Family Preservation at All Costs? The Case of Zymere Perkins

On Sept. 26, 2016, Geraldine Perkins brought the dead body of her six-year-old son, Zymere Perkins, to the St. Luke’s Hospital Emergency Room in New York City. On October 12, New York City’s Chief Medical Examiner ruled that Zymere’s death was a homicide caused by child abuse. On September 28, police arrested Ms. Perkins and her boyfriend, Rysheim Smith.

Between June 2015 and April 2016, Zymere had been the subject of four reports to the state’s child abuse hotline. Three of these reports had been substantiated by the child welfare agency and Ms. Perkins had begun participating in preventive services funded by New York City’s Administration on Children’s Services (ACS).

The death of Zymere Perkins unleashed a media firestorm resulting in the resignation of the head of ACS. The state and city have issued scathing reports on the failure of ACS to protect Zymere.

The media has understandably concentrated on the many egregious oversights by Child Protective Services workers, who repeatedly failed to investigate thoroughly the allegations of abuse.

But as a former child welfare social worker, what strikes me most is that Zymere’s family was receiving intensive supervision and services funded by ACS for ten of his last twelve months. While under investigation by CPS in September 2015, the family began participating in the St. Luke’s Family Treatment and Rehabilitation Program, which has a contract with ACS to deliver preventive services to high-risk families.

According to the city report, the St. Luke’s “case planner“ documented 42 visits with the family in the home and at the office, as well as frequent conversations with school staff, mental health professionals, shelter staff and other professionals “involved with the family” between September 2015 and July 2016.

In her notes on  those visits, the case planner repeatedly documented her concern about the unusual number of injuries sustained by Zymere, including two mouth injuries serious enough to require a dental visit and extractions, and one eye injury requiring a visit to an eye specialist.

The case planner documented her suspicion that Mr. Smith was hitting Zymere, and that Ms. Perkins was “overly influenced” by him. She also noted that Ms. Perkins had not entered a drug program or received the services that she had agreed to earlier. She had also stopped drug testing.

But the case planner never called the child abuse hotline, nor did she convene an “elevated risk conference,” which was required given her concerns.

The case was finally closed after Ms. Perkins told the case planner that she was moving to Massachusetts, a claim that was false and never verified. St. Luke’s final visit with the family took place on Aug. 26, 2016, two months before Ms. Perkins brought her son’s body to the emergency room.

New York City has suspended all preventive services intakes for the St. Luke’s program until it complies with a “Corrective Action Plan” to correct the deficiencies displayed by the Perkins case. I wonder, though, if systemic issues are as much to blame for the failure to protect Zymere. New York’s emphasis on keeping families together, in line with the dominant ideology in most states, may discourage staff from taking action to protect children from dangerous caregivers.

On Dec. 14, 2016, a day after the damning state and city reports, Dr. Jacqueline Martin, ACS’ deputy commissioner for preventive services, testified before the city council. She boasted that “New York City is one of the few jurisdictions in the country where families have access to a comprehensive, holistic, and fully funded continuum of services and supports to strengthen families and prevent entry into foster care.”

According to Dr. Martin’s testimony, family treatment and rehabilitation services (FT/R) like those received by Zymere’s family “are designed for higher-risk families and include treatment for substance abuse and mental illness. FT/R programs “offer clinical diagnostic teams comprised of licensed therapists, Credentialed Alcohol Substance Abuse Counselors (CASAC), case planners, psychologist consultants, psychiatric consultants and other providers.”

There is nothing about the Perkins case in Dr. Martin’s written testimony.

Dr. Martin’s wording is telling. The purpose of New York’s continuum of services is “to strengthen families and prevent entry into foster care,” but not to prevent abuse or neglect. Perhaps it is not surprising that Zymere’s safety was given short shrift.

Child welfare policy tends to swing between an emphasis on child safety and a focus on family preservation. On the national level, and in most states including New York, family preservation is currently the favored goal.

Of course we should avoid unnecessary placements in foster care. Removal of a child from home is traumatic and should not be done unless the child is in danger. But when a child is left in a dangerous home with multiple strong indications of maltreatment, there is reason to question the balance that is currently being struck between child safety and family preservation.

This column was published in the Chronicle of Social Change on January 3, 2017. 

Needed: A New Vision of Foster Care

The number of children in foster care has increased for the third straight year. Foster parent shortages have been reported in at least 24 states, with children staying in offices and hotels. The move by some states to close residential programs will only exacerbate these shortages. At the same time, many current foster homes are failing to provide the nurturing and attention that their wards so desperately need.

Yet child welfare leaders are surprisingly devoid of bold and creative ideas to address this problem. A case in point is the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s (AECF) recent report, Practices to Build Better Partnerships Between Foster Parents and Agencies. This document rehashes the same old ideas of better training and support, better treatment of foster parents by agencies, enhanced recruitment and more flexible licensing that come up in any discussion of the foster care crisis.

These are all good ideas. But something more is needed to meet the increased need and improve the quality of foster parents. We need a new model of foster care based on  two pillars. First, foster parents should be paid as professionals, with one parent in each household parenting full-time. Second, foster parents should be part of a community.

First, professionalism. Raising any child takes time, and all working parents struggle. But foster children require more. They have more medical needs, therapists, Individualized Education Plans (IEP’s), and school meetings. Of the best foster families I met in five years as a foster care social worker in the District of Columbia, most had a parent at home full or part-time, or at least a flexible schedule.

AECF argues against professionalizing foster care. They say it “risks marginalizing many of the families that agencies are trying to attract but who lack professional training, such as kin, families of color, and caregivers who live in or near the same communities as children in foster care.”

Clearly, a qualified relative is the preferred placement choice for any child. But many relatives, as well as caregivers from backgrounds and communities similar to those of foster youth, are not in a position to provide the kind of care our most vulnerable children need. In my personal experience, I have seen such caregivers dip into the stipend to pay their own expenses, run out of gas by the end of the month, fail to get children to appointments, and lead chaotic lifestyles similar to those of the families their wards were removed from. Children in foster care deserve something more.

AECF also argues that “Children and youth in foster care want to believe and feel that the people caring for them do so out of love — not because it’s just a job they are being paid to do.” That is very true. The problem is that many current foster parents (including kin and those from similar backgrounds to the kids) are doing it for the pay. If you don’t believe that, ask any foster care social worker or any child who has been in several foster homes.

Of course many foster parents already do it for love of children. But paying foster parents a salary will allow more such people to step forward. It will attract a new breed of foster parents — people who want to work with at-risk kids as a career and might otherwise work as social workers, teachers or other helping professionals. With this new supply, foster parents could be much more rigorously screened.

There is a way to pay foster parents a wage without drastically increasing foster-care costs, and that is allowing each foster family to take in more children. This allows larger sibling groups to be kept together. At the three SOS Children’s Villages in Chicago and Lockport, Illinois, up to six siblings live in a single home with a professional  foster parent.

Community is the other key element in a new model of foster care. By being part of a community, foster parents can provide mutual respite and assistance. It is also a way to have more eyes on each family to make sure that there is no abuse or neglect.

A foster care community can be physical. The SOS Children’s Villages and several other programs provide such physical communities. A physical community makes it easier for foster parents to help each other and allows for the provision of services and activities to multiple children in one place. Providing housing allows accommodation of larger sibling groups and can attract foster parents to areas where housing is expensive.

An alternative is a virtual community, such the Mockingbird model of foster care. Six to ten foster families live in close proximity to a “Hub Home,” which “assists in navigating bureaucracy and offers peer support, social activities and respite care.”

We needed bigger, bolder ideas for transforming foster care. It is too bad that AECF and other leading agencies have not yet responded to this need.

This column was published in the Chronicle of Social Change on December 21, 2016.

Substance Abuse Not Only Factor in Growing Foster Care Numbers

The number of children in foster care increased for the third straight year in fiscal 2015, according to data released in October by the Administration on Children and Families (ACF) and covered in The Chronicle. The number of children in state care increased from 401,213 on September 30, 2013 to 427,910 on September 30, 2015.  

This recent trend is a reversal of the dramatic decline in foster care caseloads from 567,000 in 1999 to 397,605 in 2012. Most of that decline was caused by a shortening of the length of stay in foster care rather than a decrease in foster care entries, although entries did decrease somewhat over the period.

The recent increase in caseloads, however, seems to be mostly due to an increase in foster care entries. That is, more children are being removed from their homes. The length of stay in foster care has changed little over the past three years, according to ACF data. But foster care entries increased from 254,712 in 2013 to 269,509 in 2015.

According to ACF data provided to this writer, 32 states reported increases in entries to foster care between 2013 and 2015, three reported basically no change, and the rest had decreased entries. The five states with the greatest increases in foster care entries between 2013 and 2015 were Georgia, Indiana, Arizona, Florida and Pennsylvania.

In its press release announcing the new data, ACF reported that parental substance abuse may have contributed to the growth in the foster care population. The percentage of removals where parental substance abuse was cited as a contributing factor increased by 13 percentage points between 2012 and 2015.

Reports from around the nation indicate that increases in substance abuse have been straining child welfare agencies, sometimes leading to placement crises in which there are not enough foster homes to house all of the children who have been removed.

The five states with the greatest increases in entries to foster care accounted for 67 percent of the national increase in entries between FY 2013 and FY 2015. Child welfare directors in the states with the largest caseload increases reported to ACF that substance abuse – particularly opioid and methamphetamines – are a major factor behind the increase in foster care rolls.

However, changes in policy and practice may also have contributed to increasing foster care entries in at least three states.

In Georgia, which had the largest numerical and percentage increase in foster care entry over the two-year period, officials told David Crary of the Associated Press that the creation of a centralized child abuse hotline, toughened procedures for investigating alleged abuse, and the addition of about 600 new child welfare workers were contributing to the increase in foster care cases. The latter changes were implemented in the wake of public outrage after several children known to the system died of severe abuse.

In Florida, a widely publicized series of child deaths resulted in a new law that took effect in July 2014. That law overhauled child welfare policy, changing the emphasis from parents’ rights to child safety, and greatly increased the number of child abuse investigators.

In Minnesota, a highly publicized death in 2013 of a child who had been the subject of 15 abuse reports resulted in appointment of a task force to recommend policy changes. Some of the 93 recommendations have already been implemented. These include the repeal of a law that forbade consideration of prior screened-out reports when considering new reports, and restrictions on the types of reports that can be assigned to the “alternative” (non-investigatory) response pathway. Minnesota had a sharp increase in foster care entries in 2015.

The policy changes in Minnesota, Florida and Georgia illustrate the cyclical nature of child welfare practice. The most recent national trend has been toward favoring family preservation whenever possible, but some states are beginning to reverse their direction in light of tragic events that suggested these policies are putting children at risk..

It is worth noting that over a quarter of the states did not report increased entries to foster care between 2013 and 2015. That includes California and Texas, the states with the largest foster care populations, as well as New York, which has the fourth largest foster care population after Florida.

The national increase in foster care caseloads, however, provides reason for concern in light of the shortage of placement options for these children. At least 24 states are reporting serious shortages of foster parents, sometimes causing children to sleep in offices and hotels.

At the same time, some states have implemented restrictions on “congregate care” programs (foster placements other than family homes). Advocates are still trying to implement congregate care restrictions on the national level through the Family First Act, although that effort hangs by a thread. But for the majority of states with increasing caseloads, these restrictions could have disastrous consequences.

This column was published in the Chronicle of Social Change on December 12, 2016.

Respect a Child’s Sense of Time? Not in San Bernadino County

On December 2, 2015, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik left their six-month-old daughter in their home with her grandmother, citing a doctor’s appointment. They then drove to a Christmas party at his workplace, where they opened fire, killing 14 people and injuring 22 more.

The pair were killed that day in a gun battle with police. FBI agents whisked the screaming baby away from her grandmother. A year later, the toddler is still in foster care.

Farook’s older sister, Saira Khan, has been trying to adopt her niece for the past 11 months, as described in the Washington Post. Khan and her husband are the closest surviving relatives of their niece. She knew them well, having seen them weekly during her first half-year on Earth.

Khan and her husband report having no idea of her brother’s murderous plans. She knew he had become more religious and intolerant over the past ten years, bringing home an equally conservative wife from Saudi Arabia. But they say they had no idea that this man with no criminal record or history of violence could even contemplate such a heinous act.

It was two months after the shooting before the Khans even saw their niece again. When they finally did, it was for a one-hour visit at an agency office. According to Saira Khan, the child was unrecognizable. She did not smile or interact, and her arms and legs seemed to have atrophied.

The caseworker told her that the child had not adapted well to her new home. That is not surprising, since she had never drunk from a bottle or been spoken to in English. At one point she stopped gaining weight and ended up in the hospital.

It was only in May that the child was allowed regular visits with her family in their home. Twice a week, she arrives for a six-hour visit with detailed instructions from the foster family about eating, napping, and not cutting her bangs.

Mr. and Mrs. Khan filed for adoption a few days after the shooting. They have undergone a background check and a home inspection. But the judge in the child’s court case says that she cannot be placed with the Khans until the FBI completes its ongoing investigation of their possible involvement in the shooting.

In the meantime, the Khans’ attorney is not even allowed to attend the periodic court hearings in the case. The child’s attorney has not even visited the Khans in order to assess their suitability as adoptive parents or even just to find out where the child is spending twelve hours every week. On the bright side, the Khans report that the county social worker supports the child’s placement with them.

The Khans sound like an ideal adoptive family. He manages a team of 12 in printer sales. She is finishing a master’s degree in education but has postponed her internship in order to be available for regular visits with her niece.

They have two children and a three-bedroom house at the end of a cul de sac in a suburb of Riverside. A room is all ready for the new family member.

When Congress passed the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA), there was much talk about a child’s sense of time being different from that of an adult. That is why ASFA put timelines in place to make sure that children do not languish in foster care for years.

The child in question already had a relationship with her aunt and uncle when she was taken into foster care. By leaving the child in the foster family for what amounts to two-thirds of her life, the agency has disrupted the existing bond and ensured that the child formed a new bond with her new family.

The longer the child stays with her current foster family, the more strongly she will bond to them and the harder a third transition will become. We don’t know the lifelong impacts of incurring two such disruptions in the first year of life, but we do know that disrupted attachments can impair healthy child development.

In a previous column, I opposed disrupting the bond between a child and a foster family to place a child with relatives who come forward a year or more after the child was placed in foster care. But in this case, the relatives lost no time in requesting custody of the child. The county has behaved irresponsibly in deferring the request long after background checks and home inspections were done and the relatives were cleared of any involvement in the crime.

According to the San Bernadino County Children and Family Services website, “kinship placement [placement with a relative] is the preferred placement option for children who come into care.” In its 2014 annual report, the agency boasts of increasing the proportion of children removed from their homes who are placed with relatives from from 26.9 percent in 2010 to 35.5 percent in 2014.

If events had played out differently, the child might not have come into care at all. If her parents had left her at her grandmother’s apartment, the FBI might never have removed the child and taken her to CPS.

And why the FBI took the child to CPS rather than leaving her with her family is another question that needs to be answered. If a child is orphaned or the parents are incapacitated, CPS does not normally come in. Instead, the family decides who will raise the child and petition for custody in court.

I don’t understand why placement of this child with her family should be held hostage to the FBI investigation. Yes, if they are found guilty and locked up, the baby would have to be placed with someone else. But keeping her away from her family now, when no charges have even been filed against the Khans after a year, seems a far more damaging and unethical option.

This column was published in the Chronicle of Social Change on December 2, 2017.

It’s How You Use Predictions that Matters

In his November 15 column, Chronicle Senior Editor John Kelly contested Richard Wexler’s argument that the failure of number crunchers to predict the results of the recent election casts doubt on the potential of the new predictive analytics tools to identify which children will be maltreated in the future.

I agree with Kelly that Wexler’s thesis is false. A predictive analytics tool is very different from the polling data used to forecast election results. And most importantly, as Kelly points out, the issue is not the tool, but how it is used.

To design the AURA tool that was developed for the State of California as a test of a predictive analytics approach, researchers identified deaths, near-deaths, and severe injuries (“AURA events”) among children who were referred to CPS within the previous six months. So they looked retrospectively at bad events that had already happened to see if they could have been predicted based on the circumstances of the families involved.

Researchers then correlated AURA events with a variety of child and family factors. These included child age, family composition, previous CPS reports, and the existence of earlier AURA events. Based on these correlations, they developed an algorithm, or formula, that provided a risk score for each child.

AURA turned out to be a powerful predictive tool. The ten percent of referrals with the highest risk scores accounted for 171 tragic events, 76 percent of the total number. If the families involved had received some sort of intervention (removal or case management), a significant number of tragedies could have been averted. Still, 24 percent of the AURA events would not have been predicted. That is what is meant by a false negative.

There would also have been over three thousand false positives, children who were predicted to be the victim of an AURA event when one did not happen, although some of these children might still be abused or neglected and need intervention. That’s why, as Kelly points out, we would not remove a child from parents because of predicted abuse. But we might want to do something less drastic, like offering case management and supportive services, which might help the parents improve their care and also keep the system’s eyes on the child.

Even the Strategic Decision Making (SDM) actuarial assessments being used in most states today, while not as advanced as AURA, already provide accurate risk assessments in many cases. In my last column, I wrote about Yonatan Aguilar, who was left at home without case management or services after he was assessed to be at high risk of maltreatment. He was subsequently confined to a closet, where he lived the remainder of his short life of hunger and abuse.

Richard Wexler seems to worry only that children will be removed because they are deemed at high risk of maltreatment. In the current child welfare climate, favoring family preservation above all else, I’m more worried about more Yonatan Aguilars.

Both types of bad outcomes can be prevented with good policy and practice. Nobody is recommending removing a child who is not in imminent danger of serious harm. But to refuse to use new methods that could save children’s lives on the grounds that they could be misused seems to me an unethical choice. And the relationship of this controversy with the election results seems, as Kelly puts it, tangential at best.

This column was published in the Chronicle of Social Change on November 23, 2016.

SDM Not the Root of System Failure in Yonatan’s Death

I read with great interest Daniel Heimpel’s column, Yonatan’s Death Spurs Deep Look at How L.A. Gauges Child Abuse Risk. Yonatan Aguilar had been the subject of four prior reports to DCFS through 2012. Yet, he was left in his home without any supervision from the Los Angeles Department of Child and Family Services (DCFS). Records obtained by the Los Angeles Times revealed that Yonatan was kept in closets for three years before he died.

Heimpel’s article focused on criticisms of the Structured Decision Making (SDM) assessment tools, currently used by more than half the states, for allowing this tragedy to occur. While I agree with critics that the new predictive analytics tools are preferable to SDM, the facts of this case are such that better risk assessment tools would not have prevented this tragedy.

In order to understand what went wrong, it is important to understand that every investigation involving child maltreatment in Los Angeles involves three separate decisions. Only two of these decisions involve SDM.

The first decision that has to be made in any investigation is the safety assessment, which is part of the SDM suite of instruments. The safety assessment, as described in California’s SDM Policy Manual, asks whether the child is in “present danger of immediate, serious harm.”

As Heimpel reported, Yonatan was found to be “safe” in all four cases; that is, he was not deemed to be in imminent danger of serious harm. This assessment may well have been correct, as Yonatan may not have been seriously harmed for months or years following this assessment.

Second, there is the decision about whether to substantiate the allegation that was made in the hotline phone call that prompted the investigation. This decision is based on an “allegation assessment,” described in Los Angeles’ Child Welfare Policy Manual. This assessment is somewhat similar to a police investigation and does not involve SDM. According to the Los Angeles Times‘ review of the record, all four allegations involving Yonatan were found to be either inconclusive (insufficient evidence of abuse or neglect) or unfounded (false).

Finally, the investigative worker must complete a “risk assessment” using another SDM tool. The risk assessment attempts to gauge “the likelihood that a family will maltreat their child in the next 18 to 24 months.” When the risk level is high or very high, SDM recommends that a case be opened.

Four times, Yonatan was found to be at high risk of future maltreatment. But a case was never opened.

Based upon my reading of the Los Angeles Times reporting on the case records, it appears to me that there are two major areas where the system may have failed Yonatan.

First, some or all of four investigations into allegations involving Yonatan may have been flawed. When Yonatan was four, a school nurse called police because he had several two- and three-inch scratches on his face, according to case records reviewed by the Los Angeles Times. Yonatan told police that his mother was angry at him for getting in trouble at school and that she had slapped and scratched him. But the investigator chose to believe his mother, who denied hitting him and said he might have gotten the scratches because he slept on the floor.

In March 2012, two reports came from Yonatan’s school within the span of four days. The first report related that Yonatan came to school with a black eye and gave conflicting reports of how he got it. The second report alleged that Yonatan came to school dirty most of the time and was always hungry, grabbing and hoarding food from the cafeteria — an obvious red flag. Yet, no allegations were substantiated.

There is evidence that many investigations conducted by DCFS are flawed. A devastating report submitted in 2012 by a special investigative unit found that failures in the “front end” contributed to 13 out of 15 child fatalities it reviewed. The investigators cited “the poor quality of factual information that served as the foundation for the assessments and subsequent poor decisions,” often rooted in a failure to interview key people with knowledge of the child’s situation.

The second way in which the system may have failed Yonatan is the failure to open a case after any of the four investigations as recommended by SDM, even though he was found to be at high risk each time. In order to understand this, it is important to understand one fact.

As an agency spokesperson confirmed, if the allegations of maltreatment are not substantiated, a case cannot be opened without the parent’s permission unless the county chooses to take the parent to court. I do not know how often this happens in a case where the child is not removed, but it certainly did not happen in Yonatan’s case.

One cannot imagine that Yonatan’s mother would have been receptive to the idea of a DCFS case. Case records reviewed by the Los Angeles Times indicate that Aguilar told a social worker that she was tired of social workers coming to the house and was withdrawing him from an after-school program to avoid further problems.

For the next three years, Yonatan did not go to school. Instead, he remained hidden in locked closets and sedated on liquid sleeping aids.

It is my belief that Yonatan’s death did not stem from a failure of SDM. I prefer the new predictive analytics tools because they are less vulnerable to manipulation and bring in data from outside sources rather than relying on parent reports. But using a “predictive analytics” tool would not have changed this tragic case,  because SDM accurately classified him as high risk.

Rather, Yonatan’s death stems from flawed policies and practices. These may include investigations that fail to get at the truth of what occurred. And they certainly include the inability to protect children at risk unless past maltreatment can be documented.

This column was published in the Chronicle of Social Change on November 7, 2016.

Has Connecticut's Cultural Change Gone Too Far?

I read with interest Joette Katz’ column about her efforts to change the culture of child welfare in Connecticut. Ms. Katz, Commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Children and Families (DCF), reports with pride that due to this cultural change, Connecticut has more than doubled foster care placements with relatives in less than two years.

The self-congratulatory tone of Ms. Katz’ column is surprising in light of a recent near-tragedy in Connecticut. A 19-month-old boy almost died of malnutrition and abuse after being placed for nearly five months with relatives who were completely unfit to care for a vulnerable child.

I don’t have the space to narrate the entire story of “Dylan C.’s” five months of suffering. Interested readers can access the meticulously researched and scathing report from Connecticut’s Office of the Child Advocate (OCA). Suffice to say, DCF decided to place Dylan with a cousin of his mother and her husband despite numerous red flags. These included multiple prior allegations of abuse and neglect, a criminal history including a conviction for assault, “health issues,” and “indefinitely suspended” drivers’ licenses for both parents.

Dylan had “global developmental delays” by the time he came into foster care at the age of 13 months. But during the five months that he lived with the Magee family, Dylan did not see a pediatrician and missed multiple appointments with his early intervention provider, according to the OCA report.

By the time he was removed from this deadly foster home at the age of 19 months, Dylan weighed only 17 pounds, less than he weighed seven months before. He was unable to walk, talk or feed himself. He had broken bones in both arms, several weeks old. He had a burn on his wrist, torn tissue under his tongue, and multiple bruises and abrasions. Doctors also found evidence of a retinal hemorrhage and “old bleeding” in his brain that they deemed to be a result of trauma.

OCA found that a dozen employees in four different units failed to ensure Dylan’s safety and well-being in foster care. Dylan was not seen awake by his caseworker for 102 days. For five months, the CPS unit did not address repeated red flags, including a report that Ms. Magee called the police to ask if she could get in trouble for letting Dylan cry for long periods of time.

In a column published in a Connecticut newspaper, Ms. Katz argued that a tragic outcome in a single case should not be used to reverse needed policy changes. She is right. But according to OCA, the problem is not a misguided policy. Rather, it is a set of practices that appear to be inconsistent with policy and that may be widespread.

Documents from DCF’s own internal investigation obtained by OCA “appear to reference widespread regional practices associated with the approval of relative foster homes that are inconsistent with state law and regulations.” Many employees seemed to be unaware that a waiver was required to place a child in the home of a foster parent with a criminal or child abuse history. Equally disconcerting, employees “gave various answers regarding who is ultimately responsible for assessing the licenseability and suitability of a relative foster parent.”

OCA summed up, “The interview responses depict incoherent, ill-informed and chaotic decision-making regarding what can be life and death situations for children. The responses raise the specter of numerous children who have been placed in foster homes without appropriate assessments, checks or balances to ensure their safety.”

My own reading of the OCA report raises concern about whether Ms. Katz’ vaunted change in agency climate might be contributing to the decision to place children in the homes of unqualified relatives without the most basic screening and review. In one chilling e-mail, a supervisor indicated her reluctance to place Dylan’s newborn sister in “another marginal relative resource in this family.”

The supervisor went on to state that the licensing unit was “constantly sharing concerns with us about [other relatives in this family] but when we try to act on them we’re told it’s not that bad and there’s not enough to deny or remove.” Despite these concerns, the newborn was placed in this home, joining her sister who was already there.

Through my own work in child welfare, I have learned that when agency leadership has a new agenda, middle management and workers quickly realign their priorities. Supervisors and administrators know that they are not going to rise in the hierarchy by proposing increased scrutiny of relatives. After all, how else did DCF more than double foster care placements with relatives in less than two years?

Is it possible that staff are motivated to cut corners in order to give top management what they want? Apparently Ms. Katz is not concerned. But maybe she needs to be.

This column was published in the Chronicle of Social Change on October 19, 2016.