According
to one news account, the judge overseeing the decree praised “a different day, a different
mindset, and a different atmosphere” in court compared to when the original
settlement was reached in October, 2008. According to another, a CR lawyer praised DHS for "some really important strides."
No kidding. The
current director of Michigan DHS, Maura Corrigan, and the director of CR,
Marcia Lowry, have identical outlooks: Both have contempt for birth families
(Corrigan literally walked out on them during their one and only chance to tell
their stories to one of those Obligatory Blue Ribbon Commissions that states
and localities love to name to avoid actually changing their systems) both view
permanence for children only in terms of adoption and neither cares about the slash-
and-burn budget cuts in support for impoverished families used to finance their
so-called reforms. (For full details see
our reports on Michigan
child welfare.)
Corrigan also is the one who wrote an op-ed column for
the Detroit Free Press under the headline
“Removing children from families always follows
legal procedures” at the very time probation officers were illegally
rubber-stamping the names of judges on orders removing children from their
homes.
So of course they get along famously. The so-called progress largely involves
hiring hundreds of new caseworkers to tear apart more families (financed in
part by cutting
family preservation and public assistance programs) and extending foster
care until age 21.
Amid all the celebration there is not one word about the
hundreds, perhaps thousands of foster children who have gone “missing” thanks
to the consent decree.
They’re not literally missing, of course. Someone knows where each child is
individually – the foster parents and caseworkers, mostly. But when it comes to their collective fate,
they are entirely off the radar. Corrigan
and Lowry appear content to keep it that way. They've adopted their own "don't ask, don't tell" policy. In public, at least, Lowry's group doesn't ask and Corrigan's agency doesn't tell.
The children in question are those who were kicked out of
the homes of grandparents or other relatives when those relatives couldn’t or
wouldn’t comply with the ten pages of hypertechnical requirements to become
formally licensed as a foster parent.
The consent decree requires that loving grandparents and other
relatives, who often are poor, comply with exactly the same requirements as the
middle-class strangers for whom those requirements originally were designed,
unless they can obtain a waiver. The
consent decree deliberately makes those waivers very hard to obtain.
Of course, all foster homes should be required to meet
minimal health and safety standards – and all child welfare agencies should be
required to provide the help needed to bring the homes up to those standards.
But the Michigan foster care licensing requirements go way beyond that. As I’ve
noted before, the apartment where President Obama was raised by his
grandmother would not have qualified under these regulations. Some relatives simply may be too poor to
provide all the required middle-class creature comforts.
But Lowry, the ultimate bureaucrat, has shown that she
doesn’t give a damn. Licensing brings in
federal money so the children be damned.
(Licensing also makes the relatives eligible for higher payments – no
one is saying they shouldn’t be allowed to be licensed if they want it.)
But damned to where?
Lowry doesn’t know, and DHS isn’t telling.
The only clues to what is going on are in the periodic
reports issued by the monitor for the decree.
The figures provided in those reports are confusing – and the most recent such report mentions
only the number of unlicensed homes closed without any mention of the number of
children affected. But it appears that
more than 2,000 children have been kicked out of homes with relatives since the
decree went into effect.
Where did they go?
● In some cases, they may have gone back to their own
homes, almost always a positive outcome.
● In other cases, though children were forced to move,
the home really might have been substandard and closing the home may have been
valid.
● And in other cases (now that the monitor is reporting
only on homes, not children) the home actually might not have had any children
in it.
But that probably still leaves hundreds of children
needlessly kicked out of the homes of loving relatives and forced to live with
strangers. They may be bouncing from
foster home to foster home and /or facing abuse in foster care, all to satisfy
Marcia Lowry’s licensing fetish and the hostility to families she shares with
Maura Corrigan.
The hostility runs so deep that I can find no public
statement from either Lowry or Corrigan expressing the slightest concern about
these children or the slightest interest in finding out what happened to them.
The monitor, Kevin Ryan, says he’s trying to find out
what happened to the children, but only those who were expelled from relative
homes after July, 2011. Why that
date? Because that’s when a
new consent decree superseded the original consent decree, so he has no
authority before that date.
So when it comes to all the children expelled from the
homes of relatives between October, 2008 when the first decree was signed and
July, 2011, when the second decree was signed, absolutely no one is inquiring
into their status.
After all, if they did, it might spoil the party.
