A childcare group assailed Arizona’s child welfare system this month, saying it is in a “state of perennial panic.”
The Virginia-based National Coalition for Child Protection Reform charged that the state is taking too many children away from their families, overwhelming social workers with too many cases and unnecessarily exposing kids to the trauma of a “toxic intervention,” such as placing them in foster care.
“That is at the root of the other problems that plague the child welfare system in this state,” said Richard Wexler, NCCPR’s executive director.
A state agency spokeswoman acknowledged that home removals had increased but maintained that significant progress has been made in recent years to curb the trend. A former chairman of a foster care review board also came to the defense of Child Protective Services, the state arm in charge of looking after disadvantaged children in Arizona. He said NCCPR’s Aug. 20 report discounted other types of neglect, such as the parents’ inability to provide for basic supervision and nurturing to their kids.
The head of a child advocacy group in Arizona, also criticized by NCCPR, said she agrees with some of some of NCCPR’s recommendations, primarily on the need to provide more opportunity for supportive services for families, but insisted that child safety is the priority.
In a press briefing at the Capitol, Wexler blamed Gov. Janet Napolitano’s statements made days after she came to office for the surge in home removals between 2002 and 2004. During that period, the number of children removed from home soared to 40 percent, the largest two-year spike in the country at the time.
But the move did not necessarily result in fewer child abuse fatalities, according to the NCCPR.
“A lot of states have those spikes in the wake of highly publicized cases or demands by politicians. But in most states after a couple of years, people calm down,” Wexler said. “Arizona is in a state of perennial panic… Entries into care have stayed at that same high level ever since.
“I would not say she (Napolitano) was ill motivated. I think the governor absolutely meant well. I think she had only the best interest of children in mind. Not only that, I think that she knows that she made a big mistake, and if she had to do it all over again, she would never have made those comments,” he said.
Proof of that, for Wexler, is the governor’s “sudden change” of rhetoric beginning May 2003, when constant talk of removing more kids was supposedly substituted with talk of protecting them without taking them away from homes.
In her weekly briefing, Napolitano answered points raised by the coalition.
She said a key reform made during a special session on child welfare was to say CPS “could, in fact, take child safety into account in making its decision about removal or non-removal.”
Child safety was not a statutory criterion before that, Napolitano said.
“In my view — you can look at overall statistics — but the key decision a caseworker has to make is not where does a particular case fit in a statistics, but where does it fit in terms of child safety≠ Are they removing the child because of concern about the child’s safety≠ Are they concerned about whether we will be able to provide adequate support services to keep the child in the home≠ Or, can they leave a child in the home and feel fairly confident that the child will be physically safe≠” she said.
“I think you have to look case by case and then you can look overall,” she said, adding, “I think taking those kind of isolated statistics out of thin air without attachment to particular cases is not helpful.”
Asked if she were prepared to ask for more funds for in-home services, the governor said a good case can be made regarding the need for more resources for things like substance abuse treatment.
She said she hopes when the Legislature conducts its child welfare hearings, lawmakers will begin to look at issues beyond just CPS.
NCCPR: Fatalities from child abuse steadily increased
Child abuse fatalities increased to 41 in 2004 from 36 in 2002. In 2005, that number was 50, according to NCCPR.
A November 2006 report by the Arizona Child Fatality Review Program confirmed the 2005 number, but the proportion of childhood deaths due to maltreatment had not changed during the past four years — that was 4 percent of total child fatalities each year. Some 88 percent of maltreatment-related deaths were children less than five.
The Arizona Capitol Times was unable to get DES statistics on child abuse deaths in the years mentioned by NCCPR. Other figures were also not immediately available, and the numbers cited in this article might not be comparable.
DES spokeswoman Liz Barker emphasized that a new program to provide in-home service is slowing the numbers.
A 2006 DES report said 9,906 children were placed in out-of-home care on Sept. 30, 2005, a 12 percent increase over the 8,839 children in similar condition on the corresponding day the year before. It was as high as 20 percent in 2003. A recent DES division report said various strategies have slowed that number to less than 2 percent in 2006.
“In fact, since September 2005, the number of children in out-of-home care has decreased by almost 1.3 percent,” the division report said.
“What that does,” Barker said, referring to their in-home services program, “is that if our investigation determines that a child is at risk of harm, instead of removing the child, we can put in place comprehensive support services and increased monitoring so that that child can remain safely at home while parents work on their issues of parenting.”
“Secondly, Arizona was selected by the Annie E. Casey Foundation for their Family to Family initiative as an anchor site. That means we were one of 10 states selected nationally to be the role model for other states in how to engage communities in better supporting families to prevent the need for removal,” Barker said.
An executive summary by the DES Division of Children, Youth and Families reported strides in child safety and well-being, which appeared to strengthen Barker’s statement that progress is being made in the area of keeping children at home.
The department’s findings between October 2006 and March 2007 include the following:
• Fewer young children were in group homes and shelters, a 21 percent decrease.
• Children also spent fewer days in shelter care. The number of children in shelter care for longer than 21 days has decreased by 37 percent.
• Monthly visits to children in out-of-home care are at their highest level in four years. This has been an area where the division has “historically struggled with.”
Also, between March 2005 and March 2007, the number of children served safely at home increased by 4 percent; since July 2003 that number had soared to 67 percent.
Nation’s child welfare system ‘requires a reexamination’
The Annie E. Casey Foundation is a policy advocacy organization championing vulnerable children and families. It provides grants to agencies, groups and communities helping disadvantaged children.
The foundation recently released its 2007 Kids Count Data Book, which said protecting these children “requires a reexamination of the purpose and the goals of the nation’s child welfare systems.”
Half a century ago, doctors, researchers and the media showed that some children faced unacceptable risks at home. They documented abuses, which in turn led to a “legislative revolution at the federal and state levels.” Shielding a child from harm became the overriding mission of children welfare work, accord
ing to data book.
Today, the goal of getting a child “out of harm’s way” remains central to understanding the children welfare system, it said.
“But the harsh truth is that simply removing children from dangerous homes does not, by itself, ensure that they will receive the protection, nurturance, structure and stability that they need to grow up healthy and successful,” the data book said. “Too often, the opposite is true. For many children, family separation is hurtful and traumatic — even when the family has consistently not met their needs. And for far too many, their experience in the child welfare system only compounds this trauma.”
The data book added: “Because the immediate goal is to provide children with the first available safe place to live, systems often require kids to move to a new and unfamiliar neighborhood and a new school — which means that they not only lose a connection to their family, but also to the friends, relatives, pastors, teachers, coaches and neighbors who have played important and positive roles in their young lives.”
More than 2 million children are investigated for abuse and neglect each year in the nation. About half are found to have been abused. Of this number, about 10 percent end up in foster care.
Also, children often stayed in foster care for about two years. Some 60 percent of them eventually return home, 15 percent get adopted, and the rest “age out” of foster care.
During the Aug. 20 presentation, NCCPR’s Wexler detailed troubles in Arizona’s childcare welfare system and offered several recommendations, including opening court hearings and asking the Legislature to pump some $54 million in new child welfare spending. He was joined by former lawmaker Laura Knaperek, who has also worked on child welfare, and Sen. Linda Gray, R-10.
“But every penny should go into safe, proven alternatives to substitute care. No new money should go to taking away children and holding them in foster care,” the group said.
MIT study: children fare better overall when left at home
The NCCPR cited a Massachusetts Institute of Technology study that compared foster children with comparably maltreated children left in their own homes. The study had looked into the cases of more than 15,000 children.
The MIT study advised caution in interpreting results but said they “(suggested) that children assigned to investigators with higher removal rates are more likely to be placed in foster care themselves, and they are found to have higher delinquency rates, along with some evidence of higher teen birth rates, and lower earnings.”
The results also suggested that “children on the margin of placement tend to have better outcomes when they remain at home, especially for older children.”
The NCCPR said: “Children left in their own homes are far less likely to become pregnant as teenagers, far less likely to wind up in the juvenile justice system and far more likely to hold a job for at least three months than comparably maltreated children who were placed in foster care.”
Removing children from their homes should be done “sparingly and in small doses,” the group added.
“There is nothing more important than protecting children,” Knaperek said in a press release. Knaperek had joined Wexler during the briefing. “However, the philosophy of ‘when in doubt, remove the child’ is a recipe for disaster. It puts a target on children for physical, emotional and educational risk,” she said.
Bruce Brannan, a former chairman of the State Foster Care Review Board, defended CPS and described a picture different than the one offered by NCCPR.
He said removing the child from home is a result of numerous steps and documentation, and is not the decision of one social worker alone. The review board often encountered cases of parents who abandoned children, refused drug treatment, endangered kids through violence toward each other, and who are “completely unable to provide the most basic supervision or nurturing for their young children.”
“The report released by the Virginia-based National Coalition for Child Protection Reform this week discounts these types of neglect,” he said.
Beth Rosenberg of the Children’s Action Alliance said the state has, over years, increased funding of in-home services. The Joint Budget Legislative Committee placed the funding hike at about $12.4 million for next year. It also noted that based on data available by March of this year, in-home cases have increased by 17 percent compared with the previous year.
“There has been an effort to keep as many children in their homes as possible. The department is also involved in the Family to Family initiative throughout the state,” Rosenberg said. “It is really trying to work with families and their communities to provide supportive services so children can stay in their homes, in their communities or with their relatives.”
“But we believe that safety and protection of the children is the No. 1 priority,” she added.
Her group’s view on foster care is that all factors should be considered. If services can be provided to the family and parents are receptive and are engaged in these services, then children should be kept at home.
In many cases, though, there is not much choice, according to her.
Kris Jacober, a foster mom and president of Arizona Association for Foster and Adoptive Parents, wrote the Capitol Times to say CPS has many problems, but removing too many children, in her experience, is “not one of them.”
“When I read articles that say that ‘children are suffering the agony of needless foster care,’ it does not match up with my experiences,” she said.
“Over the past six years our family has fostered 10 children. Only one has gone home. The rest are now safely in the custody of their loving relatives and adoptive families. I’m no expert, but I can’t think of one child we have fostered over the past six years who would have done ‘better at home’ with his biological parents,” she said.
In its report, the NCCPR also said reforms have also been frustrated by a left-right stalemate.
“Conservatives think DES can be stopped from needlessly taking away more children by starving the agency,” it said. “But when liberals wring more money out of the Legislature, they throw almost all of it away on hiring more workers to take away more children.”
Spending more versus spending smarter
The result is that the state ends up with the same system, only bigger.
The group urged the left to “spend smarter” even as they fight for more funding.
To the right, the group said it should “spend more.”
“Those opposed to more spending point out that there is no automatic correlation between high spending and a good child welfare system. But that is only half the story,” it said. “There is a correlation between low spending and a bad child welfare system.”
The Legislature allocated $1.8 billion to DES for the current fiscal year; up from about $1.7 billion last year.
NCPPR also recommended:
• Accelerating the reduction in the use of shelters, group homes and other institutions.
• Creating an institutional provider of defense counsel for families with support staff to do their own investigations and recommend alternatives to CPS case plans.
Sen. Gray, who had sponsored the NCCPR briefing, said she wasn’t so sure about the $54 million in additional child welfare spending recommended by Wexler. “But I’m willing to put more money into the services for parents to be able to work with their children and not be under the stress that causes them to abuse
their children.”
Gray said she will push for legislation to open court hearings.
“I think the media has been responsible in not exposing victims, in the newspapers, and I hope that would continue,” she said.
Asked what would be the benefit of that, she said: “It opens to everybody to be able to find out what’s going on in Arizona concerning children and the courts.”
Researcher Tasya Grabenstein contributed to this report.