● The child welfare agency keeps children in an out-of-state institution even after learning about allegations of widespread abuse.
● The Oregon lawmaker who never misses an opportunity to grandstand about child welfare ignores real solutions.
Last year, Disability Rights Washington (as in Washington
State) published
a report, discussed here, alleging serious, widespread problems at Clarinda
Academy, an Iowa institution to which Washington State regularly shipped foster
children it didn’t know what to do with.
The Washington State child welfare agency responded by doing
the bare minimum: They promised to get the children out of Clarinda by the end
of last month (I have seen no news accounts checking to see if they
succeeded). But that didn’t necessarily
mean things got better for the children; some were simply institutionalized
elsewhere, sometimes even farther from home.
Could any state possibly respond with even less concern and
less compassion?
Actually, yes. When it comes to child welfare failure, never
underestimate Oregon.
Last week, Oregon Public
Broadcasting reported that Oregon also has been shipping foster children to
institutions all over the country – including Clarinda and others run by
Sequel, the for-profit chain that owns Clarinda. But even though Oregon authorities know all
about the Disability Rights Washington report, they are leaving the children in
Clarinda and the other Sequel institutions.
According to OPB:
After the allegations of abuse in Iowa surfaced, a spokesman from the Oregon Department of Human Services said in an email, a representative of Clarinda Academy and Sequel visited Oregon to respond.
Oregon staff also flew to Iowa to check on the children at Clarinda, according to a DHS spokesman. In addition, the state says, Oregon contracts with third-party professionals to monitor children at all out-of-state facilities. Based on those visits, Oregon officials determined foster children being sent elsewhere are safe.
Right. Because of course, before deciding which children to
subject to alleged abuse or other ill-treatment, staff are always going to ask
what state they’re from.
Of course the real reason neither Oregon nor Washington
State will simply bring the children home is because they have no place to put
them. But the reason for that is because
Oregon and Washington State both tear apart families at rates well above the national average – and that
national average is, itself, too high.
Same thing with Rhode Island, which, as we documented
in this report, (starting on page 25), also
is an extreme outlier when it comes to taking away children, and also has had a
chronic problem of shipping children out-of-state. And it’s a perennial problem in West
Virginia, which tears children from their families at one of the highest
rates in America.
Lessons from Connecticut
Compare these states to Connecticut – which used to have the
same problem, but doesn’t anymore.
Connecticut used to tear apart families at a rate above the
national average. It relied heavily on
institutionalizing children – sending many to institutions out-of-state. Every high-profile death of a child “known to
the system” would set off a foster-care panic
– a sharp, sudden increase in children torn from everyone they know and love,
and that would make everything worse.
So, of course, when confronted about its use of out-of-state
institutions, Connecticut officials would use the same excuses heard now in
Washington State and Oregon and West Virginia: Oh, we really hate to do this,
but we have this terrible “shortage” of foster parents, so we have no place to
put all these children
Then, in 2011, Joette Katz was named Commissioner of the
state’s Department of Children and Families.
She refused
to tolerate foster-care panics. She focused on safe, proven alternatives to
taking away children. She increased the
use of kinship foster care – placement of children with relatives instead of
strangers. And she pioneered an innovative in-home drug treatment program for
cases in which substance abuse was an issue.
By curbing needless removal and increasing the use of
kinship care, space opened up for all those children institutionalized out of
state – and almost all of them were brought home.
New Jersey embarked on similar reforms, prompted by a
class-action lawsuit consent decree. New
Jersey also benefitted from bold leadership in the immediate aftermath of that
decree. Now New Jersey also takes children at a rate well below the national
average – and New Jersey also has drastically
reduced institutionalization in all forms, including out-of-state
placements.
How one Oregon legislator makes everything worse
 |
| Oregon State Sen. Sara Gelser |
Though I’m glad Oregon Public Broadcasting exposed the
fact that Oregon is refusing to remove children from Sequel’s institutions, one
part of the story was frustrating. OPB
did what Oregon media always have done in recent years – they turned for the
obligatory expression of shock and outrage to someone who has unintentionally
made all of the state’s child welfare problems worse: State Sen. Sara Gelser.
It’s not that Oregon child welfare was wonderful before
Gelser came on the scene; in fact it’s been awful for decades. And it’s not that Gelser wants it to get
worse.
But Gelser has poured gasoline on the fire – using every
opportunity to push an agenda that can be boiled down to “take the child and
run.” She first came to prominence taking
data out of context to claim that Oregon wasn’t subjecting enough children
to traumatic child abuse investigations. Then she engaged in grandstanding when
state child welfare leaders admitted
the obvious: they can’t guarantee that all children in foster care are
safe. Then she helped to effectively
kill one of the very few efforts Oregon has undertaken to try to curb needless
removal, a differential
response initiative.
All that is certainly not the only reason the number of
Oregon foster children shipped out-of-state has doubled since 2017; it’s
probably not even the main reason. But she sure isn’t helping. (And neither are
other
Oregon politicians, by the way.)
And now, Gelser has the nerve to say she doesn’t know how to
solve the problem, telling OPB:
“I don’t know the answer. If we bring them home, where do they go?” she said. “… We have kids with significant needs, and we don’t have what they need to help them and those kids don’t have time to wait for us to figure it out.”
Of course Gelser doesn't want children to be hurt. I'm sure she believes her agenda will help them. But the problem with her agenda is that it's not really a children first agenda. Over and over, Sen. Gelser has failed to put the needs of
children first.
A children first agenda
means learning from other states. A children first agenda means understanding
that child removal does not equal
child safety. A children first agenda means curbing Oregon’s obscene rate of
removal. A children first agenda means embracing Wraparound
programs, which do anything an institution can do, and do it far better,
instead of building more institutions. A
children first agenda means bringing the children home, and keeping more of
them in their own homes.
If Sen. Gelser doesn’t know the answer, then she is
willfully ignorant. Other states have found answers, but Sen. Gelser doesn't seem to want to look.
So here’s how Oregon can find the answer. Check out what
Connecticut did. Check out other states
that have safely reduced the number of children trapped in foster care. And stop paying attention to a grandstanding
politician who doesn’t know the answer because she doesn’t want to see it.
