’t have endorsed what the school district did, they wouldn’t condemn it either – since their party line is report! report! report!  Call in with anything and everything, no matter how absurd, they say, and let our “professionals” decide.

And sure enough, CFSA lived down to my expectations.  According to WUSA:

[CFSA] Deputy Director Robert Matthews said that in many cases, they call mom or dad to find out they’re just stuck in traffic. CFSA couldn’t tell WUSA9 how often this happens because they don’t keep records of that. But he said they work with schools to track families down. 

Wait. Don’t schools also have telephones?  Why doesn’t CFSA tell the schools to do this themselves – instead of traumatizing children first?

What CFSA should have said is:

We are not in the business of doing the school district’s scut work for them.  We have real cases of abuse and neglect to investigate.  And we’re not here to inflict trauma on children for your convenience.  We will refuse to send our overloaded caseworkers to your school just because a parent is late to pick up a child, and we demand that you immediately stop calling us in such cases.

Instead, they said only this:

Situations like this do not automatically mean it’s a case of neglect or cause for investigation.

Well, isn’t that reassuring.  There are several problems with this.

From the 19^th Century, when Societies for Prevention of Cruelty to Children were known in poor neighborhoods as “the Cruelty,” to today, children in those neighborhoods know exactly what an agency like CFSA is all about.  They have to. For one thing, one recent study says a majority of African-American children will be the subject of a child abuse investigation at some point in their childhoods.

So children have every reason to be scared when caseworkers show up at the school and take them to the CFSA offices downtown.

And while this is not automatically deemed cause for investigation, that call is the equivalent of issuing CFSA a fishing license to poke and pry into every aspect of a family’s life.  Since any family subjected to this is likely to be poor, and poverty often is confused with neglect, the trauma of that first trip to the CFSA office could be only the beginning.

In my previous post, I said this keeps happening because we allow it to happen:

Half a century of horror stories that bear no resemblance to what CPS agencies typically see, combined with politicians trying to score points by “cracking down on child abuse” have led us to this: a child welfare surveillance state where everyone is under constant suspicion and CPS is the weapon of choice for all sorts of bureaucratic bullies.

In DC the problem is worsened by the local Child Advocacy Center, which, undoubtedly means well, but winds up stoking paranoia. Take a look at the repercussions.

There are two legislative bodies that could put a stop to this practice in Washington, D.C.: The schoolboard could bar schools from calling CFSA just because parents are late picking up their kids, or the D.C. Council could bar CFSA from acting on such calls.  Presumably D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser could do the same.

But the bigger issue is this: As long as we are driven by fear, and as long as child welfare agencies are the enablers, school districts, among others, will be able to exploit that fear for their own convenience.

Another bill takes a swing at drug using parents – if it passes, guess who’s going to get hit

            The story on the online news site North Carolina Health News is headlined “Foster care bill could allow faster termination of parental rights.”  Written by the site’s founder, Rose Hoban, it is a far better take than most on issues involving child welfare and drug use, showing rare care and sensitivity.

It’s not unusual to see stories about the effects of opioid use on children in which reporters consider parents too subhuman even to talk to (Case in point: The Washington Post.) In contrast Hoban’s story begins with such a parent, brings out her humanity, and shows her successful reunification with her child.  Although I’ll spend much of this post citing parts of the story with which I disagree, Hoban goes to unusual lengths to present all sides.

            But (paragraphs like the one above are almost always followed by “but…”) I do disagree with one central premise of the story.  Hoban writes:

At issue is the tussle between the rights of children who have troubled parents to live less chaotic lives, in foster care, or with perhaps adoptive parents, and the rights of birth parents to take the time to get their lives in order, to win back their rights to raise those children.

            That is the standard framing of the issue.  But the problem with bills like the one in North Carolina, known as House Bill 918, is not that they hurt parents – the problem is that they hurt children.

Lessons from the last “Worst Drug Plague Ever”

            That is a lesson we all should have learned from the last “Worst Drug Plague Ever,” crack cocaine.

University of Florida researchers studied two groups of children born with cocaine in their systems; one group was placed in foster care, another left with birth mothers able to care for them.  After six months, the babies were tested using all the usual measures of infant development: rolling over, sitting up, reaching out.  Typically, the children left with their birth mothers did better.  For the foster children, the separation from their mothers was more toxic than the cocaine. 

Similarly, consider what The New York Times found when it looked at the best way to treat infants born with opioids in their systems. According to the Times:

[A] growing body of evidence suggests that what these babies need is what has been taken away: a mother.  Separating newborns in withdrawal can slow the infants’ recovery, studies show, and undermine an already fragile parenting relationship. When mothers are close at hand, infants in withdrawal require less medication and fewer costly days in intensive care.

 “Mom is a powerful treatment,” said Dr. Matthew Grossman, a pediatric hospitalist at Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital who has studied the care of opioid-dependent babies.

It is extremely difficult to take a swing at so-called “bad mothers” without the blow landing on their children. That doesn’t mean we can simply leave children with hopelessly addicted parents.  But it does mean that in most cases, drug treatment for the mother is a better option than foster care for the child. 

Indeed, as I discuss in this column for the trade journal Youth Today, child welfare’s entire approach to substance abuse exists at the intersection of ignorance and arrogance.

The chaos of foster care

That Florida study is only one example of why House Bill 918 would hurt children. 

The story says that part of the issue is the right of children to have “less chaotic lives, in foster care or with perhaps adoptive parents...” Sometimes that’s what happens; often it isn’t.  Foster care is enormously chaotic.  That’s one reason why study after study after study has found what that Florida study found: in typical cases children left in their own homes fare better even than comparably-maltreated children in foster care.

That’s true even when the foster home is a good one. The majority are.  But another series of studies finds abuse in at least one-quarter to one-third of foster homes, and the rate of abuse in group homes and institutions is even worse.

Yes, I know. The story quotes proponents as suggesting families are lining up to adopt these children.  But that’s also what they said when they fooled Congress into passing the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997.  (I say fooled because some of those making the case at the time knew that wasn’t true.)  In any event, it didn’t work. Instead, terminations far outran adoptions, and the number of children “aging out” of foster care with no home increased. 

Attacking kinship care

The bill also seeks to undermine the least harmful form of foster care, kinship foster care, in which children are placed with relatives instead of strangers.

            The story also quotes a lawyer for a county social services agency whining about how hard it is to find relatives.  That simply gives away the fact that a lot of the impetus behind this bill isn’t what’s best for children, it’s what’s easiest for agencies. 

In Allegheny County, Pa. to cite just one example, 56 percent of foster children are placed in kinship foster care.  It’s not impossible; it just takes more effort, and a true dedication to putting the interests of children first – because (yes, it’s that pesky research again) study after study has shown that kinship foster care is better for children’s well-being and, most important, safer than what should properly be called “stranger care.”

There also are the usual trendy claims about brain science, bonding and trauma.  It’s not that those issues aren’t real, but those favoring a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare have been cherry-picking from the research.  For example, one of the worst “Adverse Childhood Experiences” a child can endure is removal from a parent. Yet those who cherry-pick from the research propose what amounts to trying to fight trauma with trauma.

As for bonding, that too is real, and really important.  But look at what those Florida infants are trying to tell us, and what we’re learning about how to treat newborns with opioids in their system: Don’t break the bond these children were born with.   More generally, bonding is a lot more complicated and nuanced than simply running a stopwatch and declaring that the child is bonded with, and only with, whoever had her or him the longest.

Indeed, one should be especially wary when child welfare agencies play the bonding card – they tend to deal it from the bottom of the deck.  In fact, the Trump Administration is using it to try to justify keeping apart some of the children torn from their parents at the Mexican border.

Racial and class bias

I was surprised that there was nothing in the story about the two factors that are at the root of almost everything in child welfare: Race and class.  The biggest single problem in child welfare is the confusion of poverty with neglect, compounded by the racial bias that permeates the system.

The North Carolina bill would add even more power to a system riven by racial and class bias. What this bill, and others like it, really would do is turn the child welfare system into the ultimate middle-class entitlement: Step right up and take a poor person’s child for your very own.

UPDATE: A key CASA funder is “looking into” the Snohomish County CASA scandal

● The law firm that exposed the scandal filed complaints with the agency, and with National CASA.

● The Snohomish program is so lily-white it has to use a photo from National CASA to show a Black CASA volunteer. Several other CASA programs use the same photo.

Responding to a complaint from the law firm that exposed the Snohomish County CASA scandal, a key funder for CASA says it’s “looking into” issues raised by the firm.

The federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention provides grants to National CASA and local CASA programs. The ABC Law Group is asking that  “funding from OJJDP that goes to the CASA program in Snohomish County, Washington be investigated for ethics violations.”  They’re also asking for “a federal investigation/oversight into this program which receives your funding.”

Less than 24 hours after receiving the request, OJJDP Administrator Caren Harp replied “We’re looking into it.”

The law firm also filed a formal complaint with the Executive Committee of the National CASA Board of Directors. The board is chaired by William Bell, who also is President and CEO of Casey Family Programs.

The complaint asks National CASA to investigate the Snohomish program for “on-going ethics violations which have now been shown to have hurt families.”  The complaint cites the recent scathing decision from a Washington State appellate court which “held that our CASA program engaged in the destruction of evidence, spying, perjury, abusive use of litigation, threatening lawyers and violating the appearance of fairness.”

Up to now, National CASA’s response can be summed up this way:

You can find out all about the Snohomish County CASA scandal here.

And there’s more …

The generic CASA doesn’t look much like the real CASAs

The complaint to National CASA also seeks an investigation into “false advertising and recruitment practices at Snohomish County.”

Among other things, there’s the matter of this flyer published by the program. See that nice picture of an African-American man – the only photo depicting a CASA volunteer?  There’s just one problem:  Right now, according to the Snohomish County program itself, of the 57 volunteers in the program, the total number of African-American volunteers is exactly zero.  The complaint notes that “The flyer to promote CASA contains more diversity regarding African American families than the entire program itself.”

And Snohomish County is not alone. NCCPR ran a Google Image search. We found the same photo of the same volunteer on websites for CASA programs in Kansas City, Missouri, Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, Northern Neck CASA in Virginia, Blue Ridge CASA, also in Virginia, Clayton County CASA in Georgia, the Texarkana Texas CASA program and the Arkansas State CASA Association. On the Arkansas website, his picture appears above the caption “Our spotlight shines on those volunteers who have gone above and beyond the necessary.” But click on the link to find the real volunteer they’re profiling, and it’s a white woman. 

Looks like Generic CASA used to be on the site for Kansas CASA too. That actually would be an improvement. About ten years ago, a local CASA organization in Kansas held a fundraiser that included a Blackface act.

Generic CASA also turns up in a slick promotional video from National CASA itself.

This doesn’t mean that none of these chapters has an African-American volunteer.  But, as noted above, the one in Snohomish does not.

We also know that CASA volunteers are 80 to 90 percent white.  And we know that, according to the most comprehensive study ever done of CASA, commissioned by the National CASA Association itself, volunteers spend less time on a case if the child is Black. 

That study also found that CASA doesn’t work.  A study specific to Snohomish County found that the Snohomish County program doesn’t work either.

Yet still, National CASA has not responded to the scandal in Snohomish County.  Perhaps now, they’ll come up with a response better than this:

News and commentary round-up, week ending August 27, 2019

● Last week’s round-up included an excellent op-ed from The Hill about doctors who actually want their peers to “think less” before suspecting their patients’ parents of child abuse and referring the children to hospitals for batteries of tests – and quite possibly calls to child protective services leading to foster care.  What some of these doctors want is even worse; a wholesale expansion of the child welfare surveillance state.  I have a blog post about it.

● A tragic example of how the “think less” approach plays out in real life can be seen in this excellent op-ed column for The New York Times from Jessica Horan-Block, a lawyer for the Bronx Defenders.  It’s called “A Child Bumps Her Head. What Happens Next Depends on Race.”

● There’s also a great op-ed in the New York Daily News. This one is from Jeannette Vega, training director for Rise. It’s about legislation to bring modest reforms to New York State’s Central Registry of alleged child abusers.  The bill is now on Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s desk.

● Also on the governor’s desk: Legislation that would allow children to keep in contact with their birth parents even after parental rights are terminated, if a judge found it to be in the children’s best interests.  The Albany Times Union has two letters supporting the bill.  One is from family defense pioneer David Lansner.  The other is from lawyers whose organizations represent 90 percent of the children in child welfare cases in New York City.

● In Talk Poverty, Elizabeth Brico has an excellent overview of how financial incentives encourage the misuse and overuse of foster care.

● Remember that story about the school district in Pennsylvania that was threatening to report families to child protective services if they didn’t pay school lunch debts?  It caused a nationwide furor.  But that district is not alone.  The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that several southern New Jersey school districts have policies that allow school officials to do the same thing.  So, in an effort to educate the educators who really ought to know better, here again is a blog post about why this is so harmful to children.