Putting the Child Back in Child Welfare

It was the dead kids who inspired me to leave my comfortable, well-paid job as a researcher and become a child welfare social worker. Kids like Adrian Jones, Zymere Perkins and Yonatan Aguilar, who were killed by their parents after months or years of abuse.

The dead kids felt no more misery. But I couldn’t stop thinking about all the other kids living in fear of the next beating, watching child protective services (CPS) workers leave after accepting the mother’s or stepfather’s explanation of their bruises, and facing the now-angrier adult eager to punish them.

So I went back to school and added a Masters in Social Work to my Masters in Public Policy from Princeton and my B.A. in Sociology from Harvard. I was thrilled to be accepted as a CPS trainee at the District of Columbia’s Child and Family Services Agency (CFSA).

But my CFSA trainer told us we were not there to save children. I learned that the family, not the child, was at the center of child welfare policy. Our business was to find the strengths in each family.

We learned that “safety” meant simply the absence of “imminent danger.” A child could be “safe” but at high risk of abuse or neglect in the future. Such children should remain at home with monitoring and supervision by the agency, but since this is usually voluntary, the family can refuse to participate.

I later learned that even if the family agrees to participate, these in-home cases often closed quickly with little evidence of reduced risk to the child. I also learned of cases around the country, such as that of Yonatan Aguilar, in which these high-risk but “safe” kids died from abuse.

I never ended up being a CPS worker. I ended up instead in a private agency that provided foster care and case management to D.C. children.

Working in foster care, I learned even more about how the child is not the center of child welfare practice. Compliance with requirements, meeting benchmarks and saving money were much more important than helping children.

Assuring that a child had her physical exam on time, her two visits with the social worker within the month, her “Youth Transition Plan” every six months was paramount. But no problem if I did not have enough time to explore summer camp options, or talk to a teacher or therapist, because there was no benchmark for that.

These benchmarks could have perverse results, like the time I had to take a client for an extra physical because her placement had changed its designation from “respite,” so it was treated as a new placement. Working 60 hours a week to see my clients’ needs met, I could ill afford the time.

I learned that the field adheres to simple, feel-good policy reforms that just happen to save money and often have perverse effects on kids. Non-family residential placements are anathema in the current climate. But many excellent group homes and residential schools are far more nurturing than some of the uncaring foster homes I’ve seen.

Because of the virtual elimination of group homes in the District, social workers have to repeatedly find new placements for traumatized teens whose behavior results in repeated rejection by foster families in search of easy money with no behavior problems.

It is also accepted as gospel that children must achieve “permanency” rather than aging out of care. To increase the numbers of “permanent placements,” and reduce the number of kids aging out, workers often urge youth to accept adoption or guardianship with foster parents, relatives, or other available adults, even if they are uncaring or inappropriate. Never mind that some youth might do better staying in foster care until 21 and benefiting from continued case management and services, rather than being at the mercy of paid guardians who may divert their subsidies for their own purposes.

Once a child is off the foster care rolls, there is no mechanism to ensure that the “permanent” placement works out. And with subsidies being paid to adoptive parents and guardians, there is reason for concern. Of course, the results are not usually as catastrophic as the murder of two girls by the woman who adopted them from D.C. foster care, who collected subsidies while their bodies remained in her refrigerator.

More often, I suspect that children are left in the permanent custody of people who continue to provide the same mediocre care they did as foster parents, skimming off part of the foster care payment to meet their needs.

In my experience in child welfare, I’ve learned that too many things take precedence over the welfare of children. To share what I’ve learned, I’ve been blogging for two years as part of The Chronicle of Social Change blogger co-op. With the end of the co-op, I’ll be continuing to post my writings on my blog, at fosteringreform.blogspot.com. Readers can also follow me on Twitter @fosteringreform or on Facebook at Fostering Reform.

This column was published in the Chronicle  of Social Change on September 21, 2017.

No Excuse for Leaving Children to Suffer and Die in Abusive Homes

On August 30, the death of seven-year-old Adrian Jones after years of abuse was once again in the news as family members filed suit against the agencies and staff that failed him. Adrian’s remains were found in a pigsty in 2015 after years of horrific abuse and repeated reports to authorities.

The lawsuit documents ten hotline calls in both Kansas and Missouri between 2011 and Adrian’s death in 2015. The calls began only three months after Adrian was removed from his mother’s custody due to allegations of neglect, and placed with his father and stepmother, Michael and Heather Jones.

Adrian’s mother, Dainna Pearce, filed the lawsuit along with her mother and oldest daughter.

The hotline callers alleged that there were guns all over the house within reach of the children; that Adrian’s father beat the children until they bled; that Adrian’s stepmother was observed to be high on drugs; and that she kicked Adrian “with a big boot on,” and choked him.

In the course of multiple investigations, Adrian told investigators that he was kicked and punched, tied up and locked in his room. His siblings reported that Heather Jones would take Adrian into a bathroom from which they heard “choking sounds.”

Documents show that social workers in Kansas deemed Adrian to be at “very high risk” of abuse and neglect. But nevertheless, they determined that he was “safe.”

In 2013, the Missouri Department of Social Services determined that Adrian was not safe. But instead of removing him, they opted to provide “intensive in-home services.” Within two weeks, the family told workers they were moving back to Kansas. When Kansas contacted the couple, they said they lived in Missouri.

In March 2014, Adrian was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and placed in residential treatment. The lawsuit alleges that his father and stepmother refused to participate in his treatment or transition plan. But he was still discharged to them in September 2014.

The lawsuit alleges that DCF received several more hotline calls about photos of Adrian being tortured that Heather Jones posted on Facebook. But no rescue ensued. Adrian’s remains were found in a pigsty in November 2015.

Later, police found that Heather Jones documented Adrian’s abuse through dozens of surveillance cameras. Images stored online showed Adrian strapped to a table and blindfolded, standing in a swimming pool overnight, bruised and bloody, and apparently tied up with a plate of food in front of him and a bar of soap in his mouth.

Michael and Heather Jones pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and were sentenced to life in prison.

Adrian’s story, while horrific, is also sadly familiar. Zymere Perkins was the subject of four CPS reports and a closed case in New York City when his mother’s boyfriend killed him in 2016. Yonatan Aguilar in California, after four investigations finding him at high risk of future maltreatment, was locked in a closet for three years until he died.   

The Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities found that up to half of child fatalities involve children known to CPS, and even more were from families who were known in the past.

But these children who died are only the tip of the iceberg. For every Adrian Jones, there is an unknown number of children who survive chronic abuse before being rescued. Take the experience of Tonisha Hora, a 2017 Congressional intern:

At 14 years old, my twin sister and I were removed from a kinship care placement … after experiencing severe physical and verbal abuse for ten years … Child Protective Services often visited our home, sometimes multiple times a year, after they received reports from neighbors and teachers who we often asked for food to keep from being hungry or saw our bruises …

We were aware of how the system continued to fail us by never removing us from our home when they should have. To us, the signs were obvious, yet CPS workers always left us there. The abuse worsened after every CPS visit. That was the problem: they always left without us. Every time. For ten years.

Many factors may contribute to these system failures, including misguided policy, poor training, poor pay and high caseloads for CPS workers, and poor interstate communication. It is only by a comprehensive review undertaken by an outside party, and made publicly available, that citizens can learn what caused the failure and how to avoid it in the future.

Some states, like Michigan and Rhode Island, have established an independent children’s ombudsman or child advocate who reviews the deaths of children involved with child welfare and juvenile justice. Unfortunately, such comprehensive reviews are rarely available. It took the Kansas City Star 18 months to get Adrian’s 2,000-page record from the Kansas Department for Children and Families because of confidentiality concerns.  

Neither Missouri or Kansas have made public any analysis of what went wrong in Adrian’s case, and what can be learned from the tragedy. We can do better.

This column was published in the Chronicle of Social Change on September 15, 2017.

Don't Expect Training Requirement to Solve Shortage of Good Foster Homes

In “California Bill Aims to Create Better Foster Homes,” Holden Slattery reports on new legislation (AB 507) that would require social workers to help foster parents develop training plans tailored to the needs of the children in their homes. This legislation is the top priority of the California Youth Connection (CYC), an Oakland-based advocacy organization led by current and former foster youth.

Slattery leads with the story of CYC member Serena Skinner, who experienced three placements in one year after coming into foster care at age 17. Skinner believes that with better training, her foster parents might have understood and been able to deal with her behaviors.

CYC’s legislative coordinator told Slattery that the success of California’s Continuum of Care Reform (CCR) depends on passage of the bill. CCR attempts to move most foster youth from group and institutional settings into foster homes.

Of course, foster parents should receive training that is relevant to their specific circumstances. In my experience as a foster care social worker in the District of Columbia, I observed foster parents choosing classes based on time and proximity rather than subject matter. As a result, a foster parent with normal teenagers might take a class in fetal alcohol syndrome; that’s a real-life example.

I can attest to the importance of receiving training in all the important knowledge about trauma, attachment and brain development that we have acquired in the past ten years. Much of this new knowledge helps explain some of the behaviors that foster parents might otherwise misinterpret as hostile or disrespectful.

But I’m a bit skeptical that this legislation will achieve its grand purposes of ensuring the success of CCR, for a couple of reasons.

Simply ensuring that foster parents develop relevant training plans does not ensure that they will actually receive appropriate training. For that to occur, there has to be enough training available that a busy foster parent does not have to find child care in order to travel an hour to a training class. And the bill does nothing to ensure a supply of relevant training throughout the state.

Moreover, even if great training were available, the foster parent has to be interested and open to learning new information and new ways to look at human behavior. The foster parents I knew who would absorb this kind of information were already doing a great job. Good training might help them do their jobs even better.

I hate to say this, but in my experience, the foster parents who are doing a bad job – the ones who give their kids back at the first sign they are not perfect – are probably not going to be open to the lessons of training. Their lack of flexibility, openness to new information, and compassion are exactly the factors that will prevent them from benefiting from training.

In order to understand better the expectations that advocates have for AB 507, I searched the Internet, and found only a Facebook video of a CYC rally to support the legislation. It was disappointing. There was no discussion of the specifics of the bill. One foster care alumna spoke of her wonderful experience being cared for by a loving foster mother and adoptive family. She suggested that the bill would somehow ensure that other children in care would share her experience, but no explanation of how it would occur.

Even if training could turn bad foster parents into good ones, I don’t see how it could increase the supply of foster parents to accommodate the children being removed from congregate settings in the wake of CCR.

It is much cheaper to create a training mandate than to invest in alternatives to unsuitable foster parents, such as quality boarding schools for foster youth. One California example: San Pasqual Academy in San Diego, where more than 90 percent of students graduate high school or achieve a GED, 60 percent of alumni have attended college, and less than one percent have been incarcerated. But San Pascual is only half full.

A San Diego County Grand Jury report found that San Pasqual alumni had significantly better outcomes than other youth in foster care and recommended that the academy be fully utilized to better serve foster youth.

According to a 2013 article about San Pasqual, “The academy believes teenagers should bond with a community of their peers and a group of adults rather than be folded into a series of potentially dysfunctional families.”

But that solution would be a lot more expensive, and require a lot more courage on the part of legislators, than mandating a training plan for foster parents.  

This column was published in the Chronicle of Social Change on September 5, 2017.

Foster Care as Punishment? A Case of Biased Reporting by the New York Times

In “Foster Care as Punishment: The New Reality of ‘Jane Crow‘,” published on July 21, The New York Times drew attention to “a troubling and long-standing phenomenon: the power of Children’s Services to take children from their parents on the grounds that the child’s safety is at risk, even with scant evidence.”

There is no doubt that unnecessary removals of children by child welfare agencies have been a problem in New York and around the country for decades – perhaps as long as these agencies have existed. However, the Times’  biased and incomplete reporting makes the article almost useless to anyone who cares about improving the system.

Most importantly, the Times ignores the equally long-standing phenomenon of the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) failing to protect children victimized by chronic, severe, and sometimes deadly abuse and neglect. The reporters’ only reference to the recent beating deaths of Zymere Perkins and Jaden Jordan, who were both being monitored by the ACS when they were killed, was to assert that these deaths may have given rise to the alleged spike in child removals.

Reporters Stephanie Clifford and Jessica Silver-Greenberg began with a description of Maisha Joefield, a mother who “splurged” on her daughter even when money was tight. For example, the reporters added helpfully, Ms. Joefield “bought her Luvs instead of generic diapers when she could.” 

It is odd to me that the authors seem to consider splurging on brand-name diapers, sneakers, or apparel to be an indicator of good motherhood

One night, Ms. Joefield was so exhausted that she put five-year-old Deja to bed and took a bath with her earphones on. Her child was found wandering the streets of Queens alone at midnight. Not knowing where her mother was, she had decided to go to her grandmother’s house. She was removed to foster care, and returned home four days later by a judge’s order.

The reporters quote legal aid attorney Scott Hechinger as saying, “In another community, your kid’s found outside looking for you because you’re in the bathtub, it’s … a story to tell later … In a poor community, it’s called endangering the future of your child.”

I don’t know where Mr. Hechinger lives, but I have never heard of a friend or neighbor alone with a small child putting on earphones and listening to music so loud with the bathroom door presumably closed that her child could not hear her.

Ms. Joefield committed a serious error in judgment that suggests a certain degree of dysfunctionality and need for assistance. While it may not have justified the child’s removal, some intervention was required to ensure the child’s future safety.

The reporters’ fixation on child removals ignores the overall trend in New York City away from placing children in foster care and toward providing supportive services to families while the children remain at home. The total number of children in foster care in the city has fallen from an average of 16,031 in 2007 to 9,041 in May 2017, according to data provided to this writer by ACS.

In the wake of Zymere Perkins’ death, ACS investigated 27,549 allegations of maltreatment in the first five months of 2017, 2,000 more than in the first five months of 2016.

This has coincided with an increase in foster care placements: the number of children placed in foster care in the first five months of 2017 was 21 percent higher than the number placed in the first five months of 2016, according to data provided by ACS.

But the increase in allegations and investigations has been met far more often with family preservation services than with child removals. Between June 2016 and June 2017, the number of families placed under court-ordered supervision to keep children safe while they remain at home went up 69 percent. In dealing with the upsurge in maltreatment reports, the agency appears to be continuing to emphasize in-home services rather foster care. 

The Times article illustrates what some have called the liberal dilemma in child welfare reform. As I argued in a previous column, “liberals are reluctant to further penalize parents whose problems in parenting ultimately stem from poverty and racism by taking away their children.” But as another columnist put it, “it’s not racist to save minority kids’ lives.”

The New York Times had the opportunity to write an important story about the difficulty ofavoiding unnecessary removals while at the same time protecting children who are in very dangerous homes. Instead, the Times chose to publish a polemic with suspect numbers, old anecdotes, and slanted language. Too bad for the Times, and for its readers.

This column was published by the Chronicle of Social Change  on August 17, 2017.

States Should Forbid Homeschooling by Adoption Subsidy Recipients

This is the second of two columns focusing on adoption subsidies. In the first column, I focused on the general need for more scrutiny on recipients of adoption subsidies. In this column I discuss the need to prevent abuse of adopted children who are removed from school.

The recent deaths of two teenage girls in Iowa and the escape of another from an abusive home has resulted in heightened media coverage and proposals for an overhaul of Iowa’s entire child protection system.

Natalie Finn, age 16, Sabrina Ray, age 16, and Malaiya Knapp, age 17, had several things in common. They were all abused by their adoptive parents, who collected subsidies from the State of Iowa. And they were all withdrawn from school on the pretext of being home-schooled.

As a consequence, one of the first lines of defense against child abuse – the observation of school personnel – was absent.

When adoption subsidies are paired with homeschooling, the combination can be lethal, as blogger Sandra Halverson Reicks points out in a recent post. The Coalition for Responsible Home Education (CRHE) has reviewed hundreds of cases of severe or fatal abuse and neglect of home-schooled children. A disproportionate number of these children are adopted or have special needs.

Federally funded adoption subsidies are available to parents who adopt children with special needs from foster care. Each state sets its own definition of special needs, which may include age, ethnic background, sibling group status, medical condition, or disability.

Maximum basic monthly subsidy rates are usually in the range of hundreds of dollars per child, and depending on the state can be in the thousands for children with more intensive needs. Multiply this by the number of children, and adoption subsidies can be a sizeable addition to family income.

As the North American Council for Adoptable Children puts it, “Adoption subsidies make it possible for children with special needs to be adopted by loving families who require additional resources to help them thrive.” We don’t want to return to the days when foster parents could receive subsidies but could not receive equivalent payments if they adopted the children in their care.

But clearly, adoption subsidies provide an opportunity for unscrupulous people to take advantage of vulnerable children and taxpayers. Foster children are monitored, but adopted children are not, which leaves school personnel as the main safety net for reporting abuse or neglect. By withdrawing their children from school to ostensibly home-school them, abusive adoptive parents can effectively isolate them from the world.

When public funds are provided for the raising of children, there needs to be some oversight. School personnel is required to report all suspected abuse and neglect. These reports are crucial for the safety of children. Many homeschooled children killed by their parents might have been saved if they had been enrolled in school.

Therefore, as Reicks recommends in her blog, parents receiving adoption subsidies should be required to enroll their children in public or private schools.

“When there’s public money involved, there needs to be transparency,” writes Reicks. “It’s not enough for Iowa’s Department of Human Services to become involved after a complaint is filed. One visit does not compare to regular observations from the public or private school system.”

This does not seem too much to ask of adoptive parents, especially if the only alternative would be to require periodic home visits by adoption staff.

One might ask how this requirement would be enforced. The answer is fairly simple. Parents receiving subsidies should be required to sign a document at the beginning of each school year identifying the school the child attends and giving permission for the school to release the child’s attendance records at specified intervals throughout the school year. Continued receipt of the subsidy would be contingent on return of the form by a certain date.

The agency would request attendance records periodically, perhaps after each quarter. A history of frequent absences, or a parent’s refusal or nonresponse to the request, would also trigger an investigation.

What about young people who refuse to go to school? In these cases, clearly something is wrong, and it may well be appropriate for the state to offer assistance to the adoptive parents in dealing with the situation.

All too often, proposals like this one are rejected on the grounds of interfering with the freedom of parents. But no parent is required to receive an adoption subsidy. Those who are receiving taxpayers’ money to care for our most vulnerable children should be willing to allow their wellbeing to be monitored.

This column was published in the Chronicle of Social Change on June 28, 2017.