Maine legislative committee opposes the worst of the LePage bills

Fool me once, the adage goes, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.  Maine journalists and lawmakers had been fooled into accepting massive removal of children to foster care during the 1980s and 1990s.  So far, they have not been fooled again.

UPDATE, August 30: But a majority of the full legislature was fooled.  The worst of the bills has passed.

A victory for Maine's vulnerable children:
Gov. Paul LePage's take-the-child-and-run agenda
suffers some setbacks in a legislative committee
(Photo by Gage Skidmore)

Updates added on August 30 are in bold.

On Monday this blog reported on the efforts of Maine’s Trump-before-Trump governor, Paul LePage, to destroy child welfare reforms that had made Maine a leader in reducing needless foster care and keeping children safe.

“By definition,” we wrote. “Children are defenseless.  Right now the Maine Legislature is their last line of defense against proposed laws that will make all of them less safe.”

Yesterday, some lawmakers showed signs that the Legislature will come through.  But ultimately, the legislature failed. 

The Health and Human Services Committee voted  against bills that would have de-emphasized family preservation and imposed criminal penalties on mandated reporters who failed to call in reports alleging abuse or neglect.  A third bad bill passed, but in modified form.  Under this bill, reports so spurious that they didn’t even meet the ridiculously low standards for “substantiation” by caseworkers would have been kept forever, to be used against families.  Now, if the bill passes, they’ll be kept for either three or five years (news accounts differ).

Even the bills that were opposed by a majority in committee still are scheduled for votes by the full Maine House and Senate tomorrow – so plenty could still go wrong.  And it did.  On August 30, the full legislature passed the bill undermining family preservation.

But what happened yesterday in committee reflects rare courage in a state legislature and rare insight from a state’s media. (On the part of lawmakers, it turns out, a bit too rare.)

The usual pattern is this: A child “known to the system” dies.  Politicians take advantage of the case to trash all efforts to keep families together and/or a major newspaper does big stories falsely scapegoating such efforts.  Lawmakers rush to outdo each other in looking tough on child abuse.  So they pass awful bills that start – or accelerate – foster-care panics – sharp, sudden spikes in needless removals of children from their homes. 

That does terrible harm to the children needlessly removed, and it further overloads the entire system so workers have less time to find children in real danger. In short, foster-care panics make all children less safe.

As in other states, Maine’s foster-care panic was kicked into high gear by two high-profile tragedies, the deaths of Kendall Chick and Marissa Kennedy.  Gov. LePage immediately sought to exploit those tragedies to push his take-the-child-and-run agenda.

But Maine broke the mold two ways: First, the state’s journalists were not suckered.  Two of the state’s largest newspapers, the Portland Press Herald and the Bangor Daily News wrote editorials opposing the worst of the bills and reporters for both newspapers carefully examined all sides of the issue.  That probably helped lawmakers on the Health and Human Services Committee show the courage to put the interests of children first and oppose the worst of the bills.

And that record continues: Just this morning, the Bangor Daily News published a very good story about successful family reunification (though in one of the cases discussed in the story, involving a mother who was a domestic violence victim, it is likely the children never should have been taken in the first place).

Unfortunately, it wasn't enough.  Though the Portland Press Herald reports there was "vigorous debate" over the measure, a majority were suckered and voted for it.

Logan’s legacy

LePage is not the first Maine governor to embrace a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare.  It was the norm in Maine throughout much of the 1980s and 1990s; in fact, it probably was even worse then than it is now.  And it contributed to tragedy – a tragedy that some in public life in the state, and some journalists, still remember.

They remember Logan Marr – the little girl killed by her foster mother in 2001, a former child protective services caseworker for what was then the Department of Human Services.

They remember how Maine’s record for needlessly tearing apart families contributed to the tragedy and they remember how that led to the reforms that dramatically curbed needless removal of children and made all of Maine’s children safer – reforms that received strong support from editorial boards across the state.

Fool me once, the adage goes, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.  Maine journalists and lawmakers had been fooled into accepting massive removal of children to foster care during the 1980s and 1990s.  So far, they have not been fooled again. So now, the majority of Maine legislators have behaved shamefully.

The big bill is a mixed bag

Not all the news  was good even before the vote on August 30.  A governor and a state agency can hurt children in all sorts of ways without getting the legislature’s approval. Governor LePage and what is now the Department of Health and Human Services have done just that. Needless removals have been escalating for years, as they work to undo improvements that once made Maine a national model for child welfare reform.

And a big bill that got support in committee is a mixed bag.  The good news: It raises pay for frontline caseworkers. That’s good for the simple reason that they deserve it; being a child protective services caseworker is among the toughest jobs imaginable.  It’s also good because it will encourage workers to stick around, reducing the turnover that plagues CPS agencies.

But it also includes a provision hiring more workers and supervisors.  That won’t make things worse, but it won’t make them any better – not as long as LePage and DHHS are pursuing a take-the-child-and-run agenda.  All the new workers will be pursuing all the new cases – so at best the overwhelming workload will remain just as overwhelming, leaving Maine with the same deteriorating system, only bigger.

Maine’s best chance to actually improve the system comes next year. Due to term limits, there will be a new governor. The new governor should take a close look at how Maine went from a national disgrace in the 1990s to a national model ten years later, and follow that example.  Fortunately, thanks to some smart journalism and courageous lawmakers, even with the legislature's big mistake this week, it may not be as hard this time.

Remembering George Sheldon …

... Including the legacy the Miami Herald wants you to forget

George Sheldon

When former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, then a Republican, named one of the state’s most prominent Democrats, Bob Butterworth, to run the state Department of Children and Families, a joke made the rounds: “Nobody can fix DCF,” the joke went. “Now a Democrat will be blamed for the failures.”

Butterworth brought in another prominent Democrat, George Sheldon, to be his deputy. But if the joke was right about Crist’s secret plan, the joke was on him. Together, Butterworth and Sheldon engineered one of the largest transformations of any child welfare system in America. What was once the nation’s most prominent example of child welfare failure, became, relatively speaking, a remarkable success. 

When Butterworth left, there was speculation that Crist would never name Sheldon to the top job – after all, Crist had defeated Sheldon in two statewide election campaigns.  But he did.  And Sheldon expanded on the reforms begun under Butterworth.

During the Obama Administration, Sheldon became the nation’s highest-ranking official in child welfare, running the Administration for Children and Families at the Department of Health and Human Services. While there, he championed real child welfare finance reform.

The term “hero” is overused.  So is the term “champion for children.” But they both apply to George Sheldon, who died last week at the age of 71. 

Reading the tributes to Sheldon it is striking how many of them come from former foster children.  They knew that, finally, they had a real friend in a position of power.

Sheldon’s greatest accomplishment

Sheldon moved aggressively to curb the use of psychiatric medication on foster children, and he prohibited the use of foster children in drug trials.  He championed “normalcy,” working to clear away the bureaucratic barriers that made it hard for foster children to enjoy the smallest pleasures in life, such as a sleepover at a friend’s house.  And Sheldon and Butterworth took DCF out of the bunker, opening records and speaking candidly about the agency’s failures.

But their single greatest accomplishment was this: Sheldon and Butterworth dramatically reduced the number of children torn needlessly from their families – and independent monitors found they did it without compromising child safety.  The dramatic transformation was featured in The New York Times.  

Yet this appears nowhere in the Miami Herald’s obituary for Sheldon. 

The obit is filled with warm reminiscences and wonderful stories, like this one, from former journalist Martin Dyckman, about Sheldon’s time in the Florida Legislature:

In the 1970s, when the Legislature passed financial disclosure laws, Sheldon often ranked dead last among his colleagues in the House. One newspaper led a story about the financial worth of lawmakers by noting that then-Miami-Dade Rep. Elaine Bloom disclosed ownership of a pure-breed dog whose declared worth was greater than Sheldon’s, Dyckman recalls.

But the obituary profanes Sheldon’s memory by leaving out entirely his single greatest accomplishment in Florida. In 2,000 words, reporter Carol Marbin Miller found no room to even mention his work to safely and successfully keep more children out of the chaos of Florida foster care.  But, of course, Miller has led a crusade against those changes. Now, she wants to pretend they never happened.

But they did happen.  And the best way to honor George Sheldon would be for the people of Florida to turn their backs on the Miami Herald’s fearmongering and demand that DCF return to George Sheldon’s vision of child welfare reform.

Exploiting tragedy to tear apart families: Did LePage learn from Trump or was it the other way around?

SEE THE UPDATE TO THIS POST HERE

● Maine Governor’s child welfare proposals represent the triumph of fear and ignorance over proven success.  They will make all of Maine’s children less safe. 

● The Maine Legislature, children’s last line of defense against these dangerous bills, is scheduled to hold a hearing on them today.

What do Donald Trump and Maine Gov .Paul LePage have in common?
Among other things, a willingness to exploit tragedy to justify needlessly tearing apart families.
(Photos by Gage Skidmore)

An email roundup of media news and commentary from Columbia Journalism Review last week highlighted how Donald Trump has exploited the death of Mollie Tibbetts, allegedly killed by an undocumented worker, to push his agenda of fear and hatred toward immigrants.  As CJR noted, the White House rushed out a video featuring relatives of people killed by undocumented workers – and, of course, Fox News was glad to amplify the message.

All of it was in support of the Big Lie of American immigration. Or, as CJR explained:

The president’s hardline immigration stance is grounded in the false belief that undocumented immigrants represent a clear and present danger to American citizens, and Tibbetts’s murder fits the narrative that has been a hallmark of Trump’s rhetoric since the first moments of his campaign.

(CJR should have said false claim – we don’t know if even Trump really believes it.)

At almost exactly the same time, in Maine, Gov. Paul LePage -- often referred to as Trump-before- lying, racism, vulgarity and miscellaneous cruelty -- was announcing a series of measures to finish the job of undoing one of the nation’s most successful child welfare reforms.

Trump because of his similar penchant for

Like Trump, he invoked horror stories: The deaths of two children known-to-the-system, Kendall Chick and Marissa Kennedy.  And, like Trump, he invoked a Big Lie – this time the Big Lie of American child welfare, that family preservation is at odds with keeping children safe.

What the LePage Bills would do

Not everything in LePage’s plan is wrong.  He’s right to propose a pay raise for caseworkers and he wants to improve information technology.

But the major change proposed by LePage involves changing a single paragraph in state law.  It’s in the part where the legislature explains its intent. This section of law already accepts – in its very first paragraph – the false premise that family preservation and child safety are at odds.  LePage proposes to deemphasize helping families even further.

Other proposals encourage a massive increase in the reporting of false allegations and trivial cases, further overloading caseworkers.

So on balance, this package of bills represents the triumph of fear and ignorance over proven success.  It will make all of Maine’s children less safe. 

No system can prevent every child abuse tragedy. But Maine spent years transforming its system from a national disgrace into a national model – according to no less than Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, which made the state’s reforms a finalist for its Innovations in American Government Awards. 

Now, Gov. LePage is trying to finish what he started years ago – taking a wrecking ball to what had been, relatively speaking, a model child welfare system, and leaving the rubble for the next governor to clean up.

Indeed, even the tragedies now in the news did not occur during the administration of former Gov. John Baldacci when the reforms were in effect. They occurred after the LePage Administration already had begun dismantling those reforms.

Gov. LePage is proposing to do to children in Maine what his idol, Donald Trump, did to children at the Mexican border – tear them needlessly from their families and wreak havoc on their psyches, or worse. And if anyone says “but this is different, we’re doing it to keep children safe” – remember, Trump said everything he did was in the name of safety. (See examples here  and here.  In fact, the LePage administration already is doing it, forcing children to spend their days in offices and their nights in hotels.

Here’s how some of the governor’s bills make all children less safe:

● They doom far more children to be consigned to the chaos of foster care.  Most cases are nothing like the horror stories.  Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with “neglect.”  That’s why study after study after study has found that, in typical cases, children left in their own homes fare better even than comparably maltreated children placed in foster care. 

● They doom far more children to endure abuse in foster care itself.  Most foster parents do the best they can for the children in their care.  But the rate of abuse in foster care is far higher than generally realized and far higher than states admit in their own statistics – which involve states, in effect, investigating themselves.  Multiple independent studies have found abuse in one-quarter to one-third of foster homes.  The rate of abuse in group homes and institutions is even worse.

The more that foster care systems are overloaded with children who don’t need to be there – as is happening already in Maine and will worsen if these bills become law – the greater the temptation to lower standards for foster parents and ignore warnings about abuse in foster care.

Forgetting the lessons of Logan Marr

If there is one state that should have learned that lesson it’s Maine – after the tragic death of Logan Marr.  And, of course Maine did learn the lesson – and crafted a child welfare system that dramatically curbed needless removal of children, with no compromise of safety.  During the Baldacci administration, the Maine system was among the best evidence in America that you can’t have child safety without family preservation.

In what is perhaps an all-to-fitting legacy, what Paul LePage is doing now is like spitting on Logan Marr’s grave.

Facts and evidence mean nothing to Paul LePage.  And, apparently, neither does child safety.  Because what LePage already has been doing, and proposes to make worse through this legislation, makes all Maine children less safe.

That’s because the real reasons for deaths of children “known to the system” almost always involve overwhelmed workers missing warning signs because they have no time to investigate any case properly.  For years, LePage has been overwhelming them even more.

Even without specific bills, LePage has sent his marching orders to DHHS, orders that boil down to “take the child and run.”  So workers are even more likely to make mistakes in all directions. With no time to investigate any case properly workers are more likely to take more children needlessly and also more likely to leave more children in danger.

That’s why the only child welfare systems in America that have ever succeeded in improving child safety are those that have done more to keep families together – as Maine did during the Baldacci Administration. In contrast, no child welfare system anywhere in America has made children safer by doing what LePage is proposing to do now.

And it’s not just the bill demanding that Maine further deemphasize helping families that endangers children.

● Add to it his bill criminalizing the failure of mandated reporters to report anything and everything. That means a lot of scared doctors and teachers, among others, will be calling in all sorts of cases they know are nonsense - because they’ll be afraid to do anything else. So caseworkers will be wasting even more time spinning their wheels. They’ll have even less time to make sound decisions – and even less time to find children in real danger.  And, by the way, there is no evidence that mandatory reporting itself improves child safety; and many one-time supporters of the practice have had second thoughts. [UPDATE, AUGUST 18: This bill was defeated in committee.]

● Now add his bill requiring DHHS to keep and use reports that don’t even meet the extremely low standard for “substantiation” under Maine law.  (Substantiation doesn’t mean a court made a decision after hearing all sides. It Maine as in most states it means only that a caseworker concluded there was slightly more evidence than not that some sort of abuse or neglect occurred. Unfounded reports do not even meet that standard.) 

The state’s press release says “keeping these records allows the department to determine whether the family has exhibited a certain history or pattern of behavior.” But it is far more likely to reveal only a “pattern” of being victimized by false reports.  The proposed law is an invitation to anyone with a grudge against a former friend, a neighbor or an ex-spouse: Just keep calling in false reports and eventually it will stick.

By definition, children are defenseless.  Right now the Maine Legislature is their last line of defense against proposed laws that will make all of them less safe.

The evidence is in: Study after study after study finds that in typical cases children left in their own homes fare better than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care

UPDATED, NOVEMBER 2024

There are a couple of studies that I cite so often on this blog and elsewhere that I once suggested readers could run a betting pool to guess which paragraph would contain the reference.

They are the three massive studies of more than 15,000 typical cases conducted by MIT researcher Prof. Joseph Doyle.  The longitudinal studies compared children in typical child welfare cases who were placed in foster care to children experiencing the same sort of alleged abuse or neglect who were left in their own homes. 

The studies didn’t guess what happened to these children based on subjective assessments. And the studies didn’t track the children for just a few months or maybe a year or two.  These studies tracked the children all the way into late adolescence and young adulthood and looked at what actually happened to them.  Typically, on measure after measure, the children left in their own homes did better.  A second, even larger study, confirmed the findings.

  

That was a decade ago.  In all the time since, the study has remained definitive. Nothing has matched it for size, scope or rigor. The closest that foster-care apologists could come to finding a flaw is their claim that the studies didn’t follow young children.  (In fact, they followed children as young as age 5.)

So the only straw at which the foster-care apologists could grasp was the hope – with no evidence – that the results would be different for even younger children.

But that ignored still another study, (also discussed here) from University of Minnesota researchers.  Using different methodology and outcomes, but again tracking actual outcomes all the way into adolescence, this study looked at children who first entered foster care anywhere from birth to age 9.  This study also was an apples-to-apples comparison. The researchers  looked at children under comparable circumstances and it, too, found that the children left in their own homes did better.

OK, the foster care apologists might say, but what about just infants. If we limit the study to just infants will we get the results we want?  No. Not even when the infants are born with cocaine in their systems.

University of Florida researchers studied two groups of such children; one group was placed in foster care, another left with birth mothers able to care for them.  After six months, the babies were tested using all the usual measures of infant development: rolling over, sitting up, reaching out.  Typically, the children left with their birth mothers did better.  For the foster children, the separation from their mothers was more toxic than the cocaine.

None of these studies is perfect, of course. But compare the rigor of these studies to the best the foster-care apologists can come up with.

The 2018 study

And now comes study #6.  Unlike the others, this one concerns children in Finland.  Once again it directly examined comparable cases. Once again it tracked the children all the way to young adulthood.  And, like the Minnesota study, this one was limited to young children – ages 2 to 6.  Once again, the children left in their own homes did better.

The researchers note one point about their child welfare system that they seem to think might make it different from the one in the United States. They write:

…in the Finnish context, the main reason for placement is not abuse but some level of neglect or inability to care for the child as a result of parental poor mental health, financial difficulties or the accumulation of problems.

But in fact, those are the main reasons for placement in the United States as well.  And,  as this investigative report from Finland’s public broadcaster YLE makes clear, the Finnish system’s denial of due process and penchant for needless removal are depressingly similar to the American system.

The fact that researchers got these results in Finland is important for a very different reason: In America foster-care apologists constantly blame the rotten outcomes of foster care on the fact that the system is underfunded.  If only we had more money, they claim, we could fix it.

But Finland is a world leader in social welfare spending; by some measures it’s #1 in the European Union.  If money is the problem, then the results from Finland should be vastly different.  That they are not is still more evidence that foster care is inherently so traumatic for a child that it is fundamentally unfixable. 

The 2019 Studies

This study took a different approach. It compared families who received high-quality interdisciplinary family defense to families that did not.  Children of the families who received this defense spent significantly less time in foster care, with no compromise of safety.

Another study in 2019 compared mental health outcomes for maltreated children placed in foster care compared to those left in their own homes.  The foster children were nearly twice as likely to suffer from Reactive Attachment Disorder - not surprising, since one cause of RAD is "repeated changes of primary caregivers. ..."

A study of the studies

And then there's this, from a review of studies concerning the impact of foster care on criminal behavior:

Many studies (82% of the eleven studies that addressed the first research question) showed higher rates of offending behavior for maltreated youth placed in foster care compared to those who remained at home, while some studies (27%) found no difference between the two groups of maltreated youth. One study showed higher risk of offending for maltreated youth who remained at home compared to maltreated youth placed in foster care only. Another study showed mixed findings ...

None of this means that no child ever should be placed in foster care.  But it all shows that foster care is an extremely toxic intervention that should be used sparingly and in small doses.  And, at long last, the burden of proof should shift from those who want children to remain safely in their own homes to those who want those children taken away.

Special thanks to Alia Innovations, whose own review of the literature led me to the studies cited in this update.

For the record: No, Los Angeles County does NOT have the nation’s largest child welfare system

No matter how many times the Fox News of Child Welfare says it does, it’s still not true.

I have previously noted the serious potential for harm caused by the slanted “journalism” practiced by the so-called Chronicle of Social Change – the Fox News of child welfare. Things like promoting a column using a vile racial stereotype to attack an impoverished birth mother, or the Chronicle’s cozying up to the group home industry. 

But there’s something else worth noting: A bizarre, if relatively harmless, obsession on the part of its publisher - and self-proclaimed "child welfare expert" -- Daniel Heimpel:  His demonstrably erroneous claim, repeated over and over, that Los Angeles County has the largest child welfare system in America.

It does not.

Even using Heimpel’s measure of choice, it does not. 

I have no idea why it matters so much to him. Sure, he lives in Los Angeles, but it’s not as if having a super-sized child welfare system is anything to be proud of. Yet Heimpel’s fervor about this runs so deep that less than a month after Chronicle’s editor John Kelly corrected the error, Heimpel repeated it, and seemed to double down on it. It’s been repeated in story after story ever since.  It’s reached the point where people in Los Angeles County child welfare are starting to believe it.

Does it really matter? Not nearly as much as the Chronicle’s other failings.  But if they can’t – or won’t – get something so basic correct, why should they be trusted on larger policy issues?

It’s big – but not biggest

The Los Angeles County child welfare system is very, very big. That makes sense given that Los Angeles County is very, very big. It’s likely that Los Angeles has the largest child welfare system run by a county or other unit of local government.  But in most of America, states, not individual counties, run child welfare. And it’s easy to forget that there are states that have many more children than Los Angeles County – so many more that it’s unlikely on its face that Los Angeles County would have a larger child welfare system.

TABLE #1: Sources are listed at the end of this post

So if you simply measure the system by the number of children it has the potential to be involved with, Florida and Texas (as well as Georgia and Illinois, by the way) all are bigger. (Other states with larger child populations are like California – individual counties run child welfare.)

Another approach is to use only measures that detail how often the child welfare agency actually intervenes in a family’s life.

This table offers several possible measures, including Heimpel’s choice, discussed below. Los Angeles comes out third in all of them:

TABLE #2: Definitions and sources are listed at the end of this post.

● Number of children who were subjected to child abuse investigations? Los Angeles is third,  behind Texas and Florida.

● Number of children in foster care? Los Angeles is third again, behind Texas and Florida.

But Heimpel offers an answer for this one, writing:

Los Angeles’ child welfare agency is the largest in the nation, serving more than 34,000 children, almost 21,000 of whom are placed in out-of-home foster care.

In other words, he simply combines the number of children in foster care and the number receiving “services” in their own homes.

There’s just one problem: Florida and Texas also provide in-home “services.”  And yes, they report doing it for a larger number of children than Los Angeles.

So in category after category after category – including Heimpel’s category of choice -- Los Angeles County, California is not the largest child welfare system in America.

Complicating things further: There is plenty of room for fudging some of these figures. For example, Texas coerces large numbers of children into kinship foster care placements without taking the family to court - and doesn’t count them in its statistics on the number of children in foster care.

And, of course, these figures say nothing about the rate at which these jurisdictions place children in foster care. One reason the Los Angeles system is so large is the simple fact that it takes away too many children.

The UN-correction

The Chronicle’s error actually used to be even bigger. A year ago, the Chronicle published this story which, in its original form, called the Los Angeles system the biggest in the whole world!  So I sent an email to Chronicle Editor John Kelly pointing out the problem. I’ve excerpted it here:

From: Richard Wexler 
Date: Thu, Aug 10, 2017 at 5:10 PM
Subject: Errors in the Charity Chandler-Cole story
To: John Kelly

I know it’s difficult for Heimpel & Co. to grasp that Los Angeles is not the center of the universe, but there is one blatant factual error in this story,  …

Los Angeles County does not have the largest child welfare system in the world, or even in the United States.  The state-run systems in Texas and Florida both are larger, whether measured by the number of children living in those states or the number of children trapped in foster care in those states.  If you measure only by child population, Illinois and Georgia also are larger. …

Kelly corrected the text of the story and, after I sent a second email, he corrected the headline.

But while the Chronicle has never again called the L.A. system the largest in the world, in story after story the Fox News of Child Welfare has insisted it’s the largest in the United States.  The story citing the combined in-home and foster care numbers – published only a month after the Chronicle corrected the earlier story - seemed to be Heimpel’s way of doubling down.

That only made him doubly wrong.

It may not be true that everything’s bigger in Texas, but the child welfare system is.

Table #1: Sources:

Texas and Florida: Bureau of the Census, Current Population Survey, 2016: http://bit.ly/2Oq5uBY (Impoverished child data average the figures for 2014, 2015 and 2016); Los Angeles: Bureau of the Census, Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates, 2016: http://bit.ly/2AVRSwj

Table #2 Definitions and sources:

 CPS investigations are for the most recent 12 month period for which data are available; the other categories are snapshots of the number of children receiving services on the indicated date. 

Definition of in-home services: Texas: Children receiving Family Preservation Services, August 31, 2017; Florida: Children receiving in-home services and family support services, April 30, 2018; Los Angeles: Defined as “In-home Services” mostly “Family Maintenance Services,” August 31, 2017  Dates are the same for number of children in foster care.

Sources:

Florida: Florida Department of Children and Families, Out of Home care and In-home services, DCF dashboard: http://bit.ly/2KG56N3 Children in CPS investigations: Office Of Child Welfare, 2017 Annual Performance Report, Fiscal Year 2016-2017 http://bit.ly/2OWV8u3; Texas: Department of Family and Protective Services, DFPS Data Book: http://bit.ly/2ATQF8K; Los Angeles County: Department of Children and Family Services, Out of Home care and In-home services: Child Welfare Services Data Monthly Fact Sheet, August – 2017 http://bit.ly/2vRv0rN CPS investigations: California Child Welfare Indicators Project http://bit.ly/2nozJNO   

The story New Hampshire CASA really, really REALLY doesn’t want you to read

I’m going to provide a link to a story about a horrific case of abuse in foster care in New Hampshire and a lawsuit filed in connection with that case. But as you consider whether or not to click on it, please remember: The New Hampshire Court-Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) program would rather you didn’t.

In fact, it’s important to them that you not read the story. Really important to them. So important to them that they actually went to court to try to prevent the New Hampshire Union Leader (known as the New Hampshire Sunday News on Sunday) from publishing the story – even though CASA had been dismissed from the lawsuit in question.

So if you want to make CASA feel better, whatever you do DON’T CLICK THIS LINK.

And you probably also shouldn’t read the next two paragraphs, from another Union-Leader story that summarize the case.

The New Hampshire Sunday News story details how DCYF and the Spaulding Center ignored red flags and rushed through the licensing of a Northfield foster home when they were faced with an emergency placement.

Six months later, the toddler suffered traumatic brain injury; today he struggles with medical and developmental issues. The foster mother, Noreen Stohrer, eventually pleaded guilty to child endangerment. She had a troubled history, including the death of a foster child under her care in New York state, the reports said.

My guess is they also might prefer it if you don’t read my op-ed column for the Union Leader on learning the right lessons from the tragedy.

The reason it was even possible to ask a judge to suppress the story is because it was based on material that was placed in a public court file by accident.  But the judge agreed that since the newspaper did nothing illegal, it had a First Amendment right to publish the story.

New Hampshire CASA was not the only organization to go to court to try to suppress the story.  So did the state Division of Children Youth and Families and the Spaulding Center, the private foster care agency involved in the case. 

But CASA’s position is particularly odd.  After all, unlike the other parties, as noted above, CASA actually had been dismissed form the suit (though the lawyer suing these agencies says he may try to change that).  And CASA programs always insist that they are the only ones who have absolutely no interest other than what’s best for children.  So surely they’d want the public to know about what this child had endured and what might be learned from it – wouldn’t they?

Why, then, did CASA want the story suppressed? According to the Union Leader, CASA was willing to see the public left in the dark because “CASA lawyer Dan Deane said he didn’t want CASA to suffer from the publicity and guilt by association.” 

That attitude may come as a surprise to those whose only knowledge of CASA comes from the gushy news stories about the program that appear all over the country.  But it is less surprising considering the actual track record of the National CASA Association and some CASA chapters across the country.

● There’s the study, commissioned by National CASA itself, that found the program prolongs foster care and reduces the likelihood that children will be placed with strangers instead of relatives – with no evidence that it improves child safety.

● There’s the second study, done by a CASA, that also found CASA didn’t work.

● There’s the scandal surrounding the CASA program in Snohomish County Washington where a judge found “pervasive and egregious misconduct.”

● There’s the matter of the former CASA for that same program whose diatribe about the overwhelmingly poor disproportionately nonwhite parents the program sees would make Donald Trump blush.

● There’s the CASA program in Kansas that held a fundraiser that featured a blackface act.

● There’s the CASA program in California that fell apart over a simple request that volunteers be more diverse.

● There’s the law review article which argues that CASA is “an exercise of white supremacy.”

As for the current case, according to the story that CASA doesn’t want you to read, the mother’s lawyer, Peter Hutchins, says:

state procedures allow him to appeal the decision to drop CASA once the underlying case is resolved. “I’m not letting CASA off the hook on this,” he said. “I’m committed to appealing it. They’re a corporate entity.”

So eventually, there may be more stories from New Hampshire that CASA doesn’t want you to read. 

NCCPR in Youth Today: After anonymous child abuse reporting Is “weaponized” to attack family of #BlackLivesMatter activist, congressional candidate asks “What’s going on?” Here’s the answer.

When she first learned that journalist and Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King and his family were being harassed by a troll who had called in a false report of child abuse, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was outraged. She is the activist and champion of the poor and working class who was catapulted to national prominence when she won an upset victory in a Democratic congressional primary in New York City.

But even with all her experience as a progressive organizer and activist, she was shocked by how child protective services agencies work.

“This is wrong,” she tweeted. “Shaun is an activist that has been targeted in the past. Anonymous claims should be thoroughly vetted before exposing his children + family to a potentially damaging experience.”

And then she added a question: “What’s going on here?”

What’s going on here? Business as usual, that’s what’s going on here. The only part that’s unusual is that this is one of those rare occasions when child protective services targeted a family with the resources to fight back (not to mention more than one million followers on Twitter).

Read our full column in Youth Today about what's going on here - and what can be done about it.

Elizabeth Vorenberg, 1931 - 2018

            A few months after my book, Wounded Innocents, was published in 1990, I received a handwritten letter from Betty Vorenberg.  I’d known Betty when I was a reporter in Massachusetts in 1980 and ’81 and she was Deputy Director of the Massachusetts Advocacy Center, the state’s leading child advocacy organization. 

            In her letter, Betty asked if I had any interest in trying to form an organization around the principles in my book.  I said yes.  Betty did the rest.

            So all of us were deeply saddened to learn of her death at the age of 87.

            As NCCPR President Martin Guggenheim said:

There wouldn’t have been NCCPR without Betty. She organized the first gathering of about six people in her home in Cambridge in 1990 and helped us talk through the importance of trying to influence the public through the media. We’ve been trying ever since.

            After that initial meeting in her home came a larger, formal conference at Harvard Law School.  Then she used her contacts and her reputation as one of the nation’s foremost child advocates to do the seemingly impossible: persuade a foundation interested in civil liberties to take an interest in child welfare, and a foundation interested in child welfare to take an interest in civil liberties.

            Betty was NCCPR’s first president and always our guiding spirit.  As Prof. Guggenheim said:

Betty was a genuine champion of our cause. We will miss her dearly. She believed in NCCPR with all her heart.

            NCCPR is only a small part of Betty Vorenberg’s legacy. She served as an Assistant Commissioner for the Massachusetts Department of Public Welfare during the Dukakis administration.  She was a member of the National Board of the ACLU, and President of the ACLU of Massachusetts.  You can read more about her here.