• “Children denied the opportunity to form a consistent relationship with a caregiver in their early years, such as institutionalized children, are at serious risk for developmental problems and long-term personality disorders.”

• Children who grow up in poor quality institutions are more likely to have lower IQ scores and retarded language development.

Children in such institutions are more likely to exhibit anti-social behavior and be unable to form supportive relationships with others. “Even good institutions fail to provide children with long-term, stable affectionate relationships that are critical to later social relations.”

• Even teenagers fare worse in institutions than in other settings. Institutionalized teens fared worse even than teens in foster homes according to one major study.  And a survey of teenagers with a history of long term out-of-home placement found that the teenagers found institutions to be a significantly worse option than their own families, care by relatives, adoption, or even foster care.

The NACAC review aptly summed up the study findings: The teens felt “less loved, less looked after, less trusted, less wanted …Teens described a powerful code of behavior dictated by institutional peergroup subculture, encompassing drugs, sex, and intimidation.”

A review of 100 years of research and medical knowledge concerning orphanages concludes:

Infants and young children are uniquely vulnerable to the medical and psychosocial hazards of institutional care, negative effects that cannot be reduced to a tolerable level even with massive expenditure. Scientific experience consistently shows that, in the short term, orphanage placements put young children at increased risk of serious infectious illness and delayed language development. In the long term, institutionalization in early childhood increases the likelihood that impoverished children will grow into psychiatrically impaired and economically unproductive adults.

The harm of institutionalization occurs even in “good” institutions. But often, institutions don’t stay good for long. Even facilities touted as models in one decade will be exposed as rife with abuse the next.

And the extent of the abuse in Texas is well documented – and vividly illustrated with photos – in Comptroller Strayhorn’s report.

One of the most common problems when children are institutionalized is the misuse and overuse of potent psychiatric medications. That also is a problem in some family foster homes.

We already know that potent psychiatric drugs have been prescribed to Texas foster children as young as three. Says Strayhorn: “I can’t imagine prescribing mind-altering drugs to a three-year-old baby … I also understand that no child needs to be on 14 different drugs, and I severely question … a radiologist in San Antonio prescribing psychotropic drugs to children in El Paso.”

A study of all Texas children on Medicaid receiving psychiatric medications found that for half the children receiving antidepressants and nearly half those on antipsychotics, the symptoms described in the children’s own medical records did not justify the use of the drugs.

Dr. Ben Raimer, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Texas Medical Branch, reviewed available data on medications prescribed for foster children and asked: “…to be perfectly blunt, have these children been ‘medicated’ into compliance for home expectations, or are these children’s behaviors sufficiently aberrant to warrant these medication practices?”  He said “the adoptive father told me that he had noted it to be a fairly common practice…that ‘some’ foster parents sought out medications for children to 1. make them more submissive during care and 2. be able to draw down more financial reimbursement for their care.”

“If these kids act out at all, then they medicate them,” says Vicki Camlin of the DePelchin Children’s Center in Houston.  “I’ve seen this in several families where the kids are on medication, and once they’re returned to the family they don’t need it anymore.”

The children have no parents to protect them. The caseworkers have no personal stake, the way a parent does. Those caseworkers also are desperately overwhelmed.  The institutions that want to use the drugs so dominate the system that they write their own contracts. Using the drugs makes the children easier to manage.

And what is the legal recourse when children are removed?

The law will protect children from needless removal, because every time a caseworker decides to remove a child on the spot, that decision “must be reviewed by a hard-nosed Texas Judge” within a day.

Not quite. Actually, it’s the first working day after removal – and if there is no time then, the hearing can be delayed for two more days. So in fact, if a child is removed after 5:00pm on a Friday it may be up to five or six days before the hearing.

And it doesn’t have to be a full hearing. Under Texas law “The initial hearing may be ex parte and proof may be by sworn petition or affidavit if a full adversary hearing is not practicable.” In other words, the hearing can be held without the accused even having a right to be present – and the “hard nosed Texas judge” need simply accept whatever Child Protective Services says at face value.

And even if the birth parent is given notice and is allowed to show up at the hearing, she is not yet entitled to a court-appointed lawyer if she is indigent.

So at best, at these hearings, on one side is a lawyer for the government who’s had at least 24 hours to review the case and prepare the petition. On the other side is an overwhelmed, impoverished birth parent who will just have to fend for herself.

Presiding is a judge who knows full well that he can hold hundreds of children needlessly in foster care, and while the children may suffer terribly, the judge is safe. Let one child return to a dangerous home and have something go wrong, and the judge’s career may well be over.

Perhaps that explains why a hard-nosed Texas judge took those five children from their grandmother in Fort Worth solely because of housing. Or why another hard-nosed Texas judge took the children of that Houston mother for smoking marijuana to ease the pain of labor. Or why still another hard-nosed Texas judge took the children of the Corpus Christi mother because she had a seizure disorder and was too poor to hire home health aides.

It seems some of those hard-nosed Texas judges get just as squishy-soft as their counterparts in New York City; the ones who freely admitted to a panel of national experts that they regularly approve the removal of children even when they don’t think the child welfare agency has made a case – because they’re too scared to do anything else.46 When it comes to child abuse cases, judges are far more likely to wield rubber stamps than gavels.  As Judge McCown himself acknowledges, there is no real hearing for at least 14 days.

So in truth, CPS has a free shot at any child in Texas for at least two weeks.  By then it’s too late. As Prof. Paul Chill, Associate Dean of the University of Connecticut Law School (and a member of the NCCPR Board of Directors), has written:

   “Once a child is removed, a variety of factors converge to make it very difficult for parents to ever get the child back. One court has referred to this as the "snowball effect." The very focus of court proceedings changes--from whether the child should be removed to whether he or she should be returned. As a practical matter, the parents must now demonstrate their fitness to have the child reunited with them, rather than the state having to demonstrate the need for out-of-home placement. By seizing physical control of the child, the state tilts the very playing field of the litigation. The burden of proof shifts, in effect, if not in law, from the state to the parents.”

Judge McCowan notes that Texas law doesn’t actually require appointment of counsel for indigent parents until the very last stage of a child welfare proceeding – when the state seeks to terminate parental rights. Until then, while their children languish in foster care, the birth parents may well have to go it alone. Judge McCown further says that because counties have to pay for these lawyers, judges often put off appointing them until the last possible moment. And, he says, they are underpaid, which “affects the quality of representation.”

The Costs for these bad Policies:

If the harm the misuse and overuse of institutions does to children isn’t enough, consider the harm to taxpayers. It is a paradox of child welfare that the more harmful an option is to children, the more expensive it is to taxpayers. Thus, safe, proven programs to keep children out of foster homes generally cost less than foster homes. Family foster homes cost less than group homes, and group homes cost less than institutions.

In Texas, holding one child in one “residential treatment center” for a year can cost more than $100,000. The overuse of institutions in Texas is throwing away taxpayer dollars, as well as human lives.

Compounding the problem: Another set of perverse financial incentives. The federal government pays states a bounty of anywhere from $4,000 to $8,000 for every finalized adoption over a baseline number. There is no comparable payment for returning children safely to their own homes.  The federal adoption bounties created both a rush to terminate parental rights and the increased the likelihood of quick-and-dirty, slipshod placements.

Thus, in 2003, 2,444 Texas foster children were adopted. But another 3,786 were still waiting, parental rights terminated, but no adoptive home found.  As this continues, year after year, Texas risks creating a generation of legal orphans, with no ties to birth parents, and little hope of adoption either.  Furthermore, of all the foster child adoptions in Texas since 1997, nearly 9% already have fallen apart. For these children, the “forever family” -- wasn’t.  At this rate, in another five years, the percentage over a decade may be close to 18%.

The current biennial budget calls for spending $1.148 billion to investigate families, take away their children and hold those children in foster care. Another $204 million will go to subsidies for adoptive parents and another $19.6 million will be spent on “purchased services” for foster children and foster parents.

In comparison, less than one-tenth as much -- $100 million -- will go to all forms of prevention – including many prevention schemes, such as meaningless “counseling” and “parent education” programs that, in some cases, actually make problems worse.

Only $32 million will go to a program that is a pale shadow of a real family preservation program. Another $7.2 million in “purchased client service expenditures” help children in their own homes and their birth parents. These figures reflect a 26 percent cut in prevention dollars – and a 15 percent increase for foster care and adoption.

Much of the prevention money actually came from the federal government, in the form of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF). This is the successor to Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), it’s a program meant to support impoverished families.

But for years, Texas has used part of its TANF surplus to support child abuse investigations and foster care. And in the current budget, it got worse. The legislature eliminated TANF funding for several prevention programs, while increasing TANF funds for investigations and foster care.  In other words, the Texas Legislature effectively pulled money out of poor people’s pockets to help subsidize the system that takes their children and the middleclass strangers holding custody of them.

So What Can we do to reform our system?

Policy:

1) While only too glad to institutionalize children, Texas has lagged behind in using one of the best ways to cushion the blow when foster care really is necessary: Placing a child with a relative, often a grandparent.

Nationwide, more than 23 percent of all foster care placements are “kinship care” placements, in which the state or local child welfare agency has legal custody of the child but places the child with a relative instead of a stranger.160 In Illinois, a national leader in kinship care, it’s 37 percent. But in Texas, only 19.8 percent of foster children are in kinship care.

The prejudice against extended families is contradicted by the evidence.  The most extensive effort to track relative placements is in Illinois. That state has found less abuse in placements with relatives than in placements with strangers.

2) The biggest addiction problem in child welfare is not the one that afflicts some birth parents. The biggest addiction problem in child welfare involves well-heeled, well-connected private child welfare agencies with bluechip boards of directors that are addicted to their per-diem payments. And sadly, these agencies are putting their addiction ahead of the children.

Privatization will not save a state any money. On the contrary, before privatization began in 1997, Kansas spent $25 million on foster care and $7 million on adoption. Today, the state spends $91 million on foster care and $33 million on adoption.

We know this because of what happened in Illinois, where changing financial incentives was crucial to the state’s successful reform effort.  Illinois agencies insisted that per-diem payments had no impact on their decisions. They said they truly wished they could find permanent homes for children but, they said, the parents were so very, very dysfunctional and the children’s problems were so very, very intractable.

When Illinois removed the per-diem and rewarded the Private Agencies for keeping children safely in their own homes. They also are rewarded for adoptions. But they are penalized financially if they allow children to languish in foster care. When the financial incentives changed, an amazing thing happened. Suddenly the “intractable” became tractable the “dysfunctional” became functional, the foster care population plummeted, and child safety improved.

Funding:

1) Judge McCown says "I think kids are dying because of the unwillingness to recognize that we have to pay some additional taxes in Texas." He’s probably right.

Based on a calculation which, to the best of our knowledge, was originally performed by NCCPR, using data compiled by the Urban Institute, Judge McCown has pointed out that when the total amount of money spent on child welfare in each state is divided by the number of children in that state, Texas ranks 48th in spending per child.  The figure is for 2000. Data for 2002 have just been released – and Texas’ dismal ranking remains unchanged.

2) Illinois has proven it is possible to remove even fewer children than Texas yet compile an exemplary record for child safety. But they didn’t do it on the cheap. The former head of the Illinois child welfare agency, Jess McDonald told a Texas legislative committee that the reforms “stabilized the once skyrocketing child welfare budget”, but they didn’t bring it down much. While Texas spent $132 per child in 2002 and the national average was $306, Illinois spent $425.

Even the other model state system, Alabama, which has an exemplary record of keeping removals low and children safe, spent more than Texas. Alabama spent $245 per child.

Programs:

Milwaukee vs. the “institutions lobby, report by the Westchester County, N.Y. Journal News:

Wraparound cut the number of Milwaukee children in Residential Treatment Centers (RTCs) by 90 percent, dramatically shortened their stays, reunited hundreds of families, reduced the incidence of crime and saved millions of dollars in treatment costs. It became a national model for treating emotionally disturbed children, offering a more effective and economical means of helping youngsters without the traditional reliance on costly and controversial institutions.

"Wraparound Milwaukee demonstrates that the seemingly impossible can be made possible: Children's care can be seamlessly integrated. The services given to children not only work, in terms of better clinical results, reduced delinquency, and fewer hospitalizations, but the services are also cost-effective," the President's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health said in October. "Imagine the nationwide impact on our juvenile justice system if this program were implemented in every community."

"Residential treatment has had the luxury of basically being the sole tool out there for a very high-risk population, and they've convinced people that the only way to be safe is to have them locked up," said Stephen Gilbertson, clinical program coordinator for Wraparound Milwaukee. "We've shown that's simply not true. We've taken extremely high-risk kids and shown they can live successfully in the community."

Institutions have long argued that their role is crucial because most of the children have no stable homes. But Wraparound advocates say institutions have been too quick to write off families; Wraparound seeks out families and finds ways to make them work.

"I remember meeting with groups of people and folks saying, 'Let's get some reports out that show they (Wraparound) are going to start hurting kids now,' " said Cathy Connolly, president of St. Charles Youth & Family Services, which operates Milwaukee's largest institution.  "Well, nobody could ever bring the reports to the meetings, 'cause there were none that existed that said we were doing anything all that great. We didn't really have any solid anything that demonstrated we were able to fix kids...There were a couple big fears. … The first was, 'How are we going to financially sustain ourselves?' "

As for cost, child welfare consultant Charlotte McCullough told a Texas legislative committee that, between 1996 and 2000, Wraparound Milwaukee actually saved taxpayers $8.3 million.

Patrick Lawler runs Youth Villages, one of the largest residential treatment programs in Tennessee. Several years ago, he began to get the feeling that what he was doing wasn't really helping children.  He commissioned confirmed that his own program wasn’t working, so he rebuilt his program to emphasize keeping families together, and finding foster and adoptive homes for children when that wasn’t possible.

   “In the 28 years I have been entrusted with caring for other people's children, some of whom come from dire circumstances, I have learned firsthand there is no substitute for a child's birth family. I used to think we could do a better job of raising these children.  We know better now. The best way to help a child is to help his or her family.  Extensive research bears this out.” --Patrick Lawler, Executive Director, Youth Villages

3) A worker comes to a filthy home. She knocks on the door. The mother answers. Clearly it’s not the first time a child welfare agency has been there. “If there’s one thing

I don’t need, it’s another social worker telling me what to do,” the mother says. “What I need is someone to help me clean this house.”

To which the caseworker replies: “Should we start with the kitchen?”

The worker at the door is not a child protective services investigator. But she’s not a housekeeper either. Rather, she works for an Intensive Family Preservation Services (IFPS) program, a program which combines “soft” services, such as counseling and parent education with whatever hard services a family might need.  Here’s how it works, when it’s done right:

• The intervention begins when the family is in crisis. An IFPS intervention is designed for families whose children otherwise face imminent removal to foster care.

• The intervention is short -- usually four to six weeks -- but extremely intense. Family preservation has been falsely characterized as a "quick fix." In fact, IFPS workers have caseloads of no more than three, so though they are with a family for no more than six weeks, they can spend several hours at a time with that family -- often equivalent to a year of conventional "counseling."

Furthermore, the end of the intervention does not mean the end of support for the family. The IFPS model requires that the family be linked to less intensive support after the intervention to maintain the gains made by the family.

• The worker spends her or his time in the family's home, so she can see the family in action -- and so the family doesn't have the added burden of going to the worker's office. The worker gives his or her home phone number to the family and is on call 24-hours-a-day.

• The worker begins with the problems the family identifies, rather than patronizing the family and dismissing their concerns.

• Workers are trained in several different approaches to helping families, so they don't become hostile to those families if their first attempts to help don't work.

• But perhaps most important, they’ll “start with the kitchen;” that is, they put a strong emphasis on providing "hard" services, often services needed to ameliorate the worst aspects of poverty.

Family preservation workers help families find day care and job training, and get whatever special educational help the children may require. They teach practical skills and help with financial problems. They even do windows. Faced with a family like the one in the Dallas Morning News story, a family preservation worker will not lecture the parents or demand that they spend weeks in therapy to deal with the deep psychological trauma of which the dirty home is “obviously” just a symptom. The family preservation worker will roll up her or his sleeves and help with the cleaning.

This has a number of benefits:

• First and foremost, poverty is the single best predictor of actual child maltreatment, and as noted elsewhere in this report, broad, vague laws make it easy to confuse poverty itself with "neglect." A few hundred dollars in "flex funds" for a security deposit on an apartment in a better neighborhood may be the most important "therapy" a family needs.

• Once basic survival needs are taken care of, a troubled parent can start to work on other problems. It's a lot easier to concentrate on how to be the best possible parent when you’re not worrying about where your next meal is coming from or whether your family is about to be evicted.

The income status of the family in the Morning News story is not specified, but the location is described as a “middle-class suburb.” Providing concrete help in these cases is important as well.

• By providing such help, family preservation workers set themselves apart from many of the "helping" professionals families have dealt with. They have proven they can deliver. Where everything had seemed hopeless, the family preservation worker has provided hope. That makes the parents more receptive to the worker's ideas for how the parents can do their part to make the family work.

IFPS programs also are money savers. Though the worker has only 3 cases at a time, the intervention at this level of intensity lasts no more than 6 weeks. Over the course of a year, an IFPS worker will see the same number of families as a worker with a typical caseload in much of the country – though not as many as the unconscionable caseloads carried by Texas caseworkers.

But even in Texas, since an IFPS intervention for an entire family costs about 1/3 the amount it usually takes to hold even one child in foster care for a year, the program is actually a money-saver.

But far more important than the savings in money is the savings in lives. These programs save children from the emotional torment of needless removal. And these programs have a far better track record for child safety than foster care.

For example:

The nation’s first IFPS program, Homebuilders, in Washington State, has served 12,000 families since 1982. No child has ever died during a Homebuilders intervention. One child died afterwards, nearly two decades ago.185 Michigan has the nation's largest family preservation program. The program rigorously follows the Homebuilders model. Since 1988, the Michigan family preservation program has served more than 100,000 children. During the first two years, two children died during the intervention. In more than a decade since, there has not been a single fatality.186 In contrast, during a time when Illinois effectively abandoned family preservation, there were five child abuse deaths in foster care in just one year. That’s one reason the state subsequently reversed course.

That worker would have personally helped the family clean the house. While they were scrubbing the floors and getting rid of the cat waste, the worker would be learning about the family, finding out why things had gotten so bad, and what could be done to prevent it from happening again.  She would arrange help for the children’s learning disabilities, and be sure that the parent with the “history of mental illness” was getting help for those problems as well.  At the end of four to six weeks, the family would be linked to less intensive help.

Several rigorous studies have found that IFPS programs safely and effectively reduce foster care placements. Details concerning those studies are available in Issue Papers #1 and #11 at www.nccpr.org.

The odds that the children would have to come into foster care at some later date would be dramatically reduced – a good deal for both the children and taxpayers -- and caseworker Tovar would have more time to find children in real danger.

Although Texas has a program called “Intensified Family Preservation Services,” it does not even come close to matching the Homebuilders model.187 That’s not unusual.  Agencies often “dilute” the model. Caseloads are raised, less time is spent with each family, and the worker is not on call at all times. Then, when the diluted program doesn’t work, all family preservation programs are scapegoated.

And even the diluted Texas program reaches far too few families. DFPS spends only about $16 million per year on the program enough to serve only 2,096 families in 2003.189 About the same number of families probably were served in 2004.

Recommendations:

RECOMMENDATION 1: PREVENTION FIRST. All new money should go to prevention up to the first $500 million in new spending.

RECOMMENDATION 2: Take a “best practices” tour.

   The new director of DFPS, Carey Cockerell was Director of Juvenile Services in Tarrant County, where he did something virtually unheard-of in local government – he turned down state money.  The money would have gone to build more juvenile jails, and Cockerell was convinced that would do more harm than good.  Instead, he poured funds into innovative programs including treatment, community service, restitution – and family preservation (it works in juvenile justice, too). The result: Lower cost per child than Dallas County and a lower recidivism rate.  In other words, he saved money and improved outcomes. His efforts led to Tarrant County receiving a national award as a “guiding light” for juvenile justice reform.  (That same year the same award went to Patrick Lawler of Youth Villages.)

RECOMMENDATION 3: DFPSshould ask the Annie E. Casey Foundation 202 to appoint a panel of national experts to advise the agency on transforming child welfare in Texas.

Exactly this kind of panel led to another remarkable transformation in child welfare – like the dramatic improvements in New York City
.
Another such panel played a crucial role in crafting the innovative reform plan in New Jersey

RECOMMENDATION 4: Make sure that every contract and every subcontract with every “provider” of child welfare services contains financial incentives that encourage those agencies to find safe, permanent homes for children and discourage them from allowing children to languish in foster care. Every contract also must have a “no reject, no eject” clause.

RECOMMENDATION 5: Texas should support efforts in Congress to limit aid for foster care and allow states to divert that money to prevention, and adoption.

In FY 2004, Texas received $120 million in federal aid that could be used for foster care – and only foster care. Another $51 million went exclusively for adoption.

RECOMMENDATION 6: Texas should stop diverting TANF surplus funds from their proper purpose – helping families – to subsidizing child welfare agencies and paying strangers to take care of poor people’s children.

Though such diversion is legal, it is a reprehensible transfer of scarce funds from the poor to the better-off. When TANF is used for foster care it should be for kinship care only.

RECOMMENDATION 7: Establish a careful, rational mechanism for screening calls to the Texas child protection hotline.

Under current law, any report which would, in fact, be child maltreatment were it true automatically is sent on for investigation.

Given how broad and vague the definitions of maltreatment are, this means that any caller’s hunch, or guess about almost anything is screened in. Indeed, Texas screens out reports at a rate less than half the national average and the special report commissioned by Judge Mireles in Bexar County noted that calls which should be screened out, even under these criteria, still are being passed on for investigation.

Hotline operators need a detailed protocol they can use to carefully question callers to determine if there is any reasonable basis for their allegations. And they need careful training concerning what does, and does not, constitute child maltreatment.

RECOMMENDATION 8: As part of a rational screening mechanism, Texas should strengthen its “flexible response” system by diverting cases deemed less serious to private agencies authorized to offer voluntary help.

RECOMMENDATION 9: As part of a rational screening mechanism, replace anonymous reporting with confidential reporting.

There is at least one pending proposal to increase penalties for deliberate false reports of child abuse. But any such proposal is meaningless if a malicious reporter can simply go to a pay phone and make the call anonymously.  Of all the sources of child abuse reports, anonymous reports consistently are the least reliable. They’re almost always wrong.

Anonymous reporting should be replaced by confidential reporting. If someone who may have a grudge or someone who simply may be clueless wants to claim that a neighbor is abusing her child, that person should be required to give the hotline operator his or her name and phone number.  That information still should be kept secret from the accused in almost all cases, but the hotline needs to know. That will immediately discourage false and trivial reports.  And if the accused, in fact, suspects harassment, a mechanism should be available for the accused to seek release of the name of the accuser by petitioning a judge.

It is far safer for children if cases are screened rationally by eliminating the anonymous reports, rather than screen them irrationally based on which file floats to the top of the pile on a caseworker’s desk.

RECOMMENDATION 10: No more “white glove tests.” CPS should get out of the business of critiquing family housekeeping skills. Any reference to neatness, sloppiness, cleanliness, dirt or other home conditions should be excluded from workers’ reports entirely, unless those conditions have a direct impact on children’s health or safety.

There is no field on Earth in which the phrase “cleanliness is next to Godliness” is taken more literally than Child Protective Services – and no field where that obsession does more harm.

Over and over again, CPS workers have overlooked dangers to children because they were so impressed by the housekeeping skills of a parent or foster parent. It is a staple of news coverage: “We never suspected anything – the house was always so neat and clean.”

In one recent case, in another state, a caseworker was enormously impressed with the fact that the home was "practically immaculate, with clean and neatly folded clothing.” As a result, he didn’t notice that her child was starving to death.

Since there is, in fact, not a shred of evidence equating neatness with love, there should be no mention of the cleanliness of a home unless conditions are so bad that they clearly jeopardize the health or safety of the children. And in such cases, there are almost always better alternatives than removing the children – such as helping to clean the home.

RECOMMENDATION 11: Make provision of hard services to ameliorate the worst aspects of poverty a routine part of the work of DFPS.

A crucial step toward keeping children safe and families together is ending the confusion of poverty with child “neglect.” Agencies like DFPS will not be able to do their jobs until CPS stands for child poverty services as well as child protective services.  This does not mean Texas has to end poverty as we know it – though the first state to do so will come closer than any other to eradicating child maltreatment.

Frontline caseworkers need what, in Alabama, are called “flex funds,” a pool of money – perhaps $1,000 per family -- to use on one-shot purchases for whatever that family may need.

Consider how the model child protection system in El Paso County, Colorado, put this approach into practice, as described by the Arizona Republic:

   An oft-repeated example involves a great-aunt in Colorado who took in seven nieces and nephews when their mother no longer could care for them because of drug addiction. Facing eviction, the loss of her car and $5,000 in debt, the great-aunt called child-welfare officials to give up the kids.

   A child-welfare supervisor asked [the head of the human services agency, David] Berns, "I can't give her $5,000, can I?" They worked out how much it would be to place the seven children in foster care for a year: $168,000.

   They got her the $5,000. It was a wise use of money.

RECOMMENDATION 12: Establish a statewide Intensive Family Preservation Services Program that is available to every family that needs it and rigorously follows the model established by the first such program, Homebuilders, in Washington State.

RECOMMENDATION 13: Texas should use state funds to provide the same payments to kinship foster parents as now are given to strangers.

RECOMMENDATION 14: Bring the Family to Family program to Texas.

This Casey Foundation initiative probably is best known for “Team Decisionmaking” (also called Family Group Decision Making) in which, either in an attempt to avert a placement or in the hours immediately afterwards, everyone who knows a particular family and may be able to help – extended family, friends, neighbors, clergy, as well as child welfare agency staff -- meet together to develop a plan to help that family safely stay together.

DFPS has announced that Family Group Decision Making, now in 21 counties, “has been adopted as a statewide initiative” 217 though only about 40 to 45 counties are expected to be included by the end of the 2005 fiscal year.

Family to Family emphasizes bringing foster care to the same neighborhoods as most foster children, so when a child must be placed, he doesn’t lose all his friends or have to change schools. Visits between birth parents and foster children are much easier, and foster parents are encouraged to work as mentors to birth parents instead of seeing themselves as adversaries. Child welfare agencies themselves move from centralized downtown units to neighborhood-based centers. A key goal is reducing group home and institutional placements.

Family to Family reverses that mindset. An independent evaluation found that, where Family to Family was implemented, fewer children were taken away, placements were shorter, and there was less bouncing of children from foster home to foster home.

Most important: Even though cases in which children ultimately were taken away and placed in foster care were more difficult, there was no increase in the recidivism rate, that is, the rate at which children returned home had to be placed in foster care again, and in some locations recidivism decreased.224 That means all this positive change was done while making children safer.

RECOMMENDATION 15: Bring Community Partnerships for Child Protection (CPPC) to Texas.

Family to Family is one of two major national initiatives to rebuild child protective services. The other, similar initiative is called Community Partnerships for Child Protection.

At the heart of the partnership is mobilizing residents of some of the poorest communities in the United States to support each other, watch out for each other, and build trust among themselves and with child protective services.

In Jacksonville, Florida, the partnership brought residents together by first showing that it could help them. Residents got concrete help to ameliorate the worst problems of poverty; then they could help each other.

So when a mother left her young children home alone and was arrested for child neglect, there already were neighbors taking in the children by the time police arrived.

Partnership staff knew the neighbors, and they knew the people at the child welfare agency, so they could persuade the agency the children would be safe this way – and the neighbors would keep an eye on the mother and help her to keep the family together when she got out of jail.

In another case, a family in a housing project was about to be evicted because they couldn’t keep their house clean. Lack of housing often is a cause of child removal. Then a neighbor came forward.

“The two were not friends,” according to a report on the partnership, “but the neighbor said she hated to see a family thrown out on the street.” So she and her son offered to help the mother clean her apartment.

*The approach is producing impressive results.

In Florida’s District 4, a multicounty region which includes Jacksonville, from 1999 through 2002 confirmed cases of child abuse increased by 94 percent. In Duval County, the county of which Jacksonville is a part, they went up by 60 percent.

But in the Partnership sites the number of cases went down by 27 percent. Reabuse of children left in their own homes also went down and serious injuries to children declined by 12 percent.

And there have been similar successes elsewhere:

• Within three years of CPPC implementation in Linn County, Iowa, the reabuse rates dropped from 30 percent to six percent.

• In Jefferson County (Louisville), Kentucky, traditional foster care placement rates have been reduced significantly from 1999 to 2003. The largest change is found in the neighborhood where the Community Partnership program first began, with placement rates dropping by 70 percent.

• When the Partnership began in Peach County, Georgia, about half of the county's substantiated reports of child maltreatment originated in the target community; by September 2003 this number was less than 25 percent. Countywide reports of child abuse and neglect dropped by nine percent with a 55 percent reduction in reabuse cases.

RECOMMENDATION 16: Texas must provide sufficient funding to make drug treatment geared to the needs of parents, usually mothers, available immediately to any parent who wants it.  This must include in-patient programs where parents can live with their children.

In a University of Florida study of children born with cocaine in their systems, one group was placed in foster care, another with birth mothers able to care for them.  After six months, the babies were tested using all the usual measures of infant development: rolling over, sitting up, reaching out. Consistently, the children placed with their birth mothers did better. For the foster children, the separation from their mothers was more toxic than the cocaine.

Due process for families:

RECOMMENDATION 19: Quality legal representation must be available to all parents who must face CPS.

After a worker, acting entirely on her own authority, takes their children, the parents get no lawyer at the initial review.  And the parents may not get a lawyer at all until and unless they are threatened with termination of parental rights.

Even when that lawyer is provided, it is likely to be a grossly overworked, underpaid attorney who probably just met the parent five minutes before the start of a crucial court hearing.

*In Pierce County, Washington, the judge in charge of the county’s juvenile courts was dismayed at the escalating rate of terminations of parental rights – knowing that he was dooming some of the children to a miserable existence in foster care.

   So he persuaded the legislature to provide enough money for defense attorneys to have resources equal to those of the Attorney General’s office, which represents the state child welfare agency in juvenile court. The result: successful reunification of families increased by more than 50 percent.

   And that’s not because lawyers “got their clients off.”

   Where the parents are innocent, lawyers have time to prove it. Where there is a problem in the home that must be corrected, the lawyers have time to sit down with the parents, explain early on what they are up against and guide them through the process of making whatever changes are needed.

   Between 2000, when the program began, and 2003, of 144 cases in the program in which families have been reunified, not one has been brought back to court.

   “These children aren’t coming back,” says Washington State Supreme Court Justice Bobbie Bridge, a supporter of the program, “and we do get them back when we make bad reunification decisions.”

   The National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges is publicizing the results, and even the State Attorney General, who has to face the better-prepared lawyers, supports the project and wants it expanded.

The problem actually is compounded if the child is assigned a Court-Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) – almost always a white, middle-class person investigating the life of a poor, often minority family.

These volunteers are generally dedicated and mean well, but there is strong evidence that they have been unable to overcome biases built into the CASA model.

*A major national study of the CASA program produced some disturbing findings:

• The only major differences between children who had CASAs and children who didn’t is that the children with CASAs are far more likely to be torn from their birth parents and thrown into foster care, and far less likely either to be reunified with birth parents once in foster care or placed with relatives instead of strangers. But this did not improve child safety.

• In cases that had been closed by the conclusion of the study, children with CASAs were nearly five times more likely to be placed in foster care than children without CASAs. In cases still open during the study period, children with CASAs were more than twice as likely to be in foster care.

• Furthermore, in cases still open during the study period, children with CASAs were nearly four times less likely to be reunified with their birth parents than children without CASAs. And they were more than three times more likely to be in foster care with strangers instead of relatives.

Even more alarming, CASAs, who's employees, the national study found, are 90 percent white, spent an average of 90 minutes less on a case if the children involved were African-American.

RECOMMENDATION 20: The State of Texas should stop funding CASA programs and refuse to pass through any federal funds for these programs. Furthermore, judges should not appoint CASA volunteers to any cases unless that particular CASA program can provide significantly better, independently verifiable statistics concerning effectiveness and impartiality than those found in the national study.

Currently, Texas uses at least $4 million in federal funds to assist various CASA Programs.

RECOMMENDATION 21: All interviews conducted by CPS personnel in the course of child maltreatment investigations – not just interviews with children – should be, at a minimum, audiotaped.  For interviews conducted at CPS offices or similar settings, videotape is preferable.  Information from any interview that is not taped should be inadmissible in all court proceedings.

Texas law already encourages the taping of some interviews. But it has three huge loopholes:

• It applies only to cases of physical and sexual abuse, not neglect.

• It applies only to interviews with children, not the adults involved in the case.

• It says that interviews don’t have to be taped whenever CPS finds “good cause” not to do the taping.233 That turns the requirement into merely a suggestion.

In an age of tiny, unobtrusive microcassette tape recorders, anything less than requiring that all interviews be taped is very, very dangerous to children.

A former family court judge on Staten Island, New York wrote this just last month:

  While I found the majority of child care agencies to be caring and trustworthy, there were enough instances of deceptive agency reports that I decided to order independent investigations of every agency adoption case that came before me. It's a course of action that remains prudent today.

If CPS thinks that kind of thing never happens in Texas, then let the agency prove it. Tape all the interviews, and then the people of Texas will know. Indeed, CPS should welcome this requirement, since isn’t just a way to protect the innocent – it’s a way to convict the guilty. A defense lawyer can’t successfully claim that a child was manipulated or a parent’s comments were distorted if there is a tape that proves otherwise.

RECOMMENDATION 22: Reverse the current presumption that most child welfare records are closed, and allow DFPS to comment freely on any case made public by any other source.

To its credit, Texas is among the approximately 13 states that allow the press and public into court hearings in child abuse cases.

However, it must be expanded to include all cases, with the provision to keep parts of information private when they could damage a child.  No longer could CPS say it wished it could talk but it could not. Now reporters would know the agency was stonewalling. Conversely, when CPS is right, it’s important that the public know it, and the agency have the right to vindicate itself.

RECOMMENDATION 23: The standard of proof in all court proceedings should be raised from the current “preponderance of the evidence” standard to “clear and convincing.” The standard also should apply when a worker decides to “confirm” alleged maltreatment.

There are few punishments one can inflict on a child that are more severe than needlessly tearing away his family. And yet, when it’s time for courts to decide to place a child in foster care, they do not apply the standard used to convict someone accused of murdering a child, “beyond a reasonable doubt,” or even the middle standard, “clear and convincing” evidence. Instead, courts in Texas and most other states apply the lowest standard of proof, “preponderance of the evidence,” the same standard used to decide which insurance company pays for a fender-bender.

RECOMMENDATION 24: Abolish legal “ransom.”

That’s not what it’s called, or course. But requiring impoverished birth parents to dig themselves deeper into poverty in order to help reimburse the state that took away their children for the cost of “care” is, in fact, a legal form of ransom. It punishes innocent families, it punishes the taxpayers it is intended to help, and, worst of all, it punishes children.

Because the burden of proof in child welfare proceedings is so low, this provision inevitably punishes many innocent families.

For the same reason, ransom actually costs taxpayers more. For every extra day a child is held in foster care because the birth parents haven’t paid their “share” of th costs, the state has to foot the entire bill.  The birth parents wind up in a deeper and deeper hole and the state winds up paying more and more.

Even if the birth parents scrape together the money to get their child back, the payments only make it harder to get out of poverty. Poverty often creates stress that leads to actual child abuse, or poverty itself is confused with neglect – so the ransom increases the chances of actual child abuse and/or having the child taken away again.  Once again, you harm the child – and cost the state more money.

RECOMMENDATION 25: In all places where it appears, the phrase “best interests of the child” should be replaced with the phrase “least detrimental alternative.”

Currently, almost all state laws involving custody of children are liberally sprinkled with the phrase “best interests of the child.”  It says we are wise enough always to know what is best and capable always of acting on what we know. In fact, those are dangerous assumptions that can lead us to try to fix what isn’t broken or make worse what is.

The phrase “least detrimental alternative” is a constant reminder that we must always balance the harm that we may think a family is doing against the harm of intervening.  It is exactly the shot of humility that every child welfare system needs.