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They had names and faces once. Now they have coroner's numbers.
All the children were living in foster homes or with their parents under the supervision of social workers.
Social workers call them their "worst outcomes".
In Loving Memory Of Children Who Didn't Have to Die - 2010
VICTIMS OF A BROKEN SYSTEM
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January-February-March-April
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JANUARY
2-year-old
2010
Torbay, England
9-year-old
January 2,2010
Harlem,New York
11-year-old
January 2,2010
Manitoba,Canada
23-year-old
January 2,2010
North Collins, New York
9-year-old
January 6, 2010
Jakarta,Indonesia
18-months old
January 8, 2010
Cactus,Texas
3-year-old
January 9, 2010
Sandy,Oregon
15-month-old
January 12, 2010
Oldham,England
4-year-old
January 13,2010
Edmonton,Canada
2-year-old
January 14,2010
Roanoke,Virginia
1-year-old
January 14,2010
Lufkin,Texas
3-year-old
January 15,2010
Kimball Township
Michigan
17-year-old
January 17,2010
Calgary,Canada
2-year-old
January 20,2010
Jackson,Michigan
12-year-old
January 22,2010
Lahore,Pakistan
7-year-old
January 24,2010
Geronimo
Oklahoma
24-day-old
January 25,2010
Loveland,Colorado
3-year-old
January 26, 2010
Heathfield
East Sussex,UK
2-year-old
January 26, 2010
Heathfield
East Sussex,UK
9-month-old
January 31,2010
San Bernardino
California
FEBRUARY
1-month-old
February 2010
Baltimore, Maryland
2-year-old
February 2010
Birmingham,England
12-week-old
February 2, 2010
Nashville, Tennesse
1-year-old
February 2, 2010
San Antonio,Texas
3-year-old
February 2, 2010
San Antonio,Texas
5-week-old
February 5,2010
Clearwater, Florida
8-year-old
February 5,2010
Manhattan,New York
7-year-old
February 6,2010
Paradise,California
9-month-old
February 7,2010
Virginia Beach,Virginia
19-month-old
February 7,2010
Carpentersville
Illinois
8-month-old
February 8,2010
Meridian,Idaho
5-year-old
February 8,2010
Phoenix, Arizona
3-week-old
February 8 , 2010
Jupiter, Florida
February 9,2010
Hope in Christ Home
Newcastle South Africa
12-year-old
February 9,2010
Barking
United Kingdom
1-year-old
February 10, 2010
Belton, Missouri
2-year-old
February 10, 2010
Rincon,Georgia
2-year-old
February 12,2010
Roosevelt,New York
13-year-old
February 12, 2010
Kolkata,India
3-year-old
February 13,2010
Erdington
Birmingham,UK
4-year-old
February 14,2010
Houston,Texas
2-year-old
February 17,2010
Cleveland,Ohio
2-year-old
February 19, 2010
Dewsbury
West Yorkshire,UK
22-month-old
February 19, 2010
Powell County
Kentucky
2-year-old
February 20, 2010
Chicago, Illinois
3-year-old
February 20,2010
Nashua
New Hampshire
12-year-old
February 21,2010
Lucknow, India
2-year-old
February 22, 2010
Grand Rapids, Michigan
23-year-old
February 22,2010
Camden,New Jersey
2-year-old
February 25,2010
Linden, New Jersey
1-year-old
February 28,2010
Charlotte, North Carolina
2-year-old
February 28,2010
Charlotte, North Carolina
Newborn
January 2010
Panola County
Mississippi
MARCH
10-month-old
March 2010
London
United Kingdom
1-year-old
March 1,2010
Calgary, Canada
13-year-old
March 1,2010
Leigh
Greater Manchester,UK
17-month-old
March 2, 2010
Brick,New Jersey
16-year-old
March 2,2010
Vancouver,Canada
17-year-old
March 2,2010
Vancouver,Canada
22-month-old
March 2,2010
Lincoln, Nebraska
18-month-old
March 3, 2010
Petaling Jaya
Malaysia
21-month-old
March 3, 2010
Morinville,Alberta
Canada
2-year-old
March 4,2010
Los Angeles
California
26-year-old
March 6, 2010
Lee, Massachusetts
10-month-old
March 8,2010
London,United Kingdom
3-year-old
March 8,2010
Las Vegas,Nevada
16-year-old
March 8, 2010
Cedar Rapids,Iowa
2-year-old
March 9,2010
Oakland,California
5-year-old
March 9, 2010
Muncie,Indiana
7-month-old
March 11, 2010
Lakeland,Florida
2-year-old
March 12, 2010
Racine, Wisconsin
8-year-old
March 13, 2010
Silverdale
Washington
3-month-old
March 13,2010
Belleville,Illinois
2-year-old
March 14,2010
Kemah, Texas
3-year-old
March 17, 2010
Amherst, Ohio
4-year-old
March 18, 2010
Columbus,Ohio
1-year-old
March 19,2010
Charlotte, North Carolina
13-year-old
March 19,2010
Charlotte, North Carolina
2-year-old
March 19, 2010
Rehoboth
Massachusetts
4-year-old
March 20,2010
Panadura,Sri Lanka
7-month-old
March 20,2010
Lubbock, Texas
2-year-old
March 20,2010
Long Beach
California
22-month-old
March 20,2010
Bronx,New York
5-month-old
March 22,2010
Bakersfield, California
10-month-old
March 23, 2010
Wichita,Kansas
19-month-old
March 25,2010
Queens,New York
3-year-old
March 26, 2010
Sacramento
California
2-year-old
March 27,2010
Tirschenreuth
Bavaria Germany
19-month-old
March 27,2010
North Newton,Kansas
17-month-old
March 28, 2010
Hiawatha,Iowa
March 31,2010
Denton,Texas
3-year-old
March 31,2010
Peyton,Colorado
APRIL
17-month-old
April 1,2010
Los Angeles
California
13-year-old
April 2,2010
Hajja,Yemen
16-month-old
April 2,2010
Henderson
Nevada
12-year-old
April 3,2010
Manchester
England
23-month-old
April 6,2010
Austintown,Ohio
8-year-old
April 10,2010
Evansville,Indiana
5-year-old
April 10,2010
Evansville,Indiana
5-year-old
April 10, 2010
Austin, Texas
4-year-old
April 12, 2010
Argentine Township
Michigan
7-month-old
April 13,2010
Queens,New York
5-year-old
April 13, 2010
Gresham,Oregon
3-year-old
April 14, 2010
Subang Jaya,Selangor
Malaysia
2-month-old
April 17,2010
Fresno,California
3-year-old
April 20,2010
Toledo,Ohio
5-month-old
April 23,2010
Rancho Cordova
California
4-year-old
April 24,2010
Bakersfield
California
3-year-old
April 24,2010
Hollywood,Florida
9-year-old
April 26,2010
Magnolia,Texas
2-year-old
April 28,2010
Fairfield,California
Keviana Morgan
1-year-old
April 28,2010
Fairfield,California
4-year-old
April 28,2010
Fairfield,California
2-year-old
April 28,2010
Fairfield,California
1-year-old
April 30,2010
Oklahoma City
Oklahoma
Foster Boy 13-year-old April 30, 2010 Stony Plain Alberta,Canada
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May - June -July - August
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MAY
14-month-old
May 2, 2010
Calgary,Alberta
Canada
17-year-old
May 5, 2010
Louisville, Kentucky
17-month-old
May 7, 2010
Blue Island
Illinois
4-year-old
May 9,2010
Layton,Utah
2-year-old
May 9,2010
Las Vegas,Nevada
20-month-old
May 13,2010
Beeville,Texas
3-year-old
May 15, 2010
Clinton Township
Michigan
6-year-old
May 16,2010
Muskegon Heights
Michigan
6-year-old
May 16,2010
Muskegon Heights
Michigan
1-year-old
May 17,2010
Miami Gardens
Florida
25-year-old
May 17,2010
Edmonton,Canada
4-year-old
May 17,2010
Greensburg, Indiana
5-year-old
May 18,2010
11-month-old
May 18,2010
Lloret de Mar,Spain
3-month-old
May 20,2010
Lehigh Acres
Florida
3-year-old
May 21,2010
Swatara Township
Pennsylvania
9-year-old
May 24,2010
Cincinnati, Ohio
6-year-old
May 24,2010
Dale City,Virginia
Ahkeem Kyshawn
8-year-old
May 24, 2010
Rockdale Texas
9-year-old
May 24, 2010
Rockdale Texas
4-year-old
May 25, 2010
Rockdale Texas
JUNE
16-month-old
June 3,2010
Kermit, W. Virginia
2-year-old
June 4, 2010
Bristol,England
9-year-old
June 6,2010
Dededo,Guam
USA
3-year-old
June 7, 2010
Las Vegas,Nevada
1-year-old
June 8,2010
Las Vegas,Nevada
11-year-old
June 8,2010
Los Angeles
California
aka Jackson
David Attuso
8-year-old
June 10, 2010
Clinton,Louisiana
4-year- old
June 12, 2010
Andrew,Iowa
4-year-old
June 13,2010
Kearns,Utah
16-year-old
June 13, 2010
Fitchburg,Wisconsin
2-year-old
June13,2010
Lakeland,Florida
15-year-old
June 13, 2010
Lorton, Virginia
11-month-old
June 14,2010
San Antonio,Texas
2-year-old
June 15, 2010
La Villa,Texas
3-year-old
June 16,2010
Tulsa,Oklahoma
1-month-old
June 16, 2010
Bullhead City, Arizona
5-year-old
June 24,2010
Anthony,New Mexico
15-year-old
June 26, 2010
Stillwater,Oklahoma
2-year-old
June 26,2010
Long Beach,California
JULY
4-year-old
July 2,2010
Mount Juliet
Tennessee
6-year-old
July 5,2010
Bangalore, India
3-year-old
July 9, 2010
Sterling, Colorado
3-week-old
July 10,2010
San Antonio,Texas
3-year-old
July 11,2010
Oklahoma City
Oklahoma
Summers
4-month-old
July 12,2010
Cambridge,Ontario
Canada
16-year-old
July 15, 2010
Conroe,Texas
5-year-old
July 17,2010
Cedar Springs
Michigan
13-year-old
July 17, 2010
South Lyon, Michigan
Aureliano J.Vasquez
2-year-old
July 18,2010
Ceres,California
Dominick Doss
2-year-old
July 18,2010
Fayetteville, Arkansas
2-year-old
July 18, 2010
DeKalb County
Georgia
21-month-old
July 18, 2010
Chicago,Illinois
3-year-old
July 18,2010
Bakersfield, California
5-year-old
July 19, 2010
Irving,Texas
4-year-old
July 19, 2010
Smithfield
North Carolina
Mubarak Bala
10-year-old
July 23,2010
Sokoto,Nigeria
2-year-old
July 21, 2010
Irving,Texas
3-year-old
July 25, 2010
Port Hardy BC
Canada
8-month-old
July 26,2010
Troy,Ohio
4-year-old
July 26, 2010
Hollywood,Florida
14-month-old
July 29, 2010
Limerick,Ireland
21-month-old
July 31, 2010
Fayetteville
North Carolina
AUGUST
7-year-old
August 2010
Withington,England
25-year-old
August 2010
Delray Beach
Florida
10-year-old
August 5, 2010
Zeeland, Michigan
2-year-old
August 5,2010
Homestead,Florida
6-year-old
August 7,2010
Colorado Springs
Colorado
4 week-old
August 8, 2010
Austin,Texas
6-year-old
August 11,2010
Tucson,Arizona
15-year-old
August 12, 2010
Knoxville
Tennessee
13-month-old
August 12, 2010
13-month-old
August 12, 2010
Chicago,Illinois
17-year-old
August 13,2010
New Ulm,Texas
2-year-old
August 13,2010
Jones County
Mississippi
12-year-old
August 19,2010
Baltimore,Maryland
3-year-old
August 24, 2010
Tokyo,Japan
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Sept - Oct - Nov - Dec
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SEPTEMBER
4-year-old
September 2, 2010
Brooklyn,New York
2-year-old
September 4, 2010
Harvey, Illinois
17-year-old
September 6, 2010
Boston, Massachusetts
15-month-old
September 7,2010
Springfield Township
Ohio
19-year-old
September 7, 2010
Hawaii Kai, Hawaii
6-month-old
September 8,2010
Port Alberni, BC
Canada
8-year-old
September 8,2010
Layton, Utah
7-year-old
September 8,2010
Layton, Utah
7-year-old
September 12,2010
Cité Richelieu
Port Louis, Mauritius
Africa
12-year-old
September 12,2010
Chicago, Illinois
Skinner
7-month-old
September 12, 2010
Orange County
Florida
8-year-old
September 15,2010
Ventura, California
5-year-old
September 16,2010
Inglewood,California
7-year-old
September 18,2010
Marysville,Washington
14-year-old
September 19, 2010
Houston,Texas
12-year-old
September 19, 2010
Houston,Texas
7-year-old
September 19, 2010
Houston,Texas
1-month-old
September 20,2010
Fresno,California
3-year-old
September 20,2010
Toms River, New Jersey
13-year-old
September 23, 2010
Cypress,Texas
16-year-old
September 24,2010
Leonora,Guyana
South America
17-year-old
September 25,2010
Charlotte, N.Carolina
10-year-old
September 27, 2010
Riviera Beach, Florida
13-year-old
September 27, 2010
Riviera Beach, Florida
Bryan Barnett
14-year-old
September 27, 2010
Riviera Beach, Florida
11-year-old
September 27, 2010
Riviera Beach, Florida
OCTOBER
10-year-old
October 2010
Hickory,N.Carolina
Anita K
23-year-old
October 2010
Eggern,Austria
3-month-old
October 1, 2010
Milan,Illinois
3-year-old
October 2,2010
Milwaukee
Wisconsin
18-month-old
October 3,2010
Locust Grove, Georgia
11-day-old
October 4,2010
Los Alamos
New Mexico
4-month-old
October 5, 2010
Margate,Florida
2-month-old
October 5,2010
Springfield, Missouri
2-year-old
October 11, 2010
Chicago,Illinois
8-month-old
October 12, 2010
Warren,Michigan
17-year-old
October 12, 2010
Rotherham,England
13-month-old
October 19,2010
Allen Park, Michigan
15-month-old
October 19,2010
Allen Park, Michigan
4-year-old
October 24, 2010
Stuartburn, Manitoba
Canada
2-year-old
October 25,2010
Macomb, Illinois
2-year-old
October 31,2010
Phoenix,Arizona
NOVEMBER
10-day-old
November 4,2010
Bartlesville,Oklahoma
16-year-old
November 5,2010
Manvel,Texas
4-year-old
November 10,2010
Ra'anana, Israel
6-year-old
November 10,2010
Ra'anana, Israel
35-day-old
November 10, 2010
Bakersfield,California
32-year-old
November 18,2010
Lakeland, Minnesota
Wolfenbarger
2-year-old
November 20, 2010
New Haven, Michigan
11-month-old
November 20,2010
Abergavenny
South Wales,UK
2-year-old
November 21,2010
Federal Way
Washington
1-year-old
November 21,2010
Oklahoma City
Oklahoma
6-week-old
November 21, 2010
Loleta, California
3-year-old
November 24, 2010
Little Rock Arkansas
2-year-old
November 25, 2010
2-year-old
November 25, 2010
Coryell, Texas
10-year-old
November 27,2010
Hawthorne,California
6-year-old
November 29 2010
Salluit Quebec,Canada
8-year-old
November 30,2010
Amherst, New York
DECEMBER
3-month-old
December 5, 2010
Suisun City, California
7-month-old
December 13, 2010
Chandler, Arizona
4-month-old
December 14, 2010
Tampa,Florida
13-year-old
December 15, 2010
Manurewa
New Zealand
2-year-old
December 17,2010
San Diego, Texas
4-year-old
December 17, 2010
Louisville, Kentucky
8-week-old
December 19,2010
Easton,Pennsylvania
5-year-old
December 21,2010
Napier, New Zealand
Thieneman
18-day-old
December 22, 2010
Indianapolis,Indiana
2-month-old
December 23,2010
W.Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
11-year-old
December 23,2010
Ogallala,Nebraska
12-year-old
December 24,2010
Garden Oaks,Texas
11-month-old
December 24,2010
Stockton,California
2-year-old
December 27,2010
Cincinnati,Ohio
3-year-old
December 28,2010
Walnut Hills,Ohio
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In Memory Of Foster Girl 21-month-old March 3, 2010 Morinville, Alberta Canada
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Shame on us for putting foster kids last
Enough.
I am sick of children being - let's be candid - tortured here in Sacramento County.
The heartbreaking stories like those in The Bee recently about Amariana Crenshaw don't just shed a bad light on those directly involved in such a grotesque death.
The appalling deaths of these children disgrace you and they disgrace me.
These are our children. Not in some poetic sense.
When our government uses its blunt power to come into a home and remove children from their parents, you and I assume a terrific moral and spiritual responsibility to do right by these children; a responsibility to do better than the parents we took them from.
As the Book of Exodus commands, "Ye shall not afflict any . fatherless child."
What happens if we ignore this commandment? God gets really, really mad: "And my wrath shall wax hot, and I will kill you with the sword."
Yet when, via our government, we take these children from their parents, we treat them as if their lives and deaths were somebody else's responsibility.
Consider just a few examples: How many Sacramento County children had to die wretchedly, how many Bee editorials had to scream for accountability and action, before the Board of Supervisors was shamed into doing anything other than publicly defending the repeatedly deadly status quo?
State policy is to kick foster children - already abused and neglected by their parents, then shoved into a system the Little Hoover Commission has dubbed "heartless" - out of their placements to live on their own after their 18th birthdays. Living alone on the cold streets, penniless, nighttimes of fear: These are the gifts you and I give our foster children for their 18th birthdays. The meager supports that do exist for former foster children are a mere fraction of what we spend on our biological children when they become young adults.
When the governor last year was forced to line-item $80 million in state costs to balance the budget, did he make 80 cuts of $1 million each? No, he cut this lump sum from child welfare budgets.
Proposition 63 was enacted in part to provide new programs addressing the mental health needs of "transition age youth." No group of transition age youth has worse mental health than abused kids kicked to the streets after their 18th birthdays: Their rates of post-traumatic stress disorder exceed those of combat veterans. (Reading what happened to Amariana Crenshaw, does this surprise you?)
So, surely, the initiative with billions of dollars in its reserve is ambitiously offering desperately needed new mental health programs to our own youth forced into homelessness, right? Guess again. In a recent study by our group, the Children's Advocacy Institute of the University of San Diego School of Law, 26 counties got an F on identifying the needs of these children and helping them.
The one champion these children are supposed to have as they move through our underfunded, secretive system is their court-appointed dependency lawyer. But the number of child clients these dedicated professionals are forced to represent is preposterous. Sometimes it is nearly twice what the Judicial Council itself says is the most these lawyers can shoulder, even while millions are spent building new courthouses.
These lawyers sometimes barely get the chance to meet their foster kid-clients. They often don't have the time to enforce orders for them to visit their brothers, sisters, or grandmothers. Everyone in the know knows this is a travesty.
The whole system depends on social workers. However, these public servants scramble to separate fact from fiction in a life-or-death task laboring under caseloads that are up to twice what they are supposed to be. If your boss came into your cubicle today and announced that you had to work a second full-time job, would he be reasonable in assuming that you could do either job well? In every hall of power, the needs of these - your children - whether it be funding or accountability are too often ranked last, with predictably horrible consequences.
Here's why: There are only about 80,000 of these kids, they can't vote, they don't live in wealthy areas, they can't show up at obscure government meetings to plead their case, most everything that happens to them happens in secret, and - here is the kicker - no official suffers any consequences by placing them last.
Which brings us back to enough being enough. I am not a religious scholar but I do not think God's commandments can be delegated.
Our children will continue to die until some courageous official of uncommon faith or conscience simply decides to put these children on top of their priority list, saying, "Whatever money we have, this gets fixed first." And fatherless children will continue to be horrifically afflicted so long as communities of faith and individuals of conviction read about the anguish of little girls like Amariana Crenshaw, and decide, on purpose, to spend their time, treasure and passion on some other cause.
When a pet-related bill is up for a vote in the Capitol, the hallways are jammed with voters; the e-mails and calls to member offices are countless. But the hallways are empty and the phone stays silent when it comes to finally ending the afflictions of children like Amariana Crenshaw.
Think about that; pray on that, and I bet you won't sleep well tonight.
Ed Howard is the Sacramento-based Senior Counsel of the Children's Advocacy Institute of the University of San Diego School of Law.
© Copyright The Sacramento Bee. All rights reserved.
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L.A. County child welfare official falsified death reports, two staffers claim
The senior managers say they faced a hostile work environment after reporting the alleged wrongdoing to the department's director. County supervisors act to remove child-death investigator.
Los Angeles County's child welfare system, already under fire for failing to report dozens of child deaths tied to abuse or neglect, is facing allegations that an official intentionally falsified fatality reports.
The existence of the civil allegations, filed in June by two senior managers and revealed this week after a public records request by The Times, comes to light as the Board of Supervisors acted to remove the county's independent child-death investigator, according to three sources familiar with the decision.
It was unclear who would replace Rosemarie Belda, who was appointed last year to the position after it had been vacant since 2006. The job, which reports directly to the supervisors, involves the politically sensitive task of reviewing child fatality cases in search of ways the county's case management errors might have contributed to the deaths.
The claim that some child fatality reports had been intentionally misleading was made by Cassandra Turner, a Department of Children and Family Services senior manager who said her superior "purposefully falsified at least three child fatality reports."
"These falsifications, which occurred in spite of my fervent protest, are clearly contrary to department policy," Turner wrote in a civil claim that seeks unspecified damages.
Turner served as an administrator in the department's child fatality section at the time of the alleged falsifications. Her claim does not contain specifics about those cases. She also says in the claim that she reported the wrongdoing directly to department Director Trish Ploehn in April 2008.
After her meeting with Ploehn, Turner said, the department failed to properly investigate the allegations and retaliated by assigning her to less-desirable duties.
She listed Darlene McDade-White, the department's chief internal affairs investigator, as a witness to the alleged wrongdoing. McDade filed a claim jointly with Turner saying she too faced a hostile work environment and, like Turner, was subject to racial discrimination because the two women are African American.
Melvin Neal, Turner's and McDade-White's attorney, declined to offer further detail. If the county denies their claim, the two women will be free to pursue a lawsuit in court.
Asked about the allegations Wednesday, Ploehn issued a written statement: "These are serious claims and they are being taken seriously. These claims are under investigation by the department, and our policy is not to comment on ongoing investigations."
The allegations about falsifications were made more than two months before last week's revelations that the department had failed to comply with state disclosure laws. Those findings were contained in a report by Michael Gennaco, chief attorney for the county's Office of Independent Review, who found that in many cases department officials referenced deaths from abuse or neglect in confidential court filings but then left those cases off the child-death lists for public release.
The lack of disclosure hid dozens of cases from public view, giving the false impression that far fewer children were dying of maltreatment under the department's watch. County officials have yet to establish a complete tally of improperly undisclosed records.
The move to end the tenure of Belda, who had recommended at least 25 reform measures for Children and Family Services and the Department of Mental Health in her role as child-death investigator, was made behind closed doors at Tuesday's board meeting, according to the sources familiar with the situation.
The previous child-death investigator was quietly dismissed in 2006 after investigating just two cases.
On Wednesday, all five supervisors -- Michael D. Antonovich, Don Knabe, Gloria Molina, Mark Ridley-Thomas and Zev Yaroslavsky -- refused to comment on Belda or the future of the position. A source familiar with the discussion said Yaroslavsky was the only person to speak in defense of Belda.
Leaks don't kill kids
It is depressingly unsurprising that the Board of Supervisors would see the deaths of children in the care of Los Angeles County as a publicity problem, not a failure of the county's most basic obligation.
Faced with a series of administrative lapses that have contributed to the deaths of children in the care of Los Angeles County, the county Board of Supervisors has responded with stern and authoritative action -- against the worker or workers who may have brought the tragedies to light.
It is depressingly unsurprising that the board would see these deaths as a publicity problem, not a failure of the county's most basic obligation. As Department of Children and Family Services Director Trish Ploehn described it to the supervisors, the leaks of information regarding child deaths have created a morale issue for her colleagues. Boohoo.
The response to a crisis in child protection might involve overhauling the county's systems for safeguarding children's welfare; it might require firing some inattentive social workers; it might suggest upgrading technology to allow records from the field to be more readily available. But the response to a PR problem suggests a different course: This week, the board authorized a leak investigation.
Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, the lone dissenter, aptly noted that "the obsession with leaks . exceeds the obsession with child deaths." He's right, and his colleagues are wrong as they continue to frame the problems of their troubled department as bad press rather than bad management. Moreover, the county's insistence on hushing up these matters has led it to break the law: In contravention of the state law that requires board members to hold their meetings in public, the supervisors initially discussed the leak investigation in closed session. They tried to remedy that this week by at least debating in public, but secrecy is corroding this issue at every step.
On June 8, 11-year-old Jorge Tarin hung himself with a jump-rope hours after a county social worker interviewed him at home and then left him there; this, even though Jorge that same day had told a school counselor and a county worker that he was considering suicide. As the county board considers that tragedy, it should ask itself this question: Who did Jorge more harm? The worker who left him in a home where he complained of being beaten and where his stepfather was residing in defiance of a court order, or the county worker who may have brought details of Jorge's death to light?
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Molina: Social workers failing to visit children at risk
Social workers are failing to visit children in abusive situations and ignoring the need to document their work, sometimes resulting in child deaths, Los Angeles County supervisors said Tuesday.
"We do not have social workers following the appropriate protocols," Supervisor Gloria Molina said, adding that she believed social workers assigned to wards of the county and other vulnerable children were faking paperwork to make it look like they were doing their jobs when they were not.
Some supervisors in child welfare units are not doing their jobs either, Molina said.
An official with the union that represents social workers said the county employees were overworked and buried under bureaucratic demands.
"(Social workers) are overloaded with policy work and paperwork and tedious administrative tasks that do not allow them to focus on the child," said Suzane Pour-Sanae of Service Employees International Union Local 721.
Some case workers were up until 11 p.m., completing their work, because of ongoing policy changes, she said.
A couple were recently arrested in the death of a foster child who died from hammer blows.
Molina insisted that basics tasks were not getting done or not being documented. And documentation is critical to protecting children in a vast bureaucracy, she said.
Molina said she reviewed files in which it appeared that case workers had simply copied an entry from the last recorded visit.
"Children ... are not being seen. (In some cases, social workers) would have seen that the child was not properly fed (if they had visited) ... and the child eventually died," Molina said.
Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky agreed with Molina.
"Social workers didn't make their monthly visits as required. There was a locked room (in the house) ... they would have seen the conditions under which this child was living," said Yaroslavsky, apparently referring to the case of Viola Vanclief.
The 2-year-old died March 4, beaten by a foster mother who was the subject of five prior complaints of child abuse, according to the Los Angeles Times. An autopsy showed the fatal blows came from a hammer.
The heated discussion, covering issues often discussed behind closed doors, came up in response to a recommendation by Supervisor Michael Antonovich to re-institute investigations of foster homes by a dedicated Department of Children and Family Services unit.
An investigative unit was disbanded in 2004 with the expectation that a state licensing agency and county social workers charged with emergency response would handle such investigations.
Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas reiterated a need for better technology to support case workers and protect children.
DCFS officials have been working to adapt existing systems to better track and record interactions by all county personnel -- including sheriff's deputies, mental health providers and hospital workers -- with cases of potential abuse.
But Yaroslavsky objected to the idea that child deaths would end, "if we only had a $100 million computer system."
Molina agreed that technology could be improved, but said "it doesn't work, if you don't put the name in," again referring to entries not made by social workers.
"When (tasks) don't get done, we lose a child," Molina said.
The board voted unanimously in support of Antonovich's proposal, which also directed county staffers to present a plan to eliminate monitoring redundancies.
L.A.'s deadly foster care tangle
County supervisors did the right thing by moving to sever ties with United Care Inc. But that should be regarded as a mere down payment on reform.
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday took a crucial step toward protecting the children legally committed to our collective care by moving toward terminating its contract with a troubled foster care agency.
Prompted by the outcry over last month's fatal beating of a 2-year-old girl assigned to the agency's care, the board -- acting on a motion by Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky -- went into private session to reconsider its contract with United Care Inc. And it did the right thing, tentatively agreeing to sever ties with the group, pending confirmation in public session on Tuesday.
The Department of Children and Family Services will begin removing all children in United's care.
As significant as the vote was, it ought to be regarded as a mere down payment on reform. The Department of Children and Family Services is Los Angeles County's equivalent of a Gordian knot -- a complex interweaving of good intentions, human misfortune, impacted bureaucracy and political infighting. But dauntingly intricate as the tangle is, if we don't unravel it, one thing is certain: vulnerable children dependent on this community for their most basic needs will continue to be mistreated and even killed by the adults to whom they have been entrusted.
One place to start is with the private foster care agencies, like United Care, with which the county contracts. The latest scandal to rock the department involves 2-year-old Viola Vanclief, who -- according to coroner's records -- was killed by blunt-force trauma March 2. Her foster mother, Kiana Barker, and Barker's live-in boyfriend, convicted armed robber James Julian, were arrested on suspicion of the child's murder, then released pending further investigation.
Barker, against whom five previous abuse or neglect accusations have been lodged -- including a substantiated charge that she neglected her own daughter -- told authorities that Viola became trapped in a bed frame and that she inadvertently struck the toddler with a hammer trying to free her. The coroner found numerous bruises on the girl's body.
Barker was recruited as a foster parent by United Care, whose troubled history with the county qualifies it as part of what one official calls "the child-care industrial complex." Under its contract, United Care was being paid about $5.3 million a year to care for 216 foster children in 88 homes. Its foster parents have been cited repeatedly over the last few years for choking and striking children and whipping them with belts. In 2007, one of its foster children drowned while unsupervised in a pool. Every audit of the agency the county has done since 2005 has turned up financial irregularities.
United Care's ordinary finances are interesting enough. According to auditors' reports, the county paid the agency between $1,589 and $1,865 a child each month; United paid its foster parents between $624 and $790. Do the math, calculate the margin, and ask yourself whether you're in the wrong business.
The most inexplicable part of this arrangement was that it was self-policing. State regulations require that foster children be visited regularly by a social worker. You may imagine that always means a visit by someone from the county. Nope. Under its contract, United Care also hired the visiting social workers, so the performance of the agency's foster parents was monitored by social workers it also employed.
That raises the interesting question of how United Care's social worker missed the presence of Julian in the home where Viola died. As a convicted felon, he should have been barred from coming anywhere near a foster child. Also in the home were Barker's newborn infant fathered by Julian, his autistic 13-year-old son and a profoundly disabled 40-year-old woman.
After Viola's death, Trish Ploehn, Children and Family Services' embattled director, put a hold on any further placements with United Care and sent county social workers to visit each child under the agency's care.
Sources say Ploehn -- whose people worked through the weekend to complete their visitations -- came to Tuesday's closed session and recommended that the supervisors rescind United Care's contract. State officials, meanwhile, are conducting their own investigation.
On Tuesday, the supervisors also instructed Ploehn to undertake another essential step: reviewing the county's other 60 contracts with private child-care providers.
Now that the supervisors have recovered their consciences, what's required is a top-to-bottom reform of the way Children and Family Services does business -- and Tuesday's action was a major step in that direction.
COMMENTS
As a psychiatrist working in Los Angeles for Kaiser Permanente in the 1970's, I was horrified then, as now, by DFYS' neglect and abuse of children. This is just one in a series of preventable torture-murders. And they are just the tip of the iceberg of abuse.
Casual or no investigation of prospective foster parents or foster homes has always been the order of the day. Molestation and abuse, by convicted violent and sexual offenders too often resulted. DFYS, acting without effective oversight, in secrecy, is, of course, prone to these problems. Families and children are protected by their privacy rights from having their neglect and abuse revealed. It is the system that is at fault.
Brilliant investigative reporting by the Los Angeles Times in the areas of Social Services and Mental Health has broken stories time and time again. This is an historical situation! I know it has been going on for forty years.
Maybe the time has come to follow the model set up by George W. Bush and continued by Barack Obama in the No Child Left Behind program. They are shuttering awful schools and firing the whole lot. Ditching United Care is not enough. Fire Trish Ploehn; she is described as embattled, but behaves more like an armadillo. Fire every management employee; fire every worker. As for the occasional effective child advocate; let them reapply.
Start over!
Leo Ray Ingle, M.D.
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Foster teens ready to tell city council how to fix system
"When I need a permission slip signed for school or something, I'm calling and calling, and my social worker doesn't answer. It's like she's supposed to be my mom, she's my guardian, and how you supposed to feel with the one adult who takes care of you never answers the phone?" By Derek Reid, foster kid -- Read more.....
Kids in foster homes are up to four times as likely to suffer sex abuse as other kids.
"I've been doing this work for a long time and represented thousands and thousands of foster children, both in class-action lawsuits and individually, and I have almost never seen a child, boy or girl, who has been in foster care for any length of time who has not been sexually abused in some way, whether it is child-on-child or not," said Marcia Robinson Lowry, executive director of Children's Rights, a New York-based nonprofit. Read more.....
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A former caseworker for the child protection agency in NY describes how the agency really works
She thought investigating child abuse and neglect would give her a chance to help kids. A year of confusion, betrayal and moral cul-de-sacs was all she could take. A first-person account.
Emergency Children's Services is an inconspicuous, dingy building at the southern edge of Soho. About 30 to 40 kids come here each night, after they are taken away from their parents and while they're waiting for a foster home to take them in. When they get here, they cry, fight or sit silently on a stained couch, eyes glazed over. As an investigator for the New York City Administration for Children's Services, I spent many nights here.
When children first arrive at ECS they are taken through a metal detector by security. Some carry garbage bags containing their clothes; others tightly clutch just the one item they brought from home. Each is accompanied by an ACS child protective caseworker, who is given a number and waits to be called to check the kids in. On a busy night, of which there are many, this can take hours.
In the waiting room, some tattered old books and the odd toy lie about. A green banner hangs year round saying, "Seasons Greetings From Pre-Placement" and does little to conceal the cracking paint. The children hungrily eye a vending machine in the corner and beg their caseworkers for candy. And the caseworkers say, No way.
Some of these kids, who range from newborn babies to 17-year-olds, have been rescued from seriously abusive or neglectful parents. Others are here for reasons that are ambiguous, unjustified, even arbitrary. But they all come to the same dim room on Laight Street. And because the city's Administration for Children's Services has identified them as children in danger, this is the first of many unfamiliar places they'll be seeing as they journey through the city's foster care system.
Like me, the other caseworkers here are exhausted. Most of them are on the phone or stare up at the television hung from the wall. It is not part of the job to comfort the children just plucked from their homes. They are irritated and want to get home.
When I first started coming to ECS, I tried to reach out to all the children who were crying or sitting alone, shocked and terrified. It was easier with the little ones, because I could hug them and they would immediately respond. But the older ones were different. I asked them, "Do you know why you are here?" Chances were that they had only a vague idea; ACS investigators often do not tell the children they are removing exactly what is going on. Most of the time the kids shrugged and said, "I don't know." Or they knew pieces, like, "Because mommy didn't clean the house." Often it was, "Because mommy got arrested."
The more I ended up at ECS, the harder it became to comfort these children. When you had no idea where a child was going to end up that night, it was impossible to assure them of anything. When a child asks, "Am I going to get split up from my little brother?" you can't say no. Although all efforts are supposed to be made to place siblings together, there are countless exceptions. Instead you have to say, "Let's hope not, okay?"
One night I was at ECS with a 3-year-old named Christopher, whom I had picked up from a precinct in East Harlem. His mother was arrested that day on drug charges. He had been living in a crack house, according to the police who took him, and his arms and legs were caked with dirt. All he had with him was a pacifier and a scarf. I pulled the pacifier out of his mouth and asked him, "Are you going to talk to me?" He looked at me and said, "Fuck off." Other than this, he didn't speak.
In the waiting room he pulled a chair out from under a girl his age as she went to sit down. After she fell, crying, he jumped up and down, pointing and laughing at her. I tried to engage him, to keep Christopher from terrorizing the other children. Then another caseworker came in. He lifted him by one arm and shouted in his face, "Listen, you brat. You better sit down and SHUT UP." He tossed Christopher onto the couch and he bounced, landing on his head. The caseworker warned, "Don't even think about moving. I'm watching you." Christopher did not move or even cry. He looked at me for help.
The caseworker explained to me defensively, "That's the only way these kids listen. That's how they are treated at home, so that's the only way to get through to them." And I wondered, silently: If we aren't treating these children any better than they were treated in their homes, then what are we doing?
To the manager at ACS who makes the fateful decision to remove a child, and to the judge who approves it, a child exists on a piece of paper, alongside a list of disturbing circumstances. They don't see a child having a panic attack at 3 a.m. because he is suddenly alone in the world. Or slamming his head against a wall out of protest and desperation. The good intentions that go into the decision to remove a child often have little to do with the sometimes brutal outcomes of that choice. And the problem is not simply caseworkers who do not know how to talk to children. The whole system does not treat children with dignity and respect.
Usually, the kids fell asleep in my lap during the car rides to their new foster homes. But Christopher stayed awake all the way to his new home in Staten Island, until 3 a.m. He stared out the car window and watched Manhattan recede in the distance. He seemed to know exactly what was happening, like an adult trapped in a little body that couldn't speak. But when I finally had to leave him, he did what any 3-year-old would do in the face of abandonment. He clung for his life to my leg.
_______
When I graduated from college two years ago, I decided to become a caseworker for ACS. I wanted to learn how child welfare policy affects children and their families--not from reports and data, but on the front lines.
It may seem hard to imagine now, but in many ways I loved my job and had no plans to do anything else. As a caseworker, I was in a unique position to advocate for children and parents when they most needed help. Many of the parents and children I encountered made deep impressions on me, and I established close connections with some of them. I also enjoyed the investigative aspect of the job, the thrill of constantly going into unknown situations. At first, I saw it as a daily adventure.
But it did not take long for me to see that there was no adventure here. Many of these families were harassed, their rights systematically violated by ACS. Their children were being swallowed up by an agency that too often operated on virtually unchecked authority, wielded arbitrarily. And I represented that agency.
More and more, I felt that I could not do the job I believed I needed to do with an ACS badge around my neck. I resigned from the agency in October 1999, after working there for just over a year. After all that I had experienced, I felt, like many of my clients, crippled by feelings of powerlessness. At the time, the only thing I could do was write it all down.
In the year I worked there, the Administration for Children's Services investigated more than 50,000 reports of child abuse and neglect. I handled about 50 of them in my job as a child protective caseworker in the Manhattan field office. I went all over the city investigating cases--to housing projects, family shelters and, once, to an apartment where a father had made a robot for his kids out of old Metrocards. But except for the time I visited a family on the Upper West Side--who hired their own doctors to disprove ACS's allegations of child abuse--my work took me to low-income neighborhoods. The reality is that families who are likely to be reported to ACS are poor.
When I first started the job, my supervisor explained to me that bad caseworkers sympathize with the parents. "Being sentimental," he said, "is the worst way to be." If you relate to the parent, the wisdom goes, you cannot conduct an objective investigation.
The entire investigation process relies on the assumption that parents do not know their rights, starting with the moment they allow caseworkers to come into their homes. A lot of these families are so conditioned to caseworkers knocking on their doors that the presence of a city worker in their homes is just another part of life. Nearly half a million New York City children have been the subjects of ACS investigations. If you are poor and if you have had problems with the law, if you have ever been involved in a domestic violence dispute, if you took your child to the emergency room after an accident, if you have ever used drugs, if your children have problems in school, if you have ever been homeless, ACS has been a part of your life.
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Child protective specialists get about two to three new cases each week, sent to them by their supervisors. Those supervisors have their own supervisors, called managers. It's managers who sign off on the big decisions: whether a case is worth pursuing and, most critically, when to put children into foster care.
For a caseworker, each case represents a heavy set of tasks and responsibilities. First, unless the call was anonymous, she must contact the source of the report. Many calls come from professionals required by law to report suspected abuse or neglect, such as teachers, guidance counselors and hospital social workers. Other people call in reports, too, especially neighbors and family members. But many of these reports turn out to be false, and some of them are made purely for revenge.
Within 24 hours of a report, the caseworker has to visit the family at home. Caseworkers must interview each child and examine them all for marks and bruises. They must also interview every other member of the household, check every room for safety, check refrigerators and cabinets for food. Immunization records, birth certificates and proof of income must be verified. Next, caseworkers contact the children's schools and doctors. And in cases that involve drug allegations, the caseworker must accompany the parent to a drug test.
At any point during the investigation, a manager can order children to be removed from their homes if it is determined that their lives are at risk. But under state law and ACS policy, removals are supposed to be a last resort. As an alternative, the agency offers a menu of services to help families deal with problems; counseling, parenting classes, drug treatment and housekeeping services are the most typical.
These investigations and interventions save children's lives and protect their well-being all the time. Caseworkers are trained to look beneath the surface, to not trust a parent's statement without evidence and to compile as much information about a family as possible. Caseworkers and their supervisors are accountable for each case; the days when cases piled up on desks without anyone contacting a family are long over.
But accountability, at ACS, is a one-way street. A manager or supervisor has no one to answer to if a child who shouldn't be in foster care is removed from home anyway. There is no penalty for the wrongful taking of a child. And the pressures to remove are intense. I was trained to do removals in cases that did not necessarily qualify as abuse or neglect because, as one of my supervisors reminded me, "prevention is better than a cure." When I was resistant to doing a removal on a case, that same supervisor's advice was, "It's better to be safe than sorry." And at moments of uncertainty, the mantra was "Cover your ass"--a phrase heard often around the office. It was backed up by a pervasive fear--among caseworkers, supervisors, managers and attorneys--of seeing our photograph in the Daily News as the person who made an error that was literally fatal.
Caseworkers, usually the only people who have had direct contact with a family, don't have much to say in the decision-making process. Managers generally think of them as being incapable of giving meaningful recommendations. One week after the investigation begins, caseworkers have to file an electronic report. The computer offers two options: "safe" and "unsafe." But my manager accepted only one. Any time I determined a child to be "safe," my manager rejected it and returned it to me. The first step to protect yourself, I quickly discovered, is to determine that a child is "unsafe" from the outset of an investigation.
_______
In my division, if the allegations were bad enough--and especially if they came from a teacher, doctor, or other professional required by law to report suspected abuse or neglect--our manager considered them to be absolute truth. Virtually every time, if a caseworker could not find evidence to prove that the allegations were unfounded, the manager would refuse to sign off on a case, clearing it from our ever-growing caseloads, until we marked it "indicated" in the computer system. Indicated means that ACS has found credible evidence that abuse or neglect has taken place.
Our manager indicated a case in which an 18-year-old mother was mistakenly picked up in a drug sweep and immediately released. The same woman had been indicated in an earlier investigation, after hot tea spilled on her child at a family shelter, even though the social worker whose tea it was witnessed that it was an accident. Still, the manager decided that this previous incident--along with a robbery conviction and marijuana use before the child was born--was reason enough to indicate the new case.
Throughout ACS, the proportion of cases that end up labeled indicated has jumped from 26 percent in 1994 to nearly 40 percent in 1998. From a manager's point of view, indicating cases gives them the legal leverage they need to order a removal at any given time. For a parent, it also means something else: Having an indicated case on her record means that she cannot adopt a child, become a foster parent or work with children in any capacity.
From there, the decision to remove is entirely up to the manager. By law, children are supposed to be removed only if their physical or emotional health has been harmed or they are in immediate danger or being hurt as a result of a parent's failure to "exercise a minimum degree of care." In practice, that can mean anything from a parent failing to show up for parenting classes to sending her child to the hospital with a broken limb. But sometimes children are removed for reasons the caseworkers themselves cannot fathom.
On the night I met a client I'll call Louise at the homeless shelter where she lived, she told me her 11-day-old son, Kevin, was born without drugs in his body. That she prayed to God and he gave her another chance. And that she got clean on her own, without any program. I asked her about her other children and she told me what I already knew: She had given birth to five children who were all taken away from her while she was still in the hospital because each time she tested positive for crack.
Back at the office, my manager ordered me to remove Kevin. My manager, like most of her colleagues, did not go for the "life transformation" stuff. It did not matter that all of Louise's drug tests had been clean for the past two years. The manager called it a straight case of neglect, since the woman's other children had all been taken from her. Besides, my manager reminded me, Louise is taking heavy psychotropic medication.
Before going to court, we received a letter written by Louise's psychiatrist, whom she had seen regularly for the past year. He wrote:
I remember thinking in her case no medication and certainly no therapy had been able to have the effect on her that her new child has had on her....The effect of the role of motherhood on her has defined her and given her grounding. It is our social and moral responsibility to support [Louise] in functioning as a mother. It is clear that [Louise] is ill. However, it is my assessment, in accord with all other senior clinicians [here], that [Louise] poses no immediate threat to her child.
My manager didn't see things the same way, and she made me file the case in court. "If we can't get a neglect finding on this mother, I might as well go work for the Parks Department," she told me. When ACS's attorneys initially wouldn't accept the case, she emailed the head of the legal division. And while I was away at a three-day training, she finally managed to get Kevin into foster care. Louise had stayed overnight with Kevin's father that week after she missed curfew at her shelter, and my manager had found an old order of protection against him--evidence of domestic violence. Louise was nailed with "failure to protect" Kevin from this potentially dangerous man.
(Only later did Louise tell me that she did not really have a history of domestic violence; she made it up a few years ago since she knew it was the only way she could qualify for emergency housing. I explained to her that it was the only reason ACS was able to take Kevin. "Well, what would you have done?" she asked me.)
In Family Court, Louise spoke up for herself, because her attorney did not. She argued her case herself and, with the help of testimony from her psychiatric nurse, won the judge over. Louise got Kevin back on the condition that she secure housing, submit to drug tests, continue to see her psychiatrist and comply with ACS supervision.
The ability to return a child to his or her parent is one of the few rewards of a caseworker's job. After picking up Kevin from his foster care agency in Queens, I sat with him in the Emergency Assistance Unit, the city's dispatch center for homeless families, waiting for his mother to arrive. The waiting room was filled with mothers and crying kids. A little girl came in the waiting area and asked the lady behind the counter for a piece of paper. "No paper," was the curt reply. I told the girl to come over to where I was sitting. My hands were full because I was feeding Kevin, but I told her that she could rip some pages out of my notebook. She stood there and tore out about 30 pages, one at a time. Every few moments she looked up at me waiting for me to say no. I just smiled at her. "That your baby?" she asked me.
"No," I told her.
"You homeless?"
I shook my head.
"You took that baby, didn't you?" she asked.
"I'm giving him back."
"Yeah, you better," she warned.
_______
In my year at ACS, I was lucky to see only a few children who were severely abused and neglected. I did see bruises, belt marks and burns on kids. I saw dirty and hungry children. I saw a baby with cockroaches crawling in her crib. There were kids who had never been to school.
I had to ask a kindergartner if her father put his penis in her mouth. I sat in the back of an ambulance with a 9-year-old boy lying on a stretcher who had been beaten up by his mother with a baseball bat. He clutched his HIP card, his only possession now, in his swollen hand. I had a 3-year-old child whose mother forced him to stay awake for four days and three nights because she thought he was possessed by a ghost and would die if he fell asleep.
And I met some parents who were dangerous not just to their children, but to me. I had to get an order of protection for myself against one, and was warned by another that I was going to be killed by the Bloods outside Family Court.
But all this is what I expected from the job. In a strange way, these really horrible cases turned out to be the easy ones. It was the cases that weren't so clear-cut that kept me up at night. I saw removals occur when parents were accused of failing to follow up with a preventive service program or counseling. Breaking rules at shelters. Using or selling marijuana, or not sending their children to school. Failure-to-protect cases were common. One time, I removed a child from a mother accused of neglecting her infant son when she was hospitalized after a suicide attempt. It turned out the child was not yet even born when the suicide attempt occurred.
I worried about what I would do if my manager ordered me to remove. I worried about making mistakes myself.
_______
Two nights before Christmas 1998, I removed two children who I still believe should not have been taken from their home. I had been a caseworker at ACS for two months.
At the last minute, my supervisor instructed me to accompany an even greener coworker on a case I knew nothing about. On the way up the FDR, in the back of the city car, my colleague, Theresa, described the case to me. The children were to be removed because their 82-year-old great-grandmother, Ms. Ruth Jackson, was too old to care for them. Owen, 5, and Carla, 14, were in Ms. Jackson's legal custody, because their mother and grandmother were both absent, allegedly because of drug use.
According to the allegations from an after-school program she attended, Carla had recently slashed a girl in the face with a pocketknife at school and was beyond the great-grandmother's control. Theresa told me Ms. Jackson had medical problems, including high blood pressure, diabetes and glaucoma. Due to her "failing health," our supervisor believed that she was not an appropriate caretaker for the children.
The supervisor instructed Theresa to ask the great-grandmother to sign a form that would voluntarily place the children in ACS's custody. Theresa told me that she was instructed to call the police and remove the children only if the woman refused to sign the form. Our supervisor had informed Theresa that a refusal to sign would constitute neglect, because Ms. Jackson would not be complying with the best interests of the children.
"I don't believe that this is the right thing," Theresa complained to me. "The great-grandmother hasn't done anything wrong, and her health seems fine." I was furious at her for not telling me any of this before we left. I knew the options a family could be offered in a time of stress. A removal was to be done only in an emergency.
When we arrived, Ms. Jackson looked at us suspiciously and seemed reluctant to let us in. Decorated for Christmas, the apartment smelled like greasy chicken. It was 9 at night.
She instructed the children to go to their rooms. She sat on the sagging couch and asked, "What can I do for you ladies tonight?" She looked a little frail but seemed strong-willed.
I sat in the corner by the Christmas tree while Theresa tried to explain about the voluntary form. "You are old and you have so many health problems," she told Ms. Jackson unconvincingly. "Who will take care of the children if something should happen to you?"
Ms. Jackson said, "Ain't nothing happening to me. What if something happens to you?"
Theresa tried again. "It's not safe for the children to be living with you because you are too old to care for them properly and look after them." She looked at the floor as she said this, her voice shaking.
"What're you saying, miss? These children are not going anywhere. Nobody in this house is too old. I raised them kids since they were babies. The court gave me these children and nobody's going to take them away from me."
"My supervisor said that..."
"What?"
"My supervisor"
"Your what?"
"My supervisor. He wants you to sign this voluntary form so that the children will be safe." She placed the blank form on the coffee table.
"I don't know much about your supervisor, but nobody's signing these kids to them foster people. It's Christmas. Did you know that, dear?"
After about 15 minutes of this, Theresa signaled me to call the police. Out in the hallway I called 911, then went back into the apartment to wait for the cops.
Ms. Jackson had no idea they were coming. "Who would want to take these children?" she asked us. "It's Christmas. These children are happy. I take these children to school every day. I make sure they have everything they need to get along fine."
The cops banged on the door. "Who's that?" asked Ms. Jackson. "That your supervisor?"
I answered the door. Two cops stood around and did not say much. Theresa started crying, and everything fell into my hands. I explained to Ms. Jackson that the children were coming with us tonight and that she would have to come to court tomorrow to get them back. I had packed kids up quickly once before, so I braced myself to do it again.
The kids were watching The Brady Bunch, lying with their feet up on their great-grandmother's bed. I introduced myself and told Carla to pack up some clothes for herself and her brother. She looked at me as if the prospect of leaving might be exciting for a second. Owen wanted to know if "grandma" was coming. I told him no, and said some things about how everything was going to be okay. Ms. Jackson came in and put clean underwear on Owen, put his pajamas back on, and packed some clothes in a backpack for him.
As we continued to pack, Ms. Jackson stood in the bedroom doorway with her mouth half-open, no sound coming out. Carla ran down the stairs and waited for us in front of the police car.
In the back of the car on our way to ECS, Owen saw his big sister crying. He sat on my lap and started crying into my shirt.
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Almost all removals take place at night. Caseworkers are too busy during the day, and a family is also more likely to be home after dark. But some workers deliberately wait till after hours, for the time-and-a-half overtime. Doing a removal, staying out all night at ECS, and then taking the child to a foster home can mean more than doubling a day's pay. With caseworkers' salaries starting at under $32,000, overtime makes a big difference.
The caseworkers who want nothing to do with removals can rely on other caseworkers who volunteer for the money. When supervisors are desperate to find someone to do a removal, they often encourage caseworkers by reminding them, "You could use the extra cash." The consequence is caseworkers arriving at ECS with no idea why they just removed the kids who are with them. When the ECS intake worker or an ACS lawyer asks them why the children were removed, "I don't know, it's not my case" is a standard response. Or simply, "Because my supervisor told me to."
Any caseworker can tell you that they have done removals that they did not personally agree with. But they rarely complain to management, since they will never get in trouble for removing a child under supervisors' orders. Caseworkers are also quiet about unnecessary removals because doing a removal and then transferring a case to foster care takes them a lot less time than keeping it and trying to work with a family. Keeping a case obligates a worker to do regular home visits and follow-ups to make sure a family is getting preventive services. It also means dealing with anything that may go wrong and continuing to be responsible for the children's safety.
To become a child protective caseworker, you do not need to have any experience working with children, or demonstrate that you actually want to work with children. No one even asks if you like children. You must simply have a bachelor's degree in a social science field and pass a two-part exam. For the oral part we were asked to think of five questions we would ask a parent, based on a short case scenario. A "powerful rotting odor" is supposed to prompt test-takers to ask, "What is that smell?" For the written test, we listened to a series of voice mail recordings and wrote down phone numbers and other details. This was not a test of common sense, or even listening skills. It seemed to be a test to see if we were alive.
Once hired, caseworkers have six weeks of training, where they are taught how to conduct interviews, identify abuse and neglect, and carry out a removal. Legal issues, child development, domestic violence, sensitivity to cultural issues and handling angry clients were also part of the curriculum. Through it all, caseworkers are taught, it is essential to treat clients respectfully and professionally.
But the social work lingo of the training, where we spent two days discussing the need to "leave your baggage at the door," is far removed from the harsh reality of a field office. For new caseworkers, the obsessive concern with liability at the field offices quickly overshadows the reasonable criteria they have been taught for identifying abuse and neglect. Most quickly learn to abandon their training and to do what it takes to survive.
ACS has been making strides cutting down heavy caseloads, but it's still a stressful and at times tedious job--each case, no matter how trivial, calls for the same 15-page report. A contradiction at the heart of it all makes the work even more difficult. Caseworkers are trained to be service providers and advocates for families. To work together with families to uncover and solve problems in the home, caseworkers must establish an intimate rapport with their clients. Yet at the very same time they are engaged in an act of betrayal: as they write down parents' statements and survey their homes and behavior, caseworkers are building a potential court case against them. At no point are they able to tell their clients that everything they say can be used against them in court. The relationship of caseworker and client becomes one of manipulation, characterized by a deep lack of trust on both sides.
Although many of the best caseworkers get fed up and leave the agency, there are good workers who have been at ACS for years. They have survived because they have learned how to manipulate the system to make it work for themselves and their clients. They purposely omit or obscure facts about families in their case records and in their discussions with their supervisors to save clients from unnecessary court action. The most fortunate have supervisors who share their commitment to respecting families' rights. I was one of them: One of my supervisors was a mentor to me, and I considered her directives highly valuable.
Several months before I left the agency, an Emergency Children's Services supervisor who was resigning after more than 10 years blanketed the agency with a stunning email. He began by saying that he is not leaving the agency any better than when he started. He blamed this lack of improvement on ACS Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta, whom he accused of being more preoccupied with making the agency look good in the media than with making substantial changes that help clients. "ACS cares more about statistics than they do about children, forgetting that those statistics represent real children," he wrote. The supervisor had equally harsh words for protective caseworkers: "ACS workers cannot absolve themselves of responsibility for doing wrong removals by blaming them on their supervisors or managers or on agency policy." He compared the level of obedience and complacency at the agency to Nazi soldiers who killed 11 million civilians during World War II because "they too were just carrying out orders." Nobody around me talked about the email, not even to disagree.
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Carla and Owen were placed in foster care that night. The next day, Theresa went to court. The judge, who happened to be in his seventies himself, ordered that Owen be returned home immediately. The judge stated the obvious: Old age is not grounds for neglect. Carla, however, was to remain in foster care because of her behavior problems. When the judge asked Theresa if she felt the children were in imminent danger, she answered that in her opinion they were not.
By Akka Gordon
Source: City Limits Magazine, a bi-monthly investigative journalism publication on city-wide civic issues, and CityLimits.org, a long-standing destination for original news, resources, community interaction, and jobs and marketplace opportunities.
HSE fails children day in day out - time to out those responsible
It is heartbreaking to wake up in the morning and the first story you hear on the news is yet another case of child neglect.
We have dealt with several horrendous cases of child abuse by abusive parents and guardians in the past and the shortcomings of the authorities in failing to acknowledge these abuses earlier or even on time to save lives in too many cases.
The HSE has a lot to answer for.
Most recently we heard about a boy awaiting psychiatric assessment who was left in an internet cafe all night as there was nowhere for him to go within the system. How can this be allowed to happen? These young people are the most vulnerable in our society. They are clutching at straws and crying out for help in most cases and nobody is doing anything to help. On the contrary. In another extraordinary case a Chinese girl entered the country this year and disappeared after one night. She is feared to have been a victim of human trafficking.
In another shocking case, a teenage boy who was diagnosed with mental health problems and was known to two HSE areas but neither would take responsibility for him although he had been sexually abused and was extremely vulnerable.
These stories are all too common. The HSE has a lot to answer for but it is hard for the minister to be held accountable for any of these stories as they break when she is on St Patrick's Day business in New Zealand...
The children in our society are the future - they should be nurtured whether they come from well-to-do backgrounds or whether they come from the streets. Everyone deserves a chance at happiness and success but unfortunately, some children are born into families that are never going to offer them hope or opportunity. And this is not their fault. We are lucky to be born into loving families if we are, because this is not something we have a choice about as new-borns.
So when children are born into dangerous or unfit families, something should be done immediately to ensure that this child grows up in a safe and happy home. The HSE is responsible for this - it is a huge job - but don't take it on if you can't do it. This government and the HSE have a lot to answer for. They are failing children every day. They are leaving children in dangerous circumstances and putting their lives at risk by leaving them in places that are not safe. ?If you can't stand the heat get out of the kitchen' as the saying goes. It would certainly seem that the HSE and the minister for children are failing in their roles. Children are dying while in the care of the State. How this can be allowed to happen is beyond reasonable comprehension. Someone needs to take the agencies to task before another child dies.
Children should not be left in abusive homes when social workers know what's going on.
Children should not be ignored when they are calling out for help from social services.
Children should not be put into families that are not vetted on a regular basis.
Most of all children should be given every opportunity to grow up in a safe, loving and caring environment.
If the HSE or the Government cannot guarantee this for each and every child in this country - they need to get someone who can do the job.
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We urge legislators to take a closer look at funding child protection issues and authorities to use wisdom in investigating abuse cases.
Is there someone to speak for children so that their unfinished lives do not slip silently away?
If hundreds and hundreds of predictably and preventably dead children is not enough to inspire action, what is? If you choose not to act, who will? If not now, when?
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