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.

Adoption Subsidies Deserve a Closer Look

outh Services Insider has predicted that Adoption Subsidies Could Become a Hot Topic in Child Welfare. There is good reason to take another look at these subsidies.

Most adopted parents are loving and generous people who spend much more on their children than they receive in subsidies. But some adoptive parents and their advocates seem to see the subsidies as an entitlement that they can enjoy regardless of whether they are still caring for their children, or worse, maltreating them.

An earlier YSI article,  New York State Could Be the First State to Take a Closer Look at Adoption Subsidies, described new legislation that would empower the state to verify that adoptive parents are still supporting their children before continuing to pay adoption subsidies. The bill arises out of a concern about adoptive parents that have stopped supporting their adopted children but continue to receive subsidies.

The mechanisms required by the bill are very moderate. As YSI puts it, it does not order county agencies to “patrol adoptive homes for compliance with [their subsidy agreements], a move that would almost certainly be seen as an overreach.”

The bill does nothing more than to require each family receiving a subsidy to certify annually that it is living up to its obligations. If a family refuses to certify or ignores the request, a state can investigate. The bill also allows the state to investigate if it receives a report that a family is no longer supporting an adoptive child.

These are very modest measures. I would prefer an annual visit with the child to make sure that all is well. Nevertheless, a state alliance of foster and adoptive parents has “concerns” about the bill.

I don’t know what surprised me more: that foster and adoptive parents would have concerns about such a seemingly innocuous bill, or that a move to monitor adoptive homes would “almost certainly be seen as overreach.”

But after studying the issue, I realized that the federal position on adoption subsidies has created a sense of entitlement to these benefits among adoptive parents, regardless of if and how they are caring for the children..

As the American Bar Association (ABA) explains in an informative article about adoption subsidies and fraud, federal law requires a state to terminate an adoption subsidy when it learns that the adoptive parent is no longer supporting the child. But it provides no means for a state to make this determination.

And the federal government has deprived the states of the best opportunity for states to cut off fraudulent payments, which is an annual eligibility determination. The federal Child Welfare Policy Manual does not prohibit states from redetermining eligibility for adoption subsidies. But in response to a question from New York State, HHS made clear that states cannot cut off adoption subsidies if parents refuse to reply to a request for information, according to the ABA article.

As the ABA points out, “other federal benefit programs do not rely solely on the recipients to advise the government when they are no longer eligible for benefits.”

It’s no wonder that the “overwhelming consensus” of the 41 agencies cited by YSI as responding to a question from the Administration on Children and Families was that states should have the authority to rescind adoption subsidies.

The executive director of an organization representing foster and adoptive parents in New York told YSI that it is concerned about adoptive families that are struggling to reunify with their adopted children who have run away. But the legislation does not mandate that the subsidy be discontinued in such a case; just that the situation be investigated.

The U.S. will have its first national data on disrupted adoptions next year, but evidence from New York already suggests it is a significant issue. Potential savings from  recouping undeserved subsidies could be significant. In the current fiscal year, it is estimated that the federal outlay for adoption subsidies will be almost $2.7 billion.

A much smaller but more distressing problem than adoption disruption involves adoptive parents that abuse or neglect the children for whom they are receiving subsidies, sometimes even resulting in death. In my next column, I will propose a way to address this problem.

The overwhelming majority of adoptive parents have opened their hearts and their homes with no motive other than their love of children. I highly doubt that these parents would object to an annual check-in for the renewal of the funds that they are receiving through taxpayer support.

This column was published in the Chronicle of Social Change  on June 23, 2017. 

Risk, Not Substantiation, Should Drive Services to Families

A new report from L.A.’s Office of Child Protection (OCP), as recently reported by Daniel Heimpel in The Chronicle, recommends revising current policy to enable the Department of Child and Family Services (DCFS) to offer services to families of children at high risk, even if they do not have a substantiated allegation of maltreatment. But even more importantly, the report points to new thinking about using risk rather than substantiation as the trigger for child welfare services.

The OCP report was established in response to the horrific death of Yonatan Aguilar after four investigations failed to find abuse or neglect in his home. The County Supervisors wanted to know if the County’s Structured Decision Making (SDM) risk assessment tool was at fault in Yonatan’s death.

But as I wrote back in November 2016 (SDM Not the Root of System Failure in Yonatan’s Death), OCP found that the problem was not a misuse of the SDM risk-assessment tool. That tool correctly identified the child as being at high risk for future maltreatment. The problem was the action, or lack thereof, by DCFS.

Specifically, the problem was DCFS practice when an SDM risk level is high, or very high, but a referral allegation is not substantiated. While OCP found agency policy to be unclear, guidance issued to staff indicates that a case should not be opened when the allegation has not been substantiated. As Heimpel pointed out, this conflicts with the recommendation of California’s SDM Manual, which recommends that a case be opened most all high-risk or very high-risk families, and that an explanation be provided when a case is not opened .

OCP recommended that DCFS’ policy for cases where the SDM risk level is high or very high, but referral allegations are unfounded or inconclusive, should be revised so efforts are made to connect the family with voluntary services and supports. Such a policy is in effect in other jurisdictions, including the District of Columbia.

Such a change would be an improvement but might not save many children. That is because, as Heimpel points out, efforts to involve families with maltreatment allegations in voluntary services through differential response have had mixed results.

Part of the solution may lie in an idea that was buried in the middle of the OCP report. OCP analyzed 1,225 referrals investigated by DCFS between 2012 and 2016 where the child was later seriously injured or killed. They found that as in the case of Yonatan Aguilar, more than half of the fatalities and near-fatalities occurred when the allegation was not substantiated.

These findings are consistent with research studies over the years that have found little or no difference in future reports of maltreatment of children who were the subject of substantiated or unsubstantiated reports. For example, studying all infants born in 2006 who were reported to CPS and remained at home, Emily Putnam-Hornstein and colleagues found that the proportion reported again hardly varied between those who were screened out, unsubstantiated, and substantiated; more than half of babies in all of these groups were reported again within five years.

According to OCP, its data “support the growing conversation in the field that allegation substantiation may be inadequate to identify those children who are most at risk for future safety concerns and negative outcomes.” The authors go on to report that they spoke with “child welfare experts who expressed interest in placing more importance on levels of risk (instead of on allegation dispositions) when making case decisions, and in offering services and supports to families that may help to reduce this risk.”

The OCP closes the report by saying it will “partner with DCFS and other key stakeholders to further explore the larger question of the role that assessing risk should play in child welfare,” as well as “the effectiveness of allegation substantiation.”

Moving away from allegation dispositions (and toward level of risk) as a trigger for case decisions makes a lot of sense. While imminent danger should remain the trigger for removal of a child, high risk of future harm should be a trigger for the agency to open a case for monitoring or services.

But what happens if the parent does not agree to participate? In these cases, the agency could bring the family to court to require participation. This is already allowed in Los Angeles and other jurisdictions, although not used as often as needed. In Los Angeles County, the agency can order a “non-detention petition” when it determines that the safety and protection of a child require judicial intervention but it has not removed the child from the home.

Breaking the link between substantiation and services offers one avenue for preventing more at-risk children from falling through the cracks. But unless the agency is able to require parents to participate in services and accept agency supervision, children like Yonatan Aguilar will continue to die.

This column was published in the Chronicle of Social Change on May 30, 2017.