Heartless in the heartland

    And I thought Todd Landry, the guy who runs the child welfare agency in Nebraska, was bad. But even Landry pales compared to Dave Reed who works for a Boys Town shelter in Grand Island.

    Virtually every expert in the Grand Island area understood that, for almost every parent using the state's "safe haven" law, that parent was acting out of desperation. But not the man from Boys Town, whose every quote in this story from the Grand Island Independent oozed with sanctimony.

    "I don't know if there is a gap in services. That implies, if we have more of the right kind of services, everything would be fine, I don't know if that is true," Reed told the newspaper.

    Well, I know one way to find out. Try providing more of the right kind of services.

    Reed continues: "We have a lot of great services in Nebraska. You can call and get help in Nebraska. Sometimes, it just takes a while."

    And how long, exactly, is a parent supposed to wait if their child is assaulting them and siblings and the assaults keep getting more violent? How long must they wait after the first suicide attempt – until the second one comes closer to succeeding?

    But wait, there's more!

    "Reed also disagreed that socio-economic status affects the availability of treatment, as [one expert] suggested. 'Service is available at every socio-economic level,' he said. "If people can't afford (counseling), there are interns and student counselors. Sometimes people need to get creative. If you get in a situation where you can't pay for someone to help you, it motivates you to find other ways to get help."
    Oh, o.k. then Mr. Reed. But why stop with mental illness? If, sometime in the next few years, you need brain surgery, you don't mind if we just let a first year med student do it, do you?

    And, by the way, in one "safe haven" case, the mother said she resorted to the law after first trying desperately, on her own, to get the child admitted to Boys Town. But, she says, Boys Town refused. "Boys Town was my one and only last hope," the mother said. "There was nothing else for me."

    Fortunately, the Man from Boys Town does not appear to be typical of professionals in Grand Island.

    According to the Grand Island Independent story:

"What I've seen with the preteens and teens coming through safe haven is not abuse and neglect on the parents' part but behavioral health issues going on," said Scott Dugan, president and chief executive officer of Mid-Plains Center for Behavioral Healthcare Services in Grand Island. Dugan said the "safe-haven problem" reflects a lack of behavioral and mental health services for children and the high costs of obtaining the services that are available.

"Even if parents have insurance, many carriers don't pay for mental health care," he said. Blaming the parents or caregivers for abandoning their children isn't the answer, he said, nor is it that simple. "These kids show problematic behaviors that require therapy," he said. "These parents are at the end of their rope. (Using safe haven) is the only option they see." …

"It goes back to money," said Anne Buettner of Grand Island, a private-practice family therapist for 30 years. "Even if therapy is $5 an hour, if you don't have money for gas, you don't go to therapy." Even in a best-case scenario, when a family can access therapy and behavioral health assistance, Allen said it's not always enough. "You look at the families that have dropped children off (under safe haven). I believe they've tried everything else," she said. "For a parent to drop a child off, things have to get so bad."

Meanwhile, Landry, the guy who used the parents' plight for a little sick humor not long ago, also is getting all sanctimonious again.

His latest tactic, and that of other family bashers in Nebraska: Suggest that the parents willfully are doing severe emotional damage to the children by the message sent when the children are "abandoned" at hospitals.

In one sense, he's got a point. It does, indeed send a terrible message and common sense suggests it can be enormously scarring. But Landry implies that parents don't care about that and are just doing this out of convenience. The evidence so far, in the overwhelming majority of cases, is that these parents have been left with only lousy choices, and the safe haven law was the least bad option they could find.

And, fortunately, at least some lawmakers are not buying the snake oil Landry is trying to sell. According to the Omaha World-Herald:

Sen. Brad Ashford of Omaha … said the safe haven law is not abandonment. "I have a hard time classifying what these parents, guardians and grandparents did as abandonment, if they had nowhere else to turn and if they stayed with the case," said Ashford. "To my mind, they were very, very concerned parents."

But what's worse about Landry's comments is the rank hypocrisy. When it comes to emotional harm, you know what ranks right up there with "abandonment"? Taking a child from everyone he knows and loves, by force of law, and throwing him into foster care when it's not necessary. Year after year the state with one of the worst records in the nation for that, sometimes the very worst record, is Nebraska.

And that means no one in a position of power in Nebraska – not Todd Landry, not the Governor, not the members of the Nebraska Legislature – none of them has a right to accuse anyone else of doing emotional harm to children. Because there is simply no greater perpetrator of emotional abuse in the State of Nebraska than the government of the State of Nebraska.

If you want compassion in Nebraska, call a cop

    While the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services, and in particular its Director of Children and Family Services, Todd Landry, show appalling callousness toward families driven by desperation to use the state's unusually broad "safe haven" law, the Lincoln, Neb. Police department is taking a different approach.

    According to the Omaha World-Herald:

[Lincoln Police Chief Tom] Casady criticized state lawmakers and state health agencies that portray mental health care and other services for children as easy to find and simple to receive. People consider using the safe haven law, he said, in large part because they find the existing services lacking. He said that necessary help for parents in distress isn't always available on nights and weekends and that children fall through the cracks if they aren't deemed suicidal or violent.

"I'm a little mystified that people are so surprised by this outcome," Casady said of the 19 safe haven children. "People seem to be exposed to this for the first time. I've had these fed-up parents crying in my office for years and years."

Lincoln police officers often engage the parent when called to a safe haven case. They try to determine what problems the family is having and suggest an alternative if they know of one. Twice, a child destined to be abandoned under the law has ended up in temporary psychiatric care at a Lincoln hospital because of this interaction, Casady said.

But don't expect similar help from cops in Omaha, where they do little more than process the paperwork.

There's a similar divide among hospitals. Some do nothing but accept the child. The head of the social work department at Creighton University Medical Center says they're not going to try to help families keep their children because "we feel we'd be putting a child potentially in harm's way." Right. Like consigning a child to the Nebraska foster care system isn't "harm's way." What she really means, I suspect, is "If we persuaded a parent to keep her child and then something went wrong, we might be sued."

At first, Immanuel Medical Center responded in the same manner as Creighton "…but then we started to talk," the hospital's chief operating officer told the World-Herald. "We said: 'What if we could intervene and make a difference?'" And so far they have, for three families.

Of course, Todd Landry has his own solution to how to help these families, and no one who's read his other comments will be surprised at what it is: Shove the problem back under the rug. As the World-Herald reported:

Landry believes state lawmakers should change the law to apply only to newborns up to 72 hours old. "You fix that situation, and I think all these other questions disappear," he said.

The questions – and the families – don't actually go away, of course, they just "disappear." Apparently for Landry, that's all that matters.

Fortunately, not everyone in power in Nebraska supports Landry's sweep-it-under-the-rug approach. Even as lawmakers line up to support the 72-hour limit, the World-Herald reports that State Sen. Brad Ashford of Omaha also plans to introduce legislation to make it easier for families to get help without surrendering their children.

The latest word in cruelty to children: Nebraska

At the rate things are going, it may become a verb: to "Nebraska" one's children, meaning, to become so utterly desperate that you drop off children of any age at a hospital, anywhere from Omaha to Scottsbluff, then turn around and leave.

    "Did you hear about Fred and Susan?" a neighbor might say. "They both lost their jobs, their home was foreclosed and they got so desperate they had to Nebraska their children."

    In one sense it all began when Nebraska became the last state to pass a so-called "safe haven" law. Such laws were intended to prevent people from abandoning infants in dumpsters, by letting them leave newborns at hospitals, fire stations and other designated locations, no questions asked. But the Nebraska law didn't specify infants. So some parents left older children, often teenagers. One 18-year-old was so desperate to get help he even tried to "abandon" himself. And as the situation began attracting national attention, twice (so far) parents and grandparents began arriving from other states to use the law and leave a child behind.

    So much is so sickening about this that it's hard to know where to begin. There's the head of the state human services agency, who thought the suffering of so many families was an opportunity for sick humor, there's the judge whose astonishing ignorance made one family's suffering even worse, or there's the fact that, with hindsight, it's entirely predictable that the state where this would happen would be Nebraska, among the cruelest states in the nation when it comes to treatment of vulnerable children and families.

    But it may be best to begin with the possibility that Nebraska inadvertently wound up doing such families, all over the country, a favor – not by inventing a new form of child abandonment, but by calling attention to desperation that's always been there, and practices that have always existed.

    On Sept. 28, the Omaha World-Herald, which has done excellent work on this story from the start, published brief profiles of all the families who had used the law to that point. There is every indication that every parent or guardian involved in these cases dearly loved their children. The common theme is desperation. Most of the cases involved parents or guardians at their wits end coping with the violent behavior of mentally ill teenagers. One case, involving nine children, involved an impoverished widowed father at the end of his rope. In that case, the World-Herald reports, the family had been desperate before:

In March 2004, the children were placed in foster care because their home was filthy and had no gas, running water or phone. Court-appointed psychologists noted that the couple cared for their children deeply. But the two couldn't find stable work, so they didn't have enough income to pay bills and rent. The father looked for a second job to supplement his income. Without a high school diploma or a GED, he found good work hard to come by.

Had the state of Nebraska lifted a finger to help with these concrete problems in 2004, perhaps the father wouldn't have thought his only option was to surrender the children to foster care again last month – after his wife died. (Later, relatives would say the father could have turned to them – but when the state itself actually tried to do that – the only thing it's done right in this whole mess - a judge got in the way, a story I'll try to get to in a future post.)

    But one of the many tragedies of American child welfare is that parents like this father and the others in Nebraska have been taking such desperate measures for a century or more.

When I wrote my book on child welfare, Wounded Innocents, (Prometheus Books: 1990, 1995) nearly 20 years ago I cited an Orlando Sentinel story about a mother in Florida who desperately loved her two children, four-year-old Lisa and two-year-old Amanda, but was homeless. Fearing that the state would take them away, she "voluntarily" surrendered them, to the state, at first temporarily. "She figured giving the kids up for temporary custody was her best chance of keeping them," the Sentinel reported.

"Lisa and Amanda's mother visited them at the church day care facility every day. By fall she was talking to a church worker about giving the girls up for adoption. Because she thought that "was going to be better for them than anything she could ever give to them. She did love the girls. If she could give them up, they could be taken care of, sent to college," the worker said. … The girls said their mother "'had water in her eyes' when she said goodbye. The mother left a necklace - a chain with a big heart and two little ones - behind as a remembrance. She told Lisa to tell Amanda that she loved her. And she left."

    More recently, many newspapers, including the World-Herald, have done excellent stories and series on parents who have no choice but to surrender their children to the tender mercies of the state because it's the only way to get them mental health care. It happens thousands of times ever year but, except for those occasional news stories, it goes almost unnoticed.

    In the recent Nebraska cases, had the "Safe Haven" law not been available, odds are the parents or guardians would have resorted to some other less publicized means to surrender their children. So Nebraska lawmakers have at least brought the problem out into the open – albeit by accident. In that state, calls to revise the law are being accompanied by calls to give parents better options.

    But the latter will be a much tougher sell, particularly in Nebraska. Because while such problems exist everywhere, odds are they're worse in Nebraska, a state where even the top human services official seems to revel in condemning the desperate and adding a little extra pain to all they've suffered already. There seems to be a Nebraska mentality that says: If a family can't do everything on its own it's no good, so we should take the child and run, or encourage the parents themselves to turn them over to the state, then turn around and condemn them for it. This can be seen in the comments of Todd Landry, children and family services director for the state's Department of Health and Human Services, who insisted that the case of a desperate, widowed, unemployed, impoverished father of nine has nothing to do with poverty – and who snidely dismissed all of the parents as just being "tired of their parenting roles."

    Landry was far more generous in his assessment of the state's own ability as parent. In one case, involving a young man who had been bounced from one "residential treatment center" to another, until he aged out of the system, at a cost of more than $265,000 Landry praised the young man's care saying "All appropriate services were provided when needed for as long as needed." He actually said this after the young man, Robert Hawkins, shot and killed eight people, and then himself, at an Omaha shopping mall. (And, by the way, Hawkins' father only surrendered the boy to the state when his health insurance ran out and he couldn't afford mental health care for the boy.)

    But it's not just Landry's insensitivity that suggests the state is exceptionally cruel – just look at the numbers. Over and over again, Nebraska is a contender for child removal capital of America. Year after year, whether one calculates the figures based on total child population or impoverished child population, Nebraska tears apart families and throws children into foster care at one of the highest rates in the country. And, when one looks simply at the number of children trapped in foster care on any given day, again, Nebraska is among the very worst. (One of the out-of-state children left in Nebraska came from a neighboring state with statistics that are almost as bad, and a human services agency that is almost as cruel: Iowa. And, sure enough, a spokesman for Iowa's human services agency sounded almost as callous as Landry, declaring that the Nebraska law "doesn't mean you should throw up your hands and stop being a parent and haul your recalcitrant teenager over to Omaha when the going gets rough." But at least Iowa took the child back, let her stay with her family and now promises help.)

    Still another indication of the Nebraska mentality can be seen in the case of a 12-year-old who was released from eleven months of "residential treatment" at an Omaha hospital two- and-a-half weeks ago. According to the World-Herald, his grandmother said there was no improvement – not surprising given what the research says about residential treatment. On Sunday, the grandmother says, the boy tried to kill himself by cutting his wrist with a nail. Earlier he'd threatened to kill a neighbor boy. So grandma asked the boy's aunt to take him back to the hospital – for treatment. Grandma says the hospital simply assumed she was abandoning the child under the "safe haven" law. Now she has no say in what happens to him, and the boy has been stashed in a group home.

Perhaps the notoriety will prompt Nebraska lawmakers finally to rethink not only the safe haven law but their entire take-the-child-and-run approach to vulnerable children and families.

    In future posts, I'll write about that judge who made everything worse, about Landry's astonishingly cruel sense of humor, and about a mother who replied eloquently to Landry. In the meantime, one can only hope no other parent becomes so desperate that she believes her only choice is to Nebraska her children.

A Nebraska mother fights back

    Several recent posts to this Blog have dealt with Nebraska's "safe haven" law, which allows parents to surrender children of any age, and the astonishingly callous response from Todd Landry, who runs the state's child welfare agency, when desperate parents of teenagers started to use the law.

One of the mothers responded to Landry in a letter to the Omaha World-Herald, reprinted below.   I disagree with the mother in her assessment of coverage by the World-Herald. I think their coverage has been exemplary, and compassionate.  But given her anguish, it's easy to understand why she feels as she does.  The reference at the end of the letter to "Von Maur" is a reference to shootings at an Omaha mall this year by a young man who had been the beneficiary of all the "help" the State of Nebraska cared to offer. 

From the Omaha World-Herald, October 4, 2008:

A mother's frustration

Editor's note: Lavennia Coover, who left her 11-year-old son at Immanuel Medical Center under Nebraska's safe haven law, sent this letter to news media and the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services to express her frustration with how the safe haven cases have been portrayed. Todd Landry, the children and family services director for HHS, said Coover misinterpreted what an HHS employee told her about when she would be contacted. They have been in touch with her since the letter was sent. John Melingagio, a Boys Town spokesman, said confidentiality rules prohibit him from confirming or denying a child's stay at Boys Town. "We empathize with what families are going through right now," he said.

To Whom It May Concern:

I am saddened by the response of the media in light of the Safe Haven Law. The article in Sunday's Omaha World-Herald crucified each and every child who was admitted under the law. From what I gather from the article, four families and myself have tried to get help for their children. After this article lists the mental status and the medications these children are taking -- what more confidential information is going to be given to the public for their entertainment? I hope and pray all of these children receive the much needed help they need and deserve without being sensationalized in the public eye.

There have been many bold statements made by officials in Nebraska about the parents/guardians who have utilized the safe haven law. I personally was offended by the statements made by Todd Landry -- children and family services director for the State of Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services. I have made contact with his office to speak with him, however was redirected and contacted by an administrator Todd Reckling, and I stated to him I did not leave my child under the safe haven law because I did not want to be a parent, nor did I not want the responsibility of being a parent. I was using the law because my son is a danger to himself and the family at home. I also stated I took him to the hospital I did because he needed more help than I am able to give him. While I was at the hospital I had to request to speak with the social worker on duty at the hospital. I also spoke to the police and the intake nurse for child and adolescents. During the time I was at the hospital trying to give all the information that I felt was needed to ensure my child got the help he desperately needed, the staff continually kept telling me that I could leave now! I gave my name and phone numbers and told the staff that if they needed anything else to please call me, because all I was trying to do was get the help my child needed and was unavailable to us in the area of Nebraska where we live. Todd Reckling also stated to me that I would be contacted within 48 hours of the whereabouts of my child and the next steps. It has been four days and I have not heard anything and when I try to find out I am unable to get any information.

Another statement that was made it that there is help out there for these families they are just not using them. This is not my first time dealing with these issues. I had another child who had many mental/behavioral difficulties and I contacted Boys Town for help. My child was admitted into their program and was there for 18 months with no improvement then asked to leave because she was too much for them to deal with. I then went to the Department of Health and Human Services for help. The help my family received from the state was as follows: the state took custody of my child, I was told I was a worthless parent and the judge didn't know if I deserved my other two children, the child whom they took custody of was in 14 different placements during a 3 1/2 to 4 year time. While in these placements the same behaviors continued, yet the judge still continued to blame me as a bad parent. My child is no longer under state custody, however her real issues of behavior and mental state were never truly addressed and dealt with.

Many of us who have children with behavior disorders are judged and criticized for whatever action we make concerning our children. The public has judged that we were wrong in using the law to get help for our children. There are many families in Nebraska dealing with similar issues and do not know where to begin to go and get help. These children are deemed troublemakers and the families are deemed dysfunctional, which in turn causes undue blame to be put on the parents/guardians and their parenting skills.

Do we really want another Von Maur incident to occur before there is a recognized need for help for these children?

Lavennia Coover

Maine Child Welfare Advisory Panel charts a better way forward

There's some good stuff in this report.

At last: A group involved in oversight of Maine child welfare that shows a real understanding of the problems.  The Maine Child Welfare Advisory Panel (MCWAP) Citizen Review Panel has produced a report with six recommendations.  None of them is a dud and three have the potential for significant improvement.  The only problem is that the recommendations are too timid, often suggesting pilot programs for ideas that have already been proven all over the country. 

Unfortunately, when it comes to the most important recommendations, the Maine Office of Children and Family Services, while not opposing them outright, showed no enthusiasm. The OCFS response boils down to: Hey Legislature, it’s up to you, we don’t care.  That is to be expected from an agency led by Todd Landry whose callousness was on display back when he was running child welfare in Nebraska - and taking away children at what was then the highest rate in the country. He even made a sick joke at the expense of vulnerable families. 

It speaks volumes about the failure of Maine’s child welfare “ombudsman,” Christine Alberi, that even Landry thinks Alberi goes too far in recommending the removal of children from their homes. 

The existence of this report also calls into question a claim made by Alberi at a recent legislative hearing.  Alberi claimed that all the various oversight organizations concerned with child welfare in Maine are essentially on the same page. 

But even though Alberi is listed as a member of MCWAP, their full report is not on the same page as Alberi – they’re not even using the same playbook.  And while Alberi’s approach will make all Maine children less safe, if the state enacts the MCWAP recommendations it will be a first step toward making all children safer. 

Most important: High-quality legal representation 

The most important recommendation, in keeping with evidence-based best practice across the country, is for Maine to pilot legal representation as soon as OCFS starts to investigate – as opposed to only after a child has been taken away.  The recommendation is too tepid, calling only for some form of legal representation, largely just so families know what OCFS will do to them – as opposed to representation that lets families fight for their children and counter needless removal. 

What is actually needed, and what has been demonstrated to significantly reduce foster care with no compromise of safety is high-quality interdisciplinary representation, in which the family gets a defense team – a lawyer and a social worker, not to get “bad parents” off, but to offer alternatives to the cookie-cutter service plans forced on families by agencies like OCFS, plans that often make everything worse. The team also may include a parent advocate who’s been through the system herself.  This also would free up caseworkers to spend more time investigating cases, increasing the chance that they will find the very few children in real danger.  And, by the way, because foster care is so expensive and because, in many cases, the federal government will pay half the cost, this approach also saves money. Casey Family Programs has some excellent resources on this. 

Note that often these programs have the full support of state or local child welfare agencies.  But then those states and localities don’t have agencies run by Todd Landry. 

Flex-funds 

The term used in the MCWAP report is “discretionary funds” but in Alabama, where the idea came from, they’re called “flex-funds” The idea is that service providers can spend $1,000 per family on pretty much anything that family needs.  It might mean rental assistance, or a security deposit so a family can move to better housing.  It might mean funds for car repairs so a parent can get to a job.  It might mean emergency food aid, or repairs to a furnace or a refrigerator.  This is crucial for preventing families from being torn apart because of poverty.  

In Alabama this was part of a comprehensive approach to keeping families together that, unlikely as it may sound, has made this state – a poor state with serious drug use issues (sound familiar?) a national leader, relatively speaking in keeping children safe by keeping families together. Maine would do well to take a close look at all the Alabama reforms. 

Once again, however, Todd Landry’s response to “flex funds” is the equivalent of shrugging his shoulders. 

Domestic violence 

This recommendation is a fine example of how MCWAP understands concepts Alberi can’t seem to grasp: In this case the issue is the enormous harm done to children when they are taken from parents, usually mothers, accused of “failure to protect” their children from “witnessing domestic violence.”  In other words, they couldn’t get away when a husband or boyfriend started hitting them in front of the children.  When children are taken under these circumstances the trauma of removal is magnified.  One expert described such removals as “tantamount to pouring salt into an open wound.”  

The Western New England Law Review has an excellent – and concise summary of the research in this area, and a response to all the straw-man arguments offered by those who want to continue this barbaric practice. 

Fortunately, unlike Alberi, whose own report seems to encourage this practice, MCWAP recommends that OCFS 

prioritize efforts to decrease children from being removed, or threatened to be removed, from non-offending parents for “failure to protect” the child from exposure to domestic violence committed against the non-offending parent by the offending parent.

 This is the one recommendation of the three that OCFS does not appear to be blowing off, but they still don’t get the urgency.  Their response boils down to: This is one piece of the work of a great big committee that’s working on revising stuff. 

But it’s not that hard.  The right policy concerning tearing children from battered mothers because the children “witnessed domestic violence” can be boiled down to a single word: 

Don’t. 

Maine’s child welfare providers produce a "framework" for false consensus

If the recommendations are enacted, the biggest beneficiaries might be 
Maine's paper mills, what with all the “theories of change” “logic models”
and “strategies” that will have to be turned out.

Multiple organizations in Maine – but with the lead organizations dominated by private “providers” have put out a document they’re calling “A Framework for Child Welfare Reform” in that state.  Yes, there are some good things in it, but in general it's really a framework for false consensus.  

The document is the latest to be released in Maine in the wake of what newspapers love to call a “spate” of child abuse deaths.  But instead of rethinking the take-the-child-and-run approach that contributed to these tragedies, and similar cases in 2018, the state has been doubling down.  They’ve been led, or rather misled, by the state’s child welfare “ombudsman,” Christine Alberi.  I describe the enormous harm she is doing in this previous blog post. 

This new document isn’t anywhere near as bad as what the ombudsman has been doing – or what some state legislators have been proposing.  One section of the document would actually make things better. 

But it also calls for a further expansion of the state’s family policing bureaucracy (including a whole bunch of new middle managers reporting to one of America’s worst child welfare agency leaders, Todd Landry) more power for the ombudsman and, to the extent that it endorses prevention, it is only as an add-on to the existing system.  There is nothing that would provide due process for families or in any way require a supremely powerful, unaccountable system to give up any of that power. 

And that’s the key problem. In child welfare, we all say the same things, but we all mean different things by what we say: Nobody ever says: “I think foster care should be the first resort!”  Everyone says it should be the last resort.  Nobody ever says “Boy, do I hate prevention; if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s prevention!”  By and large, the people who say they support “prevention” are sincere. But the fact that rates of child removal vary enormously from state to state and sometimes even county to county – or, as in Maine, they can shoot upwards with no evidence of an actual increase in child abuse -  shows that we all mean different things by “prevention” and have very different definitions of  “last resort.” 

So when a document like the Framework comes out – which talks about prevention but says nothing about due process or anything else to curb the power of the family police - everyone can then congratulate themselves, lots of new bureaucrats are hired and nothing really changes.  The biggest beneficiaries might be Maine’s paper mills – because so much paper will be needed for all those “theories of change” “logic models” “strategies” (which will require “strategic plans”) coordinating committee agendas and all the other gobbledygook included in the Framework document – all of which would delay actually doing anything. 

Reducing what we call child abuse is a problem that does not require any of those documents.  Nor does it require more time, paperwork and meetings, meetings, meetings, to enhance “cross-systems collaboration,” and it certainly doesn’t need more middle-managers reporting to Todd Landry.  What’s needed is this: 

● Find the poor people.

● Send money (it doesn’t have to be a lot).

● Let them buy the help they need.

● Provide meaningful due process for families, especially high-quality family defense, something not mentioned at all in the Framework. 

I suspect one reason we don’t see anything like this in the Framework is that the “lead organizations” behind it include far too many “providers” who live off the system as it exists today.  So the recommendations are structured in a way that they add on to the existing system, but don’t challenge it. 

Meaningful due process is the most important change the system can make – and the one providers would hate most.  Because even if Maine had all the help families need, in the current climate of foster-care panic, caseworkers are going to be afraid to use it.  That’s the nature of foster-care panic; every worker is afraid of having the next tragedy on their caseload, and every judge is even more afraid than before to let a child go home.  This is why it’s so important that the legislature send a strong message to Landry, Alberi et. al. that foster-care panic is making things worse and they need to stop encouraging it or enabling it. 

The one useful piece of paperwork 

That leads me to the one piece of paperwork recommended in the document that would be useful: outcome measures.  Typically, what agencies call outcome measures actually are process measures: How many families were visited once a month, how low is the caseload in what percentage of cases, etc.  

What is needed are agreed-upon measures that tell us if children are safer.  Ideally, the Legislature will commit to this right away.  

Because right now the de-facto outcome measure is: No child will die.  I know of no statewide system anywhere that has ever achieved that.  But as long as that is the outcome measure, sooner or later, when a child dies, certain players will say this “proves” that the prevention measures failed, and the cycle will start all over again.  

There needs to be a reaffirming of no child deaths as a goal, but a simultaneous repudiation of it as an outcome measure.  Outcome measures should be based primarily on something I recommended in the post about Alberi’s failures: Readings of a representative random sample of cases by unbiased experts (so not Alberi) supplemented by statewide data on overall reabuse and foster-care recidivism (the proportion of children sent home from foster care who are placed again).  Other measures can include reduction in placements in group homes and institutions and increases in the proportion of placements with relatives instead of strangers.

 

The good news 

The good news in this document is entirely in one section, “Invest in Supportive Services.”  In particular, the recommendations on family resource centers run by agencies other than Landry’s agency, the Office of Child and Family Services, increasing the availability in rural areas of buprenorphine, a treatment for opioid addiction, and, especially, more affordable housing. (There’s also a glaring omission: childcare.)  But while we’re waiting for the family resource centers and the new housing to be built, what about direct cash assistance so families can seek better housing in the existing market and buy the kinds of help the resource centers might offer?  

Also, while it’s important that family resource centers are not run by OCFS, it isn’t much better if they’re run by groups like some of the “providers” who signed onto the Framework – in particular those that oversee foster care and institutionalize children in residential treatment centers. Would you go to a family resource center staffed by “mandatory reporters” of child abuse whose institution could gain financially if your children were taken?  Rather the centers should be run by community organizations unconnected to the family policing system.

 

The bad news 

The Framework buys into the idea that Maine needs even more caseworkers.  That tacitly assumes the current level of investigations and removals is correct.  To the extent that there is a need for more caseworkers it is solely to restore the capacity of Alternative Response agencies – not OCFS.  And the idea that OCFS needs more middle managers again assumes that the issues are far more complex than they really are.  

As for all the talk about training, that always makes my skin crawl. That’s because for decades that’s been the knee-jerk all-purpose response to anything wrong in child welfare.  It never works, because training is no substitute for due process. 

Improving “cross-system collaboration” is more meaningless boilerplate that allows everyone to nod their heads and pretend to be doing something.  Do you know anyone who’s against cross-system collaboration? 

When it comes to oversight, the fact that they want to give the ombudsman more power is a de facto contradiction of everything else in the Framework.  But the Legislature itself should be providing ongoing oversight - and that also is recommended in the Framework.  Lawmakers should pass any laws needed for this and repeal any that get in the way.

 

And finally ... 

Beware of people who declare themselves advocates of prevention but constantly talk about the need for a “public health” approach.  That’s because child abuse isn’t a public health problem. It’s a social justice problem.

Nebraska’s gift to comedy

Oh, that Todd Landry! Does the children and family services director for the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services have a great sense of humor or what?

In a previous post to this blog, I discussed what happened when Nebraska, the state with the worst record in the nation for tearing apart families, passed a "safe haven" law allowing children of any age to be left at hospitals, among other places, no questions asked. Landry immediately scapegoated the desperate families. Then, as word of the law spread and two families from other states started using it, Landry responded with all the grace and compassion that has become his hallmark, telling the Omaha World-Herald:

"This is not what we intended when we said we wanted to increase Nebraska tourism."

Yep, the guy's a laugh riot.

Is Nebraska reducing foster care – or just hiding it?

For decades Nebraska was a national example of child welfare failure. Year after year the state took away children at one of the highest rates in the nation.  The state human services agency suffered from a succession of poor leaders, including one of the very worst, Todd Landry. Landry even made a sick joke at the expense of vulnerable families.   (Proving that no matter how big a failure you are, there’s always room for you in child welfare, Landry now is in charge of child welfare in Maine.)

Nebraska’s failings are outlined in detail in a report NCCPR released in 2012.

But then it looked like things were turning around.  When Matt Wallen was named Nebraska’s Director of Children and Family Services he took some constructive steps.  The new leader of the entire state health and human services agency, Dannette Smith, appears to want to continue the progress.  The rhetoric coming from her agency certainly has improved.  But do the numbers back up the words?

Officially, the number of children torn from their families in Nebraska dropped significantly in recent years.  Officially, as of 2018, Nebraska’s rate of child removal was “only” about 20 percent above the national average, when rates of child poverty are factored in.

But did removals really decline?

Hidden foster care

It seems that even as official entries into foster care have declined, another kind of foster-care has increased.  In an outstanding law review article on the topic, Prof. Josh Gupta-Kagan of the University of South Carolina School of Law calls it “hidden foster care.”

It’s something I’ve been writing about for a decade now: Child protective services agencies go to a family and coerce them into surrendering their children “voluntarily.”  In fact, there’s usually nothing voluntary about it.  The agency says: Place your children with a relative “voluntarily” or we’ll go to court and place them with total strangers.

In Texas, nearly two-thirds of entries into care occur this way.  There are indications the number may be almost as high in Virginia – though the data are limited.  And now, some Nebraska advocates claim that, in the past couple of years there’s been as one put it “a huge increase” in such placements in Nebraska.

Although we read federal regulations as requiring states to report these entries into foster care in official statistics, typically they don’t – and the federal government has not cracked down on this evasion. Indeed, in an Orwellian twist, some states refer to this as “diversion” from foster care.

It is not. 

Kinship care is foster care

Though placement with a relative is almost always the least harmful form of foster care, kinship care is still foster care.

The issue actually got attention in Nebraska for the wrong reasons.  Whenever the Nebraska child  welfare agency tries to put its dismal past behind it, a fear-mongering chorus rises up, aided and abetted by an Omaha television station that specializes in hype and hysteria over child abuse – which is why I’m not linking to their story. So in this case, the concern is based on the false claim that these hidden foster care placements are less safe, because a court didn’t sign off on them.

In fact, multiple studies have found that kinship foster care – even informal kinship foster care - typically is better for children’s well-being, more stable, and, most important, safer than what should properly be called stranger care. 

The temptation to use hidden foster care in Nebraska is understandable. In Nebraska the courts tend to be even worse than the child welfare agency, particularly in metropolitan Omaha.  Here’s one example. There’s another on Page 41 or our Nebraska report.

So, one could argue, even if the “improvement” in Nebraska consists entirely of placing children with relatives who formerly would have been placed with strangers, that’s still an improvement.

But such placements are too easy to abuse. They deprive families of even the minimal due process protections available when a worker formally removes the child and then goes to court to rubber-stamp the removal.  In Nebraska, we don’t know if these are all cases in which the children otherwise would have been placed with strangers, or if they include cases in which the children would not have been removed at all if the agency had been required to go to court.

And these placements are too easy to hide. 

Because now we don’t know if Nebraska made progress in dealing with its obscene rate of removal, or just found a way to sweep it under the rug.

Nebraska cops out

    In a disappointing, but unsurprising move, the Nebraska Legislature has voted to limit the state's "safe haven" law to infants 30 days old or younger – and do absolutely nothing about the underlying problem, desperate families with no place to turn. Well, not absolutely nothing: they've also resorted to the all-purpose government cop out, a special committee to study the issue.

    In fairness, that's not entirely the Legislature's fault. The governor called the legislature into special session in a way which largely tied its hands. This is the same governor who has shown unwavering support for Todd Landry, the head of the state child welfare agency and a man who is to the safe haven crisis as former FEMA director Michael Brown was to Hurricane Katrina. To their credit, a number of legislators have made clear they are appalled by Brownie – sorry, Landry's – handling of the whole mess.

    Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times did a very good story about the larger issues, including a close look at another case that Landry, presumably, would say was a non-emergency, and the man from Boys Town quoted in the Grand Island paper a few days ago, would say could be solved by going to a student intern. See what you think. It's also one of the few stories to note that Nebraska is one of the worst in the nation when it comes to throwing children into foster care.

The right way vs. the Nebraska way

    The Nebraska Legislature is meeting this week to amend the state's safe haven law. Some legislators want to do it the right way: include provisions expanding help, particularly mental health services, for families so desperate that they feel their only option is to use the safe haven law. But the Governor and the speaker of the state's unicameral legislature prefer the Nebraska way: Kick the families in the teeth and sweep the problem under the rug.

    According to the Associated Press, in Nebraska, if lawmakers want to do more during a special session of the legislature than the governor asks it to, it takes a two-thirds vote – and even then, lawmakers still might need the governor's permission. The governor limited the special session to considering bills that would reduce the age of children for whom the safe-haven law would apply. So without that two-thirds vote, lawmakers can't lift a finger to actually help struggling families. It would have to wait until the regular session in January. The Speaker of the legislature says that's fine with him. And the head of the state child welfare agency, Todd Landry, (you remember, the one who thought the families' plight was a topic for sick humor) was on national television Saturday night once again rubbing salt into the families' wounds. This is all in keeping with Nebraska's record for being more hostile to vulnerable families than almost any other state, as evidenced by the fact that, year after year, it takes away more children, and holds more children in foster care, than almost any other.

    To their credit, however, some Nebraska lawmakers are fed up with Landry's agency. According to an Omaha World-Herald story:

Several lawmakers criticized leaders of the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services, accusing HHS of soft-pedaling the severe psychological and behavioral problems involved in many of the cases. … Sen. Gwen Howard of Omaha spoke her mind Friday. Howard, a longtime social worker who resigned from HHS to serve in the Legislature, blasted department leaders, saying they have portrayed the state's 35 safe haven cases as examples of bad parenting and mischievous children. Howard said many of the families who have used the safe haven law face severe crisis and in some cases are in danger. Howard and Sen. DiAnna Schimek of Lincoln said many of the 35 cases involved children with severe mental health problems.

Howard said department leaders have also given state senators bad information about how well HHS is identifying and serving at-risk children. "There's a lack of basic trust here — trust that you earn through honesty," Howard said. "It really troubles me when the director of the department paints a falsely rosy picture."

Before the safe-haven law passed, Howard, some of Howard's colleagues, and others, raised a series of objections to the entire safe-haven approach. As the World-Herald reported in another story:

Sen. Ernie Chambers of Omaha … argued that the state should not condone babies being abandoned. If lawmakers really wanted to help infants and children, he said, they should fund prenatal care, food stamps and other services and work to change the stigma on pregnant, unmarried teenagers. Sen. Tony Fulton of Lincoln … was concerned about putting the babies in the state's foster care system. … Sen. DiAnna Schimek of Lincoln cited studies in states with safe haven laws showing that, after passage of the law, as many infants have been left to die as have been left in safe havens. [Sen. Howard] said the proposed safe haven procedures would undermine traditional adoption and child welfare practices. … Voices for Children and private adoption agencies argued that mothers should have counseling, fathers should be afforded rights and babies should someday be able to know their family medical history.

But with every other state already on the safe haven bandwagon, Nebraska ultimately followed suit – except that, as part of a weird compromise to get the bill passed, lawmakers didn't limit it to infants. The rest is recent history.

So now we'll see if the legislature caves in to the governor and Landry and their sweep-it-all-under-the-rug approach, leaving families to struggle in their desperation, or whether the lawmakers who understand the deeper problems will prevail. If they do perhaps, for once, the right way and the Nebraska way will be one and the same.

Nebraska: The speed trap of child welfare

There are communities across the country that are notorious for speed traps. The speed limit is set absurdly low and the local police lie in wait for cars with out-of-state plates. The unwary don't get to leave town without paying a very stiff fine.

Nebraska is a little like a giant speed trap. Only instead of levying a fine, they take away your children.

Consider the case of Suwen Wang, a physicist, and his wife, Charlotte Fu, a paralegal, from Palo Alto, California. On June 6, they were traveling through Nebraska with their 12-year-old daughter and 13-year-old son when some sibling rivalry apparently got out of hand. The result: The children wound up trapped in foster care for more than a month - and Nebraska authorities were all set to force the daughter to miss a once-in-lifetime opportunity to travel to Korea where her award-winning art will be exhibited as part of an international competition. Things only began to look up when the case got some news coverage.

The daughter was the North American winner of a children's painting contest sponsored by the United Nations. The painting was on display at the Omaha Children's Museum, and the proud parents flew the family out to see it. But on the way back to the airport, the 12-year-old girl and her 13-year-old brother apparently started acting like, well, 12 and 13-year-olds, with the boy "needling his sister," according to the father's lawyer.

So Dad pulled over to the side of the road, and Mom got out to deal with the situation – not knowing that someone was watching from her front lawn. The witness told a local television station Mom hit the 13-year-old several times on the back. (Police reportedly said she hit him in the face, but the witness herself says otherwise.) Ms. Fu does not look like someone who could inflict much damage on a 13-year-old boy. The boy cursed at his mother, pushed her, and may have hit her - since, while the boy was entirely uninjured, mom was bleeding from a cut above her nose. At that point, Dad turned around from the front seat and allegedly hit the boy. Lawyers for the couple deny that either parent hit the children.

After 20 minutes, everyone apparently had calmed down enough for the family to resume the drive. But by then the witness had called the cops, and a Plattsmouth, Neb. Police officer pulled the family over.

Mom and dad were arrested and jailed for a weekend. The children's sentence has lasted a lot longer. As of July 9, they still were in foster care, though, thanks to the news coverage and the parents' middle-class status (which meant they could afford private attorneys), Nebraska made a deal to let Santa Clara County, California, authorities take over the case. (In California, individual counties run their own child welfare systems.) So the children probably will be released soon, if they're not back in California already. Were this family poor, odds are the children would be trapped in foster care for years.

Of course, things like this can, and do, happen anywhere. But they're more likely to happen in Nebraska, which, year after year, takes away children at one of the highest rates in the United States, by far. The Neanderthal state of child welfare in Nebraska was exposed to the nation during the state's Safe Haven debacle last year, when the then-head of the child welfare agency, Todd Landry, made jokes at the expense of desperate parents and otherwise belittled their problems.

Landry since has left, but his replacement, Todd Reckling, appears to be cut from the same cloth, blithely declaring that these things take time, even as the children were trapped thousands of miles from home.

In fact, as the Omaha World-Herald pointed out, when Nebraska was desperate to send out-of-state "safe haven" children home, they made it happen within days. Meanwhile, the parents even reported themselves to Santa Clara County child welfare authorities in the hope it would speed up the process.

Nebraska authorities also appear to be justifying their actions based on the fact that there has been one other incident involving the parents back in California. Mom and Dad got into a loud argument. Mom said she was leaving to stay in a hotel. Dad may, or may not, have grabbed her arm to restrain her. And he may, or may not, have gotten into a scuffle with police when they were called.

But this also is a family so well-known for their love of their children that more than a dozen friends flew thousands of miles to be with them at a court hearing in Nebraska and to protest outside the courthouse.

"This is an Orwellian nightmare," one friend, Larry Markosian, told the San Jose Mercury News. "Every family occasionally has difficulty raising kids, especially teenage boys. I don't know what happened. But we know they are a loving and kind family and we see no reason whatsoever to keep these kids in a foster home so far from the community they grew up in."
So yeah, it seems the folks in this family have tempers – like real, fallible human beings. A couple of times it may have gotten out-of-hand. Apparently, no one told them about the CPS-endorsed Oprah-fication of American family life. They hadn't heard that to be sure you stay out of trouble with CPS you should never, ever lose control and all differences are to be settled by saying "I'm not o.k. with that" and otherwise mumbling therapy-speak at each other.

Who knows? Maybe this family could use some of that "counseling" that CPS agencies always try to impose – though in this case it should be strictly voluntary. After all, it is possible to live together as a family with neither the phony harmony of therapy-speak nor ever raising a hand (as opposed to a voice) toward another in anger. The issue here, as almost always, is balance of harms. And one thing is clear: Whatever problems may have existed before, the Nebraska child welfare agency has made them worse by punishing the children with needless foster care.

"These kids are very much involved in the Palo Alto community, with Boy Scouts, art and Chinese lessons," Markosian, the family friend, told the Mercury News. "And they are being ripped away from not only their family but from their whole community."

He went on to read aloud from an e-mail sent by the 12-year-old girl to her parents: "Dear Mom and Dad," the e-mail said. "We love you a lot. Remember that. We know you're doing everything you can to bring us back home and we are very thankful. Love you a lot." The e-mail is signed with 10 exclamation points.
Part of the explanation for the behavior of Nebraska authorities is just bureaucratic inertia. Another part is the fanaticism about child removal that permeates the state. But there also is an undercurrent of racism running through the case.

Although the family are American citizens and the parents have lived in the United States for 17 years, the 12-year-old's "law guardian," who, in theory, is supposed to watch out for her "best interests," wanted to seize the family's passports – which would have made it impossible for the girl to go to South Korea for the award ceremony. (After all, what could be more suspicious, and pose more risk to a child, than an Asian-American family going to – Asia?) The law guardian reportedly explained that the art contest was irrelevant to the foster care case.

In addition, during visits, the family was forced to speak English, though they prefer Chinese – so the supervisors monitoring the visits could understand every word. I've seen no explanation concerning why the visits had to be monitored in the first place.

Such bias is certainly nothing new in Omaha. In 2002, authorities tore 10 Hmong children from their families after they confused marks left by a traditional Southeast Asian healing practice known as "coining" with child abuse. Even after the error was explained, authorities kept the children – until publicity and protest marches, which included one Asian youth singing "We Shall Overcome," won their freedom. I have two letters from the Omaha police chief proudly justifying the raids.

Would the caller in this most recent case, who has refused to back up her claims by disclosing her name, have made the same call, had the family been white?

Meanwhile, authorities in Santa Clara County haven't acquitted themselves all that well either. They have not promised to return the children even after they obtain legal custody and they've come up with an absurd list of hoops the parents are going to have to jump through – something almost guaranteed to increase the stress in the family (though it's possible they did that to appease Nebraska.)

In general, though Santa Clara does a far better job than Nebraska, that's a mighty low bar. The county has one of the highest rates of removal in California, as is documented in NCCPR's California Rate-of-Removal Index. And, as former Mercury News columnist Peter Delevett documented, child welfare authorities in Santa Clara may not treat Mexicans any better than their counterparts in Omaha treat Asians.

Back in Nebraska, the child welfare agency justified what it did to these children by saying their staff followed procedures. But that, of course, is a big part of the problem: the procedures stink.

Then, at the hearing where the agreement with Santa Clara County was reached, an attorney for the Nebraska child welfare agency, Susan Buettner, declared: "The most important thing has been lost: This is a case that involved alleged child abuse,"

No, Ms. Buettner, that fact hasn't been lost at all. But it was your agency that did the abusing.

UPDATED OCTOBER 7: A family is gagged - pass it on!

Please see the update at the end of this post

LINCOLN, NEB: Yesterday, I had the honor of being one of the speakers at a public forum in Omaha organized by the Family Advocacy Movement, a grassroots group organized by families affected by Nebraska's "Safe Haven" debacle last year, and families with similar issues.

Such laws usually are passed to allow parents to abandon infants in safe places, no questions asked. But the Nebraska law had no age limit. So some desperate parents, usually parents who had struggled for years to find help for children with severe mental illness, only to be turned away over and over, invoked the law and "abandoned" older children.

What the law really did was put a public face on a widespread problem. Every year, thousands of families are forced to surrender their children to states - often admitting to phony neglect charges - because it's the only way to get mental health care for those children.

But the response from the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services was almost unspeakably cruel, ranging from sick jokes to snide comments about the parents supposedly wanting to "push the easy button." (For details, see these previous posts to this blog.)

That kind of family-bashing is no surprise here in Nebraska, which, year after year tears apart families at one of the highest rates in the nation.

Ultimately, the legislature amended the law to apply only to newborns. The former head of the child welfare agency, Todd Landry, smugly predicted that once that happened, "all these other questions [will] disappear."

For the past year, the Family Advocacy Movement has put the state on notice that that's not about to happen.

There were lots of speakers at the forum yesterday - but the most eloquent moment was a moment of silence. That moment was used to honor Sue and Avery Quakenbush, two Safe Haven parents who are no longer allowed even to tell their story. After their story appeared in the Wall Street Journal in November, 2008, Nebraska DHHS went to court to obtain a gag order against the Quakenbushes.

But even the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services can't censor a news story - especially one that's already been published.

So there is one thing all of us can do to support the Quakenbushes, the other safe haven families, other families in similar situations, and everyone else who's been bullied by a child welfare agency that cares a lot more about its own image than it does about about the young people it is supposed to serve: We can take that Wall Street Journal story and, electronically, pass it on. We can send it to everyone we know who might share our outrage at the gagging of a suffering family. We can make clear to Nebraska DHHS that trying to hide what they've done will only call more attention to the agency's failings.

Later this week, I'll send the story to the NCCPR Child Welfare News Exchange, NCCPR's e-mail list of more than 300 reporters around the country.

So here's that link to the Journal story again: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122728078741248013.html Pass it on!

One footnote: The two top officials at Nebraska HHS attended the forum. The CEO of the agency (that's the title in Nebraska) mouthed the usual platitudes about wanting to listen and not taking it personally, etc. etc. But, as the Lincoln Journal Star reported, then he admitted that one thing bothered him: the fact that no one from his agency was among the speakers.

Yeah. It's frustrating being gagged, isn't it?

UPDATE, OCTOBER 7: The Lincoln Journal-Star reports that the Nebraska Court of Appeals will hear an appeal of the gag order on October 21.

According to the story, the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services contends that the Quakenbushes are perfectly free to discuss their concerns – just as long as they don’t mention what their child actually is suffering from, what medicines he was given, and who treated him. In other words, the Quakenbushes can say whatever they want – as long as they provide no actual evidence to back up their claims.

In the story, DHHS also claims that their son objected to the disclosures in the original Wall Street Journal story. But we have no way of knowing if that’s true. We don’t know if he read the story, or, if not, what he was told about what it said. We don’t even know if he knows that his privacy was protected by withholding his last name, which is not Quakenbush.

But this much we do know: The head of the Nebraska child welfare agency at the time of the “safe haven” debacle, Todd Landry, wanted the whole issue to “disappear” – meaning the “safe haven” families and all the others simply would keep on suffering in silence. I suspect his successors share that goal.

The only thing that stands between them and their goal is the ability of families like the Quakenbushes, and their supporters, to tell the world what the State of Nebraska is doing to their children.

Maine’s child welfare ombudsman is dangerously wrong

Maine's first child welfare ombudsman, Dean Crocker, understood
the lessons from the tragic death of Logan Marr, who was taken
when her family poverty was confused with "neglect" and killed
in foster care.  The current ombudsman, Christine Alberi, does not.

● In a classic example of trying to make policy-by-horror-story, her latest report uses a tiny, non-random sample of cases she chose herself to justify sweeping conclusions that all boil down to: Take away more kids and don’t send them back!  That is making all Maine children less safe. 

● She is wrong about domestic violence, she is wrong about truancy, she is wrong about “alternative response,” she is wrong about false reports and she is wrong to call for more institutionalization of children.  Most of all she is wrong to ignore the enormous harm of needless removal. 

● At a time when the entire child welfare field finally is coming to grips with issues of poverty and race, she puts out a report that mentions neither. In the entire report the word "poverty" does not appear even once.

● For the sake of Maine's most vulnerable children, any legislation to give her more power and staff should also include a requirement that she use objective evaluators and base policy recommendations only on a statistically valid random sample of cases.  The office also needs a more representative Board of Directors. 

● But ultimately, we all need to be the ombudsman.  In Maine and elsewhere, the ombudsman’s power is fed by secrecy.  For starters, Maine should join the many states in which child welfare court hearings are open. 

How could a state like Maine, a state that once almost got child welfare right, keep careening full-speed backwards.  How is it that no one has stopped a foster-care panic that has undone reforms that once were a national model; a panic that has made all of the state’s children less safe? 

There are many reasons, and I have discussed them on this blog and elsewhere before.  But one reason is the state’s child welfare “ombudsman,” Christine Alberi.  She issues reports with shamefully shoddy methodology that throw gasoline on the fires of foster-care panic.  Judging from Alberi’s latest report, she has never, ever encountered a case in which she believes a child was wrongfully taken.  At a time when almost everyone else in the field is discussing the confusion of poverty with neglect, Alberi has managed to issue a 20-page report that never once even uses the word poverty.  Also missing: The fact that even in an overwhelmingly white state, there is evidence of racial bias in Maine child welfare. 

Unfortunately, Alberi’s approach is not unusual.  As in many states, legislators in Maine effectively delegated responsibility to hold the child welfare system accountable to one person – an “ombudsman” or “child advocate.” 

Back in 2007, on this blog, I wrote about the typical behavior of people filling such posts: Investigate horror stories and jump to conclusions based on those horror stories that boil down to: Take away more kids.  

Though ombudsmen generally have no formal powers aside from the ability to investigate and report their findings, their influence is enormous.  That’s because in systems more secret than the CIA, they get to see everything – or at least a lot more than everyone else outside the child welfare agency sees.  (It doesn’t actually have to be that way, as I’ll explain below.)  So almost the entire view of the system seen by journalists and lawmakers is whatever the ombudsman wants them to see – and very little more.  It’s like trying to figure out who and what is in a large room by looking through a pinhole. 

In report after report Alberi zeros-in on what she views as poor decision-making at two key stages of the process: The decision to remove children from the home and the decision to return them home.  But by poor decision-making, she never seems to mean that it was a poor decision to take away a child. 

The ombudsman’s report defies common sense 

Common sense tells us there will, in fact, be a lot of poor decision-making at these points.  But common sense also tells us that, for reasons noted above, the bad decisions will go in all directions.   It is ludicrous to think that, in a system filled with underprepared overloaded workers rushing from case to case all of the errors would go in only one direction. 

Yet any reader of Alberi’s latest report who took it at face value would have to conclude just that.  Because, as Alberi tells it, the only mistakes made by Maine child welfare caseworkers are to leave children in dangerous homes and return them there. 

She is dangerously wrong. 

The errors go in all directions, and all of these errors harm children.  

● Wrongful removal inflicts profound psychological trauma.  Although DHHS caseworkers almost always mean well  - as does Alberi by the way – the trauma when a child is torn from everyone loving and familiar in Maine is just as severe as when it happens on the Mexican border.  

● Wrongful removal places children at serious risk of abuse in foster care itself, where independent studies find rates of abuse far higher than agencies such as DHHS admit in official statistics.  

● And all the time, money and effort wasted on false allegations, trivial cases and poverty cases is, in effect stolen from finding children in real danger.  In short, the foster-care panic encouraged by Alberi’s whole approach actually makes more likely the very failings Alberi cites. 

Alberi’s latest report draws her sweeping conclusions from a tiny sample of cases – the 84 her office chose to accept in 2021.  But Maine caseworkers investigated nearly 12,000 cases in 2021.  While it is reasonable to draw conclusions based on a sample, 84 is a far smaller number than, say, the typical “case reading” done to assess agency performance when such agencies are the subjects of class-action lawsuits. 

Even worse, this is not a random sample.  Rather it is those cases Alberi and her assistant personally deemed worthy of investigation – and the criteria for choosing a case can be startlingly subjective.  They include, for example, “the demeanor and credibility of the caller.”  Really?  Suppose your child had just been torn from your arms and you were desperate for help.  How would you be doing demeanor-wise? 

Another criterion: “The degree of harm alleged to the child.”  But an ombudsman who doesn’t even mention poverty is unlikely to consider a case in which a child was taken because of poverty – such as Logan Marr -- to be terribly harmful.  Rather the focus will be on the much smaller percentage of cases that allege sexual abuse or serious physical abuse. 

And so, based on this tiny, skewed sample, Alberi offers broad, sweeping conclusions and examples in which, in every single case, she concludes, the error was to leave a child in the home or return a child to the home.  It should be clear that this is absurd on its face.  

Alberi’s whole approach is so absurd it leads me to write a sentence I never thought would appear in this blog: In some respects, Todd Landry is right. 

Landry runs the Office of Child and Family Services within Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services.  His hiring is, frankly, inexplicable.  He had a horrible track record when he ran child welfare in Nebraska – under his leadership that state was worse than Maine, tearing apart families at one of the highest rates in America, and his callousness could be astounding. 

But Alberi’s methodology is so absurd even Landry sees through it.  In his office’s response to the Alberi, he writes:

 

Rather than a random sample, a case review begins with self-selected inquiries and is often complaint driven. … 

A source of disagreement for a number of reports relates to the Ombudsman’s finding or recommendation that involves bringing children into State care or keeping them in care for a longer period of time. While OCFS recognizes the perception that children are safer when removed, the evidence overwhelmingly shows that removing a child from their home has the potential to inflict harm or trauma. In addition, there is little research to support the belief that, in general, children who enter state custody are safer than they would be if they had remained in the home with efforts undertaken to address safety concerns. There are numerous scholarly articles regarding the potential harm of removal. 

As I said, on this Todd Landry is right.  When you look at the typical cases OCFS and its counterparts across the country handle, not the tiny, self-selected sample used by Alberi, the research shows children typically fare better in their own homes, even when agencies don’t have much help to offer.  

Alberi’s examples 

All of this still gives Alberi a huge benefit of the doubt: It assumes that Alberi is right about those 84 cases.  But often we have no way to know that.  In summarizing 40 of the 42 cases (out of the 84) that Alberi says raised “substantial issues,” she offers only a short paragraph on each one.  Sometimes that’s enough to make clear that in the specific case, Alberi is right – the child should not have been left in the home.  (If one believes, as I do, that the errors go in all directions then of course there will be such cases.)  Others are less clear.  One summary, in its entirely states: 

A parent had significant mental health issues and the inability to protect the children from domestic violence. Throughout the case, despite the fact that the parent was engaged in treatment, the treatment was not effective. Providers were not objective and recommendations in a psychological evaluation were not implemented. After a significant period in state custody, trial placement began and then it was discovered that the parent was still in a relationship with the perpetrator. Trial placement was not ended. In general, the parent’s level of treatment did not match the severity of the illness. The risk to the children remained high. 

Note first that there is no allegation that the children themselves were abused.  Rather they witnessed domestic violence.  When children are taken for that reason the trauma for the child is actually worse than other forms of removal. That’s why taking children for that reason is illegal in New York City as a result of a class-action lawsuit. (NCCPR’s Vice President was co-counsel for plaintiffs.)  One need only read the outstanding investigative journalism from USA Today to see how much such removals hurt children – and discourage battered women from leaving their abusers and seeking help. 

Thus, an objective ombudsman would have questioned why the children in this case were removed at all. 

Now, let's go through this paragraph sentence-by-sentence.  

Throughout the case, despite the fact that the parent was engaged in treatment, the treatment was not effective. 

Alberi offers no evidence for this, but even if true, there is more than one approach to therapy – why not recommend trying another? 

Providers were not objective and recommendations in a psychological evaluation were not implemented. 

How do we know providers were not objective? Because they didn’t do what Alberi thinks they should have done?  As for “psychological evaluations,” like so much else child welfare agencies and their subcontractors do, they can be cookie-cutter and unreliable.  Maybe in this case the providers were right and whoever did the “psych eval” was wrong.  Maybe it’s Alberi who is “not objective.”  We don’t know, and nothing in Alberi’s single paragraph tells us. 

After a significant period in state custody, 

That should have been the red flag here – why were the children taken, apparently for witnessing domestic violence, when that is so enormously harmful to children? 

trial placement began and then it was discovered that the parent was still in a relationship with the perpetrator. 

This shows only Alberi’s lack of understanding of the dynamics of domestic violence.  There are all sorts of reasons this might happen – including, by the way, poverty.  Why didn’t authorities act to remove the abuser by arresting him and jailing him? 

Trial placement was not ended. In general, the parent’s level of treatment did not match the severity of the illness. The risk to the children remained high. 

Risk of what?  Presumably witnessing domestic violence again.  That is a serious and real problem.  But removing children for that reason can be even worse.  One expert calls taking away children under these circumstances “tantamount to pouring salt into an open wound.”  But Alberi seems to want OCFS to adopt a policy that boils down to: Please pass the salt. 

It is possible that there is a reasonable explanation for all of this, and a detailed look at the case file and interviews with all involved would reveal that yes, in this case there was no other option but removal.  But we don’t know that based on Alberi’s one-paragraph summary.  And it would be a huge mistake for media and lawmakers to simply take Alberi’s word for it. 

A bizarre call to institutionalize more children 

Alberi also does not seem to be up on the research about institutionalizing children in so-called residential treatment centers.  So I’ll summarize it.  It doesn’t work.  Period. Full stop. 

There is nothing that residential treatment does that can’t be done better using Wraparond programs that bring whatever help a child needs directly into his own home or, when genuinely necessary, a foster home. 

One of Maine’s biggest successes was its significant reduction in the use of this worst possible option.  Yet Alberi apparently wants to reverse course.  At one point she writes: 

There are not enough therapeutic foster homes, not enough high-quality residential treatment facilities, and a general lack of mental health resources for both young and old.  [Emphasis added.] 

But “high-quality residential treatment” is an oxymoron – it doesn’t exist.  Get the children who don’t need to be in foster care back into their own homes, emphasize wraparound services and there will be plenty of good, safe, therapeutic foster homes for the children who really need them.  Maine already has proven it. 

The differential response obsession 

Alberi seems oddly obsessed with a program that barely exists in Maine and soon won’t exist at all.  Differential response, known in Maine as “alternative response” in Maine is one of the most-studied approaches in child welfare, it involves diverting low-risk cases to agencies that offer voluntary help.  At any time if that agency thinks the case is too serious they can send it back to caseworkers for a full-scale investigation.  More than two-dozen studies have found that this approach safely reduced foster care.  But in state after state, it’s become a convenient scapegoat after high profile fatalities.  But generally, once the system caves in and gets rid of differential response the bashing of the program stops. 

But even though  OCFS is phasing out the program; indeed it barely exists, Alberi is still bashing it. 

Here again, I’m sure there are indeed high-risk cases that have been wrongly diverted to differential response.  But at noted study after study shows this is far from the norm and that differential response reduces the trauma of needless foster care with no compromise of safety.  

The fact that Alberi continues to beat this nearly dead horse is still another indication of how profoundly she seems to believe that child welfare agencies must be police forces, constantly harassing and surveilling families and taking away their children. 

Wrong about truancy 

At one point,  Alberi writes that  “truancy of children as a sign of risk is underestimated.”  That’s because truancy generally isn’t a sign of risk.  Oh, I’m sure Alberi has horror stories, but she seems unaware of the comprehensive landmark study by the highly-respected Vera Institute of Justice – a study that included yes, a representative random sample of cases. 

That study found that having agencies like OCFS pursue “educational neglect” allegations – i.e. truancy – does far more harm than good.  Truancy is not, in fact a “gateway allegation” – some kind of sign of more serious evil afoot.  Indeed, the Vera report recommended that if truancy must be part of a child protective agency’s portfolio it should be handled through – differential response. 

Wrong about unsubstantiated reports 

At one point Alberi writes: 

When [multiple encounters with OCFS] result in unsubstantiated assessments or [alternative response] referrals, the lack of child abuse and neglect findings is mistakenly thought to be evidence of safety. … It is not well understood that the existence of many reports and assessments alone elevates the risk to children. 

No, what is not understood by Alberi is that false reports almost always are just that – false.  They are so flimsy they don’t even rise to the minimal level required for an OCFS caseworker to check the “substantiated” box on the form.  By Alberi’s logic there is no such thing as a false report: Call it in often enough, harass a family with enough false allegations and, by the Alberi standard, you must assume the child is at high risk. 

Many reports do not elevate the risk to the children (except to the extent that they may increase stress on the family).  Rather, they are a form of self-fulfilling prophecy.  Precisely because Alberi and so many others encourage workers to believe that “where there’s smoke there’s fire” workers become predisposed to check the “substantiated” box.  Multiple unfounded reports elevate not the risk of child abuse but the risk of spurious conclusions and system involvement. 

In child welfare, where there’s smoke there’s usually just smoke.  And nobody can see clearly through smoke. 

But what about that whole section – sorry, one paragraph – about prevention? 

“But you don’t understand,” I can imagine Alberi saying, “I’m for prevention.”  Sure.  Have you ever known anyone to say they’re against prevention?  And, after all, Alberi devoted one entire paragraph of her report to saying prevention is a good thing. She even concludes the one paragraph with: “The fact that services and resources for families are minimally discussed in this report should not discount their importance.” 

But, of course, that’s precisely what devoting one token paragraph to some general concept of prevention in a 20-page report does.  All the more so in a report that doesn’t mention poverty and portrays a system that only errs by keeping families together. 

Even the lip service paid to prevention doesn’t say what kind of prevention she has in mind.   But given that Alberi can’t even bring herself to mention poverty it’s likely she has in mind only the kind of prevention that makes the helpers feel good – lots of “counseling” and “parent education,” instead of what’s needed most: Concrete help to deal with problems like housing, childcare, and other issues of poverty. 

It doesn’t look like OCFS gets this either. Their response emphasizes the vastly overhyped federal Families First Act – which allows federal funding for only a few, very limited types of prevention – mostly of the counseling and parent education variety. 

What to do instead 

Unfortunately, Alberi is treated with enormous deference by some lawmakers and media.  So there has been one proposal after another to give her office even more power.  There are better options: 

● Ideally, everyone should be the ombudsman – and yes, that can be done.  Everyone should be able to see how the state child welfare system really works in every case.  For starters, Maine could open court hearings in child welfare cases.  More than 40% of America’s foster children live in states where these hearings are open and none of the fears offered by opponents – who also are the people who don’t want us to see what really goes on -- has come to pass.  In addition, there should be a strong rebuttable presumption that most records are open.  There is a detailed discussion of how this would work, without compromising children’s privacy in NCCPR’s Due Process Agenda. 

As soon as courtroom doors open and legislators, journalists and citizens can sit in on the day-to-day process, they will see for themselves what the typical cases are like.  They will see how often the crucial issue is poverty and how often that poverty is confused with neglect.  They also will see the kind of mistakes Alberi highlights.   But once we see that the errors go in all directions and those errors are related – wrongful removal overloads systems so workers have less time to find children in real danger – it changes completely our understanding of how to fix it. 

It is within the Legislature’s power to do this.  Of all the comments I’ve heard or read concerning Maine child welfare in more than 20 years, perhaps the weirdest was this from a Maine State Senator: 

“By law, the department can’t share a lot of information, so our ability to provide oversight is limited.” [Emphasis added.] 

By law, you say?  Hmmmm. And what is it that legislators enact, repeal and amend? 

Now, in fairness, it’s possible that this lawmaker was referring to a federal law, the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act.  Perhaps DHHS told him CAPTA made it impossible for the agency to share information. 

But there are two problems with that: 

-- CAPTA has lots of wiggle room.  A state that passed a law allowing legislators themselves to see records, for example, should have no problem with CAPTA.  And there is no question that CAPTA allows open courts. 

-- The penalty for ignoring CAPTA is almost nil – the forfeiture of a very small amount of federal funding – so small that the costs of complying with CAPTA may be greater than the costs of ignoring it.  

● Failing that, at least reform the ombudsman’s office.  As I said, most ombudsmen operate like Alberi.  But there are exceptions. Maine’s first ombudsman, Dean Crocker, was one. He understood that the errors go in all directions and he supported the reforms that helped make Maine, briefly, a child welfare leader.  He even wrote a guest post for this blog.  Another was Kevin Ryan, who ran New Jersey’s Office of Child Advocate.  Even when dealing with horror stories, Ryan’s office turned out careful, nuanced reports.  But he also realized that just focusing on the horror stories was inherently distorting. 

So he decided to review a random sample of cases.  And to ensure objectivity he recruited reviewers from two groups, one with a mentality much like Alberi’s, the other more attuned to issues of poverty.  They then had to reach consensus:  That consensus – yes, the system errs, in all directions.  

The Maine Legislature should require that the Maine ombudsman’s office take the same approach – examine a random sample of cases each year and examine enough of them to be representative.  A panel of experts, diverse not only in race and class but in viewpoints, should be named to review the cases and issue reports. 

The ombudsman should be barred from drawing systemic conclusions based on self-selected individual cases. 

-- The Board of Directors for the ombudsman’s office should be reconstituted to include representatives from all of the groups that have a stake in keeping Maine’s children safe: The board should include one of the sate’s leading family defense attorneys, one its leading child abuse prosecutors, a parent who lost children to the system, a foster parent, a grandparent or other relative providing kinship foster care, a former OCFS caseworker, the director of a domestic violence shelter, leaders of civil rights organizations for Black, Latinx and Native American communities in Maine, at least one leader of an anti-poverty organization, and at least two current or former foster youth. 

-- Every member of the Board and every staff member should be required upon appointment/hiring to watch the PBS Frontline documentary “The Taking of Logan Marr” and to read the letter Logan’s mother Christy sent to the foster mother who ultimately would kill Logan. 

The context 

A retreat from reform is tragic anywhere, but especially in Maine since, as I noted at the outset, Maine is a state that almost got child welfare right. 

In 2001, After five-year-old Logan Marr was taken from her mother when the mother’s poverty was confused with neglect only to be killed by a foster mother who also had been a supervisor for OCFS, lawmakers and media refused to accept the usual pat answers about licensing, training, etc.  They zeroed-in on the appallingly high numbers of children the state routinely took away. 

A new governor, John Baldacci, brought in new leadership that rebuilt the system to emphasize safe, proven approaches to keeping families together.  Foster care numbers declined significantly.  When children had to be taken, as noted earlier, far fewer were institutionalized and far more were placed with relatives.  The reforms became a national model. 

But another new governor, Paul LePage, slashed the agency budget and demanded a return to the take-the-child-and-run approach.  He doubled down after two deaths of children known-to-the- system in rapid succession in 2018.  That started the foster-care panic – the sharp sudden increase in the number of children torn from their families. 

But the deaths didn’t stop.  Of course they didn’t.  A foster-care panic often is followed by more child abuse deaths because workers are so overloaded with false allegations, trivial cases and poverty cases that they don’t have time to investigate any case properly.  So they make terrible errors – yes, in all directions.  

Yet with another new governor in office, Janet Mills, and four more deaths in rapid succession in 2021, lawmakers and Maine’s child welfare establishment still didn’t learn.  They doubled down again.  

Partly that’s because the Mills administration chose Landry to run child welfare.  Partly it’s because, between term limits for lawmakers and consolidation in the news media, a lot of institutional memory has been lost.  Maine has largely forgotten the lessons from the death of Logan Marr and the time when, relatively speaking, Maine was a child welfare leader. 

Nevertheless, it puzzled me that even in Maine, lawmakers could so easily be taken-in by an approach that had so demonstrably failed over and over.  Now I understand. 

Everyone is paying way too much attention to Christine Alberi.

And here’s the thing: Had Alberi and her office been around when Logan Marr first was taken, and had her mother, Christy, called looking for help, I’ll bet Alberi would have turned her down. 

She probably wouldn’t have liked Christy’s demeanor.