Grabbing the Wrong End of the Stick on Educational Stability for Foster Youth

van For decades, children in foster care have endured multiple school changes as they moved between foster homes and other placements. With each move there is another school placement, with some children and youth changing schools several times in the same year. This is not a satisfactory situation, especially because many children who are placed in foster care have already endured many school changes and long periods of absence from school, leaving them already behind academically.

But in order to bring about educational stability for foster youth, legislators have grabbed the wrong edge of the stick. Rather than keeping foster youth near their original schools, Congress has passed legislation requiring education and child welfare agencies to transport children from new foster homes and placements to their former schools, no matter how long it takes and how much it costs.

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) requires school systems to transport foster children to their original schools “whenever it is in their best interest.” There is nothing wrong with the legislation as written. Clearly, young people should be transported to their original schools if it is in their best interest. The question is, when is it actually in a child’s best interest to be transported to their original school?

Is it in their best interest to be in a van for up to four hours a day as the driver stops to pick up different children going to different schools? Is it in their best interest to be transported by a private services that gets them to school late daily? Is it in their best interest to be unable to participate in extracurricular activities because they have to be picked up right after school ends? Is it in their best interest to spend agency money that could be used for tutoring or therapy on transportation? These are all common problems that I observed as a foster care social worker in the District of Columbia when the children on my caseload were being transported to their original schools from their Maryland foster homes.

Some child welfare agencies, advocates, and journalists seem to think that being transported to their original schools is always in the best interests of foster children. But those who work directly with foster youth know better. As Margaret Henry, a Los Angeles Superior Court Judge, wrote in a powerful column, “Why spend money transporting children for hours to their home school, instead of working harder and more creatively to find them placements in their home school’s district?”

The contradictions of this backwards approach to educational stability are illustrated by a recent case that could have major implications for the education of foster youth nationwide, according to Dan Heimpel of the Chronicle of Social Change. “V. Doe” entered foster care in Rhode Island at the age of six in 2005 and had moved a dozen times by 2017. In May 2017, while she was living in a group home in North Smithfield, RI, the school district decided to move her to a special school for youths with disabilities and mental health issues after she had several altercations with other students at her high school.

Reportedly, V. Doe began to thrive at the new school and completed her junior year, hoping to graduate in 2018. But Rhode Island’s Department of Children, Youth and Families (DCYF) decided to move her into a foster home–a placement that soon disrupted. Rather than returning her to the original group home (perhaps it was full?), she was moved to a residential facility in another school district.

DCYF determined that it was in V. Doe’s best interest to stay in the North Smithfield School. The North Smithfield school district agreed but (reasonably) refused to pay now that V. Doe was no longer living in there (and had been there for less than a year). DCYF filed a petition with the State Department of Education arguing that the district’s action violated ESSA. The Education Commissioner agreed and required that she be re-enrolled immediately at the private school, with North Smithfield picking up the costs.

The advocates who are praising this solution seem to be missing some key points about what caused the problem and who is paying for the fix.

A DCYF youth who has bounced between foster homes and group placements a dozen times was finally thriving in a group home and a specialized school. Why did DCYF choose to move her out of the district just before her senior year in high school? Could V. Doe be a victim of the fashionable assumption that “every child needs a family,” which not coincidentally happens to save money for the state as well? Unfortunately, V’s placement in the foster home did not last and now she was stuck in a new group home. The premature removal of young people from group care, to be placed in homes where they will be shortly kicked out, is also something that I observed as a social worker in foster care.

And then there is the issue of who pays the costs of DCYF’s mistake. V. Doe moved and out of multiple school districts in a demented game of musical chairs. The district that finally found a school that was right for her got stuck paying the costs until graduation. Wouldn’t it make more sense to have a centralized state fund (in either the education or child welfare department) for foster youth in this situation?

The backwards approach to educational stability embodied in ESSA is reminiscent of other false fixes for foster care, like legislation attempting to solve the shortage of foster homes by requiring more training for foster parents. It is not a coincidence that these approaches are often easier and cheaper (at least for the child welfare agency) than policies that would get to the root of the problem. Instead, policies should aim at finding placements that are closer to students’ original schools . Readers wanting examples of better policies can see my recommendations and those outlined in Judge Henry’s column.

Why The Child Welfare Establishment May Not Want to Know About Child Torture

The Child Welfare League of America (CWLA), one of America’s most venerable child welfare organizations, issued its weekly update on January 21 with something conspicuously missing. “Last Week in Child Welfare, January 14 -21” contained updates on Mississippi’s lack of representation for families involved with child welfare, a recent report from New Jersey’s court monitor, and an opinion piece in the Indiana star about Indiana’s struggles with opioid abuse and its impact on the foster care system.

You would never know that on January 14, a starving seventeen-year-old escaped from a house of horrors where she and her twelve siblings were being starved, beaten, chained to beds, and kept prisoner. The teenager told police that her parents would kill her if her escape plan failed. During the week after the children’s rescue, public and press around the country and indeed the world were fixated on this story, trying to understand why it could happen and what could be done to prevent similar occurrences in the future. But this event apparently did not figure in CWLA’s “week in child welfare.”

One might think that an organization with a self-described mission “to advance policies, best practices and collaborative strategies that result in better outcomes for children, youth and families that are vulnerable” would be concerned that 13 children were allowed to suffer for so many years. You’d think that they would be putting out information about the warning signs of child abuse and neglect and an admonition to make the call that might save a life. But you’d be wrong.

CWLA is part of what I think of as the child welfare establishment–the group that dominates the national conversation around child welfare. These organizations’ resources have enabled them to dominate the national conversation around child welfare by funding materials, conferences, and technical assistance to state and local child welfare agencies. Since the 1970s, this group has been preoccupied with keeping families together and children out of foster care–with scant concern about the costs to kids in families that are so dysfunctional and dangerous that foster care is clearly a better alternative

Like the other members of the child welfare establishment, CWLA believes that “children fare better in their own homes compared to children in foster care who have been similarly maltreated, suggesting that social services should promote therapy, education, and treatments to increase family stability instead of relying on removals. ”

Of course child removals should should be minimized unless absolutely necessary, but it is difficult to imagine that parents like the Turpins could be helped through “therapy, education, and treatment” to love and nurture their children. The child welfare establishment appears not to want to believe in the existence of such parents who are so bad as to be beyond rehabilitation.

The child welfare establishment also fears that publicizing cases like that of the Turpins will result in a flood of calls to child abuse hotlines, resulting in the type of “foster care panic” that sometime occurs after a tragic case. Perhaps they would rather not encourage members of the public to report suspicions of child abuse that might save children in the future, because they believe such reports must increase the foster care rolls.

Of course we don’t want the public making frivolous, malicious, or fallacious reports. Nor do we want investigators responding to tragic events by sweeping kids up into foster care who don’t need to be there. In some cases, we can help children by monitoring their situation and providing services to their parents without removing the children. But in other cases, the children can only be protected by removing them from their toxic families.

The desire to avoid publicizing extreme cases of abuse and neglect might also explain why the child welfare establishment was not part of the coalition that supported the establishment of the Commission the Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities. And it might explain why, as I wrote in an earlier post, child deaths and other tragedies that are missed by CPS are often followed by the comment from system administrators that “systems should not be judged by one case.”

During the week the Turpins were uncovered, CWLA thought it was more important to cite an op-ed piece that criticized Indiana’s highly respected former child welfare commissioner, who resigned with warnings that children would die if more funding was not provided. CWLA assured readers that “Even infants who have been exposed to narcotics fare better when they are kept with their mothers, assuming the mother has access to government resources and drug treatments.”

Unfortunately, the child welfare establishment’s obsession with keeping kids out of foster care may be condemning more children to suffering, physical and emotional injury, and death at the hands of their own parents.

This post was updated on January 29, 2017.

Breaking the Silence: How to Encourage Family and Neighbors to Report Child Abuse

Yesterday I published a post arguing for monitoring of home schools to prevent cases like the horrific story of the Turpins in California. But we really can’t be sure if regulation of home schools would have prevented the horrific abuse of these children. Even if David Turpin had not registered his home as a school, he would not have been caught unless somebody reported his children as truant. Given the silence of their neighbors and family about the disturbing signs of maltreatment, they might have been equally silent about the children’s apparent failure to attend school.

The silence of neighbors and family despite multiple signs that something was terribly wrong in this family was striking. There were numerous red flags. One neighbor reported trying to speak to some of the children when they were outside of the house. She reported that they “froze,” “shut down,” and were “terrified.” They also appeared thin and malnourished. And yet the neighbor did not notify authorities.

Multiple neighbors told reporters that the family was only rarely seen working in the yard or getting into vans at odd hours and always responded to greetings with silence. as a representative of the Riverside County Department of Social Services told USA Today, “Not one person called us. How sad,” she said. Sad indeed.

Before they moved to California, the Turpins’ household also raised questions among their neighbors in rural Rio Vista Texas, according to the Los Angeles Times. One neighbor, Ricky Vinyard, was concerned that the children rarely left their home, lights were on at all hours with blinds drawn, and eight new children’s bikes sat outside for months. A dumpster outside the house was filled with trash and David Turpin “would stand in the driveway shooting cans with his pistol, aiming toward the road.” Mr. Vinyard told the Times that he and his wife suspected abuse but decided not to report it, fearing repercussions, especially since Turpin had a gun.

Elizabeth Flores, Louise Turpin’s sister, tearfully told Good Morning America that all attempts by family members to see the children were rebuffed. When Flores came to her sister’s home in Texas, she was not allowed inside and visited with her sister in the driveway. The children never appeared. When her mother drove hours to visit in Texas, she was denied entry, and when her father bought a flight ticket, he was told not to come. The family must have discussed this strange behavior among themselves, but they never reported it to authorities.

The silence of neighbors and family seems to defy belief, yet similar silence has been noticed in other cases of long-term abuse. Is it part of American culture to believe that one’s home is one’s castle and neighbors should not interfere? What can be done to change this reluctance to intervene? This is not an easy issue so I would love to hear readers’ suggestions on how to get members of the public to report suspected abuse or neglect.

At a minimum, it seems clear that states should do a better job of informing the public of the signs of child abuse and neglect and the responsibility to report even a suspicion of maltreatment to avoid a tragedy. Brochures with this information should be available at libraries, pediatricians’ offices, health centers, departments of motor vehicles and police stations. This information should be given out along with drivers’ licenses and voter registrations and included with tax forms. Television and radio PSA’s (along the lines of “If you see something, say something”), bus ads, and other vehicles should be used to disseminate the information. Online training should be available to all citizens.

Beyond public information, the question is whether states should require reporting of suspected abuse or neglect with penalties for those who fail to report. All states require certain professionals, such as doctors and teachers, to report their suspicions. But most states (including California) don’t require ordinary citizens to report when they fear a child is being harmed.

However, Texas is one of about eighteen states that require any person who suspects abuse or neglect to report it. The identity of the reporter is confidential and cannot be released except under very limited circumstances. Failure to report suspected child abuse or neglect is a misdemeanor, punishable by imprisonment of up to one year and/or a fine of up to $4,000. And that law has been in existence in Texas at least 20 years. Nevertheless, Mr. Vinyard and his wife chose not to report.

This leaves several questions. Did the Vinyards know that they were required by law to report their suspicions of abuse? Did they know that failure to report was punishable by a fine or imprisonment? While penalties have been imposed on mandatory reporters who failed to report abuse that they saw in their professional capacity, I have not been able to find documentation of such a penalty being enforced upon a member of the general public. Such enforcement might be considered too heavy-handed by most citizens and legislators. However, one way or another it is critical that citizens report to the authorities when there are signs that things are desperately wrong as they were in in the Turpin case.

The Turpin children have been rescued. But they are physically and mentally stunted, most of them probably for life. We don’t know how many children are currently chained to their beds, locked in rooms. and starved by the people who are supposed to care for them. Monitoring all children who are ostensibly home-schooled and campaigns to encourage citizens to support their suspicions of maltreatment seem like the best ways to save these children and prevent more horror stories.

Turpin Case Shows Risks of Not Monitoring Home Schools

Turpins It seems that the whole country is talking about the Turpin family. Thirteen children and young adults were found imprisoned and emaciated in their home in Riverside County and California on January 14 after a seventeen-year-old escaped and called the police.

Reporters and politicians soon focused on one salient aspect of this family. The children were being ostensibly homeschooled under a provision of California law that allows parents to designate their homes as a private school by simply filing an affidavit. These “schools” are not monitored or inspected aside from an annual fire inspection.

I have already written about Natalie Finn. starved to death by her adoptive parents Adrian Jones, tortured to death by his mother and stepfather, and a little girl in Kentucky who was rescued at the last minute from a similar fate. All were ostensibly home-schooled, although little schooling was going on in these toxic homes.

Homeschooling is increasing in popularity in the United States. About 3.3 percent of the school-aged population was homeschooled in America in 2016. This is nearly double the percentage tin 1999. Clearly most of their parents are not abusive and want to provide the best education for their children, often at great personal sacrifice.

But available evidence suggests that the most severe cases of abuse and neglect, often fatal, tend to involve homeschooling. A study by Barbara Knox of the University of Wisconsin found that 47% of a sample of children tortured by their parents had been withdrawn from school and an additional 29% had never been enrolled.

.The Coalition for Responsible Home Education (CRHE) has collected nearly 400 cases of severe or fatal child abuse in homeschool settings that it identified from public records that mentioned home schooling as a factor. Even based on this incomplete database, CRHE estimates that homeschooled children are more likely to die of abuse or neglect than children of the same age overall.

Many of the severe and fatal homeschooling abuse cases that CRHE has collected share ugly details with the Turpin case. More than 40% of these cases involved some form of imprisonment. These children were chained to their beds, kept in cages, or locked in rooms for years. More than 45% of these cases involve food deprivation.

The linkage between home schooling and severe child abuse is not totally surprising. As Rachel Coleman and Kathryn Brightbill of CRHE point out in an op-ed piece for the Los Angeles Times, children who are in school cannot be isolated and locked away. They cannot easily be starved to death as school staff would notice and they would have access to food. And they are required to have an annual physical exam.

Of course children who attend school are abused and neglected too. But attending school exposes them to teachers and other staff. School staff submit more child abuse reports than any other group. Education personnel submitted 18.4% of the child maltreatment reports that received an investigation or alternative response in 2015, the most recent year for which the information is available

In order to prevent more cases like the Turpins, CRHE recommends requiring that homeschooled children receive annual education assessments and physical examinations. This would provide two opportunities for each child to be seen by a mandatory reporter.

State Assemblyman Jose Martinez, who represents the town where the Turpins live, has already expressed his concern about the lack of oversight of private and home schools and his intent to explore introducing legislation to mandate some type of oversight.

But homeschooling advocates are opposed to any regulations on homeschooling. The President of the powerful Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) asked a reporter for Reuters, “Should all the innocent home-school families, who do a great job, … be intruded upon because of this family?” he said. “I think the answer is no.”

HSLDA is one of Washington’s most effective lobbying groups, according to the Washington Post Magazine. State groups have also been able to scuttle attempts to regulate homeschooling in response to child abuse deaths in Florida, Iowa and Kentucky.

It is hard to understand why responsible homeschooling parents and their advocates would object to such minor requirements as requiring an annual doctor’s visit and educational assessment. State legislators should set aside their fears of backlash from extremist advocates and assume that most voters will support protecting children.

Yes, A System Should be Judged by One Case

“A system should not be judged by one case, no matter how sad or sensational,” said Joette Katz, Commissioner of Connecticut Department of Children and Families (DCF) Katz’ words were reported by the Hartford Courant.

Katz was referring to the case of Matthew Tirado. Matthew, a 17-year-old diagnosed with Autism and Intellectual Disability, died on February 14, 2017 from prolonged abuse and neglect by his mother. As revealed by a heartbreaking report from Connecticut’s Office of the Child Advocate (OCA), Matthew had been known to DCF for 11 years, since he was five years old. Yet, DCF missed several opportunities to save Matthew, who was nonverbal and could not speak for himself. Matthew’s interactions with DCF included:

In December 2005, when Matthew was six years old, his school called DCF to report that Matthew had missed more than 30 days of school since the school year began, . DCF investigated and found neglect but later closed the case after Matthew’s attendance briefly improved.
In December 2006, the school again contacted DCF to report that Matthew had missed over 50 days of school. DCF closed the case six weeks later without finding neglect. Matthew’s mother told DCF that her mother was moving in to help her care for the children. This should have been a red flag because agency files documented Matthew’s grandmother’s long history of involvement with DCF, alcohol abuse and mental illness. But repeated risk assessments erroneously noted that Matthew’s mother had no history of being abused or neglected as a child.
In 2009, school officials again called CPS stating that Matthew came to school with bruising on his face that was covered up with makeup. School officials also reported contacting Ms. Tirado on other occasions regarding bruises, which she responded were inflicted by Matthew’s two-year-old sister. Matthew’s mother denied abusing him and the case was closed before requested medical records arrived.
In October, 2014, Hartford Public Schools (HPS) reported that Matthew’s sister, a first-grader, showed signs of physical abuse and reported that her mother hit her. She told school staff that Matthew was also hit, but he was not seen or assessed.
In November 2014, HPS reported to DCF that Matthew was not enrolled in school and may not have been in school for a long time. In fact, Matthew had hardly attended school since 2012. DCF found Ms. TIrado to be neglectful and abusive and opened a case on the family for supervision by the agency.
Matthew attended less than 100 days of school between June 2012 and his death in February 2017. HPS made five reports to DCF between October 2014 and May 2016. about the children’s failure to attend school. After March 2016, Ms. Tirado refused to allow DCF access to her children. In July, DCS iled a neglect petition with the Juvenile Court.
The Court held six hearings on the case between July and December 2016 but Ms. Tirado never appeared. In December 2016 DCS asked the court to terminate the case. No orders were sought to compel Ms. Tirado to produce the children, permit visitation of Matthew’s sister in school, or to remove the children, even though there was legal justification for any of these actions. Unbelievably, after a failed attempt to compel Ms. Tirado to come to court, the court accepted DCS’ request to close the case. DCS closed its own case on the family in January 2017.

After Matthew’s death, the Hartford Courant reported that Commissioner Katz shockingly told legislators that “As horrible as this may sound, there comes a point where you have to make a determination that you have done all that you can legally do. There are 15,000 cases and only so many social workers.”

The Commissioner also said that a system should not be judged based on one case. It’s an old refrain. But is it true? I don’t think so. There are many reasons why a system should be judged by one case.

First, we are not talking about one bad decision. A child suffered for as long as 11 years and agency social workers missed multiple opportunities to protect him. His sister fared a little better since she survived but will probably bear lifetime scars. This is more than a one-time event.

Secondly, for each “worst case, “we don’t know how many children suffer for years and don’t die while the system ignores repeated red flags. At least Matthew is out of his misery. The others are still suffering. We may never know their names.

I’m tired of agency heads who tell us not to judge the system by the worst cases. Lets bury this trope once and for all. A system should be judged–above all–by the worst cases. For each of these cases represents many more children whose daily suffering will lead to lifetime emotional educational and physical damage.

A potentially lifesaving algorithm in Allegheny County, PA

In August 2016, Allegheny County Pennsylvania (which includes Pittsburgh) became the first US jurisdiction to use a predictive algorithm to screen every call to the child abuse and neglect hotline. In a brilliant article for the New York Times Magazine, science writer Dan Hurley clearly explains how the tool works and how it changes current practice. Hurley’s account suggests that Allegheny’s experience is a hopeful one for the county and for children nationwide.

Hurley introduces the Allegheny Family Screening Tool, an algorithm developed by leading child welfare researchers in concert with DHS policymakers. To develop the algorithm, the authors analyzed all referrals made to the county child abuse hotline between April 10 and April 2014. For each referral, the authors combined child welfare data with data from the county jail, juvenile probation, public welfare, and behavioral health programs to develop a model predicting the risk of an adverse outcome for each child named on each referral. (A more technical description is provided by the authors here.) The end product was an algorithm that calculates a risk score between 1 and 20 for each child included in a referral.

The policymakers and developers chose to use the algorithm to supplement, not supplant, the clinical judgment of hotline workers. Only if the score exceeds a certain threshhold does it trigger a mandatory investigation; below that level the risk score it provides another piece of data to help the hotline worker decide whether to assign the case for investigation.

Among the most important takeaways from Hurley’s article are the following:

Before the development of the new algorithm, Allegheny County had experienced a series of tragedies in which children died after maltreatment reports had been made to the hotline but screened out. The problem was not incompetence or poor training. Hotline workers simply cannot within the 30 minutes to one hour allowed for decision making investigate all the historical data on all family members from numerous agencies with which they may have had contact.
Evaluation data shared with the reporter show that implementation of the Allegheny County Screening Tool resulted in more high-risk cases being screened in and more low-risk cases being screened out. Hurley provides a real case example. A teacher reported that a three-year-old child witnessed a man dying of an overdose in her home. Department records showed numerous reports to the hotline dating back to 2008 about this family, including allegations of sexual abuse, domestic violence, parental substance abuse, inadequate food, physical care, hygiene and medical neglect. Nevertheless, the hotline worker was poised to screen out the case as low risk. The tool, however, calculated a risk rating of 19 out of 20, causing an investigator to go out to the home. Eventually, the mother was found to be unable to care for the children due to her continuing drug abuse, and they were placed with family members, where they are doing well.
County officials were astute in awarding the contract to develop a predictive algorithm. Several other jurisdictions have gone with private companies such as Eckerd Connects and its for-profit partner Mindshare, which has a predictive analytics tool called Rapid Safety Feedback (RSF). The details of RSF are closely held by the companies, and the state of Illinois recently terminated its contract because the owners refused to share its details, even after the algorithm failed to flag some children who later died. The Allegheny Family Screening Tool is owned by the county. Its workings are public and have been published in academic journals. Moreover, its developers, Emily Putnam-Hornstein and Rhema Vaithianathan are acknowledged as the worldwide leaders in their field, with extensive publications and experience in doing similar work.
County officials were also astute in developing and rolling out their model. They held public meetings before implementing the tool, giving advocates a chance to interact with the researchers and policymakers. Choosing to use the tool at the hotline stage rather than a later step such as investigation made it less threatening as the tool is not being used as input on whether to remove the child, simply whether to investigate. In addition, the county commissioned an ethics investigation by two experts before implementing the tool. The reviewers concluded that not only was the tool ethical but that it might be unethical to fail to implement it. The concluded that “It is hard to conceive of an ethical argument against use of the most accurate predictive instrument,”
Many opponents of predictive analytics argue that it institutionalizes racial bias by incorporating data that is itself biased. Supporters have argued that predictive algorithms reduce bias by adding objective algorithms to subjective worker judgments. Preliminary data from Pittsburgh supports the proponents, suggesting that the algorithm has resulted in more equal treatment of black and white families.
Other jurisdictions are already emulating Allegheny County. Douglas County, Colorado has already commissioned Putnam-Hornstein and Vaithianathan to develop an algorithm and California has contracted with them for preliminary statewide work.

Given the Allegheny County algorithm’s promising results, one cannot help wondering whether a similar algorithm should be used at later stages of a case as well. A similar tool could be very useful in aiding investigators in making a decision about the next step in a case. Such a proposal would of course trigger an outcry if used to decide whether to remove a child from home. But like the Allegheny County screening tool, such an algorithm can be used to supplement clinical judgment rather than replace it. Policymakers need not set any level that would trigger a mandatory removal. However, they could set a risk level that requires opening a case, be it out-of-home or in-home. Many children in many states have died when agencies failed to open a case despite high risk scores on existing instruments. Algorithms can also be used to monitor ongoing in-home cases, as Rapid Safety Feedback has demonstrated. Perhaps if and when predictive algorithms are proven to be effective at protecting children they will be integrated into multiple stages and decision points, like the actuarial risk assessments that many states use today.

Identifying the children most at risk of harm by their parents or guardians has been one of the knottiest problems of child welfare. Allegheny County’s experience, as portrayed by Dan Hurley’s excellent article, provides hope that emerging predictive analytics techniques can improve government’s ability to identify these most vulnerable children and keep them safe.

What’s Behind the Drop in New York City Foster Care Numbers? More than the Commissioner Chooses to Say

BluePrint

On December 12, 2017, the New York Daily News published an exclusive story of a dramatic drop in foster care numbers in New York City. Only 8,966 children were in foster care in Fiscal Year 2017, down from 2016’s total of 9,926. Moreover, New York City’s foster care rolls have been dropping over the past four years as the nationwide caseload increased.

Administration on Children’s Services (ACS) Commissioner David Hansell awarded his agency most of the credit for the decrease, telling the Daily News that “primarily it has to do with keeping families together whenever we can.” As he told the reporter, instead of immediately removing a child deemed to be at risk, ACS seeks to provide services to the family to ameliorate that risk without removing the child.

Hansell’s remarks to the Daily News can be questioned on two grounds. First, there is evidence that agency policy is not the only factor behind the caseload decline. Second, a simple decline in foster care caseloads is not evidence of progress unless we know the agency is not leaving children to languish in unsafe homes

A closer look at the numbers (contained in a Foster Care Strategic Blueprint Status Report issued by ACS on December 18), compared with population trends in New York City, reveals that more is going on than the Commissioner chose to discuss.

In New York City, according to Census data, the number of children in poverty fell from 553,499 in 2012 to 471,190 in 2016, a 15% decrease. During fiscal years 2012 to 2016 (a period that is off by 6 months from the annual data) New York’s foster care caseload fell from 13,820 to 9,926, a decrease of 28%. (See the table below for the numbers.)

It’s a well-known fact, and well-documented by research, that poor children are much more likely to be placed in foster care than their peers. There are many reasons why this might be the case, and some critics allege that some children are actually placed in foster care simply because they are poor.

Based on the decline in children in poverty, we could have expected roughly a 15% decline in the foster care rolls. The percentage drop in New York City’s foster care caseload was almost twice that, so agency policy probably did contribute to the foster care decline. But based on the percentages, demographic change may have been equally important.

Hansell did admit that there were “a lot of reasons” for New York City’s caseload to decline while the national caseload went up. But he did not choose to mention any of them.

We can’t be sure of the reasons for the decline in child poverty in New York. However, we do know of the influx of well-to-do people into many previously poor New York neighborhoods commonly described as “gentrification,” often driving poor people out of those neighborhoods.

A similar pattern may be observed in other cities experiencing rapid gentrification. For example, the number of children in poverty in San Francisco dropped from 16,000 in 2012 to 11,000 in 2016, according to Census data. And the number of children in foster care dropped from 1,073 in October 2012 to 811 in 2017 at the same time as the State’s caseload increased, according to the California Child Welfare Indicators Project.

Unfortunately, foster care caseload data is not easily available for most other cities, because the current Administration has instructed the federally funded center that houses large child welfare datasets to stop giving out this data to citizens after 20 years of doing so. However, it is highly plausible that other cities experiencing similar demographic changes also saw significant drops in foster care

There is another problem with Hansell’s remarks. A decline in foster care numbers is not in itself a reason for celebration. We must remember that the purpose of foster care is to protect children. As an important issue brief from a California child advocacy coalition argues, states which have been cutting their caseloads for years may reach a “bottom’ below which further caseload reduction is not feasible without compromising child safety. ”

New York’s foster care caseload has been dropping since 2007. To the extent that these drops are due to policy changes, the city may reach a point where it is not safe to continue in the same direction.

Hansell cheers about “fewer children removed, fewer families separated and much less trauma experienced by children.” But what about the children who are being traumatized when they are left with abusive or neglectful parents at home?

Hansell admitted that there are some cases where the risks of leaving a child in a home are too high, such as the case of Zymere Perkins, who died at the hands of his mother’s boyfriend after ACS missed numerous warning signs.

We must remember that the purpose of foster care and the child welfare system is not to reduce foster care caseloads. It is to protect children. Its success should be evaluated accordingly.

Children in Poverty and Children in Foster Care, New York City, 2012-2016

Year	2012	2013	2014	2015	2016
children in poverty	553,499	522,992	523,538	508,503	471,190
children in foster care	13,820	12,958	11,750	11,098	9,926

Source:

Children in Poverty: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey, http://factfinder.census.gov

Children in foster care: Administration on Children’s Services, Foster Care Strategic Blueprint Status Report, https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/acs/pdf/about/2017/BluePrint.pdf

Predictive analytics, machine learning, and child welfare risk assessment: questions remain about Broward study

analytics

On November 30, a major child welfare publication reported on a new study, published in the respected journal Children and Youth Services Review, that tested Broward County, Florida’s child welfare decision-making model against a model that was derived using the new techniques of data mining and supervised machine learning. The researchers concluded that 40% of cases that were referred to court for either foster care placement or intensive services could have been handled “with less intrusive options.” A close reading of this opaquely written paper, as well as conversations with two of the authors, Ira Schwartz and Peter York, reveal a pioneering effort at applying emerging data science techniques to develop a “prescriptive analytics” model that recommends the appropriate services for each child. This research is innovative and exciting but this first attempt at deriving such a prescriptive model for child welfare has serious flaws. These very preliminary results should initiate a conversation but should not be used to support policy recommendations.

The authors began with a large database of 78,394 children with their complete case histories between 2010 and 2015. They merged datasets from the Broward County Sheriff’s Office, ChildNet (the local agency contracted to provide foster care and in-home services) and the Children’s Services Council (CLC), which represents community based agencies serving lower-risk cases. The authors primarily used only one year of data on each child after they were discharged from the system. Children without a full year of data were not included. So the authors had a large selection of hotline, investigative, and service data for the children in their database as well as information on whether they experienced another referral within a year.

In a nutshell, the authors applied machine learning to build a model “based on the segmentation and classification of cases at each step of the reporting, investigation, substantiation, service and outcome process.” The result was the creation of groups or clusters that have a similar combination of characteristics based on hotline and investigative data. Each stage of the modeling process produces progressively more uniform groups. The goal was to ensure that if these groups received different treatments, the difference in outcomes would be due to the treatment and not some other aspect of the children or their situations. Within each group of similar children, the researchers compared those who receive different interventions, namely removal from the home or community-based prevention services. They used a technique called propensity score matching to control for differences between members of .each group that might affect their outcomes. The authors use one outcome–whether a child is re-referred to the system within a year of exit–to determine whether each intervention was successful.

Based on this analysis, the authors concluded that many families are receiving services that are too intensive for their needs. For example, they concluded that “at least 40% of the cases that were referred to the court and to Childnet (mainly for foster care) were inappropriate based on the outcome data for children in their cluster group. The authors then went on to claim that these “inappropriate referrals” are actually harming children. For example, “inappropriate referrals” to court were 30% more likely to return to the system after the court referral than they would have been if the referral had not been made. And “inappropriate referrals” to ChildNet were 175% more likely to return to the system than similar cases that did not receive such a referral.

Finally, the authors present a “prescriptive” model that addresses the question, “Which services are most likely to prevent a case from having another report of abuse an/or neglect [within a year]?” This concept of “prescriptive analytics” is a new one in child welfare if not human services in general. The authors devote only two paragraphs to this model but they note that it would result in a decline in “inappropriate referrals” to court and ChildNet.

Even if we accept the machine learning process presented by the authors as a reasonable basis for estimating risk, several issue remain about the authors’ findings. The first issue is the use of one-year re-referral rates to denote intervention success. Ongoing maltreatment may not be seen or reported for months or years. The authors report that 57% of their cases that received another referral did so within one year. However, that leaves 43% that were referred after a year had passed. These cases were not counted as “failures” by their model. In addition, because the databased covered only 2010 to 2015, the authors did not include any referrals that happened after 2015, including those that are yet to happen. If the authors classified some cases wrongly as not returning, this reduces the validity of their model.

The second problem stems from that famous social science bugaboo–unmeasured differences between groups. The authors relied entirely on hotline and investigative data on family history and characteristics. Yet, many family issues may not be reflected in the data. These could include unknown histories of criminal behavior, mental illness, violence, or drug abuse. If the authors observed that an intervention appeared to cause harm to certain children, the explanation may not be that the intervention was inappropriate. A more plausible explanation might be that that the matching algorithm failed to correctly assess risk as well as the social workers in the system. If the cases referred to the court were in fact those that social workers correctly identified as being at higher risk (even though this was not picked up by the algorithm) one might expect higher rates of return to the system of these cases relative to cases that were matched with them by the algorithm but not referred to the courts. This possibility seems a lot more likely than the possibility that court-ordered services made parents more abusive or neglectful.

A third problem relates to the use of the child rather than the family as the unit of analysis. The family or household is obviously the appropriate unit of analysis here. It was the parents or caregivers that perpetrated the abuse or neglect and they are the main recipients of services. Author Peter York agreed that using the family would be be more appropriate but explained that most of the data in the system were linked to the child and not the family. Using the child as the level of analysis means that the same parents will be counted as many times as they have children in the system. This will obviously weight larger families more heavily, with whatever biases this may introduce.

Finally, it is concerning that the authors reported about the proportions of children that were provided with too-intensive services such as foster care but not the proportion that were provided with services that are not intensive enough. We all know about the worst case scenarios when children die or are severely injured after the system failed to respond appropriately to a report, but there are many more cases in which allegations are not substantiated or interventions are not intensive enough, and the children return to the system later, often in worse shape. Reporting on one type of error but not its opposite invariably raises questions about bias.

The authors should not be blamed for making too much of their findings. In their article abstract, they do not mention the specific findings about over-reliance on foster care and more intensive child welfare interventions. Rather, they argue that their findings indicate that “predictive analytics and machine learning would significantly improve the accuracy and utility of the child welfare risk assessment instrument being used.” I fervently agree with that statement. But this new approach by Schwartz et al is qualitatively different from the predictive risk modeling algorithms currently being applied and studied by jurisdictions around the country. In particular, the authors used machine learning to identify groups with similar risks but which received different treatments. Their purpose was to assess the effectiveness of distinct treatments of different subgroups. How well this approach will accomplish that purpose remains to be seen. This fascinating study is just the the beginning of a conversation about the utility of this new approach, not an argument for reducing the reliance on foster care or community services.

Secrecy in child welfare: cover up or get better?

Kansas-Kids- — Evan Brewer, Caleb Blansett, Adrian Jones: From http://www.crimeonline.com

Clint Blansett’s 10-year-old son had been dead just a few days when a social worker from the state knocked on the family’s door in south-central Kansas . She wasn’t there to offer condolences after Caleb’s death or ask about his sister, Blansett said. She wanted him to sign a form saying he wouldn’t talk about his son’s death or the Kansas Department for Children and Families. No details about contact the agency had with the family before Caleb’s mom smashed his head with a rock while he slept and then stabbed him seven times.

So begins a story by the Kansas City Star entitled Secrecy inside child welfare system can kill: ‘God help the children of Kansas. In it. reporter Laura Bauer describes an agency that chooses to protect itself at the expense of fulfilling its mandate to protect kids. Among the examples included in the story are

A DCF deputy director resigned after she was asked to shred notes of meetings about critical cases. Furthermore, her attempt to implement a systemwide review process for such cases was refused because administrators did not want mistakes documented in writing lest they would be used in court against the agency.
For a year and a half, DCF refused to release information about its repeated interactions with the family of Adrian Jones, who was killed by his father and stepmother and fed to their pigs. It was only after the murderers were sentenced to life in prison that DCF reduced 2,000 pages of records that were haphazardly thrown together in what looked like a purposeful attempt to baffle readers. The records, once put in order, revealed multiple investigative errors, particularly three that probably cost Adrian his life.
A Wichita television station reported that DCF received several reports of mistreatment of Caleb Blansett, beginning in 2012 and continuing in the months before his death. On August 3, 2017, the Star requested information about these calls and any ensuing investigations. Three months later, DCF responded that it did not have the staff to respond to the request.
Just this past September, the body of three-year-old Evan Brewer was found in a cement structure outside the house where his mother and boyfriend were living. He had been missing at least since the previous March. His father claims to have made multiple reports to DPS alleging abuse of Evan. DCF denied a request from a local TV station for the records relating to these reports.

Kansas law requires that “in the event that child abuse or neglect results in a child fatality or near fatality, reports or records of a child alleged or adjudicated to be in need of care received by the secretary, a law enforcement agency, or any juvenile intake and assessment worker shall become a public record and subject to disclosure.” But unfortunately, the law does not define “reports and records.”

To receive federal money under the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA), a state must allow “public disclosure of the findings or information about the case of child abuse or neglect which has resulted in a child fatality or near fatality.” Unfortunately, the vagueness of this language allows states to avoid releasing information necessary to identify how the agency failed. In a report entitled State Secrecy and Child Deaths in the U.S., two child advocacy groups found that all states have some sort of public disclosure policy regarding child abuse deaths. However, the report gave 20 states (including the three most populous states) a grade of C or below on these policies based on a variety of criteria, including whether they were encoded in statute, whether the disclosure is mandatory, and the scope and specificity of the information that must be disclosed.

Kansas was actually in the better half of states. It received a “B” from authors of the state secrecy report, mainly because it has a policy, the policy is encoded in statute, and is mandatory, despite the vagueness of the information that must be released. It is worth noting that only 14 states got higher than a B grade. Moreover, the report’s authors also found that states often fail to abide by their own disclosure policies–as when Kansas claimed to lack staff to respond to the request for information about the death of Caleb Blansett.

New Jersey’s child welfare agency, under the guise of protecting children’s privacy, in 2013 adopted a rule that the child welfare agency must release information only “to the extent it is pertinent to the child abuse or neglect that led to the fatality or near fatality.” Even the under the new tightened rules the agency should have disclosed information about its past interactions with the family of JoJo Lemons after he became the third sibling in his family to die while sharing a bed with other family members. His parents were charged with reckless manslaughter and child endangerment, and each pleaded guilty to a count of child endangerment. Nevertheless, CPS concluded that JoJo’s death was not caused by abuse or neglect. Therefore, the agency was not required to release information about its interactions with the family.

In Cleveland, 5-year-old Tenasia McCloud was beaten to death by her mother and her girlfriend on March 17, 2017. At the time of her death, the child welfare agency had an open case on the family, according to News 5 Cleveland. A social worker had visited the home eight times, including three days before Tenasia was brought to the hospital in cardiac arrest. The paper tried to find out how the agency did not see that the child was in danger. But Cuyahoga County Children and Family Services refused to provide records of agency contacts with the family, citing a rule prohibiting disclosures that might jeopardize a criminal investigation or proceeding. Only five other states have a similar rule, according to the State Secrecy study, suggesting that it is not a necessary requirement. Moreover, two states conversely allow disclosure only if a person is criminally charged or would have been criminally charged if they had not died.

Congress and the states must strengthen disclosure requirements in the event of child maltreatment fatalities or near-fatalities. Congress should amend CAPTA to define specifically what data states must release in the event of a child maltreatment fatality or near fatality. Until that happens, states should amend their own laws to strengthen the disclosure requirements. These disclosures should be required with no exceptions to any member of the public. The information required to be disclosed should include a summary of all past reports on the family or household, whether these reports were investigated, results of all past investigations and reasons for the determinations made; as well as a summary of all cases opened for the family or household, what services were provided, when the cases were closed and the reasons for closure.

Congress and states should also require that a commission of experts review every death or near-death of a child in a family known to the child welfare system. As I stated in a previous post, the death or severe injury of a child in a family known to the child welfare system should be treated like a plane crash or the loss of the space shuttle Challenger. All such deaths or severe injuries should be reviewed immediately and exhaustively by experts of the highest caliber with access to all agency records regarding contact with the family or household. The report should include recommendations to avoid similar tragedies in the future and should be released to the public with names redacted when necessary to preserve the privacy of innocent children and adults.

The point of requiring release of information and analysis of case history is not mainly to allocate guilt or punishment, although practitioners guilty of egregious errors should be retrained or let go. Rather it is to identify policies or practices that can save children in the future. As the authors of the state secrecy report put it:

Abuse and neglect deaths represent child welfare agencies’ most tragic failures. Unfortunately, it is often only through such cases that lawmakers and the public learn of systemic inadequacies in child welfare systems. If improvements and reforms are to be achieved, it is vital that the facts about these cases reach the public in a meaningful way.

Domestic violence and child abuse: a lethal combination

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It did not take long for the press to discover that Devin Kelley, the the perpetrator of the recent mass shooting in Texas, had repeatedly assaulted his first wife and fractured the skull of his infant stepson in 2012. He was court-martialed for those offenses, pled guilty, and was imprisoned for a year.

I could not help noting the parallel to the case that I wrote about in my last post–that of Antoine Flemons, who at two months old was beaten to death by his father, Antoine Petty. The post focused on one aspect of this case–the fact the father was known to have abused many other children. I argued that baby Antoine might have been protected by a broader policy to identify at birth babies born to parents with such a record.

But the revelations about the Texas shooter reminded me of another important aspect of Antoine’s family that put the baby in grave danger. In an interview with the Washington Post, Antoine’s grandmother stated that her daughter Geneice Petty loved her son but suffered from “battered women’s syndrome.” In other words, she was a victim of domestic violence.

The connection between domestic violence and child abuse is well-documented. Research suggests that “in an estimated 30 to 60 percent of the families where either domestic violence or child maltreatment is identified, it is likely that both forms of abuse exist.”

In the 40 states providing domestic violence data to the Administration Children and Families for its Child Maltreatment 2015 report, 25% of child maltreatment victims were found to have a caregiver who was either a victim, perpetrator or witness of domestic violence.

Co-occurring domestic violence and child abuse can take several forms. In many cases, one parent (usually the father) abuses both the other parent and the child or children. There are other configurations, such as families in which the abused parent in turn abuses the children.

In baby Antoine’s case, no information has been released to the public. One can speculate in view of the father’s extreme violence that Geneice Petty was afraid to protect her children and that her husband bullied her into covering up his killing of their son.

The key question is what could have been done to prevent the death of Antoine. Historically, child welfare systems have had not responded effectively to domestic violence. Common and problematic patterns have included ignoring or minimizing the domestic violence and, conversely, giving women an ultimatum to leave the abuser or leave their children–a response which often leads women to fear and avoid child protection authorities rather than seek their help.

One study found that “[Domestic violence]appears to have only a minor role in influencing the decisions of child welfare workers; yet, children exposed to [domestic violence] often have multiple contacts with [child welfare services] due to the higher number of repeat allegations of maltreatment.”

The Children’s Bureau has has published a useful manual about how to handle child maltreatment cases in which domestic violence is present or suspected. The manual’s many recommendations provide alternatives to the problematic practices mentioned above.

Unfortunately, we don’t know if Maryland child welfare workers even identified domestic violence in earlier cases involving Antoine’s parents, let alone how they responded. That’s why, as I have said over and over again about all child maltreatment deaths and serious injuries, there needs to be a thorough investigation, a public report, and a proposal for changes in policy and practice to protect future baby Antoines.