NCCPR CHILD WELFARE BLOG, JULY AND AUGUST, 2006
DEATH IN A LICENSED HOME
Just
eight days after Children’s Rights filed its lawsuit in Michigan (see “Marcia
Lowry Sues the Wrong State” below) there is new, horrifying evidence that the
lawsuit will undermine reform and endanger children.
The evidence is on the body of a little boy named Isaac
Lethbridge. According to the Detroit
Free Press:
“…he had second-degree burns to 80% of his chest and
abdomen area, fresh bruises on his forehead and right ear and old bruises on
his chin, left shoulder, left upper arm, left thigh, right ankle and
buttocks. An autopsy report showed he
died of multiple blunt force injuries and burns, and that he had a broken
clavicle.”
No one has been charged in connection with the death, and
there were nine people in the home where Isaac died. But like Ricky Holland and Timothy Boss, Isaac Lethbridge died in
a Michigan foster home - - a licensed Michigan foster home.
Like the foster parents of Ricky Holland and the foster
parents of Timothy Boss, the foster parents of Isaac Lethbridge also were
adoptive parents, who adopted children during an era when the mantra in
Michigan was adoption-at-all-costs.
Like the foster/adoptive parents of Ricky Holland, it
appears that there were many warnings about the home where Isaac died.
Like the foster/adoptive home of Ricky Holland, the home
where Isaac died was licensed and overseen by a private child welfare agency,
with the agency reimbursed for each day each child is in foster care.
And, perhaps most tragic, as in the case of Ricky
Holland, there may well have been no need for Isaac ever to have been taken
from his birth parents at all.
According to news accounts, the only accusations against the birth
parents are a dirty home and failure to attend to all of their children’s
medical needs. (As readers of this Blog
may recall, Ricky Holland was taken from a mother whose only crimes were to be
homeless and jobless).
All of these placements – Timothy Boss, Ricky Holland,
and Isaac Lethbridge - - were made during a different era in Michigan child
welfare, before reforms initiated by the current leadership, reforms that have
only just gotten underway.
The new leadership wants to take away fewer children like
Ricky and Isaac. CR’s lawsuit would
undermine those efforts and encourage more child removal. When foster care really is necessary the new
leadership wants to place more children with grandparents and other
relatives. The CR lawsuit attacks such
placement, in favor of licensed stranger care homes – like the ones where
Timothy, Ricky and Isaac died. The new
leadership wants to put children first, even at the expense of private agencies
addicted to their per diem payments.
The CR lawsuit wants to shift more power and money to those private
agencies.
In short, everything in this lawsuit would create a
system in which tragedies like the deaths of Timothy Boss, Ricky Holland, and
now Isaac Lethbridge are even more likely.
CR is the 800-pound gorilla of child welfare
litigation. Corporate raider Carl Icahn
once chaired its Board of Directors.
They’ve got plenty of resources to wage prolonged battles against
financially-strapped states. But
Michigan owes it to its most vulnerable children to stand and fight.
I’ve
been afraid this would happen for some time now.
A
group in New York called “Children’s Rights,” (formerly Children’s Rights Inc.,
and, either way, a name remarkable for its hubris) probably has brought more
class-action lawsuits against child welfare systems than any other organization
in the country. It may have brought
more than most of the others combined.
There
was a time when that was good for children.
But CR has become an increasingly regressive force in child
welfare. Whereas there once was a time
when its founder and only executive director, Marcia Lowry, understood the
pervasiveness and the harm of wrongful removal, today CR’s
website claims that “only the most severe cases of abuse and neglect result
in children being removed from their homes and placed in foster care.” And today, Marcia views adoption as the
panacea for the ills of child welfare.
Her settlements often make little mention of reunifying families, and
almost no mention of preventing wrongful removal (which is hardly a surprise
since she has proclaimed that wrongful removal doesn’t exist). And they focus relentlessly on getting adoption
numbers up at all costs.
But
in the past, Marcia has only gone after systems that were so awful that any
lawsuit probably would make them at least a little better, or at least no
worse. In two cases, New York City and
New Jersey, the Annie E. Casey Foundation (which helps to fund NCCPR) effectively
bailed CR out and redirected solutions toward keeping families together. In New York City, that has led to real
improvement and in New Jersey there is great potential for such improvement
(though CR recently renegotiated that settlement and took out some of its
better features).
Indeed,
we have defended CR against claims that they were in it to collect high legal
fees and that litigation wastes a system’s time and its scarce resources. In the past, the systems CR sued generally
were bottom-of-the-barrel, there was no evidence that they were improving – or
even that officials had any interest in improving – and it was clear that
litigation was the only way to push them forward, and get more resources for
improvements. And however wrong they
are on many issues, in 30 years I have never seen any evidence that CR and
Lowry are motivated by anything but their perception of what is best for
children.
New
Jersey is a good example. When others
attacked the litigation on the grounds I’ve just noted, NCCPR defended CR, and
we did so years before the Casey Foundation got involved.
But
as Marcia Lowry has become more and more removed from the realities of child
welfare and the harm her family-bashing does to children, I’ve been afraid that
sooner or later she’d pick the wrong target.
And now, I think she has.
About
two weeks ago, she announced that she’s suing Michigan. It’s the wrong suit in the wrong state at
the wrong time.
I
don’t say Michigan is the wrong target because Michigan has a good system. Clearly it does not. And in the Complaint
filed in federal court, Marcia’s description of many, though not all,
problems plaguing the system, is on target.
So
why is Michigan the wrong target for this kind of suit? Because, perhaps for the first time, Marcia
has targeted a system that actually is starting to get better - - and her
solutions are likely to undermine reform.
In
the early 1990s, Michigan was a national leader in reforming child
welfare. Politics plunged the system
into the dark ages. But all through
those dark ages, Marcia Lowry never sued the state.
New
leadership has begun to change things in Michigan. Gov. Jennifer Granholm named Marianne Udow to run the state human
services agency, and she’s taking Michigan back to the future - - returning to
the innovations that once made it a leader, and adding new ones. The agency has boldly taken on the issue of
racism in child welfare, it’s embraced Casey’s Family to Family initiative and,
most remarkable of all, it’s accepted a waiver from federal funding
restrictions. That will allow millions
of dollars formerly reserved for foster care to be used as well to keep
families together (and also for adoption, by the way). For more on the waiver, see the August 10
Blog, “CWLA Shows its True Colors, Part Three,” below.
All
of these initiatives are great for children, but threaten private agencies that
live on per diem reimbursements for foster care. (You remember: the same agencies that
trooped up to Lansing recently to oppose Family to Family on grounds that it’s
better for overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately Black children to be placed
with middle-class strangers than their own families – because, the agencies
explained, the strangers live in better neighborhoods. See the April 30 Blarchive entry:
“When the Mask Slips”.) These also are
the agencies that run parking place shelters like the one in Lansing discussed
in the last two posts to this Blog.
So
now Marcia is suing.
Yes,
the recent progress in Michigan represents only first steps on a journey of a
thousand miles. But this suit threatens
to reverse those steps – and not just because, this time, it is a waste
of time and money. In some cases, the
remedies suggested in the lawsuit are themselves steps backward. Indeed, this lawsuit reads like a
thinly-disguised attempt to transfer resources away from birth families and into
the pockets of private agencies and middle-class strangers serving as foster
families to poor people’s children.
Consider
Marcia’s take on kinship care. She
seeks to stigmatize all relatives with the scarlet letter U for (heaven forbid)
unlicensed. In the lawsuit, CR
claims to be shocked – shocked! – that many children are in “unlicensed” foster
homes. What she doesn’t say is that in
many cases, these are the foster homes of children’s aunts, uncles and,
especially, grandparents.
And
the reason many kinship foster parents are unlicensed typically is because
licensing standards often have nothing to do with safety and everything to do
with middle-class creature comforts. I
don’t know the standards in Michigan, but around the country things like
minimum square footage requirements and requirements for a separate bedroom for
every foster child are common. And, on
average, as is documented by this
report from the University of Illinois Children and Family Research Center,
kinship placements are safer than what should properly be called “stranger
care.”
Marcia
might claim that licensing would help kinship parents since states must pay
relatives who are licensed at the same rate they do strangers. (States have the option of doing this
with unlicensed kinship homes, but they can’t get federal aid for it). But if that’s really what Marcia thinks, she
should demand that licensing standards be changed to consider only health and
safety, making it easier for kinship foster parents to become licensed. I don’t see that in the lawsuit. Or she could simply demand that Michigan
find the funds to pay kinship parents at the stranger-care rate; something
that, in fact, now may be easier because of the waiver. I don’t see that in this lawsuit either.
Marcia’s
also suddenly decided that all foster parents should have gigantic pay
raises. They already get far more to
care for a stranger’s children than birth parents get to care for their
own. This cuts to the heart of an issue
we’ve never really faced: What is our “social contract” with foster
parents? If, as I believe, most are
really doing it for the good feeling it gives them to help children in need,
why is it unreasonable that reimbursement not quite cover every expense?
Even
now, reimbursement for foster parents often isn’t as bad a deal as it’s
portrayed as being. The reimbursement is tax-free. There also generally are clothing allowances and sometimes other
forms of reimbursement as well. Yes,
good foster parents are still going to reach into their own pockets, but maybe
that’s part of what makes them good foster parents.
Attention
to foster parent pay also tends to focus on the “base rate” paid for the lowest
“level of care.” In some states higher levels of care can be quite
lucrative. Indeed, that creates a
serious danger of foster parents and, especially, group homes and institutions,
deliberately overstating a child’s problems, and pushing to overmedicate
children, just to get them certified for a higher level of care. There’s also a disincentive to admit that a
child is getting better.
Yet
over and over in the Michigan lawsuit, Marcia crusades to pull out all the
stops on certifying children for higher levels of care - -which means, of
course, higher per diems for agencies.
There’s not one word about ensuring that this is not misused.
The
lawsuit also crusades for more adoptions without regard to their quality
either. Indeed, it is striking that a
lawsuit complaint that relies heavily on news accounts mentions nothing about
the death of Ricky Holland, taken from a birth mother because she was homeless
and jobless, only to die, allegedly at the hands of his adoptive parents, who
previously had been licensed foster parents. Another Michigan foster child, Timothy Boss, was killed by his
adoptive licensed foster father after a quick-and-dirty, slipshod
placement. If this lawsuit succeeds,
the likelihood of such tragedies actually will increase.
Another
striking feature of this lawsuit is its lack of attention to the one area
where, up to now, CR has remained progressive: fighting the misuse and overuse
of group homes and institutions. CR has
issued excellent reports on the harm of such placements particularly for young
children. One report deals with parking
place shelters like the one in Lansing, another with problems with
group homes in New York City. And
CR’s New Jersey settlement includes strong provisions curbing the use of
congregate care.
But
even as the issue is grabbing headlines in Michigan, as that useless Lansing
shelter tries to grab children away from first placements in foster homes in
order to keep itself in business, CR’s Michigan complaint has almost nothing on
this topic. Yes, the fact that children
get stuck in shelters for too long is mentioned, but this appears to be only in
the context of the need to recruit more foster homes. There is no indication that there will be an attempt to seek the
kinds of prohibitions against using shelters and other congregate care that are
found in the New Jersey settlement. In
short, there is no indication that Marcia has any real interest in taking on
the institutions lobby. (But then, it’s
so much easier to pick on an unlicensed grandparent).
Contradictions between
named plaintiff stories and proposed remedies
I’ve
read a fair number of class-action lawsuit complaints over the past 30 years,
including many from CR. But I’ve never
seen this before: On at least two occasions, the facts in the cases of the
named plaintiffs contradict the proposed remedies.
As
I noted above, Marcia repeatedly demands that it be made easier to shovel
children into higher “levels of care.”
Yet in the case of a child they call Carmela, the lawsuit alleges she
was doing well at a lower level of care, but her psyche was destroyed when she
was moved, needlessly, to a more restrictive placement – the kind that
increases the per diem rate for private agencies.
Similarly,
the stories of the named plaintiffs are filled with tales of abuse by
stranger-care parents and other children in stranger-care homes. There is not one allegation of abuse by a
kinship care parent. Perhaps
“licensing” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
The
Complaint claims that the federal “Adoption and Safe Families Act” requires
“concurrent planning” a pernicious, fundamentally unethical
practice that attempts to repeal the laws of human nature. I won’t go into the details about why it’s
such lousy practice here. Rather, I
question the claim about there being such a requirement. As originally passed in 1997, ASFA
encourages concurrent planning but does not require it. I’ve found no
indication that this part of the law has been amended. Is Marcia seeking to enforce a bad provision
of a bad law or, worse, create a de facto amendment to that law?
The named plaintiff stories are filled with
allegations that children shouldn’t have been reunified. The allegations may be true. As I’ve often said, child welfare systems
are arbitrary, capricious and cruel – they make dreadful mistakes in all
directions.
But
you’d never know that from this lawsuit.
In a state which takes children at more than twice the rate of a
national model like Illinois, CR could not find one named plaintiff who was
wrongfully removed from his home. In
fact, they almost certainly didn’t look.
Ricky Holland might have qualified, of course, -- if only he were still
alive.
CR
didn’t always behave this way. Nearly
20 years ago, Marcia Lowry brought to a Congressional hearing the lead
plaintiff in another class-action lawsuit – a 12-year-old named Boyd, forced to
endure five years in foster care just because his mother lacked adequate
housing. At the time Marcia was
crusading to enforce a 1980 law requiring “reasonable efforts” to keep families
together.
''Boyd's mother had a difficulty, not a
very serious difficulty, but it took her five years to get her children back,''
Marcia testified, according to a
New York Times story available in the paper’s paid archive. ''There
was never any question of abuse with this family. These are children who are
supposed to be protected by this very fine legislation. But reasonable efforts
were not made in this case or in thousands of cases.''
And then the Times quoted Boyd: ''They took almost five years
away from my life,” he said, “and I'm only 12.''
Four
recent studies have found that 30 percent of America’s foster children are like
Boyd - - they could be home right now if their parents just had decent
housing. But, as noted above, CR’s
website claims that “Only the most severe cases of abuse and neglect result in
children being removed from their homes and placed in foster care.”
I
have no doubt that, were a child like Boyd to show up at CR’s offices today,
their reaction would boil down to: “Go ‘way kid, ya bother me.”
August 17, 2006
I had just posted the previous Blog entry about
parking-place shelters when I saw the 60 Minutes story about The
Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert’s nightly parody of certain cable news programs.
I was reminded of that word he coined: Truthiness. It means believing something is true because
you want it to be true. As Colbert puts it: “You don't look up
truthiness in a book, you look it up in your gut. … I don't trust books. They're all fact and no
heart."
Turns out, that debate over a parking-place “shelter” in
Lansing, Michigan, discussed at the end of the previous post to this Blog,
offered up a perfect example of the difference between truth and
truthiness. The Lansing shelter is the
one standing almost empty because the state child welfare agency doesn’t need
it – they’re able to place almost all children in the area directly with
families. Instead of celebrating, some
Lansing politicians are treating this as a tragedy.
As noted in Monday’s Blog, on August 6, the Lansing
State Journal published an
op ed column by Prof. Victor Groza of Case Western Reserve University, in
which he offers some hard truths: He
notes that “for more than 60 years, studies have shown the damage of
institutional care” and he carefully explains why shelters harm the emotional
development of children.
He
discusses a rigorous recent study of shelters like the one in Lansing. The study found that the claims on behalf of
such places don’t hold up. After
actually following the children who’d been through the shelters and a comparable
group that had not, this study found that the children who started their
foster-care odyssey in shelters did no better, and often did worse than those
who were placed directly with families.
The following week, the director of the shelter’s parent
agency offered up a response. It’s classic truthiness.
“Children have entered traumatized and exhausted,” he
declares. “They have left with a sense of stability, direction, normalcy, and
love.” And how does he know this? The children are too young for exit
interviews. The shelter is brand new
and the article doesn’t even claim to have actually followed the children, much
less compared them to those not placed in shelters. No, it’s true because they want it to be true. They looked it up in their guts. Or, as the agency director put it: “Our early experiences at Angel House have confirmed
what we expected” [emphasis added].
As for all that research, well, the agency director has
no more use for it and those darned “out of state academicians” than Colbert
has for books, declaring: “We believe the people of mid-Michigan have more
faith in the wisdom of local child advocates than the distorted views from
academia…”
Or, as Colbert put it the other night: “The world of
illusion is wonderful. Join me in it.”
But when children’s lives are at stake, we can’t afford
to live in a word of illusion. And we
can’t afford to make our decisions based on truthiness.
Postscript:
Monday’s Blog also dealt with Child Haven, the baby
warehouse in Las Vegas. There’s more on
Child Haven in
this story from today’s Las Vegas Review-Journal.
They may be the second most sacred cow in all of child
welfare, and no wonder. Donors love them.
They can get a plaque on the wall for giving money or furniture or, if they’re
really rich, donating a whole building.
The volunteers love them. They can turn real flesh-and-blood human
beings into human teddy bears who exist for the volunteers’ gratification and
convenience, even as they convince themselves they’re helping children. Whey they get bored with their human teddy
bears, they simply hand them back to the shift staff.
In short, they’re good for everyone but the children.
They are “shelters” - - those first-stop parking place
institutions in many communities where children are deposited for a few days or
a week or a month or, often, longer, to be examined and “assessed” by “trained
staff” in order to prepare them for exactly what they would have gotten without
the shelters – usually a succession of foster homes.
Shelters are exercises in adult self-indulgence and adult
self-delusion. As with any form of
orphanage, and that’s really what shelters are, a whole rationalization
industry has grown up around them.
“How can you call us an institution?” the people who work
at the local shelter say. “We have
‘cottages’ and they’re so pretty. We
even have a cutesy name. We’re so homelike.”
Whenever somebody says his or her institution is homelike,
I think of the stuff I sometimes put on bread when I’m trying to lose
weight. It may be called “buttery
spread” or “buttery light” but it always tastes like liquid plastic. I can tell the difference between buttery
light and butter. And children know the
difference between “homelike” and home.
“Our shelter provides ‘stability’” the operators will
say, so children don’t move from foster home to foster home. But it’s the people
in a child’s life that create stability, not the bricks and mortar. A child in a shelter endures a multiple
placement whenever the shift changes.
She endures multiple placement when the weekend workers replace the
weekday workers. And she endures
multiple placement when the volunteer who seemed so interested in her last week
has something better to do to this week and doesn’t show up.
“We must be doing good work,” the volunteers say. “Look how the children come running up to us
to hug us.”
Consider what one staffer at one of the shelters
said. He works at Child Haven, a giant
complex in Las Vegas that warehouses more than 150 children, including infants
-- now, even stacking them up like cordwood in the gym. The staffer told a local television station
that he loves coming to work at Child Haven because babies and toddlers “grab
my leg. They call me Mr. Lou. They tell me they love me.”
But when a young child grabs the legs of anyone who will
pay him a little attention and tells him “I love you” he’s not getting better –
he’s getting worse. He is losing his
ability to truly love at all, because every time he tries to love someone, that
person goes away. It’s even worse than the well-known problem of children
bouncing from foster home to foster home. We are setting some of these children
up to become adults unable to love or trust anyone.
The parking place industry will come back with claims
that they can “assess” children and “stabilize” them, so that they can find the
right foster home for the child when he or she leaves.
That was the theory in Connecticut, when they set up a
network of such shelters in 1995, in the wake of a foster-care panic that led
to a huge increase in the number of children taken from their parents.
But a comprehensive study of the shelters by Yale
University and the Connecticut child welfare agency itself found that wasn’t
true either.
On the contrary, the children who went through the
shelters tended to have worse outcomes than those who didn’t. The only thing she shelters were good at was
wasting huge sums of money. (As usual,
in child welfare, the worse the option for children, the more it costs).
Of course, as soon as the Connecticut Department of
Children and Families (DCF) saw the results of the study they commissioned they
shut the shelters down.
Just kidding.
In child welfare, research is no match for political
clout and adult self-indulgence. Take
away our human teddy bears? Never! As the Hartford Courant put it in
this story, available in the paper’s paid archive:
“Three
years after a study that showed short-term group homes for first-time foster
children are a costly failure, the state Department of Children and Families is
still funneling hundreds of children through the facilities each year.”
But that doesn’t
mean DCF didn’t take action. The agency used to have the study up on its own
website. But after the Courant
story came out, DCF removed the link.
(I have a copy of the study, which I’d be glad to send to anyone who
wants it).
The final rationalization is the one in which the shelter
operators admit shelters are a lousy option but, you see, there simply is no
alternative. There just aren’t enough
foster homes, they say.
That’s the constant claim in Arizona, where a foster-care
panic increased the number of children taken from their parents over the course
of a year by 40 percent in just two years.
That created an artificial “shortage” of foster homes -- and a baby boom at the shelters.
And all through the panic, who could be counted on for an
inflammatory quote encouraging the needless removal of children? The executive director of the East Valley
Crisis Center, the same shelter operator who kept insisting that it was a shame
to have to rely on shelters – but there was no other alternative.
And even with the panic, that shelter had room for some
dubious cases. A Christmas-themed puff
piece about the shelter in an Arizona newspaper in 2004 focused on two cases:
In case #1, a mother has to give up her child because she
is homeless.
In case #2, a grandmother has to surrender her children
because she “couldn’t take the kids herself because of health problems.” Then, after the children are separated from
their grandmother, they are torn away from each other. The shelter insists it’s for their own
good. In fact, it was almost certainly
for the shelter’s convenience. The
shelter’s own website reveals that children are segregated by age. That’s understandable. It’s dangerous to mix age groups in an
institution.
With
everything we know about what works and what doesn’t work for children in the
21st Century there is only one word for institutionalizing a child
because his mother is homeless or his grandmother is ill: Barbaric.
When
I mentioned this in an op ed column in that same newspaper, a shelter supporter
replied by citing another reason she felt the shelter was essential: To
warehouse children taken from battered mothers solely because those mothers had
been beaten.
Fortunately
a reform-minded head of the state human services agency and the threat of a
lawsuit from the Youth Law Center have
combined to reduce the use of shelters in Arizona. There’s a long way to go, but it’s a start.
One hundred years of research is nearly unanimous:
Institutionalization is inherently harmful. And the younger the child, the greater the harm. No one who writes puff pieces about shelters
would argue that shift workers and volunteers dispensing indiscriminate
pseudo-love to any child who walks in the door are a substitute for their love
for their own children. It’s no
substitute for somebody else’s child either – and the children know it. That’s why institutionalization does them so
much harm.
And better child welfare systems know it as well.
In Alabama, the system has been rebuilt to emphasize
keeping children out of foster care in the first place. It happened as a result of a suit brought by
the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law
(co-counsel for plaintiffs is a member of the NCCPR Board of Directors).
The lawsuit led to a consent decree that puts strict
limits on shelters. The following is from Making
Child Welfare Work, The Bazelon
Center’s book about the consent decree:
“Because it is so traumatic to uproot a child,
an important goal of [the Consent
Decree] is to have the child’s first placement be the only placement … To
minimize moves, the decree outlaws the use of shelter care except under unusual
circumstances. Workers are not
permitted to park a child in a shelter while they look for a more permanent
placement, unless the child can receive the full range of necessary services
while in the shelter and ‘it is likely that the [child’s] stay in foster care
will not extend beyond his/her stay in the shelter.’ [Emphasis in
original]. What this meant was that
counties had to develop a sufficiently large and flexible array of [placements]
so they could place children directly…to the setting determined as most
appropriate for meeting the child’s needs.”
There are two key indicators that the “no alternative”
argument is just one more rationalization.
The first is who the shelters take in and who they leave
out.
Everyone in child welfare knows the group for whom it is
hardest to find a foster home: Teenagers, especially teenagers with behavior
problems. To the extent that there is
ever a “need” for a shelter or some other form of “congregate care” it would be
for teens. Younger children are easy to
place and babies easiest of all.
So of course, these shelters are for teenagers, since
that’s where the need is.
Just kidding again.
Most of these shelters are only for children age 12 and
younger. There is no better indication
that shelters really exist to serve the adults who work and volunteer
there. After all, a teenager who’s been
through removal from his or her home is as likely to spit in your face as to
throw his arms around you. They make
lousy human teddy bears.
So the shelters stick to children 12 and younger,
including what the head of that Arizona shelter so cloyingly calls “the itty
bitty ones.”
The second indicator is what happened when a
reform-minded child welfare agency called the shelter operators’ bluff.
In Michigan, after a decade of careening full-speed
backwards, the state’s Department of Human Services has been working to curb
needless removal of children. Its
innovations are beginning to pay off.
As a result, in the Lansing area, DHS has become so good at finding
homes for children who really had to be taken from their parents, that a brand
new shelter stands almost empty.
Of course, the community celebrated.
Yep. Just kidding
again.
The Lansing State Journal treated this cause for
joy as a tragedy. So did local
politicians. And the local judge
stepped forward and promised to overrule DHS and start filling the shelter with
babies, even when DHS had homes available - - even though, under state law, the
county would then have to pay the full $170-per-day cost of the placement
instead of only half. Said the judge:
“I guarantee you that place will be full.”
So much for the “we have to have shelters because there’s
no other alternative” argument.
Prof. Victor Groza of Case Western Reserve University,
which happens to be in Ohio, wrote an
op ed column for the State Journal carefully explaining all the research on
the harm of shelters. Yesterday, the
head of the agency that runs the shelter replied, essentially as follows: Prof.
Groza’s not from here so he can’t know anything; nyah, nyah, nyah. (This time, I’m not kidding; have
a look). The agency chief
nevertheless cited one out-of-state source that supports shelters - - the trade
association for shelter operators, the Child Welfare League of America (see
previous Blog entry).
But then, the institutions lobby is particularly powerful
in Michigan. In an earlier post to this
Blog, I described how private child welfare agencies trooped up to the State
Capitol to oppose the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Family to Family program,
which keeps children in their own homes or with their extended families. (The Casey
Foundation helps to fund NCCPR). They
opposed it, because, they said, it’s better for these disproportionately
minority children to be torn from everyone loving and familiar and thrown in
with affluent strangers in the suburbs because the strangers live in better
neighborhoods. (See “When The Mask
Slips,” in the April Blarchive.)
And now, the opponents of reform in Michigan have got
some high-powered help.
That story in a future post.
In previous posts
to the Blog I’ve discussed the campaign by the Child Welfare League of America
to take the current roughly nine-to-one disparity in federal funding for foster
care versus funding to avoid foster care – and make it roughly 18 to one.
That’s what would happen if Congress did what CWLA wants
and released the only brake that curbs the current unlimited entitlement states
get to reimbursement for 50 to 83 percent of what it costs them to hold
children in foster care.
States can get this incredibly generous reimbursement
only for children whose birth parents are poor enough that they would have
qualified for the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children program under
income limits set in 1996. Because
child welfare is a system that routinely confuses poverty itself with “neglect”
that still covers about half of all foster children.
Because of inflation, that proportion is likely to
decrease a little every year. This
prospect terrifies CWLA, a trade association with members that include many
agencies whose survival depends on a steady supply of foster parents.
So they want to eliminate the “eligibility lookback” as
it’s called.
In fact, there is a very good plan that would do just
that. It would eliminate the lookback –
thereby saving states millions they now must spend determining eligibility and
proving it to the feds. But CWLA isn’t
welcoming this plan. In fact,
they hate this plan. No wonder. This
plan also would eliminate the perverse incentive to throw children in foster
care caused when you can get 50 to 83 percent reimbursement. And this plan would free up billions of
dollars now reserved for foster care, allowing states to use this money for
prevention, family preservation and adoption as well.
One more thing: The plan would be strictly
voluntary. States that did not feel
this was a good deal for them could stick with the status quo.
Here’s how this plan would work: Instead of the current open-ended entitlement,
states would sit down with the federal Department of Health and Human Services
and together they would estimate how much they would be likely to receive under
the current system over the next five years.
Then the federal government would give them that amount as a lump sum at
the start of each fiscal year. No more
complex eligibility restrictions. And,
more important, no more requirement to spend the money only on foster care
instead of better alternatives.
Not only would states stop losing money, any state that
could reduce its foster care population would wind up gaining federal funds,
since it could keep the savings.
There are two caveats: Once a state opts in, it would
have to stay in for five years. And, of
course, the open spigot closes. There
would be an emergency fund, but the threshold for triggering it would be quite
high – as it should be. The whole point
is to discourage the misuse and overuse of foster care. So states that gave in to foster care panics
and started tearing away huge numbers of children would have to pay for it with
their own money.
We know it works, because Illinois beat the federal
government to it. Starting in 1997,
though a combination of piecemeal waivers and its own ingenuity, Illinois
changed a related set of financial incentives, the ones that used to reward the
state’s private agencies for trapping children in foster care. As a result, in nine years, the number of
children in foster care plummeted from 51,000 to under 18,000. And independent court-appointed monitors
found that as the foster care population declined, child safety improved.
Of course, one group was hurt: private agencies. Those that couldn’t get enough children into
permanent homes stopped having children referred to them. Some of them had to close.
No
wonder CWLA is terrified of anything that would make it easier for other states
to do what Illinois did. Only such
terror can explain the apocalyptic terms CWLA uses to describe the plan. In a set of talking points sent to its member
agencies, CWLA instructs them to tell journalists that this plan
"would
END FOR ALL TIME the federal commitment to sharing in what should be a national
commitment to our nation's most vulnerable children" [emphasis in original].
On
the contrary, the plan would ensure a commitment at least equal to the current
commitment. It would, however, end the
commitment to restrict this money to foster care and shut out better
alternatives.
CWLA argues that inflation would erode the value of the
grants. Not so. The grants are negotiated based on whatever
a state would have received under the status quo, and that includes
inflation. Furthermore, the agreement
ends after five years.
CWLA also argues that changing the program from an
entitlement to a grant would make it easier for some future Congress to cut it.
Again, not so. The entitlement is just a law, it’s not
enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. (Perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned that –
it might give CWLA ideas). It’s just as
easy to cut – or raise – an entitlement as it is to cut or raise a grant.
And CWLA uses the misleading scare
term “block grant.” While I know of no
official dictionary of government terminology, in common usage a block grant
involves combining several different funding streams into one and lopping a
portion of the total off the top on the theory that the block grant will
increase efficiency.
This plan does nothing of the
kind. It takes just one funding stream
and makes it flexible - - with nothing lopped off the top.
I haven’t mentioned where this plan
comes from. I thought I’d let my
liberal friends judge it on its merits.
Too many of my fellow liberals have jerked their knees in opposition because
of where the idea comes from. So before
I mention the source, let me add this: Child welfare is a field filled with
good people who mean well but keep doing the wrong things. If some people who may not be so good and
may not mean well want to do the right thing for a change, that’s fine
with me.
O.K: The plan comes from the Bush Administration.
But the source of this good idea
makes it all too easy for CWLA and its allies to spread scare stories among
Democratic members of Congress.
Unfortunately, too many of my fellow liberals are as unquestioning in
their fealty to the foster care-industrial complex as their conservative
counterparts are to the military-industrial complex.
And it seems that the left is far
more interested in killing the plan than the right is in passing it. So the plan has gone nowhere. The Administration hasn’t even introduced it
as a bill.
But
that hasn’t stopped one courageous liberal Democrat, Governor Jennifer Granholm
of Michigan, from breaking ranks.
Though the plan did not pass Congress, HHS offered a similar deal to a
few jurisdictions in the form of a “waiver” from current restrictions. Granholm decided that the state’s children
were more important than the state’s child welfare agencies, and opted in. So did Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, making this
perhaps the only time the two have agreed.
And up to 20 counties in California,
including Los Angeles, will get the same waiver.
The Administration plan would simply
offer the same deal to every state, on a purely voluntary basis; in effect, the
ultimate waiver. What part of
“voluntary” don’t my fellow liberals understand?
There’s been another death of a child “known to the
system” in New York City.
Actually, there probably have been many such deaths in
the past few months since, sadly, in a city that is home to 1.9 million
children, such deaths have occurred at a rate of roughly one every two weeks
since 1993 – with a small decline during the years when the city emphasized
keeping families together. (While it is
very difficult to compare, this rate does not appear to be out of line with the
national average).
So perhaps I should say: Another death of a child known
to the system, Sharllene Morillo, has caught the attention of the city’s media,
particularly The New York Times.
Before I tell you what the Times said about this
case Tuesday, a little context:
● If the account from the city’s Administration
for Children’s Services is correct, in this particular case there is no file
filled with red flags. And there was no
history of ACS trying to keep the family together. Rather, there was one anonymous call to the state child abuse
hotline. ACS acted promptly, and did
not stop with its own investigation.
According to the Times, the child was “evaluated by medical and
psychological professionals at a child advocacy center” which found, according
to an ACS spokeswoman, “there was no solid evidence of abuse.”
● In the months since Nixzmary Brown died, the
number of children taken from their parents is up 70 percent over the
same period in 2005. So this death
comes at a time when caseloads have increased as the number of children torn
from their homes soared. In short, it
comes at a time of foster-care panic.
Here, then is how the Times summed things up:
Sharllene's death … comes at a time when the
city is struggling with a policy that aims to provide services to children
while leaving them in their homes.
The co-author of
the story, Leslie Kaufman, no doubt would respond by citing the next paragraph
in the story:
“With yet another tragedy, you have to wonder
just what preventive services could have been provided to these children and
their families," said Steven Banks, the lead lawyer for the Legal Aid
Society, which was assigned Sharllene's case last Wednesday, two days before
she died. "Resources are the magic missing ingredient in these
cases."
But
that doesn't change anything. Though
Banks is speaking generally, it's only likely to anger readers who would wonder
- rightly - why anyone would want to offer "services" to the alleged
killer in this case who, if news accounts are correct, was a sadistic brute,
not an overwhelmed parent in need of help.
Then,
yesterday, the city’s “Public Advocate,” Betsy Gotbaum weighed in. According to the Daily News:
"Yet again we find ourselves asking: Why
wasn't a preventable death avoided?" Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum said.
"Has nothing been learned from the tragedies of past victims of child
abuse?"
And
according to the New York Sun, she offered this burst of original
thinking:
"‘Those who do not learn from history are
condemned to repeat it' is a maxim that rings painfully true with the news of
yet another child killed in an abusive home," Ms. Gotbaum said.
But
it is Gotbaum who needs to learn from history – and she can start by checking
her office filing cabinets. There, if
she didn’t throw them out, she should be able to find the work of C-PLAN, the
exemplary organization set up by her predecessor, Mark Green.
C-PLAN
was among the smartest, most careful organizations ever to study child welfare
and advocate for individuals. It
documented the repeated misuse and overuse of foster care in New York City as it
sought to help families wrongly torn apart during the foster-care panic
following the death of Elisa Izquierdo.
And it was C-PLAN’s outstanding report, Justice Denied, that
documented the harm to children caused by the lack of an institutional provider
of counsel for birth parents. (I’d post a link to it, but no reports predating
Gotbaum’s tenure are available on the Public Advocate’s website).
Anyone
in New York knows that Mark Green is not a shy man. At the moment he’s running for state Attorney General. But on the particular issue of child
welfare, when Mark Green ran the Public Advocate’s office, he actually chose
substance over soundbites (while always prepared to offer both). And the stands his office took – supporting
birth parents during a foster-care panic --
did nothing to help him politically.
Gotbaum showed the true extent of her concern about child welfare by what she did after inheriting C-PLAN. When she couldn’t find continued private funding for it - -