[Suffer the Children]: Emily Mays was dead before her second birthday."Blunt force trauma to the head," said the medical examiner. Murder, saidthe police....

http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/2006-...-the-children/

Suffer the Children
Governor Napolitano made CPS reform a top priority. But it's been a
tough four years
By Sarah Fenske
Published: October 26, 2006


Emily Mays was dead before her second birthday. "Blunt force trauma to
the head," said the medical examiner. Murder, said the police.


There were bruises on Emily's body, and scrapes and bruises on her head.
Emily's caregivers, a Tucson couple, were charged with felony child abuse.

It sounds like any one of the horrific cases that made headlines in
2002. At the time, crisis was in the air: Thirty-six children died that
year because of maltreatment — a new state record. Caseworkers at Child
Protective Services were overworked and underpaid, to the point that
they simply couldn't do the work necessary to keep kids safe. The
Arizona Republic spent months chronicling the sad stories and calling
for systemic change.

Janet Napolitano, elected governor that fall, made the newspaper's
mission her own. Fixing CPS, she announced, would be one of her top
priorities. Children needed to be protected.

The new governor wasn't messing around. Under her tenure, CPS has seen
big changes: more money, more training for caseworkers, more new
programs to reach at-risk families.

You'd think that kids now must be a lot safer than they were in 2002.

But Emily Mays didn't die in 2002.

She died three years into Napolitano's tenure, in the summer of 2005 —
after the reforms, after massive budget increases, after Napolitano's
vow that kids need to be kept safe above all else.

And Emily's wasn't an isolated case. You don't read about it in the
papers, but the latest statistics show even more children in Arizona
dying from maltreatment than before Napolitano took office.

In 2004, it was 40 kids — and CPS had prior involvement with 18 of them.
Eight of the cases were actually open at the time of the child's death.

Part of the problem is that real reform takes time. It's not fair to
expect progress overnight.

But it's also true that, for all her good intentions and the excellent
work done by her commission, some critics believe Napolitano made a
serious misstep early in her tenure.

By equating child safety with removing children from their parents,
Napolitano triggered a huge increase in removals — removals that came
before the agency had the infrastructure in place to handle them.

There were only about 6,200 children in foster care when she took
office; by June 2006, there were a staggering 10,166.

And though Napolitano fought for a $35 million raise for the agency in
the fall of 2003, the Legislature didn't agree until that December. And
that was for $17 million, less than half of what she requested.

Naturally, it took months after that to hire additional workers — and
months after that to train them. (And by the time they were trained,
enough workers had quit that the agency was still running on empty.)

And so the influx of foster kids meant even more work for a staff that
was already grossly overburdened. And it meant more kids living with
strangers, or, worse, left for months on end in group homes and shelters.

One of the kids in foster care was Emily Mays. Her foster parents now
face felony child abuse charges in Pima County.

Napolitano vowed that children needed to be taken from their homes to
keep them safe. But as Mays' short life illustrates all too well, it's
never that easy.

On Napolitano's fourth day as governor, she spoke at a child abuse
conference in Mesa. There, she told CPS workers that they no longer
needed to make "reasonable efforts" to keep a family together — if a
child's safety was at risk, they needed to get the kid out of there.

It sounds uncontroversial; what's more important, after all, than
keeping a child safe? But to anyone familiar with debates over CPS
policy, or the Republic's coverage of maltreatment deaths, the language
was loaded.

CPS workers had long been instructed to make "reasonable efforts" to
keep families together. But the Republic griped that the policy left
workers with competing mandates: family togetherness, or safety?
Napolitano's words in Mesa, and the changes that were subsequently
codified in the agency's mission statement, were a public directive to
err on the side of safety.

No one disputes that many kids, unfortunately, need to be taken from
their homes, and taken quickly. But to some critics, Napolitano's
message was this: Don't worry about making a rush to judgment. Better to
overreact.

By the time of her first State of the State speech, Napolitano had
already created an advisory commission to recommend major changes for
the agency.

In the four years since, many of the commission's recommendations have
become law. Salaries for caseworkers have increased dramatically; so has
training. Funding for the Division of Children, Youth, and Families,
which includes CPS, is way up: Even with a resistant Legislature,
Napolitano was able to increase the agency's budget significantly from
2004 to 2006.

But for better or worse, her January 2003 decree — more than the
subsequent common-sense reforms — has defined CPS during her tenure.

CPS statistics are released on a semi-annual basis that doesn't
correspond with the calendar or political changes. But the first full
year of data under Napolitano shows a record number of kids being
removed from their homes: It's actually a 32 percent increase from the
last full year of data under Napolitano's predecessor, Jane Hull.

That happened before the agency could hire many new workers.

And the numbers continued to rise steadily, with a 48 percent increase
over the baseline in Napolitano's second year. The six-month period
ending this past March was the first without an increase since
Napolitano took office — but CPS still removed 3,753 kids, 41 percent
more than in the last period under Hull.

"You had a caseworker fury in removing kids," says Representative Laura
Knaperek, R-Mesa, a longtime critic of Napolitano's CPS policies. "Even
if they didn't think they should remove the child, they did it anyway —
because they were afraid not to."

The goal was admirable. The results, not so much so:

• Despite the increased number of kids coming into foster care,
adoptions out of the system stayed flat. And so the number of kids in
out-of-home care swelled from just over 6,000 in 2003 to more than
10,000 today — a 62 percent increase.

• New foster homes didn't keep pace with the demand, so many children
ended up in shelters. In 2003, 2,754 kids were stuck at shelters or
group homes for more than 21 days. Some kids stayed for more than a year.

• The law requires CPS workers to visit kids in foster care once a
month. Under Napolitano, the percentage of kids getting the mandated
visits has actually dropped to an embarrassing 64 percent — 5 percent
below the last two years of Hull's administration.

• Despite salary increases for caseworkers, turnover hovered near 20
percent until recently. Inexperienced workers are still forced to make
life-changing decisions on tight deadlines.

• While the Legislature allotted money for new positions, CPS can't fill
them fast enough to make up for people who quit. There are currently 53
caseworker vacancies. A six-week training session for new hires means
that another 186 are in class rather than on the job, leaving co-workers
to cover for them.

• As a result, caseloads are far too high: Investigators average 15
cases a month instead of 10, per CPS standards. Workers handling ongoing
cases are in even worse shape — typically exceeding CPS standards by
more than 10 cases a month.

CPS staffers say that, just like before Napolitano took office, they're
too busy to do their job properly. The agency's computer system, they
say, is still a redundant, confusing mess that saps far too much of
their time.

And now they have more kids than ever to monitor.

Napolitano vigorously defends her record. Although she didn't have time
for an interview, her deputy chief of staff, Mike Haener, said in a
written statement that the governor is especially proud of statistics
that show increases in the number of children returned to their parents
from 2003 to 2006, as well as an increase in the number of foster homes
available.

"Piecemeal changes had been tried in the past with few results," Haener
wrote. "A complete overhaul was necessary. It was difficult; we all know
that change can be hard and it takes time. But in the long run, the
sustainable changes we have made and are continuing to make will lead to
better outcomes for children and families for years to come."

Indeed, CPS's top brass cite a number of promising programs and point to
statistics that seem to be improving. They boast great progress, to the
point of sounding almost giddy.

But by any statistical measure, and for any worker on the ground floor,
the past four years have been difficult.

"I don't think you can ever say that making sure children are safe is a
bad thing," says Alissa Scott, a CPS supervisor who left in 2004. "But I
can't say the agency was ready for the increased workload. We lost a lot
of good people.

"The expectations are reasonable for the safety of the children," she
adds. "But they were unreasonable for the workers."

As any caseworker can tell you, there's no such thing as a completely
innocent victim. CPS caseworkers don't just show up in the middle of the
night and take happy, healthy babies from perfect homes.

There is always something complicating the situation: a drug-addicted
boyfriend, a child who's acting out sexually, a toddler roaming the street.

Robin Scoins admits that her case, too, had its complications. She knows
it was ridiculous not to realize she was pregnant until just weeks
before giving birth.

But what happened after that wasn't just ridiculous, it was a nightma
a classic example of how faulty evidence — pushed by a caseworker
without the time to do her homework — can trump the facts.

It started after the birth of Scoins' third child, a boy. Then 35,
Scoins was seriously depressed. She had good reason: Her then-boyfriend
was an alcoholic, she says, and had been abusive in the past. The
relationship was on its last legs. And Scoins' oldest son, then 14, had
been diagnosed with a host of mental-health problems.

The doctor at Southwest Behavioral Health Services put Scoins on
heavy-duty antidepressants, according to records provided to New Times
by Scoins' lawyer, Scott Ambrose.

For the seven months that Scoins saw counselors at Southwest, her
doctors reported that she was anxious, worried about her older boy, and
depressed about her relationship ending, records show.

But they never once suggested that she was a bad parent. And they never
noted a suspicion of drug use.

Then Scoins found out she was pregnant again. Very, very pregnant.

She'd gained weight with her previous pregnancy, so she was already
heavier than usual. She complained to her doctors about nausea, and
irregular periods, but records show that she assumed it was a side
effect from the meds.

So in early September 2003, Scoins found out she was pregnant, and on
September 27 her little boy was born — two months early, weighing only
three and a half pounds.

And that's when Scoins, who insists she'd never used illegal drugs,
tested positive for amphetamines.

Even the hospital's own test results warn that antidepressants, like the
ones Scoins was using, can create a "false positive" for amphetamines.
So can cold medicine, which she'd also been on.

Not only did the baby test negative for everything, but Scoins
subsequently passed two more drug tests.

No matter. When Scoins' boy (called C.Q. in court papers to protect his
privacy) was big enough to leave the hospital in November, Scoins didn't
get a call to pick him up. Instead, a CPS worker left her a note.

CPS had taken the baby.

The reason: According to the caseworker, Scoins had "tested positive for
methamphetamines."

Amphetamines are present in any number of drugs, not just crystal meth.
But while CPS caseworkers deal with thousands of meth-related cases in
the course of a year, the staffer on Scoins' case didn't seem to realize
that. Nor did she acknowledge that Scoins' amphetamine "positive" was in
dispute.

Instead, CPS's report claimed that Scoins was a drug addict. The
caseworker wrote that she'd "abused substances for a long period of
time" — an absurd claim for which the worker offered no supporting
documentation. The report also claimed that Scoins had been homeless and
living in a car. Again, completely false.

Even worse, in the same report, the caseworker claimed that Scoins' baby
had yet to be tested for drugs.

That wasn't true. C.Q.'s tests were complete within days of his birth,
two months before. He was negative for all drugs.

Taking C.Q. amounted to a rush to judgment that may have been triggered
by good intentions — but doesn't hold up to scrutiny today.

Scoins was devastated at losing her baby.

"I was just a mess," Scoins says. "I kept thinking, there's some
mistake. I've never used drugs; they must have me confused with someone
else. When they find out, this will all be over. But that never happened."

Instead, CPS only let Scoins see C.Q. during supervised visits. And
Scoins' caseworker filed paperwork to take away her other three
children, too.

Ultimately, the agency dropped its threat; when C.Q. was nine months
old, CPS finally returned him to his mother. But that was only thanks to
an attorney friend who handled Scoins' case for free.

"I probably would not have my son back today without that," she says.

Throughout a three-hour interview with New Times at the public library
in Surprise, Scoins' two youngest boys interrupt frequently to show
their mother books, pester for her library card, and ask for help with
the computer. They have a warm rapport; Scoins is affectionate with
them, and they clearly adore her in return.

Since her battle for C.Q., Scoins founded the Arizona Family Rights
Advocacy Institute and devotes much of her time to helping families
across the state fighting CPS. She doesn't get paid, yet she estimates
she easily spends more than 60 hours a week taking their calls, helping
them with paperwork, even showing up in court to offer an assist.

She knows the dark side of Napolitano's push for safety first. She's
lived it.

"This wasn't even a case where they took the kid and asked questions
later," says her attorney, Ambrose, disgusted. "In this case, they
didn't even ask questions."

As a matter of policy, CPS officials cannot discuss individual cases,
except in cases of child death. But its administrator, Janice Mickens,
says the agency had no choice but to increase removals at the beginning
of Napolitano's tenure.

Prior to that, CPS used to farm out less-serious complaints to a network
of community and volunteer agencies — about 6,000 calls a year.

Napolitano decreed that CPS would investigate every complaint it
received. And Mickens says the increased investigations account for the
rise in removals.

But while even critics of the agency applaud the "every complaint"
policy, they question why so many kids had to be moved into foster care
rather than monitored in-home.

That was clearly Napolitano's wish; she gave a speech in April 2003
where she stated plainly, "We cannot both assure the child's safety and
guarantee to keep the family home. We must choose."

The problem with that logic? Well, when it comes to children and safety,
there's rarely 100 percent assurance for anything.

Many homes aren't safe. But every year, kids die in foster care, too.
And sometimes, a home that seems perfectly safe is the one that proves
deadly.

Wayne Holder is the Albuquerque-based director of ACTION for Child
Protection, which offers technical assistance to child welfare agencies.
He believes that thinking like Napolitano's is old-fashioned. People
used to think "safety" and "family" were contrary goals, he says. Not
anymore.

"The nature of this business is to have an either/or dichotomy, but
we've been making efforts to think a bit more dynamically," Holder says.
"There is now a growing recognition that even removing children from
their homes doesn't necessarily mean they're safe."

Carole Shauffer, executive director of the San Francisco-based Youth Law
Center, agrees. Her agency is a public-interest, nonprofit law firm that
litigates on behalf of kids in juvenile detention or bad foster care
situations.

"Any time you get a lot of child deaths, you see a state do 'safety
first, let's remove every single kid,'" she says.

But that doesn't mean it's the right thing to do, Shauffer says. "Many,
many children can be kept safe at home. Safety first should not mean
removal first."

After all, most parents caught up in the CPS system aren't the sort of
abusers who end up on the evening news, carted to jail after
systematically torturing their kids for months.

The majority of cases involve neglect, not abuse — and it's not only the
politically correct who are concerned by the gross overrepresentation of
poor and minority kids in foster care across the country. Statistics
show that alcoholics in Paradise Valley typically don't attract CPS
attention. Single moms living in west Phoenix do.

And foster care, as it turns out, is hardly a panacea.

A study published in Development and Psychopathology earlier this year
by researchers at the University of Minnesota suggests, surprisingly,
that foster care may actually be worse for kids than abusive homes.

The professors surveyed records from 189 high-risk children in
Minneapolis, from birth to their 16th birthdays.

Researchers split the children into three groups: The first spent time
in foster care. The second group suffered similar maltreatment — but
weren't removed from their homes. And the third was a control group:
children from poor families, but without abuse or neglect.

Naturally, the control group performed the best; practically from the
beginning, they scored better developmentally than the mistreated kids.

Initially, there was no such difference between the kids who ended up in
foster care and those stuck in abusive homes. But once the kids were
sent to foster care, they began to perform demonstrably worse than their
stay-in-home counterparts.

Even after their release from care, the foster kids had more problems.

"[T]he results support a general view that foster care may lead to an
increase in behavior problems that continues after exiting the system,"
the researchers concluded. The results, they wrote, "raise cautious
concern regarding the impact of child care on development."

That's almost certainly not the fault of foster parents, much less the
kids themselves. Few researchers blame the quality of foster homes;
instead, they believe the problem comes from children being wrenched
from their parents.

And that may be why CPS executives no longer present removals as an
unqualified positive. Instead, they talk about keeping families
together, monitoring children in their homes, and new initiatives to get
support services to needy families.

Indeed, ask CPS administrator Janice Mickens what she's most excited
about, and she'll cite a program called Family to Family, developed by
the respected Baltimore-based Annie E. Casey Foundation. In place now in
Maricopa County and Tucson, CPS hopes to roll it out statewide in five
years.

Its goal is to work with families to reduce kids' time in foster care
and to increase placements with family members or trusted friends.

"We're saying child safety is paramount," Mickens says, "but that
children belong in families. The focus is on safety and trying to help
them within their families — whether that's their family of origin or
relatives."

Another sign of the agency's movement since Napolitano's original
mandate: The second program Mickens singles out for praise is CPS's
in-home services unit, which monitors at-risk kids, but doesn't remove them.

CPS actually applied for, and got, a waiver from the feds. The waiver
lets the agency use federal funds typically earmarked for kids in foster
care on programs to support families, connecting them with services like
drug counseling or even food stamps.

"It allows us to work with families at a much earlier stage and prevent
them coming back into the system," Mickens says. "In the past, with
cases like this, there was no one to send them. We'd say, 'Okay, well,
I'll keep this case open.' But then we'd get another report — because
they just weren't getting services."

Richard Wexler is the director of the National Coalition for Child
Protection Reform, a group that believes far too many children are
placed in foster care. He was a critic of Napolitano's early speeches on
child safety. By "throwing gas on the fire" and focusing on maltreatment
deaths, he says, she sparked a panic.

But Wexler says he's noticed a real change in Arizona. He's convinced
that Napolitano has consciously backed away from her previous strategy.

"Essentially, everybody involved in fomenting the panic now realizes it
was a terrible mistake," he claims.

(Napolitano's deputy, Haener, says the governor has not had a change of
heart. "Safety is and must be the top priority at CPS," he says. The
increase in kids, he says, was absolutely necessary, and due to "real
reforms that helped us to better identify risk factors for children.")

And Wexler's not willing to let Napolitano off the hook that easily
anyway. After all, he notes, there are still more than 10,000 kids in
foster care. And CPS defends its actions in 2003, even if the agency's
now changing course.

"Until people are ready to say out loud, 'What we did in 2003 was flat
wrong, and we have to reverse course,'" he says, "this isn't going to
get any better."

Wexler may be too harsh. But it's clear that keeping kids safe is much
more complicated than Napolitano initially suggested.

Some foster parents may need as much intervention and monitoring as some
birth parents. And under Napolitano, that's actually happened less
frequently than under Hull — occasionally, with disastrous results.

Patrick Traufler Jr. was born just nine months before Robin Scoins' son
C.Q. Like C.Q., he was taken from the hospital and immediately placed
into foster care.

But Patrick really did have drugs in his system, court records show. And
rather than ultimately finding an adoptive family, he died before he was
a year old.

CPS had placed Patrick with Angela Monroy, a young Phoenix mother.
Monroy wasn't just raising two kids of her own, she also had another
foster child — another boy who'd been born to a drug-addicted mother,
says Brad Astrowsky, who handled the case as a Maricopa County
prosecutor. (The case is still pending, but Astrowsky has left the
office for private practice.)

Monroy's husband worked the night shift, Astrowsky says. And that left
Angela Monroy as virtually the sole caregiver for four very young children.

"It wasn't as if Ms. Monroy was an evil person who set out to kill the
child," Astrowsky says. "She was a young mother in over her head, who
started out with good intentions, but was allowed to be in over her head
by the state."

After Patrick died, investigators found that her other foster child,
too, had suffered abuse. Prosecutors charged Angela Monroy with shaking
and smothering Patrick to death — and also with fracturing his foster
brother's forearm.

It was a horrible ending, made even worse by the fact that no one could
argue that Patrick Traufler Jr. should have stayed with his biological
parents. His mother couldn't even manage to successfully sue the county.
(She filed suit, but it was thrown out after her lawyers failed to hit
their deadlines, records show.) Court records also reveal that the
baby's presumed father, Patrick Traufler Sr., proved not to be the
biological dad.

It would be tempting to conclude that these cases are tough, and leave
it at that. But Astrowsky believes it exemplifies a more systemic problem.

He believes the agency must remove children when they're in danger; he
doesn't fall into the camp of those who would always support birth parents.

But by not paying better attention to Patrick's situation in foster
care, he says, CPS messed up.

The timing may have been a factor. After all, little Patrick's death
came six weeks into Napolitano's term as governor. He was placed in the
Monroys' house in the midst of the frenzy of removals, driven by the
command to remove kids first and ask questions later.

During the six-month period that includes Napolitano's first three
months in office and Patrick's placement with the Monroys, the number of
children removed from their homes grew almost 12 percent from the six
months before.

The state didn't have enough foster parents, much less caseworkers to
supervise them. And the number of caseworkers, naturally, didn't grow 12
percent in this period. Not even close.

And so the caseworker who visited Monroy's home wasn't just young,
Astrowsky says. She was an intern.

Even worse, she was an intern who already personally knew the family,
Astrowsky says. (Her fiancé was a cousin of Monroy's husband.) That may
have given her reason not to question the family's placement, no matter
how much stress Angela Monroy was under.

The intern disclosed the conflict to her supervisor, Astrowsky says. But
the supervisor decided it wasn't a problem.

And two months after he was born, Patrick Traufler Jr. was dead.

In its response to the lawsuit from Patrick's mother, CPS defended its
actions as appropriate. Monroy's criminal case is still pending.

But even today, despite a few hundred new positions added to CPS's
roster, workers who monitor kids like Patrick hardly have time to do
their jobs.

The agency codified its caseload standards in 2005: Investigators, who
make the initial determination whether children need to be in foster
care, should take no more than 10 new cases a month. "Out of home" case
managers, like those supervising Patrick Traufler Jr., are supposed to
handle no more than 16.

Even those numbers seem high, but the reality is much, much higher. In
June 2006, the most recent month available, the average "out of home"
manager handled 25 cases.

And that's actually lower than many months in the recent past. In
October 2005, for example, monthly "out of home" caseloads averaged 32.5
cases — double the agency's standard.

"Unless you gave up most of your personal life and worked continuously,
you could not keep up," says Alissa Scott, who left the agency after
almost four years in 2004. "I was a single parent, dropping my daughter
off at a day care at 6:30 a.m., and they'd be waiting at the door when I
showed up at night because they were closing."

Workers, too, are plagued by the stress of making life-altering
decisions. They're damned in the newspapers if they don't remove kids —
but reviled by parents when they do.

"The job is a 24-hour-a-day job, whether people want to acknowledge that
or not," Scott says.

As a result of heavy workloads, some foster homes get little scrutiny.
The law requires caseworkers to visit kids in foster care once a month.
But throughout Napolitano's tenure, that's happened, on average, for
just 64 percent of foster kids.

That's 5 percent below the agency's average in 2001 and 2002, according
to records.

Foster parents like Angela Monroy are an anomaly. According to
statistics Arizona reports to the federal government, fewer than 1
percent of kids in foster care here have suffered abuse. And while death
gets the headlines, it's not what most CPS workers deal with on a daily
basis.

But a far more systemic problem dogged CPS during the Napolitano-era
foster care boom: dumping kids in shelters or group homes for months on end.

Marsha Porter, herself a former CPS worker, is the longtime executive
director of nonprofit Crisis Nursery in central Phoenix. A slender woman
with a stylish blond shag, she's happy to give a tour of the Crisis
Nursery campus on Roosevelt Street, and it's easy to see why: It's like
a college dorm for kids, with bedrooms, common areas for play, and a
sunny backyard strewn with toys.

But the place wasn't initially designed for foster care, as Porter
readily attests. Crisis Nursery began as a place where parents could
voluntarily drop off kids if they felt overwhelmed. As long as the
parents didn't disappear, Porter says, the agency didn't alert
authorities, and mom got a break.

Only later did the nursery, and others like it, start accepting
contracts to house kids while foster homes could be found.

From that point, it became only too easy for CPS to leave kids there
for months on end. CPS workers preoccupied with new, urgent cases didn't
always have the time to return to children they'd placed in shelters.
After all, places like Crisis Nursery are nothing if not safe — and in
the short term, that can seem like enough.

But then the short term turned into the long term. And suddenly kids
were staying in shelters for months, or even a year.

Bonnie Cohn is a former CPS worker who started a five-bed shelter,
Marcus House, in 1995. Like Porter, she felt she was providing a
valuable service to her young charges — but was sometimes surprised at
how long kids stayed before CPS found them placements.

"We had a sibling pair here for a full year," she says. "Then they were
moved to foster parents who wouldn't take them — so they came back for
another two months. And after that, CPS put them with a relative who
hadn't seen them in six months!"

The Youth Law Center in San Francisco had long been critical of
shelters, particularly when kids are extremely young. In 2004, the
Center turned its attention to Arizona.

"It is not safe to put an infant in a group home for a long period of
time," says Carole Shauffer, the director. "It may be physically safe,
but it is not — and I can say with 100 percent certainty — not
psychologically safe or developmentally safe."

The problem, Shauffer says, is that kids in shelters are cared for by
staffers who come and go, rather than a single parent or couple they can
count on. While there haven't been extensive studies of the impact of
shelter stays in this country, Shauffer cites studies of kids coming out
of orphanages in Asia and Eastern Europe, who often show developmental
problems even after adoption.

That may be an exaggeration; nothing about Crisis Nursery resembles a
grim Romanian orphanage. But it's also easy to see why homes are better
than institutions, no matter how cheerful.

And so Shauffer's group threatened Arizona with a lawsuit over the
shelter stays. Only then did CPS commit to no longer using the shelters
as a long-term placement for kids. (CPS also agreed not to place kids
younger than 3 in shelters, unless special circumstances exist.)

"Then we had so many foster homes lined up for these kids and the
children removed from Marcus House so quickly, it made your head spin,"
Cohn recalls.

Porter says that Crisis Nursery is trying to reposition itself now that
there's no steady stream of long-term CPS placements. But Marcus House
ended up folding under the new policy; it couldn't stay afloat without
CPS's endless supply of $110-a-day placements.

"Really, I don't know why they didn't beef up the foster care system
much sooner," Cohn says. "They were obviously spending a lot of money on
shelters, and that wasn't cheap for them."

But with so many problems to address in the short term, the big picture
wasn't always in focus.

Kris Jacober, director of the Arizona Association of Foster and Adoptive
Parents, generally praises Napolitano's efforts and the reform process.
But she says that she and other foster parents have pushed CPS to do
more for foster care recruitment.

"We sat on every committee, and so we know reforms are coming," she
says. "But where the rubber meets the road, we're not seeing a lot of
what's supposed to be happening."

Foster parents wanted a statewide campaign. As a woman who runs her own
marketing and public relations company, Jacober knows what that should
look like.

It hasn't happened yet.

"I still don't see a billboard," she says, sighing.

The number of foster homes has increased 16 percent since Napolitano
took office, records show. Mickens says the agency is now focused on
targeted recruitment, in hopes of keeping kids within their communities
and even the same school district.

And, recently, CPS has done a good job of increasing the numbers of
foster beds available — which means that more foster parents are willing
to take multiple placements or sibling groups.

Records show that the number of kids in shelters has finally dropped.

After the Youth Law Center's lawsuit threat, and with Crisis Nursery's
blessing, CPS assigned a caseworker to the nursery. The goal is to keep
the kids there from falling through the cracks and find them foster
homes quickly, rather than just dumping them.

The shelters are not yet empty. According to the most recent statistics,
for June 2006, 806 kids have been living in shelters for 21 days or
more. The average length of stay is 87 days.

Mickens, CPS's administrator, says those are mostly sibling groups and
hard-to-place kids.

But Shauffer says the state is "not hitting the marks" that it agreed to
in order to avoid a suit. Still, she feels confident that they can keep
working together.

"I believe the governor is actually committed to ending the use of group
care, and understands the problems with it," she says. "The question is
how quickly they're committed to moving — and how much of a priority it
is. That's really the question."

On one subject, Napolitano has earned raves from both top CPS staffers
and the constituencies that interact with the agency: her willingness to
listen.

Christa Drake, an alumna of Arizona's foster care system and director of
a Tucson-based program called In My Shoes, recalls attending a forum
where Napolitano took suggestions from the community on CPS reform.

"There were people who'd had their children taken away, and they were
just yelling at the governor," Drake recalls. "But we talked to her
about what we were hoping to do with In My Shoes, and she put our peer
mentoring program into her 'Blueprint for Success' as a statewide model.
She actually listened. And I think she did a wonderful job."

Jacober, director of Arizona's foster parent support group, agrees. When
her group insisted on a voice in the reform process, they found
Napolitano was willing to hear them out.

"She said, 'I will support you,' and she has never wavered from that,"
Jacober says.

Among top staffers at CPS, the mood is optimistic. Mickens, who's worked
for the agency since 1985, says she's never witnessed such excitement.

"It is a wonderful time to be working at CPS," Mickens says, "the best
four years I've had in the whole time I've been at the agency."

The big question is whether that excitement is going to translate into
actual, statistical results — and whether it's shared by workers, whose
job stress is enormous and whose caseloads never seem to shrink.

In the past year, turnover among caseworkers and their supervisors has
finally shown dramatic improvement. That could make a big change.

But in some ways, workers' voices are quieter than ever before.
Legislators critical of CPS, like Representative Knaperek and Senator
Karen Johnson, a conservative Republican from Mesa, say that they used
to get calls from CPS workers all the time, seeking help or trying to
expose problems they'd witnessed.

Now they don't get such calls. They believe the problems are still
happening, but that caseworkers are afraid to speak out.

One caseworker, who stepped forward to testify before a legislative
committee last year, says that Mickens called the night before he was
scheduled to testify. She tried to talk him out of speaking for 45
minutes, he says.

The caseworker testified anyway, detailing numerous problems with the
in-home unit in his Kingman district and the overwork that plagues CPS
workers. After his testimony, the caseworker says he was then repeatedly
denied promotions. Last week, he resigned. (Because he is seeking a job
in another state, he asked New Times not to use his name.)

For whatever reason, CPS is no longer a subject that gets much media
attention. The Republic was up in arms when 36 kids died in 2002. But
though state records show that another 77 kids died in 2003 and 2004,
they hardly rated a mention. The reporter who once wrote in-depth
reports on child death now covers Nutcracker auditions and files stories
helping parents decode their teenagers' slang.

And it isn't just the Republic. Although CPS reports are almost always
confidential, the agency can release summaries at the media's request in
cases where children die.

In 2004 and 2005, reporters asked for summaries in only four cases,
according to records CPS provided to New Times.

There are less gory examples. CPS began issuing a regular bulletin
called "Reform Watch" to keep outsiders posted on its progress; the
bulletins petered out, then finally stopped abruptly a year ago.

And then there's the departure of David Berns. Berns, who had run a
CPS-style agency in Colorado Springs, was praised as a visionary with a
national reputation when Napolitano hired him to run CPS's umbrella
agency in 2003. But while his arrival came with great hoopla, his
departure this summer, after less than three years on the job, barely
rated a mention.

Berns declined New Times' requests for an interview.

Indeed, despite the good cheer at the top, there's some indication that
CPS continues to be plagued by poor morale and caseworker burnout at the
bottom.

Last week, Brenda Truesdell, a CPS supervisor with the Kingman district
for five years, resigned from the agency. The next day, she came to
Phoenix to testify in a closed Senate hearing room in front of several
legislators.

Truesdell described a scenario where everyone is overworked except a
top-heavy management team, where training is ineffective, where even the
most inexperienced caseworkers must handle complex cases, just because
there isn't anyone else.

A tall, thin woman with military crispness, Truesdell described a box of
nearly 200 cases that's sat in her office for months. She couldn't get
overtime approved to enter the information into the agency's archaic
computer system.

If a new complaint comes in about one of the cases stuck in the box, CPS
would never know it, Truesdell explains. The data from the earlier
report, after all, simply hasn't been logged into the computer.

"I'm no longer willing to work for an organization that puts money above
the safety of children," she told the legislators. "I'm not going to do it."

Truesdell explained that Napolitano's much-vaunted Core training program
puts new caseworkers in the classroom for a six-week course. But after
taking the class herself, she understood why new workers often seemed so
ill-prepared.

There was no test at the end of the course to make sure workers "got"
it. And since training is run by the central office instead of district
staff, supervisors like Truesdell get no information on what the
students have mastered and where they still need more help.

"It costs $20,000 to $25,000 to send them through [six] weeks of Core,
when you add up hotels and food and reimbursement for gas," Truesdell
told Senator Karen Johnson, whose mouth nearly hit the table. "When I
think of the staff I could have with the amount of money spent on Core .
.. ."

Throughout more than two hours of a question-and-answer session,
Truesdell painted a bleak picture of some of the same programs that
Mickens praised to New Times the week before.

Take the in-home services division. Truesdell says it's been so
understaffed in Kingman that caseworkers from other units have gotten
calls from families asking why no one ever followed up with them. Other
cases, Truesdell says, were closed in just a few weeks — hardly enough
time to monitor a family's progress. Even worse, she named CPS offices
in several cities that have yet to set up an in-home unit.

(CPS spokeswoman Liz Barker Alvarez denies this, saying that every
office has in-home workers, if not a full unit. But she admits that
rural areas pose special challenges.)

Overall, Truesdell's testimony painted a chilling contrast to the
glowing reports from CPS administrators and people outside the system.

Napolitano promised to reform the agency to make children safe. Her
deputy, Haener, says she's convinced she's done that.

The foundation has been laid for real progress, he writes, "and is
starting to yield results. . . . Building on those successes will take
time, continued investment, and steadfast commitment on the part of CPS
and all our partners."

But after four years at CPS, the statistics still reveal cause for
concern. And Brenda Truesdell, for one, isn't buying the governor's rosy
picture.

Truesdell told the legislators that she'd previously worked as a
caseworker in Indiana.

"I didn't think a system could be any worse than Indiana when I left
Indiana," she told the legislators. "Arizona is worse. Arizona is much
worse."

*
Joe Forkan
* Representative Laura Knaperek gives Janet Napolitano an
Emily Piraino
Representative Laura Knaperek gives Janet Napolitano an "F" — the
increased number of kids in foster care, she says, is not acceptable.
* Robin Scoins has become one of CPS's biggest critics.
Martha Strachan
Robin Scoins has become one of CPS's biggest critics.
* Scott Ambrose says CPS didn't take the time to do its homework
before taking his client's baby.
Martha Strachan
Scott Ambrose says CPS didn't take the time to do its homework
before taking his client's baby.
* CPS Administrator Janice Mickens says she's most excited about a
new program to help families early — before crisis hits.
Martha Strachan
CPS Administrator Janice Mickens says she's most excited about a
new program to help families early — before crisis hits.
* Brad Astrowsky says Angela Monroy was
Martha Strachan
Brad Astrowsky says Angela Monroy was "in over her head."
* Christa Drake gives Napolitano's reforms high praise.
courtesy of Christa Drake
Christa Drake gives Napolitano's reforms high praise. "Foster
care saved my life," she says.
* In 2003, CPS workers left kids at Marsha Porter's Crisis Nursery
for months on end.
Martha Strachan
In 2003, CPS workers left kids at Marsha Porter's Crisis Nursery
for months on end.
*

BE SURE TO FIND OUT WHERE YOUR CANDIDATES STANDS ON THE ISSUE OF
REFORMING OR ABOLISHING CHILD PROTECTIVE SERVICES ("MAKE YOUR CANDIDATES
TAKE A STAND ON THIS ISSUE.") THEN REMEMBER TO VOTE ACCORDINGLY IF THEIR
"FAMILY UNFRIENDLY" IN THE NEXT ELECTION...