Back in January, 2006, shortly after Nixzmary Brown died and some news organizations were scapegoating efforts to keep families together, National Public Radio broadcast a report from “member station” WNYC which was just like so many others. The entire thrust of the report was that the death supposedly proved that the city was doing too much to keep families together. No birth parents were heard from, nor was anyone who represents them.
NCCPR and local advocates complained both to WNYC and to NPR. WNYC responded by proving that the solution to the problems of journalism is more journalism. The station did a follow-up story.
As we first noted on this Blog in April, 2006, for the follow-up story the reporter who did the original piece visited the Child Welfare Organizing Project, a group that helps parents advocate for themselves and for reform of the system. She spoke to one of those parents about her fear that, having lost her children to the system once, she might lose them again. The follow-up story aired on February 3.
And she didn’t stop there. The next month WNYC broadcast another story from the same reporter, this time about the special problems faced by immigrant families dealing with the child welfare system.
But NPR aired neither story.
And NPR had a very different response to our initial complaint, sent to the network’s ombudsman at the time, Jeffrey Dvorkin. Dvorkin passed on a response from Andrea de Leon, whom he described as the story’s editor. De Leon wrote in part:
“Ultimately, the piece was not about removal of children vs. prevention and support. There's broad agreement with Mr. Wexler's view that keeping families together is superior to foster care. This story was about whether NYC's system makes the best choices about whether families are healthy enough to keep their children and how well the city agency and the private contractors work together. …
“I do not think including families that have lost children and predict that this will again become a common result would have been appropriate. It seems like fear mongering. I don't believe these people are key stakeholders in a story about whether the system is functioning well today. I do think, as I mentioned on the phone, that journalists should investigate the claim of a spike in family separations in the wake of the Nixzmary Brown media coverage. I can't say whether that's something we'll put on the air nationally but I can tell you that we are looking into it.”
Even taking de Leon’s characterization at face value, the story still offered only one side of the question she posed, the side represented by all those people who felt the city’s Administration for Children’s Services was making poor choices “about whether families are healthy enough to keep their children.”
But it’s the second paragraph that ought to be shocking to anyone who expects NPR to present all sides of a story.
Fear mongering? People can disagree about whether the spike in child removals in New York City is good or bad, but no one disputes that it exists. How does reporting indisputable fact become “fear mongering”?
And the only way one can believe that birth parents are not “key stakeholders in a story about whether the system is functioning well today” is if you personally believe that all such parents are sadistic brutes who don’t care about their children. As soon as you concede the possibility that birth parents might love their children and care desperately about them, then their status as “stakeholders” becomes obvious.
So de Leon’s reply tells us an enormous amount about her personal biases and deep animosity toward any birth parent whose child is caught up in the system.
But de Leon does not even afford them the dignity of being called “birth parents.” Rather they are referred to as “these people” – a phrase with a particularly ugly resonance in a city like New York, where the children taken from their parents are almost entirely nonwhite.
But the ombudsman wrote us that, just like WNYC, NPR would return to the story:
“I think that NPR has a deep commitment to this story and I can assure you that there will be more on this subject.”
One year and eight months later, the ombudsman is gone. His replacement as ombudsman is gone, and NPR apparently has decided it’s too good to need an ombudsman.
The additional reporting has yet to materialize.
At one point, NPR was planning to do a multi-part series exploring these issues in some depth. A team of journalists was assigned and even had tentatively picked the state they would focus on. A reporter had begun extensive research. I’m not going to name her because she’s a very good reporter who probably would have done some fine stories, and I’m sure what happened next wasn’t her decision.
What happened next was – nothing. The project was first delayed and then, apparently, abandoned. The reporter has not responded to repeated queries about this.
The closest NPR came to a major child welfare project was a multi-part series on, what else, middle-class adoptive families. Meanwhile the reporter who would have done the foster-care stories was assigned to something else: A multi-part series on the admissions process at the nation’s elite colleges. I found it fascinating – as would any other upper middle class parent with a college-age child. And, of course, there were no comments from “these people” that might spoil a good “driveway moment.”
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Monday, August 13, 2007
Why the New York City police should hire 100 social workers
This was originally published August 13, 2007, before this blog was on Blogspot. I've reposted it here now because it is newly-relevant to events in New York City.
Suppose, hypothetically, after an extreme case of police brutality made headlines in New York City, the Mayor ordered the city’s Department of Investigation to investigate community-police relations. But lets suppose the method he chose was to have DOI single out the nine most horrendous instances of alleged police abuse and see what lessons there are to be learned about the police department as a whole.
No doubt, the resulting report would be filled with broad-brush condemnations of how police “often” attacked innocent civilians, “regularly” trampled on civil liberties and “routinely” abused their power. After all, case after case – among those nine cases – revealed those problems. Indeed, DOI might well suggest that the NYPD hire, say, 100 social workers to accompany cops and aid them in learning how to properly deal with the communities they serve.
And everyone immediately would realize why the whole report was absurd.
But of course it doesn’t work that way with child welfare.
So when DOI, on orders from the Mayor, examined nine cases in which children “known to the system” were killed and filled the resulting report with “oftens” “regularlys” and “routinelys” every news organization accepted it at face value. And everyone seized upon DOI’s recommendation that the city’s Administration for Children’s Services hire 100 more people with law enforcement backgrounds, typically former police detectives, to assist its caseworkers.
Of course, it didn’t help that ACS meekly accepted the report and its recommendations.
One can only imagine what DOI would have recommended had it gotten a very different set of marching orders. Suppose the Mayor had said: Canvass the organizations providing defense counsel in child abuse cases, and those helping birth parents advocate for themselves in such cases, and ask them for the nine worst cases of taking children from innocent families they’ve seen in the past year. Then examine each case and generalize from it.
The resulting report would be all about how ACS often tears apart families for no reason, regularly confuses poverty with neglect and routinely distorts information presented to the court. It would, no doubt include a series of recommendations to curb the power of ACS, not add to it. But, of course, no political leader is ever likely to commission a report like that.
A clear example of how the skewed sample biased DOI’s findings concerns its contention that ACS workers “often” labeled cases as unfounded when they should have been substantiated. Perhaps they do. I’m not aware of any recent objective data on that. But older data suggest the opposite. First, the one time a national study second-guessed these decisions it found that workers were two to six times more likely to wrongly substantiate a case than they were to wrongly label a guilty parent innocent. And in New York, statewide, a class-action lawsuit in the early 1990s revealed that 75 percent of the time, when parents appeal a finding of substantiation, that finding is overturned – even though it’s an administrative hearing that applies the same standard of proof as the caseworker from the child welfare agency. (NCCPR’s Vice President was co-counsel for plaintiffs in that lawsuit.)
The only way to know what a child welfare agency does often, regularly, and routinely is to examine a random sample of cases – and have the examination done by experts with a track record for objectivity, or experts whose biases balance each other.
That’s what the first head of New Jersey’s Office of Child Advocate, Kevin Ryan, did. He recognized that making recommendations based solely on reviewing fatalities inherently distorts the process and gives an erroneous impression of what kinds of mistakes are routine, regular and happen often. So, at NCCPR’s suggestion, he audited a random sample of cases involving families under the supervision of the state child welfare agency. He found that caseworkers routinely, regularly and often made mistakes – in all directions. He also found a series of problems beyond those workers’ control. (Now, Ryan has the unenviable task of trying to solve the problem; he runs the state child welfare agency).
Similarly, Leroy Pelton, professor of social work at the University of Nevada – Las Vegas, and one of the most distinguished scholars in the field, recently completed a case reading of a random sample of cases in metropolitan Las Vegas.
Among his findings:
“case plans ordinarily consisted merely of sets of demands: ‘Father will complete drug treatment program…parents will obtain housing, attend parenting classes…’; ‘Mother will apply for housing; maintain adequate income’; ‘Father will complete parenting classes’; ‘(Mother) will obtain stable housing’; ‘Mother will complete a six week parenting class…will obtain and maintain stable housing and employment’; ‘Parents will obtain and maintain stable and adequate housing’; ‘Mother will maintain stable and appropriate housing.’ All of the foregoing quotations are from case plans in cases in which the parents were homeless.”
The study found that DFS workers seemed to have little concept of the enormous emotional trauma inflicted upon children when they are torn from everyone they know and love, institutionalized, and then moved from placement to placement.
Prof. Pelton found that some common practices by child welfare authorities are “breathtaking in their insensitivity to the safety and well-being of children” and wind up “creating a child protection problem” where none existed before. The study also documented errors in the other direction: two cases where children were left in dangerous homes when they should have been removed.
Like DOI, Prof. Pelton also recommended some new hiring. But instead of former police officers, he recommended hiring housing counselors whose one task would be to help families at risk of losing their children because of housing problems to get the housing they need.
It’s amazing what you find out when you look at cases at random.
In fact, having experienced law enforcement officers as a resource for child protective caseworkers makes sense – and not only for the obvious reasons. Having people around who understand concepts like “evidence” can help exonerate innocent families.
Even where the entire job has been turned over to law enforcement, the results haven’t been anything like what backers of a take-the-child-and-run approach had expected. In one state where investigations in several counties are handled by law enforcement there was little change in rates of removal, or quality of investigations. The investigator in charge of child abuse cases in one county law enforcement agency even called up NCCPR to describe how angry he was at the lack of discretion given his officers by the state’s child abuse hotline. Whereas his officers could ignore obviously false leads, crank calls and efforts to harass people in criminal cases, the child abuse unit had to pursue everything sent from the state hotline, no matter how absurd.
But it does not follow that hiring more ex-cops should be any child welfare agency’s top priority. ACS already has 18 former police detectives available to help its caseworkers (two more positions are vacant). Hiring 100 more would cost several million dollars. There are lots of things ACS could do with that money that would do far more to keep children safe – like pouring those funds into rent subsidies, day care, and other concrete help.
But the larger problem with the report is simply that it is one more document leaving the false impression that the errors go only one way. That – plus ACS’ dutiful response – makes it one more message to caseworkers that they can take away every child in sight and suffer no penalty. The only time they put themselves at risk is when they leave a child in her or his home and something goes wrong.
It’s one more reason to expect that just as the surge in removals of children might be slowing down, it’s going to start up again.
And that means more devastated families and a higher load for caseworkers – and overloaded caseworkers are the root cause of most preventable child abuse tragedies. Not always, of course, but often, regularly, and routinely.
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Why the New York City police should hire 100 social workers
Suppose, hypothetically, after an extreme case of police brutality made headlines in New York City, the Mayor ordered the city’s Department of Investigation to investigate community-police relations. But lets suppose the method he chose was to have DOI single out the nine most horrendous instances of alleged police abuse and see what lessons there are to be learned about the police department as a whole.
No doubt, the resulting report would be filled with broad-brush condemnations of how police “often” attacked innocent civilians, “regularly” trampled on civil liberties and “routinely” abused their power. After all, case after case – among those nine cases – revealed those problems. Indeed, DOI might well suggest that the NYPD hire, say, 100 social workers to accompany cops and aid them in learning how to properly deal with the communities they serve.
And everyone immediately would realize why the whole report was absurd.
But of course it doesn’t work that way with child welfare.
So when DOI, on orders from the Mayor, examined nine cases in which children “known to the system” were killed and filled the resulting report with “oftens” “regularlys” and “routinelys” every news organization accepted it at face value. And everyone seized upon DOI’s recommendation that the city’s Administration for Children’s Services hire 100 more people with law enforcement backgrounds, typically former police detectives, to assist its caseworkers.
Of course, it didn’t help that ACS meekly accepted the report and its recommendations.
One can only imagine what DOI would have recommended had it gotten a very different set of marching orders. Suppose the Mayor had said: Canvass the organizations providing defense counsel in child abuse cases, and those helping birth parents advocate for themselves in such cases, and ask them for the nine worst cases of taking children from innocent families they’ve seen in the past year. Then examine each case and generalize from it.
The resulting report would be all about how ACS often tears apart families for no reason, regularly confuses poverty with neglect and routinely distorts information presented to the court. It would, no doubt include a series of recommendations to curb the power of ACS, not add to it. But, of course, no political leader is ever likely to commission a report like that.
A clear example of how the skewed sample biased DOI’s findings concerns its contention that ACS workers “often” labeled cases as unfounded when they should have been substantiated. Perhaps they do. I’m not aware of any recent objective data on that. But older data suggest the opposite. First, the one time a national study second-guessed these decisions it found that workers were two to six times more likely to wrongly substantiate a case than they were to wrongly label a guilty parent innocent. And in New York, statewide, a class-action lawsuit in the early 1990s revealed that 75 percent of the time, when parents appeal a finding of substantiation, that finding is overturned – even though it’s an administrative hearing that applies the same standard of proof as the caseworker from the child welfare agency. (NCCPR’s Vice President was co-counsel for plaintiffs in that lawsuit.)
The only way to know what a child welfare agency does often, regularly, and routinely is to examine a random sample of cases – and have the examination done by experts with a track record for objectivity, or experts whose biases balance each other.
That’s what the first head of New Jersey’s Office of Child Advocate, Kevin Ryan, did. He recognized that making recommendations based solely on reviewing fatalities inherently distorts the process and gives an erroneous impression of what kinds of mistakes are routine, regular and happen often. So, at NCCPR’s suggestion, he audited a random sample of cases involving families under the supervision of the state child welfare agency. He found that caseworkers routinely, regularly and often made mistakes – in all directions. He also found a series of problems beyond those workers’ control. (Now, Ryan has the unenviable task of trying to solve the problem; he runs the state child welfare agency).
Similarly, Leroy Pelton, professor of social work at the University of Nevada – Las Vegas, and one of the most distinguished scholars in the field, recently completed a case reading of a random sample of cases in metropolitan Las Vegas.
Among his findings:
“case plans ordinarily consisted merely of sets of demands: ‘Father will complete drug treatment program…parents will obtain housing, attend parenting classes…’; ‘Mother will apply for housing; maintain adequate income’; ‘Father will complete parenting classes’; ‘(Mother) will obtain stable housing’; ‘Mother will complete a six week parenting class…will obtain and maintain stable housing and employment’; ‘Parents will obtain and maintain stable and adequate housing’; ‘Mother will maintain stable and appropriate housing.’ All of the foregoing quotations are from case plans in cases in which the parents were homeless.”
The study found that DFS workers seemed to have little concept of the enormous emotional trauma inflicted upon children when they are torn from everyone they know and love, institutionalized, and then moved from placement to placement.
Prof. Pelton found that some common practices by child welfare authorities are “breathtaking in their insensitivity to the safety and well-being of children” and wind up “creating a child protection problem” where none existed before. The study also documented errors in the other direction: two cases where children were left in dangerous homes when they should have been removed.
Like DOI, Prof. Pelton also recommended some new hiring. But instead of former police officers, he recommended hiring housing counselors whose one task would be to help families at risk of losing their children because of housing problems to get the housing they need.
It’s amazing what you find out when you look at cases at random.
In fact, having experienced law enforcement officers as a resource for child protective caseworkers makes sense – and not only for the obvious reasons. Having people around who understand concepts like “evidence” can help exonerate innocent families.
Even where the entire job has been turned over to law enforcement, the results haven’t been anything like what backers of a take-the-child-and-run approach had expected. In one state where investigations in several counties are handled by law enforcement there was little change in rates of removal, or quality of investigations. The investigator in charge of child abuse cases in one county law enforcement agency even called up NCCPR to describe how angry he was at the lack of discretion given his officers by the state’s child abuse hotline. Whereas his officers could ignore obviously false leads, crank calls and efforts to harass people in criminal cases, the child abuse unit had to pursue everything sent from the state hotline, no matter how absurd.
But it does not follow that hiring more ex-cops should be any child welfare agency’s top priority. ACS already has 18 former police detectives available to help its caseworkers (two more positions are vacant). Hiring 100 more would cost several million dollars. There are lots of things ACS could do with that money that would do far more to keep children safe – like pouring those funds into rent subsidies, day care, and other concrete help.
But the larger problem with the report is simply that it is one more document leaving the false impression that the errors go only one way. That – plus ACS’ dutiful response – makes it one more message to caseworkers that they can take away every child in sight and suffer no penalty. The only time they put themselves at risk is when they leave a child in her or his home and something goes wrong.
It’s one more reason to expect that just as the surge in removals of children might be slowing down, it’s going to start up again.
And that means more devastated families and a higher load for caseworkers – and overloaded caseworkers are the root cause of most preventable child abuse tragedies. Not always, of course, but often, regularly, and routinely.
No doubt, the resulting report would be filled with broad-brush condemnations of how police “often” attacked innocent civilians, “regularly” trampled on civil liberties and “routinely” abused their power. After all, case after case – among those nine cases – revealed those problems. Indeed, DOI might well suggest that the NYPD hire, say, 100 social workers to accompany cops and aid them in learning how to properly deal with the communities they serve.
And everyone immediately would realize why the whole report was absurd.
But of course it doesn’t work that way with child welfare.
So when DOI, on orders from the Mayor, examined nine cases in which children “known to the system” were killed and filled the resulting report with “oftens” “regularlys” and “routinelys” every news organization accepted it at face value. And everyone seized upon DOI’s recommendation that the city’s Administration for Children’s Services hire 100 more people with law enforcement backgrounds, typically former police detectives, to assist its caseworkers.
Of course, it didn’t help that ACS meekly accepted the report and its recommendations.
One can only imagine what DOI would have recommended had it gotten a very different set of marching orders. Suppose the Mayor had said: Canvass the organizations providing defense counsel in child abuse cases, and those helping birth parents advocate for themselves in such cases, and ask them for the nine worst cases of taking children from innocent families they’ve seen in the past year. Then examine each case and generalize from it.
The resulting report would be all about how ACS often tears apart families for no reason, regularly confuses poverty with neglect and routinely distorts information presented to the court. It would, no doubt include a series of recommendations to curb the power of ACS, not add to it. But, of course, no political leader is ever likely to commission a report like that.
A clear example of how the skewed sample biased DOI’s findings concerns its contention that ACS workers “often” labeled cases as unfounded when they should have been substantiated. Perhaps they do. I’m not aware of any recent objective data on that. But older data suggest the opposite. First, the one time a national study second-guessed these decisions it found that workers were two to six times more likely to wrongly substantiate a case than they were to wrongly label a guilty parent innocent. And in New York, statewide, a class-action lawsuit in the early 1990s revealed that 75 percent of the time, when parents appeal a finding of substantiation, that finding is overturned – even though it’s an administrative hearing that applies the same standard of proof as the caseworker from the child welfare agency. (NCCPR’s Vice President was co-counsel for plaintiffs in that lawsuit.)
The only way to know what a child welfare agency does often, regularly, and routinely is to examine a random sample of cases – and have the examination done by experts with a track record for objectivity, or experts whose biases balance each other.
That’s what the first head of New Jersey’s Office of Child Advocate, Kevin Ryan, did. He recognized that making recommendations based solely on reviewing fatalities inherently distorts the process and gives an erroneous impression of what kinds of mistakes are routine, regular and happen often. So, at NCCPR’s suggestion, he audited a random sample of cases involving families under the supervision of the state child welfare agency. He found that caseworkers routinely, regularly and often made mistakes – in all directions. He also found a series of problems beyond those workers’ control. (Now, Ryan has the unenviable task of trying to solve the problem; he runs the state child welfare agency).
Similarly, Leroy Pelton, professor of social work at the University of Nevada – Las Vegas, and one of the most distinguished scholars in the field, recently completed a case reading of a random sample of cases in metropolitan Las Vegas.
Among his findings:
“case plans ordinarily consisted merely of sets of demands: ‘Father will complete drug treatment program…parents will obtain housing, attend parenting classes…’; ‘Mother will apply for housing; maintain adequate income’; ‘Father will complete parenting classes’; ‘(Mother) will obtain stable housing’; ‘Mother will complete a six week parenting class…will obtain and maintain stable housing and employment’; ‘Parents will obtain and maintain stable and adequate housing’; ‘Mother will maintain stable and appropriate housing.’ All of the foregoing quotations are from case plans in cases in which the parents were homeless.”
The study found that DFS workers seemed to have little concept of the enormous emotional trauma inflicted upon children when they are torn from everyone they know and love, institutionalized, and then moved from placement to placement.
Prof. Pelton found that some common practices by child welfare authorities are “breathtaking in their insensitivity to the safety and well-being of children” and wind up “creating a child protection problem” where none existed before. The study also documented errors in the other direction: two cases where children were left in dangerous homes when they should have been removed.
Like DOI, Prof. Pelton also recommended some new hiring. But instead of former police officers, he recommended hiring housing counselors whose one task would be to help families at risk of losing their children because of housing problems to get the housing they need.
It’s amazing what you find out when you look at cases at random.
In fact, having experienced law enforcement officers as a resource for child protective caseworkers makes sense – and not only for the obvious reasons. Having people around who understand concepts like “evidence” can help exonerate innocent families.
Even where the entire job has been turned over to law enforcement, the results haven’t been anything like what backers of a take-the-child-and-run approach had expected. In one state where investigations in several counties are handled by law enforcement there was little change in rates of removal, or quality of investigations. The investigator in charge of child abuse cases in one county law enforcement agency even called up NCCPR to describe how angry he was at the lack of discretion given his officers by the state’s child abuse hotline. Whereas his officers could ignore obviously false leads, crank calls and efforts to harass people in criminal cases, the child abuse unit had to pursue everything sent from the state hotline, no matter how absurd.
But it does not follow that hiring more ex-cops should be any child welfare agency’s top priority. ACS already has 18 former police detectives available to help its caseworkers (two more positions are vacant). Hiring 100 more would cost several million dollars. There are lots of things ACS could do with that money that would do far more to keep children safe – like pouring those funds into rent subsidies, day care, and other concrete help.
But the larger problem with the report is simply that it is one more document leaving the false impression that the errors go only one way. That – plus ACS’ dutiful response – makes it one more message to caseworkers that they can take away every child in sight and suffer no penalty. The only time they put themselves at risk is when they leave a child in her or his home and something goes wrong.
It’s one more reason to expect that just as the surge in removals of children might be slowing down, it’s going to start up again.
And that means more devastated families and a higher load for caseworkers – and overloaded caseworkers are the root cause of most preventable child abuse tragedies. Not always, of course, but often, regularly, and routinely.
Sunday, August 5, 2007
Class and courage trump the Red Queen
This is a story about class and courage at a child protective services agency – in Florida, no less.
It doesn’t begin well, of course. It begins the way many stories begin with the death of a child “known to the system” in Palm Beach County, Florida, last year. The case was ambiguous; not one of those where the file had more “red flags” than a Soviet May Day parade. It’s clear the caseworker should have asked more questions. But there is nothing to indicate the worker’s supervisor, Michele Fuhrman, did anything wrong.
And Fuhrman, a 20-year veteran, was not your average supervisor. According to The Palm Beach Post:
DCF bosses regularly judged Fuhrman's work as outstanding. As an investigator, she routinely came to work at 6:30 a.m. to field calls and joined the rapid response team, which meant that she could be called in at any hour to investigate critical incidents of child abuse.
"Michele's honesty, caring attitude and excellent child safety assessment skills stand out the most," a supervisor wrote in 2002.
Over one 17-month period from 1999 to 2000, Fuhrman investigated 336 cases, many of them time-consuming and complex, according to her file. She volunteered to take the most difficult cases and often pitched in to help others with their own cases.
But child welfare agencies are firm believers in the Red Queen School of Management. And the aftermath of the death of a child “known to the system” is never complete without the Ritual Sacrifice of the Caseworker. So the Florida Department of Children and Families first demoted Fuhrman and then forced out of her job.
And there the story would have ended, if not for Alan Abramowitz. Abramowitz has become something of a trouble-shooter for DCF – and that makes him a very busy man in Florida’s now heavily-decentralized, heavily privatized child welfare system. He and the head of the privatized lead agency in Volusia and Flagler Counties, Ron Zychowski, played a key role in turning around that district. Then he led major changes in the Orlando area. About a month ago, he was sent to Palm Beach County as acting District Administrator there.
Some years ago, Abramowitz had been Deputy District Administrator in Palm Beach County. He knew Fuhrman and he knew her good work. So among his first acts as acting District Administrator: Offered Fuhrman her job back.
Fuhrman, in fact, had landed another, very good job. She was doing just fine. But she cared too much about the children to turn the offer down. So I don’t know which is more impressive: Abramowitz making the offer or Fuhrman, who had every reason to tell DCF exactly what it could do with its job, accepting.
Now, an injustice to one individual has been at least partially rectified. The children of Palm Beach County once again will benefit from Fuhrman’s experience, dedication and good judgment. And, for once, a child welfare agency is sending the right message to the frontlines: We’ll hold you accountable when it’s really your fault, but we’re not going to make you scapegoats.
A little class and a little courage can trump the Red Queen.
It doesn’t begin well, of course. It begins the way many stories begin with the death of a child “known to the system” in Palm Beach County, Florida, last year. The case was ambiguous; not one of those where the file had more “red flags” than a Soviet May Day parade. It’s clear the caseworker should have asked more questions. But there is nothing to indicate the worker’s supervisor, Michele Fuhrman, did anything wrong.
And Fuhrman, a 20-year veteran, was not your average supervisor. According to The Palm Beach Post:
DCF bosses regularly judged Fuhrman's work as outstanding. As an investigator, she routinely came to work at 6:30 a.m. to field calls and joined the rapid response team, which meant that she could be called in at any hour to investigate critical incidents of child abuse.
"Michele's honesty, caring attitude and excellent child safety assessment skills stand out the most," a supervisor wrote in 2002.
Over one 17-month period from 1999 to 2000, Fuhrman investigated 336 cases, many of them time-consuming and complex, according to her file. She volunteered to take the most difficult cases and often pitched in to help others with their own cases.
But child welfare agencies are firm believers in the Red Queen School of Management. And the aftermath of the death of a child “known to the system” is never complete without the Ritual Sacrifice of the Caseworker. So the Florida Department of Children and Families first demoted Fuhrman and then forced out of her job.
And there the story would have ended, if not for Alan Abramowitz. Abramowitz has become something of a trouble-shooter for DCF – and that makes him a very busy man in Florida’s now heavily-decentralized, heavily privatized child welfare system. He and the head of the privatized lead agency in Volusia and Flagler Counties, Ron Zychowski, played a key role in turning around that district. Then he led major changes in the Orlando area. About a month ago, he was sent to Palm Beach County as acting District Administrator there.
Some years ago, Abramowitz had been Deputy District Administrator in Palm Beach County. He knew Fuhrman and he knew her good work. So among his first acts as acting District Administrator: Offered Fuhrman her job back.
Fuhrman, in fact, had landed another, very good job. She was doing just fine. But she cared too much about the children to turn the offer down. So I don’t know which is more impressive: Abramowitz making the offer or Fuhrman, who had every reason to tell DCF exactly what it could do with its job, accepting.
Now, an injustice to one individual has been at least partially rectified. The children of Palm Beach County once again will benefit from Fuhrman’s experience, dedication and good judgment. And, for once, a child welfare agency is sending the right message to the frontlines: We’ll hold you accountable when it’s really your fault, but we’re not going to make you scapegoats.
A little class and a little courage can trump the Red Queen.
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