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Paying the price of panic in Texas foster care
Paying the price of panic in Texas foster care
http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/opinion/14947116.htm By RICHARD WEXLER Special to the Star-Telegram After sifting millions of Medicaid claims and other pieces of data, state Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn has painted a devastating portrait of Texas foster care. For all the talk of "reform," the system is worse than ever. State officials say Strayhorn is politically motivated. Maybe she is. She also happens to be right. And that should come as no surprise. The real tragedy of Strayhorn's findings is that they were entirely predictable. In fact, our organization essentially forecast them in the report we released on Texas child welfare in January 2005. We argued that Texas was in the midst of a foster-care panic -- a sudden spike in removals of children from their homes in response to highly publicized deaths of children "known to the system." We argued that many of those children were taken from parents who were neither brutally abusive nor hopelessly addicted. Instead, their poverty had been confused with "neglect." Worst of all, we said, all those children needlessly removed from their homes would distract caseworkers from finding children in real danger. We said Texas needed to pour new money into safe, proven alternatives to tearing children from their parents. If, instead, it just hired more caseworkers, the new caseworkers would chase after the new cases, and Texans would be left merely with a larger version of the same lousy system. But the Legislature opted to virtually ignore alternatives to foster care in favor of an approach that can be boiled down to "Take the child and run." Strayhorn's findings reveal the result: the same lousy system, only bigger. The number of children taken from their parents in Texas shot up 30 percent in a single year -- from 13,431 in fiscal 2004 to 17,428 in fiscal 2005. That probably will turn out to be the worst foster-care panic in any state in 2005. This also means that, even when the poverty rates of the two states are factored in, Texas is taking away children at a rate more than 20 percent higher than Illinois. But it is Illinois that is, relatively speaking, a national model. As that state's foster care population plummeted, independent, court-appointed monitors found that child safety improved. Rather than learn from the Illinois experience, Texas opted for the same take-the-child-and-run approach that has failed all over the country. And who pushed hardest for more of the same? My fellow liberal, former Judge Scott McCown, director of the Center for Public Policy Priorities. McCown is a man of noble purpose and pure motive. But whisper the words "child abuse" in some liberals' ears, and they'll support infringements on civil liberties that would make John Ashcroft blush. McCown has the solutions flat wrong. There is a detailed discussion of McCown's errors in an appendix to our Texas report, which is available at www.nccpr.org. McCown has been campaigning relentlessly to tear more children from their parents for nearly a decade. The first time he succeeded (in 1999), removals of children shot up 27 percent, eating up hundreds of millions in new spending that was supposed to improve the system. Sound familiar? But in child welfare, nothing succeeds like failure. So when child abuse fatalities were in the news again in 2005, McCown again told the Legislature and state officials to jump. And, afraid of being labeled soft of child abuse, they replied: "How high?" Now another panic is eating up the new dollars that were supposed to fix the system. And what is the Department of Family and Protective Services reduced to doing in response to Strayhorn's revelations about the price of panic? Debating whether conditions for Texas children are, as Strayhorn says, even worse than before or merely no better. DFPS responds to Strayhorn's specific findings about deaths in foster care by saying that some deaths were not related to abuse or neglect. DFPS may regret suggesting such a comparison -- because even if you count only the 11 deaths in foster care attributable to abuse or neglect, that's about 10 times the child abuse death rate of the general Texas population. And that assumes that the state's official figure of 11 is accurate. Whether to call a death neglect or an accident often is a judgment call, and when the state is investigating itself, there is a strong incentive to check the "accident" box. Fatalities are not, in fact, the best way of measuring safety -- for a reason for which we all should be grateful. Though each is a tragedy, the raw number of deaths in foster care is small enough to fluctuate because of random chance. But there is a mountain of other evidence, much of it cited in NCCPR's Texas report, that the overall rate of abuse in foster care is far higher than in the general population, and far higher than generally realized. For example, one recent study of foster care alumni from systems better than the one in Texas found that one-third said they'd been abused by a foster parent or another adult in a foster home. The same study found that only 20 percent of foster care alumni could be said to be doing well. But Strayhorn also makes a crucial error. She repeatedly refers to children as being even worse off in Texas foster care than they were with their birth parents. In other words, she maintains, children go only from bad to worse. That reinforces false stereotypes about birth parents. In fact, many children suffer no maltreatment at all at home -- they suffer only from poverty. They are not abused until they are forced into foster care. How long will Texas officials blindly follow a policy that says the primary solution to family problems is to shovel children into a system that churns out walking wounded four times out of five? How many more Texas children will pay the price of panic? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Richard Wexler is executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform. www.nccpr.org |
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Paying the price of panic in Texas foster care
Honkey Dorie wrote:
Paying the price of panic in Texas foster care http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/opinion/14947116.htm By RICHARD WEXLER Special to the Star-Telegram After sifting millions of Medicaid claims and other pieces of data, state Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn has painted a devastating portrait of Texas foster care. For all the talk of "reform," the system is worse than ever. State officials say Strayhorn is politically motivated. Maybe she is. She also happens to be right. And that should come as no surprise. The real tragedy of Strayhorn's findings is that they were entirely predictable. In fact, our organization essentially forecast them in the report we released on Texas child welfare in January 2005. We argued that Texas was in the midst of a foster-care panic -- a sudden spike in removals of children from their homes in response to highly publicized deaths of children "known to the system." We argued that many of those children were taken from parents who were neither brutally abusive nor hopelessly addicted. Instead, their poverty had been confused with "neglect." Worst of all, we said, all those children needlessly removed from their homes would distract caseworkers from finding children in real danger. We said Texas needed to pour new money into safe, proven alternatives to tearing children from their parents. If, instead, it just hired more caseworkers, the new caseworkers would chase after the new cases, and Texans would be left merely with a larger version of the same lousy system. But the Legislature opted to virtually ignore alternatives to foster care in favor of an approach that can be boiled down to "Take the child and run." Strayhorn's findings reveal the result: the same lousy system, only bigger. The number of children taken from their parents in Texas shot up 30 percent in a single year -- from 13,431 in fiscal 2004 to 17,428 in fiscal 2005. That probably will turn out to be the worst foster-care panic in any state in 2005. This also means that, even when the poverty rates of the two states are factored in, Texas is taking away children at a rate more than 20 percent higher than Illinois. But it is Illinois that is, relatively speaking, a national model. As that state's foster care population plummeted, independent, court-appointed monitors found that child safety improved. Rather than learn from the Illinois experience, Texas opted for the same take-the-child-and-run approach that has failed all over the country. And who pushed hardest for more of the same? My fellow liberal, former Judge Scott McCown, director of the Center for Public Policy Priorities. McCown is a man of noble purpose and pure motive. But whisper the words "child abuse" in some liberals' ears, and they'll support infringements on civil liberties that would make John Ashcroft blush. McCown has the solutions flat wrong. There is a detailed discussion of McCown's errors in an appendix to our Texas report, which is available at www.nccpr.org. McCown has been campaigning relentlessly to tear more children from their parents for nearly a decade. The first time he succeeded (in 1999), removals of children shot up 27 percent, eating up hundreds of millions in new spending that was supposed to improve the system. Sound familiar? But in child welfare, nothing succeeds like failure. So when child abuse fatalities were in the news again in 2005, McCown again told the Legislature and state officials to jump. And, afraid of being labeled soft of child abuse, they replied: "How high?" Now another panic is eating up the new dollars that were supposed to fix the system. And what is the Department of Family and Protective Services reduced to doing in response to Strayhorn's revelations about the price of panic? Debating whether conditions for Texas children are, as Strayhorn says, even worse than before or merely no better. DFPS responds to Strayhorn's specific findings about deaths in foster care by saying that some deaths were not related to abuse or neglect. DFPS may regret suggesting such a comparison -- because even if you count only the 11 deaths in foster care attributable to abuse or neglect, that's about 10 times the child abuse death rate of the general Texas population. And that assumes that the state's official figure of 11 is accurate. Whether to call a death neglect or an accident often is a judgment call, and when the state is investigating itself, there is a strong incentive to check the "accident" box. Fatalities are not, in fact, the best way of measuring safety -- for a reason for which we all should be grateful. Though each is a tragedy, the raw number of deaths in foster care is small enough to fluctuate because of random chance. But there is a mountain of other evidence, much of it cited in NCCPR's Texas report, that the overall rate of abuse in foster care is far higher than in the general population, and far higher than generally realized. For example, one recent study of foster care alumni from systems better than the one in Texas found that one-third said they'd been abused by a foster parent or another adult in a foster home. The same study found that only 20 percent of foster care alumni could be said to be doing well. But Strayhorn also makes a crucial error. She repeatedly refers to children as being even worse off in Texas foster care than they were with their birth parents. In other words, she maintains, children go only from bad to worse. That reinforces false stereotypes about birth parents. In fact, many children suffer no maltreatment at all at home -- they suffer only from poverty. They are not abused until they are forced into foster care. Nonsense. Wexler's language, as always, is full of limiting qualifiers, rather than solid data. Notice in the sentence, "In fact, many children suffer no maltreatment at all at home," the limiter, "many." How does that actually relate to the number of children that do come into state foster care? Who are these children that are not abused but taken into care? Are they another "many?" How long will Texas officials blindly follow a policy that says the primary solution to family problems is to shovel children into a system that churns out walking wounded four times out of five? How many more Texas children will pay the price of panic? You have to accept the weak and carefully qualified (by foggy words like "many") as being a valid premise to presume that the children in the system were not abused prior to entering at a rate NOT 4 to 5 times the population. Usually that ARE. "Many" is a muddy water term. An interesting and much needed experimental model was tried out in Illinois, to intervene in drug and poverty effected families. Some title 4E monies were redirected to this project....the famous, "put the money into prevention services" argument. The outcome? http://cfrcwww.social.uiuc.edu/pubs/...nterimeval.pdf .... "SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS Substance abuse is a major problem in child welfare. It is estimated that the abuse of alcohol and other drugs not only increases the risk of child maltreatment, but delays and often obstructs efforts to reunify children and families. The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services applied for a Title IV-E waiver in June 1999 and approval was granted by ACF for a fiveyear demonstration on September 29, 1999. The purpose of this demonstration project is to improve permanency outcomes for children of parents with substance abuse problems. To achieve this purpose, Recovery Coaches assist parents with obtaining AODA treatment services and negotiating departmental and judicial requirements associated with drug recovery and permanency planning. This report serves as an interim update and evaluation of the progress of the Illinois AODA waiver. Eligible families for the demonstration include foster care cases opened on or after April 28, 2000 in Chicago and suburban Cook County. To qualify for the project, parents in substance affected families were referred to the Juvenile Court Assessment Program (JCAP) at the time of their Temporary Custody hearing or at any time within 90 days of the hearing. JCAP staff conducted AODA assessments and referred families for treatment, if indicated. The parents that were randomly assigned to the control group received traditional substance abuse services. This was not a “no treatment” control group. The parents that were randomly assigned to the demonstration group received traditional services plus the services of a Recovery Coach. The Recovery Coach worked with the parent, child welfare caseworker, and AODA treatment agency to remove barriers to treatment, engage the parent in treatment, provide outreach to re-engage the parent if necessary, and provide ongoing support to the parent and family through the duration of the child welfare case. It was hypothesized that Recovery Coaches would positively affect key child welfare outcomes (e.g. permanency). More specifically, the evaluation focused on the following four research questions (1) Are parents in the demonstration group more likely to access and complete AODA treatment? (2) Are children in the demonstration group more likely to be safely reunified with their parents? (3) Do children in the demonstration group spend less time in foster care? (4) Are families in the demonstration group less likely to experience subsequent maltreatment? Treatment access: the demonstration group is more likely to access substance abuse treatment (60% control vs. 69% demonstration). Similarly, there is additional evidence to suggest that these same clients are accessing substance services more quickly (median days: 28 control vs. 14 demonstration). We are currently unable to report on rates of treatment completion. Reunification: only 6.0% of the children in the control group and 8.4% of the children in the demonstration group were living in the home of their parents. This difference is not statistically significant. Regarding permanency goals, the majority of children in both the demonstration and control group have “return home” as their permanency goal (69% vs. 75% respectively). 48 Length of time in substitute care placement: children in the demonstration group experienced fewer days in foster care relative to the children in the control group (282 for the demonstration group vs. 309 days for the control group). It should be noted that there were no differences between the demonstration and control groups in terms of the number of foster care placements (3.67 days for the demonstration group vs. 3.79 days for the control group). Safety: there were no significant differences between the rates of subsequent allegations of maltreatment. The rates of subsequent maltreatment are quite low (4%) for both the demonstration and control group. In closing, the demonstration is achieving some of its stated objectives withregards to access to substance abuse treatment (demonstration group morelikely to access treatment) and with regards to time to first treatment episode(demonstration group accesses substance abuse treatment more quickly).However, we do not see major differences between the control anddemonstration groups with regards to reunification or safety. Given thedifficulty and amount of time associated with substance abuse recovery(especially for parents with extensive history of substance abuse), thesefindings are not entirely surprising. Many parents in the project have chronicproblems with alcohol and drugs. The repeated delivery of substance exposedinfants indicates the seriousness of such problems. Thus, it is possible thatthese families require additional time to recover and reunify. Despite thedifficulties and length of time associated with recovery, we anticipate that thetimely entry into care and increased participation rates will eventuallytranslate into higher rates of program completion and reunification. " ... My challenge is to reconcile the claim that children are better off with their parents than in foster care, in the state of Illinois given that parents where the children came from did NOT respond successfully to intervention. And, in addition, if the children would have been safe residing at home instead of in foster care, why could the parents NOT respond to intervention? The answer, of course is that Wexler is mistaken. They were NOT un-abused children. And this, folks, is the model he held up, the state of Illinois. http://www.state.il.us/dcfs/child/index.shtml .... "Approximately 26.4 percent of all reports are "indicated" or confirmed after investigations are completed. Of the 104,258 child reports taken in Fiscal Year 2004, 27,508 were indicated as victims of abuse or neglect. Indicated reports of child abuse or neglect are kept by the Department for a minimum of five years. Indicated reports of death or sexual penetration are kept for 50 years, while reports involving serious physical injury are kept for 20 years. Unfounded reports are retained for a shorter period of time varying from 30 days to one year. The number of children reported to the state's Child Abuse Hotline nearly doubled between Fiscal Years 1986 and 1995. In Fiscal Year 1986, 70,425 children were reported to the Hotline as abused or neglected. The highest number recorded was in Fiscal Year 1995, with 139,720 children reported abused or neglected. The number of reports taken since that time has gradually declined to a low of 97,428 child reports taken in Fiscal Year 2003, then rose to 104,248 in Fiscal Year 2004 and 111,711 in Fiscal Year 2005." ... Whatever the policies are about foster placement it is NOT effecting the actual rate of child abuse in Ill. So the argument is a pile of crap. AND if you look at: http://www.state.il.us/dcfs/foster/index.shtml You will see that the decline in rates of foster placement had, just like the most of the country, began declining long long before any "program" to reduce placement had taken place. In fact, the high water year, (true all over the country) was 1996...with steady declines since. Big, DEAL. This is what I mean by cherry picking...and the concealing of OTHER RELEVANT DATA to create a false impression and carry an argument that is, sadly, full of holes. The gradual defunding of child protection (NOT child welfare which includes prevention) defunds the area where the pain is being felt by the child. Where the abuses take place. All it will do is create, for a time, a false impression (just like this example of Illinois) that something 'wonderful is happening' with the reduction in foster care placement. No, nothing wonderful is happening. Except child abuses are being swept under the carpet. Even Illinois does it: "DCFS has taken steps to reduce the number of children who require substitute care. Through new early intervention services, called Front End Redesign, families are given help immediately after their needs become apparent, even before a child abuse or neglect investigation is completed. These services may help prevent the need for a child to be placed into substitute care. In accordance with state and federal laws, an increased emphasis has been placed on early permanency that includes a child's return home, adoption, or guardianship. At its height in Fiscal Year 1997, 51,331 Illinois children were living in substitute care. Because of an increased emphasis on early intervention and permanency services such as adoption, that number has declined to 17,415 children in February 2006 -- a 62 percent decline compared to June 1998." Consider the study of how front end services actually worked. They didn't. I suspect we are seeing a rush to send children home to reabuse. Reduce the state response to reports of reabuse and viola! You have your magic. Rabbit from a hat with a false bottom. The truth that is being hidden? The claim that these children in state care were not abused before hand by their parents? Read: http://www.childabuse.com/fs14.htm -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Richard Wexler is executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform. www.nccpr.org Wexler has been singing this song for years. It's his trademark. And he does it by being a cherry picking journalist, not a scientific researcher. For instance there is no mention, when remarking on the better child safety in Illinois (while trying to link it to fewer children in out of home - foster - care), of employment rates. Every responsible researcher in child welfare KNOWS the two are linked. When joblessness goes up, so does child abuse and neglect. When it goes down, child abuse follows. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...=Google+Search Illinois was enjoying a remarkable reduction in unemployment. This is the kind of 'reporting' I consider irresponsible. -- "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well armed lamb contesting the vote." - Benjamin Franklin (or someone else) |
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