This post was updated on December 31, 2015 to provide more recent data on the rate of entries into foster care in Oregon. The good news: Thanks to stories in Willamette Week, the alternative weekly in Portland, the state of Oregon has shut down a private foster care agency that warehoused children in hideous conditions.
Here’s a quick sense of how bad
things were: Over ten years, four group homes run by this agency were the
subjects of more than 1000 police reports – that’s an average of 25 police
reports per home per year. If the police
were called to any impoverished birth parent’s home that often, you may be sure
the children would have been taken away.
The bad news: Willamette Week also shows how the state
Department of Human Services (DHS) knew exactly what was going on and turned
a blind eye for more than 18 months.
The private foster care agency was called Give Us This Day, but a more
appropriate name would have been Give Us The Children And Go Away.
Even after the first story was
published, in September, it was another state agency, the Department of Justice,
that actually shut the agency down, not because of what it was doing to the
kids, but because of financial irregularities.
Finally, after publication of the
story exposing how much top officials knew and how long ago they knew it, the
governor demoted the acting head of DHS.
Why did DHS
allow all this state-sanctioned child abuse for all this time? The Willamette
Week stories make clear that political connections had something to do with
it. But the bigger reason is the problem
that has plagued Oregon child welfare for decades: Oregon is begging for places
to put children it takes from their parents, and beggars can’t be choosers.
And the reason
for that is not because there are too few foster parents. Rather, it’s because Oregon takes away far
too many children. To the state’s
credit, it’s made considerable progress in reducing removals over the past
decade or so. But as of 2014, the most
recent year for which comparative data are available, Oregon still was tearing
apart families at a rate at least 15 percent above the national average. When you factor in rates of child poverty
among the states, which is the fairer way to compare, Oregon takes children at
a rate nearly 34 percent above the national average.
Oregon’s
rate of removal is double and triple that of states recognized as national
leaders in reforming child welfare. And
no, this record, which goes back decades, is not because of methamphetamine – the all-purpose excuse
long used in Oregon for every child welfare failure.
In Oregon, the harm of wrongful
removal is compounded by another common problem. The Willamette
Week stories note that Give Us This Day was willing to take the children
deemed most difficult – children other private agencies wouldn’t touch. But “private” agencies funded with public
funds shouldn’t have a choice in the matter.
It appears that DHS does not require private agencies to sign “no
reject, no eject” contracts. That allows
agencies to engage in a practice commonly-known as “creaming” – as in skimming
the cream. They take the easy cases and
ignore the rest. Since the state allows
this, it makes agencies like Give Us This Day among the only choices for the
children deemed hardest to place.
Until Oregon stops letting private
agencies get away with this, and stops taking so many children needlessly, there
will be plenty more bad actors for good newspapers to expose.
