For decades Nebraska was a national example of child welfare
failure. Year after year the state took away children at one of the highest
rates in the nation. The state human
services agency suffered from a succession of poor leaders, including one of
the very worst, Todd Landry. Landry even made a
sick joke at the expense of vulnerable families. (Proving that no matter how big a failure
you are, there’s always room for you in child welfare, Landry now is in charge
of child welfare in Maine.)
Nebraska’s failings are outlined in detail in a report NCCPR released in
2012.
But then it looked like things were turning around. When Matt Wallen was named Nebraska’s Director
of Children and Family Services he took some constructive steps. The new leader of the entire state health and
human services agency, Dannette Smith, appears to want to continue the
progress. The rhetoric coming from her
agency certainly has improved. But do
the numbers back up the words?
Officially, the number of children torn from their families
in Nebraska dropped significantly in recent years. Officially, as of 2018, Nebraska’s rate of
child removal was “only” about 20 percent above the national average, when
rates of child poverty are factored in.
But did removals really decline?
Hidden foster care
It seems that even as official entries into foster care have
declined, another kind of foster-care has increased. In an
outstanding law review article on the topic, Prof. Josh Gupta-Kagan of the
University of South Carolina School of Law calls it “hidden foster care.”
It’s something I’ve been writing about for a
decade now: Child protective services agencies go to a family and coerce
them into surrendering their children “voluntarily.” In fact, there’s usually nothing voluntary
about it. The agency says: Place your
children with a relative “voluntarily” or we’ll go to court and place them with
total strangers.
In Texas, nearly two-thirds
of entries into care occur this way.
There are indications the number may be almost as high in Virginia –
though the data are limited. And now, some
Nebraska advocates claim that, in the past couple of years there’s been as one
put it “a huge increase” in such placements in Nebraska.
Although we read federal regulations as requiring states to
report these entries into foster care in official statistics, typically
they don’t – and the federal government has not cracked down on this
evasion. Indeed, in an Orwellian twist, some states refer to this as
“diversion” from foster care.
It is not.
Kinship care is foster care
Though placement with a relative is almost always the least
harmful form of foster care, kinship
care is still foster care.
The issue actually got attention in Nebraska for the wrong
reasons. Whenever the Nebraska child
welfare agency tries to put its dismal past behind it, a fear-mongering chorus rises up, aided and abetted by an Omaha television station that specializes in hype and hysteria over child abuse – which is why I’m not linking to their story. So in this case, the concern is
based on the false claim that these hidden foster care placements are less
safe, because a court didn’t sign off on them.
In fact, multiple
studies
have found that kinship foster care – even informal kinship foster care -
typically is better for children’s well-being, more stable, and, most important,
safer than what should properly be
called stranger care.
The temptation to
use hidden foster care in Nebraska is understandable. In Nebraska the courts
tend to be even worse than the child welfare agency, particularly in
metropolitan Omaha. Here’s
one example. There’s another on Page 41 or our Nebraska report.
So, one could argue,
even if the “improvement” in Nebraska consists entirely of placing children
with relatives who formerly would have been placed with strangers, that’s still
an improvement.
But such placements
are too easy to abuse. They deprive families of even the minimal due process
protections available when a worker formally removes the child and then goes to
court to rubber-stamp the removal. In
Nebraska, we don’t know if these are all cases in which the children otherwise
would have been placed with strangers, or if they include cases in which the
children would not have been removed at all if the agency had been required to
go to court.
And these placements
are too easy to hide.
Because now we don’t
know if Nebraska made progress in dealing with its obscene rate of removal, or
just found a way to sweep it under the rug.
