Out-of-County Placements Tax Kids and Workers Alike

The Chronicle’s series on out-of-county placements for foster youth provided excellent examples of the problems caused by placing foster children out of county or far away from home. In the District of Columbia, where I worked as a social worker with foster children, over half of foster youth are placed in the Maryland suburbs.

California seems to be unique in having data about out-of-county placements. However, while nationwide data are not available, this is likely a national issue. As far back as 1999, child welfare scholar Mark Testa discussed the lack of foster homes in the cities and the placement of urban children in suburban foster homes.

Working with D.C. children who lived with Maryland foster families, I saw firsthand the problems with having foster youth in another jurisdiction. Child welfare agencies are now required to keep children in their home school unless it is not in their interests to do so. As I discussed in an earlier column, these young people are often forced to use special van services, which means that they cannot participate in extracurricular activities since drivers are not available after normal school hours.

Moreover, travel times are often lengthy as drivers might have several children in different jurisdictions on one route. Faraway schools means that it is difficult for children to see friends after school or participate in evening or weekend activities.

Long distances from children’s families also cause big problems. Young people usually visit with their families weekly, and this means lots of time in the car for kids and staff– a waste of everybody’s time. Overwhelmed social workers often have to do the driving, detracting from other important duties.

I was confused by Judge Henry’s column asserting that the burden is on parents to travel long distances to visits. In the jurisdictions with which I am familiar, visitation takes place at the agency, the parent’s home, or in the community at a location convenient to the parent.

Finding mental health services in another jurisdiction can also be problematic, as TheChronicle series points out. Because the District has so many children in the Maryland suburbs, mental health services are available there, but frequent moves mean that children have to change therapists or endure commutes of more than an hour each way to mental health services.

Long commutes to school, family visits and therapy are major inconveniences for kids, who should be using the time for schoolwork, activities and fun. Along with long drives for social workers to required home visits, they also impose a financial cost on agencies, which must pay for transportation. And having master’s degree-holding social workers spending hours every week driving hardly seems a good use of taxpayers’ money.

The Chronicle’s series raises the question of how to address the out-of-county placement dilemma. As I argued in a previous post, we need to move kids back to their jurisdictions. But it is unrealistic to expect that a new supply of foster parents will miraculously appear without some redefinition of the foster care concept.

Agencies might consider a model of the government owning the home and paying foster parents as employees to live there and provide full-time care to the children. As I stated in an earlier column, we need to pay foster parents as professionals in order to solve the foster parent shortage and attract the kind of nurturing families that are required for this demanding job.

For teenagers, we might consider family-style group homes of up to eight children such as those endorsed by foster care alumnus and congressional intern Eric Barrus. Due to the high cost of land in many cities, agencies might have to acquire land or facilities for this purpose or help nonprofits like Boys Town to do so.

In addition to bringing children back to their own jurisdiction, these models would have the virtue of making it possible for one member of a two-parent family to be a full-time foster parent. As both the foster parent and the CASA Director interviewed by The Chronicle in Part Five of the series stated, foster parenting should be a full-time job in view of the intense needs of most foster children, not just those labeled as “therapeutic.”

These solutions sound expensive. However, let’s not forget the costs of transporting children to schools, family visits, court hearings and therapists out of county, as well as the cost of masters-level social workers driving hours to get to home visits and doing some of the client transportation.

Compared with these current costs, providing professional foster care in county may not be so expensive. And the benefits to children would be great.

This column was published in the Chronicle of Social Change on September 15, 2015.

Too Often in Foster Care, Kids' Privacy Rights Used to Protect Agencies

The privacy rights of children and their families caught up in the child welfare system should be protected. But all too often, they are used to shield agencies from questions about their actions.

In my last column, I wrote about Ashley Rhodes-Courter and her efforts to find out the truth about the death of a foster child who was briefly in her care. The story of a child welfare system trying to suppress information about the death of a child is unfortunately all too common.

But a recent story from upstate New York illustrates an agency hiding behind privacy rights at the expense of a living child. A 13-year-old in Warren County, New York, is being kept in foster care so that the child welfare agency can keep secret the circumstances under which she was allowed to stay with a heroin addict and convicted felon who was unrelated to her.

The child in this case had been in the system most of her life. She was living with her maternal grandmother, but they were not getting along. A crisis was reached on July 4, when the grandmother called police and the girl threatened to run away.

The next day, the girl was picked up by a family friend, Shannon Dickinson. The sheriff’s office told the Glens Falls Post-Star that Dickinson was a known heroin addict who overdosed last December after injecting heroin while driving. He is also a twice-convicted felon and a paraplegic as a result of a failed suicide attempt decades ago.

According to the Post-Star, the Warren County Department of Social Services (DSS) approved the placement with Dickinson. Because he was a family friend and the maternal grandmother approved the placement, she could be placed in his home as a “kinship placement” and a background check did not have to be done before she was placed.  The child remained with him until July 30, when she reported that he had sexually abused her the night before. DSS then placed the girl in foster care. They later stated that they were not aware that the paternal grandmother had custodial rights.

On August 26, the paternal grandmother came to court to request custody of her granddaughter and get her out of foster care. Judge Jeffrey Wait told her attorney to file a motion. But he could not schedule a hearing on that motion because of a DSS appeal of his ruling about closing the court.

DSS wants the courtroom to be closed for further hearings. The judge has refused this request twice. But DSS announced its intention to appeal his decision, so the judge stated that he would schedule no more court dates at this time.

In the meantime, the 13-year-old remains in foster care with strangers. The agency claims that it wants the courtroom closed to protect the girl’s privacy. But the judge noted that the press has not reported her name nor the names of any family members. And according to a reporter who was there, the child’s court-appointed guardian urged the court to allow the case to go ahead.

On September 2, the Glens Falls Post-Star ran a hard-hitting editorial stating that DSS has “made the girl’s welfare secondary to their own interest in keeping details of this case secret.”

All of my information comes from the Post-Star, and the press can sometimes be an accomplice in blaming individuals when systemic problems are at fault. That is one reason why agencies are so preoccupied with protecting themselves.

I know how hard it is to be a social worker in the child welfare system, especially working with children old enough to run away. I once allowed an 18-year-old client under agency supervision to stay with a family member after her father kicked her out. There were some concerns about the family member’s home but I knew my client would run away if I placed her in foster care with a stranger.

Another family member, who was mentally ill, came over and got in a fight with my client, seriously injuring her. If God forbid my client had been killed, this could have been portrayed as my negligence, rather than choosing the option that appeared the least unsafe.

The press can be unfair and uninformed. But the answer for agencies is not in sacrificing their client’s interests to protect themselves. This is simply unethical.

We will not be able to improve policy or practice unless we know why things go wrong. Since the agency does not seem to be open to explaining and fixing its own problems, the public needs to be informed, so that those who truly care about children can step in to prevent similar problems in the future. 

This column was published in the Chronicle of Social Change on September 9, 2015.

Foster Parent, Facing Ultimatum, Chooses Not to be Silenced

In my last column for The Chronicle, I reviewed Three Little Words by Ashley Rhodes-Courter, who triumphed after a harrowing 10 years in foster care. Her second memoir,Three More Words, documents her life since leaving her adoptive home for college.

Rhodes-Courter is now a popular speaker with a Master’s degree in social work. And until this year, she was a dedicated foster parent for the State of Florida who had taken 20 children in crisis into her home.

Her drive to speak out against the problems in her state’s child welfare system have cost her the ability to help improve it. She chose not to be silenced by a state-sponsored ultimatum to clam up about the death of a child she once cared for.

Last February, Rhodes-Courter was horrified to read that one of her former foster children had been beaten to death by a schizophrenic uncle. Jenica Randazzo had been with the Courters less than a month before she was placed with a family that was planning to adopt her. But Rhodes-Courter learned that after Jenica had left her home, the plan for Jenica had changed.

Jenica and her siblings had been sent back to the grandparents’ home from which they had been removed in 2012 because they were deemed to be in “substantial and immediate danger.” Also living in the home was Jenica’s uncle, Jason Rios, who has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

On February 7, Rios killed his mother and Jenica with a tire iron. His father stopped him after he had hit Jenica’s 7-year-old sister and had his arm raised to hit her again.

Executives with Eckerd Community Alternatives, the lead agency providing child welfare services in the Tampa Bay area, reviewed the case and concluded “there were no indications that could have predicted this tragic outcome.”

But Jason Rios’ mental health issues were not noted by Eckerd or the Florida Department of Children and Families (DCF), even though he lived in the home. His parents never told caseworkers that he was committed to a psychiatric institution three times because of behavior that could be a threat to himself or others. The third time was only two or three months before he killed Jenica, when she and her siblings were already living in the home.

Jenica’s team appeared to be focusing on a non-relative adoption for Jenica until the private agency handling her case closed, according to an investigation by the Tampa Bay Times. The previous team had concerns about the grandparents’ ability to handle the children.

But everything changed when that agency closed and Jenica had a new case manager and therapist. Suddenly, the focus was on returning the children to their grandparents, against the recommendations of her court-appointed volunteer guardian.

DCF could have requested a Critical Incident Rapid Response Team report to clarify all of the unresolved questions in order to avoid further tragedies, but the agency declined to do so. Rhodes-Courter and her husband did not accept the agency’s refusal to take responsibility.

They decided to speak out, posting about the case on Facebook and eventually speaking to the media.

“Someone needs to demand answers for Jenica. I don’t want the truth of what happened to remain buried with her body,” said Rhodes-Courter.

Rhodes-Courter notes officials with Carlton Manor — the case management agency assigned to Jenica when her original agency closed — lost no time in contacting her and her husband and advising them to stop speaking to the media. Eventually they demanded that the Courters sign a document admitting they had violated confidentiality and pledging to stop speaking out.

Failure to sign the contract, Rhodes-Courter was told, would be grounds for closing her home to new foster care placements.

According to the Courters’ attorney, her clients did not breach any confidentiality statutes. But the Courters decided to surrender their license rather than stop speaking out or risk having their license formally revoked, which could prevent their fostering or adopting in the future.

The fact that an agency was willing to jettison a dedicated foster family to cover itself is emblematic of the problems plaguing child welfare in this country. The over-use of confidentiality to hide agency negligence is common as well.

Being a great foster parent requires being passionate. But when it comes to government, passion can be your downfall if its directed at something that will get leaders in trouble.

In this case, Rhodes-Courter’s passion for a better Florida child welfare system cost the state a dedicated foster family.

NOTE ON SOURCES: I learned about Ashley Rhodes-Courter’s fight to get justice for Jenica from an article published by the Children’s Campaign of Florida. Rhodes-Courter also has her own “Justice for Jenica” page, which provides links to various media accounts. I found the detailed articles by the Tampa Bay Times and the Bradenton Herald to be particularly helpful.

This column first appeared in the Chronicle of Social Change on September 1, 2015.

Three Little Words: A Must-Read for Child Welfare Professionals

The odds seemed to be stacked against Ashley Rhodes Carter. Born to a teenage mother in Florida in 1985 and removed from her mother at the age of three, she spent ten years in 14 different homes, surviving abuse, neglect, and separation from her brother.

But Ashley defeated the odds. Adopted at the age of 12, Ashley completed high school, went to college on a full scholarship, and obtained a master’s in social work. In 2008, Ashley published Three Little Words, chronicling her harrowing journey through the child welfare system and her eventual adoption by a family whose loving care enabled her to blossom into an accomplished and successful adult.

I just discovered this book, which is surprisingly classified as Young Adult. ButThree Little Words should be required reading for any child welfare professional. Ashley’s story illustrates some ways that things have improved and some ways they haven’t, and casts light on debates that are still raging.

Unhelpful Front End

Ashley and her brother were removed from their mother after she was arrested for writing a bad check. She was cleared and released in six days, but the children were not returned. Ashley’s mother was told she needed to provide for her children, but her applications for financial assistance and food stamps were denied because she did not have custody of them at the time.

Today, almost 30 years after Ashley’s removal, the field places a high priority on keeping kids at home and getting them back home as soon as possible with agency assistance. Nevertheless, children often stay in foster care long after they could be returned if the right help was available. Perhaps new legislation introduced by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) to change the financing of child welfare will help. It will give states the flexibility to use federal foster care funds on preventive services to keep kids at home.

But changes also need to be made in the culture of child welfare agencies and government agencies that interact with low-income people. Just last weekend, the New York Times carried the story of a woman who left her baby with a friend in the domestic violence shelter where they were living in order to purchase diapers after the official curfew. When she returned, the police were taking her baby away. She spent two weeks in jail and lost her shelter spot. Five months later, she was still fighting to get her child back.

Languishing in Foster Care

Ashley’s mother also had a problem with drugs and alcohol. Perhaps she would have received more help today, but she did not take advantage of the opportunities available at the time. She did not make herself available for visits and was often in jail. Despite that disinterest, Ashley was in foster care for over five years before her mother’s rights were terminated and she was freed for adoption.

Federal legislation passed in 1996 attempted to prevent children languishing in foster care for years. It requires agencies to initiate the termination of parents’ rights for children who have been in care for 15 of the last 22 months, with certain exceptions. This has certainly improved the chances for many children like Ashley to achieve permanency. However, in my experience in the District of Columbia, judges often did not cooperate with attempts to terminate parental rights, insisting that parents be given additional months or even years to regain their kids.

Safety vs. Well-Being

After Ashley had been in four different foster homes, she and her brother found a loving home with her grandfather and his common-law wife in South Carolina. But the children were eventually sent back to Florida to live with strangers. Ashley was never able to find out why they were sent back. There were apparently safety concerns regarding her grandfather’s lifestyle but Ashley felt that this was beside the point.

“It seemed logical to me that Luke and I would be safest with someone who actually loved us,” she writes in Three Little Words.

The conflict between safety and well-being for foster children still plagues the system today. There are no easy answers, but social workers need to understand the importance of a loving home to a child’s well-being and healthy development.

Bad Foster Homes

If safety really was the concern in the removal of Ashley from her relatives, the system truly failed when she was placed in the nightmarish home of the Moss family. In the Moss home, the husband stood by while his wife punished the children by pouring hot sauce in their mouths, requiring them to run and squat, dragging them by the hair, and in Ashley’s case, pushing her face into her own vomit.

The Mosses were investigated three times, but the charges were never substantiated because their word was taken over that of the children. It was only years later that Ms. Moss was arrested for abuse and neglect of children she adopted.

When she obtained their file, Ashley learned that the staff who originally licensed them had overlooked numerous red flags that should have prevented their being licensed at all. The file was full of praise for their great work as foster parents even as negative reports were ignored.

Horror stories like this exist but more common are the people who foster for the money and provide little more than room and board. This type of neglect may be less traumatic than horrific abuse, but it can be very harmful to children who need special attention.

The perennial shortage of foster parents means that agencies are extremely unlikely to fire bad ones. And one reason for this shortage is that the government is unwilling to spend the money it takes to pay for professional, full-time foster parents or family-style group homes. Which brings us to the next point…

Benefits of Group Homes

After many foster homes, Ashley was placed in a group home, where she stayed until she was adopted. Ashley’s tale makes clear the drawbacks of group homes: the institutional celebration of holidays, the lack of normalcy, and worst of all, the transience of staff.

But Ashley grew and matured in this home, and formed a close relationship with two staff members, who became lifelong connections. It seems clear that she got better care in the group home than she did in many of her foster homes. It was only in the group home that she found stability and relationships with caring adults, as well as the therapeutic services she needed. From the group home, she was adopted at the age of 12 by the Courter family, whose love and support enabled her to fulfill her great potential.

An Attorney for Every Child

Ashley’s book illustrates the necessity that every foster child have an advocate in court. It was only after a volunteer Guardian Ad Litem was appointed that the government moved to terminate her mother’s rights.

The only way to make sure that every child has an advocate is to mandate that an attorney be appointed for every child in foster care. A 2008 report indicates that 31 states plus the District of Columbia mandated the appointment of an attorney. The other states—including Florida–need to follow suit. The appointment of an advocate should be a right, not a privilege. It may even save money if it leads to children exiting foster care sooner.

Ashley Rhodes-Courter went on to become a motivational speaker, author, foster parent, adoptive parent, and birth mother. She chronicles these experiences in her new memoir, Three More Words, just published this year.

This column was published in the Chronicle of Social Change on August 25, 2015.

Barrus Report Proves It: Group Homes Are Right for Some Kids

On August 5, The Chronicle highlighted the recommendations of Eric Barrus, one of 12 former foster youths participating in the Foster Youth Internship Program of the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute. Barrus agrees with many experts that large group homes or institutions should not be used as long-term placements for foster youth. However, he proposes that small group homes run by families should be a preferred option for older, harder-to-place foster youth.

Barrus’s position is based on his personal experience. He was in foster care from age 16 through 19, and was initially placed in large group homes of up to 30 children where it was “next to impossible” to build the relationships with staff and peers that are important to healthy adolescent development. Finally, he was placed in an independent family group home in Montana called Open Gate Ranch. Eric thrived there, and was eventually adopted by the family that runs the home.

“The Ranch,” as it is affectionately known, is an independent family group home that houses up to eight boys at a time. Barrus stresses the family-like nature of the Ranch. “The parents live in the home 24/7, which creates a loving and accepting environment, where there are opportunities to develop trust, build relationships and be part of the family. They also…[make] every kid feel special by attending their extracurricular activities; …helping them attain a driver’s license; and celebrating birthdays, graduations, and other milestones.”

Residents of the home also enjoy weekly family nights, family vacations, theme park trips, and holiday celebrations, he wrote.

As a former foster care social worker, I know this is significantly more than I saw most foster parents do for their wards.

The Ranch is not alone in the provision of excellent family-based group care. In an earlier column, I described my visit to a Boys Town family group home in Washington, D.C. The dining room wall is covered with photos of former residents many of whom come back often to see the home’s “Teaching Parents,” who have been doing this for 20 years. Both the sparkling interior and the loving, dedicated full-time parents were in sharp contrast to many of the dark, dingy, loveless foster homes I have observed.

Group home opponents often cite research purportedly showing that foster care produces better outcomes than group care. But Dr. Bethany Lee, one of the nation’s leading experts on group care, questions the quality of this research. In an introduction to her own study, she notes several methodological problems with previous comparative studies between group care and foster care.

In their study, she and her co-author, Dr. Ronald Thompson, tried to minimize these limitations. Comparing youth who received foster care through Boys Town with youth who participated in Boys Town family-style group homes, they found that the youth in group care were more likely to be favorably discharged, more likely to return home and less likely to experience a subsequent formal placement than the foster care youth.

No differences were found in subsequent legal involvement or the likelihood of living in a homelike setting six months after discharge.

As Eric points out, family-style group homes are particularly needed in light of the foster parent shortages around the country, which can result in a prevalence of poor-quality foster homes. Agencies with a foster parent shortage are often reluctant to screen out or dismiss people who go into foster care for the money and provide nothing more than room and board. I described the results in an earlier column about bad foster homes.

Group home opponents often cite their expense, which is considerably greater than that of family foster care. Eric points out that some youth in foster care, especially older boys who have experienced trauma and failed in multiple family placements, simply cannot function in a foster home. The higher cost of group care for these youth might be a bargain if it enables the taxpayers to avoid future expenses on public assistance, homelessness, substance abuse, and incarceration.

Eric recommends that family group homes be made “a preferred placement option over non-family group home and institutional placements for “hard-to-place” teen boys.” He also suggests that “family group homes” should be considered a separate category between foster home care and group care.

Unfortunately, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), the powerful chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, has expressed his intention to restrict funding for group homes. It’s not clear whether Senator Hatch recognizes the distinction between large institutional group homes and smaller, family-style homes. As The Chronicle suggests in the article about Eric’s recommendations, we need more research into the outcomes of different types of group homes for different types of youth before Congress places restrictions on their funding.

This column was published in the Chronicle of Social Change on August 13, 2015

Class Action Consequences: The Dangers of Measuring Quantity Instead of Quality

Child welfare systems in many states are under court monitoring or receivership. Courts became involved due to class action lawsuits, such as the one recently filed against New York City’s child welfare agency.

Obviously, these legal advocates are trying to help children caught up in these systems. However, as a social worker in the District of Columbia for five years, I was surprised to learn that court oversight often hindered my ability to help my clients.

Class action settlements often emphasize quantifiable performance, even when this is not meaningful. Moreover, some standards are poorly defined, requiring staff to waste time in unnecessary activities.

In the District of Columbia, the Child and Family Services Agency (CFSA) is operating under an Implementation and Exit Plan (IEP) approved by the court. The IEP contains 83 requirements (with associated “exit standards”) that CFSA must meet to “exit” court oversight. A few examples will illustrate the problems.

The IEP prescribes that each child in a new placement be visited four times in the first month. It seems reasonable to require more visits during the first month so that the social worker can assess how placement is going and intervene if necessary. But mindless implementation of that standard can result in absurdity.

I had a client who was temporarily placed with a new foster family because her foster parent needed heart surgery. As required, I visited my client four times in the first month in her temporary placement. The ailing foster parent made a slow recovery and my client ended up staying at the “temporary” home. When the placement was changed from “respite” to long-term, it was treated as a new placement, and I had to visit four times in that month as well!

The IEP requires that children in foster care receive a full medical evaluation within 30 days of placement. This sounds reasonable. What could be wrong with requiring a medical evaluation?

Let’s start with the fact that CFSA requires that this evaluation be provided by its own clinic. That clinic does not give immunizations, so if the child needs immunizations, she will have to receive another physical from a real clinic.

What happens if the child has already had a physical within the past year and documentation of this physical is obtained? No dice, unless that physical happened within the past month.

No big deal? Remember that the hard-working social worker or case aide is required to transport the child. Counting transportation there and back, this may take up half a day, typically more than the amount of time a social worker has to spend on each case per week. Meanwhile, the child might miss a half-day of school in order to obtain a physical that may be unnecessary or insufficient.

The IEP calls for the reduction of multiple placements for children in care. Of the youths served in foster care during a current year, 83 percent of them must have two or fewer placements.

As a result, CFSA staff are extremely reluctant to approve new placements even when in the child’s interest. I had one client who was not thriving. His foster parent provided no support or supervision, and he was alone much of the time.

When I tried to get him a new placement, I was told that he would have to stay in the home. It was more important to the agency to avoid a new placement that would hurt the numbers than it was to meet the needs of my client.

The IEP requires that all youth 18 or older have a “Youth Transition Plan” to prepare them for adulthood. A simple, useful format was replaced some time ago by a cumbersome template which contains about 20 separate Word documents.

Hysteria gripped my office when the deadline approached for documenting that all of our older teens had plans. Daily emails made it clear that this documentation was to be our top priority, ahead of things that had much more relevance to children’s lives.

Clients often were not interested in attending the team meeting that was supposed to be held to develop the plan. In one case, I had the entire team assemble three times, to be stood up by the client every time.

The existence of a written plan is much less important than other factors such as the quality of foster parenting, mental health care, and education that the client receives. But the existence of a plan is much easier to measure—and it is much easier to produce a plan than to improve the quality of services that the client receives.

I do not wish to leave readers with the idea that court supervision or performance standards are necessarily bad. If the standards are meaningful, they can be an effective method for improving child welfare systems. But meaningful standards are often ones that cannot be measured quantitatively.

The IEP contains some qualitative standards. Assessing performance on these standards requires qualitative review, which is expensive and hard to do well. Perhaps that is why agencies and courts seem to be addicted to meaningless, easy-to-measure standards that often hinder, not help, the provision of quality service.

This column was published by the Chronicle of Social Change on August 4, 2015.

The Shortcomings of Structured Decision Making

As recently reported in The Chronicle of Social Change, Los Angeles County and other jurisdictions have been developing a new tool to help assess the risk to children who have been referred to the child welfare system.

Los Angeles, like many other jurisdictions, is using an earlier generation of risk and safety assessment tools. But at least in my experience in the District of Columbia, few professionals have any faith in the utility of these tools.

I am referring to the so-called Structured Decision Making (SDM) model for child protection, produced by the National Council on Crime and Delinquency (NCCD). The model includes six different assessments conducted at different stages of a case.

According to NCCD, the model is in use in 33 jurisdictions in the United States and in a total of 48 jurisdictions worldwide. As recently as May of this year, Texas adopted the SDM assessments for investigations and is planning to adopt the remaining assessments for ongoing services in the fall.

SDM is based on checklists filled out by social workers based on their interviews and observations, as well as other data they might be able to obtain. Using this information, the computer uses “actuarial science” to generate a risk level or a recommended action.

Unfortunately, these SDM assessments rely on yes-or-no questions that do not capture many important factors. Speaking to The Chronicle‘s Holden Slattery, Los Angeles social workerRuby Guillen complained that the yes-no framework fails to distinguish between a mother experiencing depression after her husband’s death and a mother suffering from schizophrenia and refusing medication.

She added that the instrument also fails to incorporate important risk factors, including the risk posed by secondary caregivers such as a mother’s boyfriend—a major concern in child welfare.

The head of child welfare in Los Angeles, Philip Browning, expressed concern that, due to the manual nature of the process, workers could manipulate the process to provide the desired result. I know from personal experience that this is easy to do, especially since the checklists include poorly defined multiple-choice answers that leave workers no choice other than using their judgment.

Alternatively, the worker can simply override the system-generated result. However, I discovered that neither was necessary in the District of Columbia. In one case, I decided to leave the system-generated recommendation in place even though we had already decided to override it, just to see if anyone cared. Not surprisingly, nobody did.

So why are jurisdictions using these instruments if they are useless and ignored? In the District of Columbia, the SDM is so tightly integrated with the entire case management process within the electronic database that it might be costly to remove it. But if the costs in time spent by social workers were calculated, removing SDM would probably save money.

It is possible that in jurisdictions where social workers are not required to have a Master’s Degree or a license, the SDM provides some needed guidance in making decisions. But integration within the data system does not explain why the state system in Texas would be adopting the tool today.

Automated risk assessment algorithms (whether old or new) are supposed to improve upon the ability of the social worker to make child protection decisions. But the SDM risk assessments do not provide any such improvement in my experience. Whether a new generation of risk assessments can do better remains to be seen.

The risk modeling experiment conducted in Los Angeles used a wide variety of data including parents’ mental health and substance abuse history. Given privacy rules, I am not sure how the Department of Children and Family Services is going to get access to all this information.

Regardless of the answer to that question, I hope that those developing the new tools will field-test them extensively to make sure that they don’t suffer from the same problems as SDM.

But let’s not wait until new tools are adopted to throw out SDM and similar first-generation risk assessment tools, at least in jurisdictions where they are useless and ignored.

There is a real cost to having workers complete useless assessments, and it is measured in time: The time it takes workers to complete them; supervisors to review them (if they bother to); and trainers to train workers to use them.

Worst, perhaps, is the effect on worker morale of having to complete busywork when there is so much real work to be done.

This column was published in the Chronicle of Social Change on July 30, 2015.