Cowley
County, Kan., a place almost exactly in the middle of middle-America, is
conservative and working-class. It would seem to have little in common with
coastal Marin County, Calif., one of the wealthiest places in America, where
the politics are as blue as the ocean.
But it seems the two places have one thing in common: an
inability to confront issues of race and class biases in that most sacred cow
of child welfare, Court-Appointed Special Advocates (CASA).
CASA volunteers are assigned to court-involved families in which
children have been, or might be, removed from their homes, and tell the court
what to do about it. Courts routinely rubber-stamp the recommendations of
CASA volunteers.
No one
doubts that, like most people in child welfare, CASA volunteers mean well. But
nationwide, while more than 41 percent of the children to whom CASAs are
assigned are children of color, only 18
percent of CASA volunteers are nonwhite. Children in the child
welfare system are overwhelmingly poor. Since CASAs are volunteers, they need
free time and flexible hours; often poor people have neither.
So you get this:
An Unfortunate Fundraising Event For One CASA
Chapter
In
Cowley County, the big annual fundraiser for CASA in 2008 was a drag queen
contest. The winner of the talent competition – and the “Miss CASA” title
– was a local mayor. He dressed up as a woman to whom he gave a
surname described as “graphic slang for a female private part.” So is the name
the mayor chose for his back-up dancers. Oh, and one more thing: The
mayor did his act made up in blackface.
The local CASA director said she was mortified when someone
explained what the surname meant. Other than that, though, she thought
the whole thing was great, telling a local news website: “The part of his act I
felt was excellent was the dancing. … The back-up singers were gorgeous and
could probably back up any professional.” As for the blackface, the CASA
director said she didn’t think the mayor was trying to portray a different
race: “It wasn’t black black,” she said. “It was all really just tan.”
It was not until after the National CASA Association went into
damage control mode and set up a conference call with the local chapter, the
state chapter and the local NAACP that the local chapter apologized.
Conflict Over Diversity
in Another
In Marin County things were more complicated.
According
to the Marin
Independent Journal, it began when the
state CASA organization got upset at how white things were at Marin CASA –
presumably even whiter than the national average, since they called for a “much
more robust outreach plan for men, Latinos and African-Americans.”
The Marin CASA program was run by Marin Advocates for Children.
Kerline Astre, an African-American who is executive director of Marin Advocates
for Children, took the criticism to heart and decided to act. Astre says that
when CASA director Laurie Good, who reports to Astre, resisted reform, she
fired Good.
The firing, and a critique saying they were insufficiently diverse,
apparently greatly upset the CASA volunteers. Their complaints prompted the
county judge who handles child welfare cases to act. Unfortunately, she did not
decide she ought to consider if there really was a diversity problem in CASA.
Instead she said Astre, who sought to make the program more
diverse, and the entire board of Marin Advocates for Children, should resign.
When they didn’t, the judge shut down the program. CASA in the county is on
hold until a new sponsoring organization can be found.
Meanwhile,
Good argues that she is the one who was discriminated against. She’s filed a
lawsuit. Perhaps all this helps explain why, in Marin County, black
children are in foster care at a rate more than 23 times the
rate for white children.
These
are not the only CASA chapters to be embroiled in high-profile scandal. Recall
the CASA program in Washington State in which one of the volunteers was accused
by a judge of spying on lawyers for parents – and lying
about it in court. CASA chapters also behaved badly in another Washington
State case and this high-profile case in Texas.
And
most important, there’s that great big, embarrassing
2004 study commissioned by the National CASA Association itself. As
a Youth Today columnist put
it at the time, the study
not only challenged the effectiveness of the court volunteers’ services, but suggested that they spend little time on cases, particularly those of black children, and are associated with more removals from the home and fewer efforts to reunite children with parents or relatives.
Yes, there have been slight improvements. National CASA now has
an African-American CEO. And the fact that California CASA raised the issue of
diversity was a start. But now, the state organization does not seem to be
backing up Astre, who tried to make Marin CASA more diverse.
And
racial diversity is not enough. In child welfare, racial bias often combines with class bias to create a toxic mix for poor families
of color. Economic diversity is almost impossible in a program dependent on
volunteers.
In its current form, CASA is inherently unfixable. CASAs should
be restricted to the one area where they really can be useful: as mentors for
foster children. Such a program would provide real help for children, instead
of harming them by prolonging foster care and undermining families.
