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| Cherokee County, NC Courthouse |
Lesson #1: It’s probably happening in your community, and it should be a scandal there, too.
There is quite a scandal in the
child welfare system in Cherokee County, North Carolina. But where to begin? How about with the first few paragraphs of
this September 11, 2019 story by Kate Martin of the nonprofit news site, Carolina
Public Press:
The State Bureau of Investigation is continuing to look into possible felonies at Cherokee County’s Department of Social Services, nearly a year and a half after its investigation began.
Current and former workers of Cherokee County’s DSS office, including former director Cindy Palmer, are under investigation related to removing children from parents without judicial oversight using a document called a custody and visitation agreement or CVA. Social workers at the office did so for more than a decade, according to testimony in court last year.
Whether the agents are now looking at related issues that have come to light in recent months remains unclear.
Although suspended as director in March 2018, Cherokee County DSS rehired Palmer as the office’s business officer in June 2018, and she continues in that role despite the ongoing criminal probe.
The reason we all should be paying
attention is simple: Some of the things exposed in Cherokee County first by
investigative reporters for the Associated Press and now by Carolina Public Press are highly unusual
– at least I hope they are. But at the
heart of the scandal is a practice that goes on all over America. And the real scandal is that only in North
Carolina is it being treated as a scandal.
How hidden foster care works
It works
like this: A parent is told at a minimum:
We’re going to take your children away and place them in foster care
with strangers. In some cases they’re told: We’ll also separate them from each
other and place them far, far away. You can go to court and try to get them
back but, well, good luck with that. Good luck even visiting them. Then they offer the alternative: Just sign
this little piece of paper in which you “voluntarily” agree to have us place
the children with someone nearby – usually a relative.
Of course
no lawyer for the family ever looks at that piece of paper first, or explains
to the family their rights. The parents’
only explanation of what the piece of paper means is what the caseworker tells
them it means. And while many of these placements are theoretically short-term,
in some of the North Carolina cases these agreements effectively involve
signing away rights to a child forever.
As I said,
it happens all over the country. But only one state child welfare agency has aid
the whole thing is illegal: North Carolina. (North Carolina is one of the
states in which counties run child welfare and the state social services agency
has some oversight.) Even in North
Carolina, it’s not clear if the state would have acted had the practice not
been exposed in a
major national news story by Associated Press reporters Mitch Weiss and Holbrook
Mohr. Since then, Kate Martin of Carolina
Public Press (CPP) has been following up aggressively.
The timeline
Here’s what
happened and when, based on news accounts:
October, 2017: A state Department of
Health and Human Services team conducting a routine review discovers that
plenty is rotten in the County of Cherokee Department of Social Services. A memo obtained
by Carolina Public Press nearly
two years later reveals what the state examiners believed to be widespread falsification
of records involving contact between child welfare caseworkers, birth parents
and foster children.
The memo
also states that terminations of parental rights “are pursued very quickly with
little or no engagement with parents. It
is hard to believe with the lack of engagement and documentation that TPRs are
even granted.”
There is no
indication that they also discovered the use of hidden foster care at this time. But, it appears the state did very little about
what it did discover. The Cherokee County district attorney told Carolina Public Press she was “flabbergasted”
she was not notified at the time about what might be criminal activity.
As CPP put it:
Although the DHHS memo expressed concern about records falsified by duplicating other records, it focused not on potential criminal fraud or violation of families’ rights, but on DSS funding and destabilizing DSS child placement actions: “These records are tied into funding. A parent’s attorney could get ahold of these records and make an argument to have the kids returned home.”
December, 2017: A local attorney, Melissa
Jackson, discovers the use of hidden foster care in Cherokee County while
representing a father coerced into “voluntarily” signing a so-called “custody
and visitation agreement.” As the Associated
Press would later report:
Soon after Jackson exposed the practice, the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services sent an “urgent” letter to county agencies on Dec. 20, 2017, warning that “facilitating the completion of private custody agreements” without court oversight “falls outside of both law and policy.”
If the state
did anything else at that point, there is no public indication of such action.
December, 2017: Jackson and attorney
David Wijewickrama sue Cherokee County on
behalf of parents whose children were taken using CVAs. They are seeking class-action status.
Early March, 2018: The state asks
Cherokee County for a “corrective action plan.”
March 14, 2018: With Jackson’s client
prominently featured, the AP story
exposing Cherokee County’s system of hidden foster care is published. The story reveals that the practice dates back
at least to 2007 and may involve hundreds of families. Exactly how many is unclear because former
Cherokee County DSS attorney Scott Lindsay said at court hearings that many “files
are missing.”
At about the same time, District
Judge Tessa Sellers rules that CVAs violate state law, the state
constitution and the United States Constitution. According to the ruling:
The CVA is the product of both actual and constructive fraud on behalf of the Cherokee County Department of Social Services, it’s agents and Attorney Scott Lindsay and director Cindy Palmer.
March 16, 2018: Now the state is really interested, and, apparently, concludes that
a “corrective action plan” is not enuogh. After the scandal makes national news, the state announces it will temporarily take
over the child welfare functions of the Cherokee County Department of
Social Services. The takeover begins
three days later.
At about
the same time the county district attorney – who only learned of the scandal by
reading the AP story – asks the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation to
investigate possible criminal wrongdoing.
March through June 2018: Though the
state is taking over the child welfare functions, the county DSS still is
overseen by a local Board of Social Services. The Board holds what is apparently an
unusually large number of special meetings. But we don’t know exactly what
happened at all of them – because, Carolina
Public Press reveals, the
minutes are missing. We do know,
however, that Lindsay’s replacement as DSS attorney, David Moore, said Palmer may
have lied under oath.
April 2018: The Board of Social Services suspends Palmer, with pay. She is replaced with an acting director. Moore tells the board Palmer should not be
allowed to return.
May, 2018: The position of business officer for Cherokee County DSS
becomes vacant. Palmer had held that job before she was named director.
June 11, 2018: Palmer resigns as DSS
director.
June 11, 2018: Palmer’s interim
replacement hires Palmer to be the DSS business officer – the job Palmer held
before she became DSS director.
June 12, 2018: DSS attorney David Moore
resigns.
July, 2018: Cherokee County DSS
receives a
bill of $3,311.87 for document shredding services covering the period mid-June
to mid-July, 2018. The highest previous monthly
total since November 2017 was $367.76, in May.
In November and December, 2017, the bills were $90.17 per month.
The DSS agency in early 2018 also started a curiously timed massive shredding campaign, which went into high gear after Palmer returned to the agency in June 2018. The effort was supposedly designed to create urgently needed space and did not touch child welfare documents, which DSS had been ordered not to destroy. But a year later, the space remains unused. Whether any additional child welfare documents went missing remains uncertain.
October, 2018: The state Deparemtent of
Health and Human Services ends its direct control over child welfare in
Cherokee County.
November, 2019: The State Bureau of
Investigation’s findings concerning CVAs, and possibly other issues, are now in
the hands of the state Attorney General’s office. CPP
reports that “Palmer, and possibly others, remain under criminal
investigation…” by that office.
And a new
problem has been discovered: The county and the state have had to repay the
federal government more than $247,000 in federal foster care funds to which
they were not entitled “after mistakes by social workers and their supervisors.”
