NJ DYFS cw's violated state law-Not interviewing all family members

In the case of adoptions.

Testimony of Ms. Lowry before the House Ways and Means Committee

House Committee on Ways and Means



Statement of Marcia Robinson Lowry, Executive Director, Children's Rights, New
York, New York

Testimony Before the Subcommittee on Human Resources
of the House Committee on Ways and Means


November 06, 2003

My name is Marcia Robinson Lowry and I am the Executive Director of
Children’s Rights. Children’s Rights is a national non-profit advocacy
organization dedicated to promoting and protecting the legal rights of abused
and neglected children. I want to thank Chairman Herger and other members of
the Subcommittee of Human Resources of the Committee on Ways and Means for
providing me with the opportunity to testify today.

As Executive Director of Children’s Rights, I have overseen class action
litigation in over 12 jurisdictions across the country, including New Jersey,
seeking to vindicate the constitutional and federal statutory rights of
children under the care of public child welfare agencies. These are, more
often than not, poorly managed and inadequately funded agencies that are rarely
held accountable for their chronic failures. As you know, of the dozens of
states that have been audited for their child welfare performance by the
Administration for Children and Families (ACF) in the recently implemented
Child and Family Services Reviews (CFSRs), not one has passed.

I appreciate the opportunity to address this Committee and detail the current
situation in New Jersey and across the country that will continue to produce
child welfare tragedies such as witnessed recently in Collingswood, New Jersey,
as long as federal child welfare statutes are not strengthened and enforced.

As you are probably already aware, Children’s Rights filed a lawsuit against
the New Jersey Division of Youth and Family Services (DYFS) in 1999. That
lawsuit was filed after years of attempted reforms of the child welfare system
in New Jersey had failed – blue ribbon reports and concerted efforts by local
advocates had effected little – if any – change in a child welfare system
uniformly seen as dysfunctional and failing. Our lawsuit detailed a host of
serious problems that required immediate attention to ensure the safety and
well-being of children in the New Jersey foster care system. The class action
on behalf of the over 12,000 children in foster care in the State of New Jersey
was certified by the federal court last year.

The lawsuit was met by stiff opposition and resistance by DYFS – that is,
until the discovery of the death of Faheem Williams and the deplorable
condition of two half-starved brothers in January of this year. DYFS faced,
under intense media pressure, the horrific consequences of having essentially
“lost� these children in its system, failing to protect them despite being
placed on clear notice that the children were at considerable risk of harm. At
the same time, independent experts retained by Children’s Rights to examine
the safety practices of DYFS, delivered the devastating results of their review
of state data and hundreds of randomly selected foster children’s case
records maintained by DYFS. Concluding that children in foster care in New
Jersey were simply not safe, they found that:

Over one in ten foster children in New Jersey are abused and neglected in
foster care;

Foster children supervised by the Adoption Resource Centers were over three
times more likely to be abused and neglected in their foster homes than other
foster children;

20% of foster children had ping-ponged back into foster care at least once from
a failed reunification or adoption; and

Many caseworkers carry caseloads well over 80 children, when the national
standard calls for a caseload of 15 to 17 children (12 children for adoption
workers).
Under increasing public pressure to address the undeniable dangers that
children in the New Jersey foster care system faced, DYFS entered into
settlement negotiations with Children’s Rights. An agreement was signed by
all parties on June 23, 2003, and on September 2, 2003, Judge Stanley R.
Chesler of the United States District Court in Trenton, New Jersey, approved
the settlement agreement that for the first time mandated sweeping reforms of
the New Jersey foster care system.

In the settlement, the State agreed to both emergency and long-term reforms
aimed at protecting children, all under the oversight of an outside panel of
experts and the federal court. Under the Settlement Agreement, $30M in
emergency State funds have already been appropriated for additional casework
staff and needed supplies such as computers, cell phones and cars, and every
child in foster care – including some 4,000 children placed with families
supervised by DYFS’s Adoption Resource Centers - is being individually
assessed to be safe or removed from an unsafe foster home. Additional reforms
will include the re-training of all casework staff and the elimination of
barriers to hiring experienced staff, the belated implementation of a
Statewide-Automated Child Welfare Information System (SACWIS) allowing the
proper tracking of children, foster homes, and case progress, and the
resurrection of a defunct Quality Assurance function for continuous internal
review and assessment of the State’s child welfare case practice.

Meanwhile, though, the number of reports of child abuse and neglect in the
State has risen dramatically this year and caseloads have actually increased.
The State was also just penalized $6.2M in federal funds after failing a second
audit of its Title IV-E claiming for federal foster care matching funds, due to
placing foster children in unlicensed homes or facilities, and failing to
document the children’s legal status. Clearly, reform is a long-term
proposition, and Children’s Rights will be actively monitoring the progress
of the court-ordered reforms.

This is the context in which the latest scandalous oversight of the New Jersey
child welfare system needs to be understood. While aberrant mistakes can
occasionally be made in any child welfare system, egregious oversights are
highly predictable in an under-funded and mismanaged agency such as DYFS in New
Jersey. Caseworkers are overwhelmed with too many children to monitor and an
insufficient number of foster homes and few supportive services for foster
children. They are poorly trained and supervised. Staff has not been given
adequate tools to track children, their needs, and whether they are in safe
placements. Without such accountability, the State cannot assure the safety of
the children in its care.

In the Collingswood case, over the course of the last two years, caseworkers
visited the Jackson home dozens of times – a home in which four already
adopted children were apparently being starved, so badly malnourished that
their tiny sizes masked their true ages. The caseworker reportedly did not
question the children’s condition or refer any concerns for further
investigation. Nor did an emergency safety assessment of this foster home by
DYFS in July, mandated by the Children’s Rights settlement because the family
was caring for a DYFS-supervised foster child who was also slated to be adopted
by the family, identify any safety concerns.

In the case of the children adopted and then apparently mistreated by the
Jacksons, the agency failures fall squarely into two categories:

An inadequate assessment of the Jacksons when they applied to adopt – that
is, a failure to carefully consider their psychological status and parenting
abilities, which, even if not evident at the time of the boys earlier
adoptions, were certainly apparent when the child in foster care was most
recently placed with them pre-adoptively.

A failure to adequately conduct a safety assessment on behalf of the child in
foster care who was placed with them – an assessment which should have
included an evaluation of the home environment and any and all health and
safety issues affecting all children in the home. Had such a complete
assessment been conducted, the terrible circumstances under which the four
adopted boys were living would have become obvious.
None of this happened, hwever – why not?

First, it is clear that DYFS currently lacks the capacity on its own to conduct
valid and credible safety assessments. Its caseworkers, as a group, lack the
skills and the time to appropriately assess the risk of harm to children and
the threat of imminent danger, and they do not have the skills, the time or the
supervision needed to take appropriate protective action to ensure the safety
and well-being of children for whom DYFS is legally responsible. For this
reason, the state is seeking independent professionals to make in-person visits
to thousands of children for whom emergency safety assessments under the
Children’s Rights settlement must be redone. This issue, obviously, raises
the larger question of capacity-building within DYFS itself to ensure that in
the future, DYFS staff do indeed have the skills to assess the safety of
children and to ensure that the results of their safety assessments can be
relied upon with confidence.

Second, supervisory and administrative accountability within DYFS is critically
lacking. The failure to detect and respond to the alleged abuse and neglect of
the children in the Jackson home cannot solely be attributed to the
caseworker’s inadequate assessment and response. That individual had a
supervisor and that supervisor was accountable to higher-level administrative
staff who also have responsibility for the quality of safety assessments and
for ensuring that action is promptly taken to protect children in foster care.
Clearly, substantial work is needed within DYFS to develop and implement strong
supervisory and administrative processes that monitor and ensure the quality of
casework practice.

It is these two areas of unacceptable practice on which we must focus.
Nationally, there are 600,000 abused and neglected children in foster care
custody. As you know, the federal Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 was
enacted with two laudable goals: to speed the placement of these foster
children into permanent homes and to prioritize child safety at all times for
children under the care and supervision of state child welfare agencies. For
FY 2002, New Jersey in fact qualified for the second largest financial
incentive award in the country under the Act ($1.9M), due to its significant
increase in the number of adoptions it completed. This is a positive
development if the homes are being screened and chosen appropriately in each
child’s interests, rather than solely in the state’s interest in showing
compliance with a federal statute.

We must demand that DYFS, and every child welfare system in the country meet
the highest safety standards for children in foster care. It has been
suggested that the Collingswood case demonstrates the need for some focus on
post-adoption monitoring. The truth is that too many states, certainly
including New Jersey, cannot even do an adequate job of monitoring children
while they are in foster care. It would indeed be a mistake if instead of
focusing our energy and efforts on critical safety issues, we instead began to
question the viability of adoption as a permanency option for children in
foster care; to question the vital role of adoption subsidies in making
possible the adoptions of thousands of children in foster care each year (a
role that adoption subsidies have played since 1980); or to question the
commitment and love with which tens of thousands of adoptive families have
embraced children in foster care, giving them the nurturing, stability and hope
that they otherwise would not have had.

We know that adoption “works� for children in foster care. We know that
adoption subsidies are a critical adoption resource. It is important to
recognize that subsidies typically do not even cover the basic expenses of
raising a child – a fact that undercuts the argument that families adopt
“for the money.� Nonetheless, subsidies provide an important support for
families who adopt children with special needs because they defray some
expenses and because health insurance coverage accompanies subsidies. Finally,
we know that with the exception of a few disturbed adoptive families like the
Jacksons (who should have been screened out of the process in the first place),
families who adopt children with special needs from foster care are strong,
healthy families who contribute to their children’s lives and to their
communities. Upon adoption, they socially and legally become “just like�
other families. To treat these families as “second class� citizens who
need continuous monitoring and oversight would not only deprive them of their
constitutional rights – a matter of not insignificant importance – but
would create a system of government intrusion very likely to discourage
families from stepping forward to adopt the now 126,000 children in foster care
in this country for whom adoption is planned.

The agency failure in Collingswood was not a failure to supervise adopted
children as has been suggested. It was a failure to properly screen and match
the Jackson family with foster children they could handle, and then a complete
failure to adequately re-evaluate the family – including the children in it
– before repeatedly approving them to adopt those foster children. Since
adoptions are meant to be permanent, before the child welfare agency signs off
on an adoption the child’s safety and well-being in the home need to be
evaluated and assured. Standard social work practice (and, in New Jersey,
state law) requires that every member of the household be part of that
evaluation. Any concerns must be fully explored and resolved. Only upon such
a complete evaluation, if positive, should an adoption be finalized. Once
finalized, however, the family is and should be considered legally
indistinguishable from any other family. Children are entitled to be
considered equal members of the family, and not subject to the conditions of
further agency review.

As children’s advocates, we deeply appreciate the interest of this Committee
in the situation in New Jersey, and its concern about abused and neglected
children. I would like to suggest positive actions that Congress can take to
protect the well-being of these children. Congress has already passed
legislation several times, beginning in 1980 with the Adoption Assistance and
Child Welfare Act, and most recently in 1997 with the Adoption and Safe
Families Act. This legislation is directed at ensuring that children are safe,
that they do not remain in state foster care systems indefinitely, that they
are treated appropriately while they are in state foster systems and that they
grow up in permanent families, either their own or new adoptive families.

However, in this legislation Congress has given the states only the broad
outlines of its desirable public policy goals and then left the states on their
own to comply with those broad outlines. But by now Congress should realize
that far too many states are either not meeting even those broad outlines or,
when they do, for example, raise their adoption numbers, are doing so by
including many clearly inadequate families, as the Jacksons appeared to be,
along with the genuinely committed loving families who want to make a home for
these children, just to “succeed� by boosting their numbers.

If Congress wishes to really protect these children, to make the broad outlines
of its child welfare statutes meaningful instead of a cruel hoax, and to ensure
the best possible utilization of billions of federal dollars, it will also
impose minimum standards in such areas as job qualifications, worker training,
caseloads, and systems of accountability on these child welfare systems. With
federal money the states can either save or destroy young lives. We are
destroying far too many. If you are appalled at the stunted bodies of the boys
in Collingswood, and if you remember the mummified body of 7-year-old Faheem
Williams and his starving brothers discovered in a New Jersey basement in
January, you will consider mandating minimum standards for the operation of any
child welfare system that has the lives of these young children in its hands.

Thank you for this opportunity to present these thoughts to your Committee.