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(Editors Note: Alan Milner was the director of public relations for Project Place, Boston’s landmark youth program, from 1972 to 1974, and developed, directed or consulted with a wide array of youth service programs from 1974 to 1996, including the Project Checkpoint Youth Program. He was a director of the nation’s first runaway hotline, The Project Place Hotline, served as the founder and director of the nation’s first statewide substance abuse hotline from 1987 to 1996, and has been a principal in two software development companies that specialized in producing turnkey systems for human service programs.)
Rilya Wilson was just over four years old when she disappeared from her foster home in January of 2001, but her disappearance wasn’t reported to the police until 15 months later, igniting a firestorm of controversy over conditions in Florida’s foster care system that continues unabated four years later.
When Rilya Wilson’s disappearance was finally reported on April 24, 2002 , Florida instantly became the poster-state for bad foster care. Responding quickly, Florida Governor Jeb Bush empanelled a blue ribbon committee on May 5 th to investigate the circumstances surrounding Rilya Wilson’s disappearance.
The report issued by this committee just weeks later blamed just about everyone except the current administration for Wilson ’s disappearance.
It blames DCF for not doing a proper background checks on Patricia Graham, the foster parent with whom Rilya was placed, or Geralyn Graham, Patricia Graham’s roommate, who has been variously described as Rilya’s parental grandmother, Patricia’s Graham’s cousin, and Patricia Graham’s wife. Had DCF done so, the child would never have been placed with the couple, both of whom had long criminal records. It blames the case worker for failing to make required home visits, and forging documents to cover her failure to perform them. It blames the case worker’s supervisor for apparently condoning this behavior and, ultimately, blames the entire mess on disorganization and disaffection within the DCF itself.
The report goes on to excoriates Florida’s foster care program in no uncertain terms, pointing out that various governors have appointed twelve special committees and various attorneys general have empanelled five separate grand juries, all since 1985, to investigate foster care services within the state. Responding to the findings from these investigations, the state legislature has tried to revamp the system 22 times during the past 33 years, with interventions ranging from minor adjustments to complete re-organizations of the entire system. As the report notes, this means that there have been substantial modifications to the foster care system on an average of every 18 months, with negligible results.
But there was a light at the end of the tunnel, according to the committee. A bill passed by the legislature in 1998 put DCF under a mandate to privatize foster care services by the end of 2004, dividing the state into 23 separate districts, and handing off the responsibility for managing foster care services in these districts to nonprofit agencies. This, according to committee’s report, was a giant step in the right direction.
This was good news because, by the time the committee had completed its report, DCF had admitted an internal audit revealed as many as 1,000 children were missing from the foster care system. By August of the same year, approximately 400 of those children were still missing, causing the Governor ordered the creation of a task force to track them down. By November of 2002, more than 200 children remained unaccounted for, despite the best efforts of the task force.
Now, four years later and two years after the privatization of the foster care system was completed, a June, 2006 audit revealed 652 foster children were missing while the total number of children in the system has actually decreased by 16%.
We seem to be heading in the wrong direction.
Disappearing clients weren’t the only problem. Since 1998, the percentage of children who have been abused multiple times has increased from 8% to 11% in 2006. Note that the number of times children have been abused just once aren’t even being counted. Isn’t once enough?
One of the 23 “lead agencies" contracted to manage foster care services in various districts has already gone bankrupt. More are sure to follow, because all but one of the 23 lead agencies are working under fixed price contracts, which puts them between a rock and a hard place by capping the number of service delivery days they can afford to provide within their districts.
How could a four year old child be missing from her foster home for sixteen months before anyone filed an official report with the police? The answer seemed obvious enough. A bad case worker didn’t do her job properly, and a bad supervisor allowed the case worker to get away with it. Case closed?
The evidence suggests that the problems are much deeper than occasional malfeasance by rogue employees. The evidence suggests that, after all the studies and all the legislation, we don’t really understand the problem at all.
Attempts to understand the problems of foster children in American have to begin with how children become homeless in the first place.
Children become orphans when their parents die. They run away from homes where they are living under intolerable conditions, including physical and sexual abuse. They are thrown away by parents who don’t want to deal with them any more.
But they don’t become homeless simply because of these events. They become homeless only when they live in an environment that doesn’t cherish children and fails to provide a safety net to help them when their own family can’t or won’t.
Tribal cultures don’t have homeless children, because all tribal cultures cherish children. Among most Native American tribes, children were raised to regard every woman in the tribe as their mothers and every man as their fathers, so there was no such thing as an orphaned Native American child, or a homeless one.
Rural cultures don’t have homeless children for much the same reason the entire community is organized as an extended family network or, in other words, like a tribe.
Homeless children are a largely urban phenomenon. Higher population densities force people to erect stronger barriers against social interaction….the lonely crowd. The relative anonymity of high density urban environments weakens the social bonds between neighbors and relatives, eviscerating the extended family network that supports good child-raising strategies.
Child-raising isn’t a natural trait. We’re not born knowing how to raise children. As the saying goes, “Children don’t come with an owner’s manual." Parenting is always learned on the job.
Who do you learn parenting skills from? From your own parents, of course. Generation after generation of parents have learned how to be parents from their own parents. That’s why grandparents are so important to a healthy culture.
When the bonds between successive generations break down, has they have been breaking down for the past fifty years, we lose many of the skills that have been acquired by families from time immemorial.
There is substantial evidence that the breakdown in child-raising systems is due largely to the population shifts over the past hundred years, as children moved away from their families in search of better opportunities. What began as a trickle after the Civil War became a flood during the Great Depression, but it was until the economic boom times after World War II, that these migrations had a demonstrable impact on the multi-generational family, and upon the transmission of child-raising skils.
But that’s not the whole story, because homeless children have been with us for as long as there have been cities. There are credible reports of packs of feral children running the streets of Rome two thousand years ago. Throughout the middle ages, children were treated as chattel by society, and the bonds of filial affection were much weaker than they are today.
In the United States, there was an epidemic of homeless children as the first waves of immigration began to arrive in the early 1800s but serious efforts to address the problem of homeless children began in the late 1830s, and can be directly traced to a single book, Charles Dickens’ “Oliver Twist."
Published in 1836, “Oliver Twist," an expose of the atrocious conditions under which homeless children were forced to exist in 19 th century London, established Dickens’ reputation as a social reformer, and got people throughout the world to start thinking about children differently.
While there were orphanages in America before 1836, they were largely sectarian programs operated by Catholic, Protestant and Jewish communal organizations. Studies indicate that only 20% of the children housed by these institutions were actually orphans. Many of the residents in these facilities were sent there by their own families, which had grown tired of dealing with them. Sometimes, all it took to restore a child’s perspective on life was a few days in one of these homes for the homeless.
They were the lucky ones, the ones who had home to which they could return. The balance of the children in these facilities were products of broken homes, runaways, and throwaways….in other words, exactly the same populations we’re dealing with today.
The first recorded instance of a non-sectarian foster care program was the Children’s Aid Society of New York, which was founded in 1853 by Charles Loring Brace, a Presbyterian minister, with the backing of Theodore Roosevelt Sr, the future president’s father and a major New York philanthropist.
The Children’s Aid Society’s program was intriguing. Children found on the streets were brought to the Society, where they would be fed, clothed and housed while the Society’s members tried to reunite them with their families. When this proved impossible, thousands of children were sent to live with families in the western half of the country.
Surprisingly, this proved to be an effective solution. According to the Society’s admittedly spotty records, more than 85% of the children sent off in this manner did “splendidly." The success rate was due in part to the relocation of the foster children to another part of the country, away from the negative influences of the urban environment where most homeless children live.
From the turn of the 20 th Century, until the 1950s, state governments built a wide array of institutions to house special populations, including the mentally ill, the developmentally handicapped, and homeless children, building more and more of these megalithic institutions as the number of people needing their services continued to grow along with the urban population.
Today, the vast majority of homeless children still come from lower-income, minority group backgrounds (although the specific ethnicity has changed from Irish, Italian and Jewish, to Black and Hispanic), from families where alcoholism, drug addiction, physical and sexual abuse, and simple neglect result from unemployment, divorce, abandonment and economic deprivation.
Already suffering self-image problems, under these conditions, bright children become dull, outgoing children become withdrawn, and happy children become hostile. They develop extremely egocentric and yet self-destructive behavior patterns characterized by poor impulse control, a powerful need for instant gratification, and a sociopathic inability to feel any empathy for other beings.
Children under such circumstance are already damaged, and need therapeutic care that most foster families aren’t equipped to provide. They have to be stabilized under controlled conditions, and rehabilitated to the extent that they can begin to function normally in an age-appropriate manner.
Anything less is merely putting a band-aid on a cancer, but that’s exactly what happens in most foster care systems. Children who need months of inpatient treatment are farmed out in a matter of days, or weeks, to foster families where they often fail to thrive because the underlying emotional issues haven’t been dealt with properly.
The whole foster care system was designed as a stop-gap measure to prevent children from becoming homeless in the first place, and so it remains today. This is the key to the whole puzzle. We are dealing with the issue of children without safe homes. Everything else is commentary.
In the mid-1960s, the entire social service system came under what may have been unfounded attacks by social reformers who believed that “warehousing unfortunate people" in such impersonal settings constituted a form of “cruel and unusual punishment."
What they wanted, instead, was to establish networks of smaller, “community-based" programs that would operate on a more humane scope and scale. They believed that reducing the number of clients in a facility would decrease the ratio of clients to counselors and case workers, increasing the amount of time the care givers could devote to each client expected more individual attention to result in better results for the client.
At the time, it seemed like a reasonable position, not dissimilar to what the Children’s Aid Society had done by sending homeless children out west.
In retrospect, however, the social reformers were clueless about the scope, scale and extent of the problems they were addressing.
In the end, it turned out to be a colossal blunder.
Instead of getting better educated, better trained workers, the qualification levels of counselors and case workers declined significantly. Instead of having more time with individual clients, group homes were forced to resort to more group therapy because there weren’t enough worker hours in the budget to cover an equivalent amount of individual attention for each client.
It also turns out that counselors and case workers employed by private vendors don’t make as much as counselors and case workers employed by the state. In most cases, the employees of nonprofit organizations are not unionized and don’t have collective bargaining agreements. Adding insult to injury, the employees of these nonprofit organizations don’t have the same kinds of health and retirement benefits that state workers usually enjoy.
This disparity didn’t go unnoticed, making it increasingly difficult to retain good workers. Gradually, the more competent employees began leaving. As a consequence, the overall quality of care in the smaller, community-based, group home environments was worse, not better than you could provide in a large, well-run institution.
There were acknowledged deficiencies within these larger institutions, failures of training, supervision, and leadership, resulting in horrific conditions in some institutions. At the same time, however, other institutions were model programs. In Massachusetts , for example, Bridgewater State Hospital , the subject of Frederick Wiseman’s ground-breaking 1968 documentary, “Titicut Follies," was a nightmarish hell-hole. A few miles down the road, Framingham State Hospital was one of the best state run mental hospitals in the country.
The more correct solution would have been to fire the incompetents, hire more competent people to replace them, and install better supervisory systems, but that’s not what happened.
Across the nation, states happily shut down many of their mental hospitals, sanitariums, and reform schools for juvenile offenders, and tried to replace them with smaller, community based facilities. The states were happy to do this because the changes showed up on their states budgets as a significant decrease in overhead and operating costs associated with a wide variety of human services, at least for awhile.
To a fiscal conservative, that might sound like a good thing. It isn’t. Without either a tenure program or a union behind them, employees of nonprofits are less likely to blow the whistle on their superiors when their superiors are out of line, which virtually guarantees that these nonprofits will be run like private fiefdoms because that’s exactly what they are.
Far from being less expensive, the movement from large state-run institutions turned out to be much more expensive in both the short-run and in the long-run. The cost of setting up new community-based facilities was exacerbated by community resistance to group care facilities suffering from the “not in my backyard" syndrome
The simple facts of the matter are that it proved to be economically infeasible to provide the same number of beds in community-based programs as the larger state-run institutions previously provided with the same quality of care.
The net results from the “deinstitutionalization experiment" can be seen in every city in the United States because massive increases in the homeless populations across the country can be traced directly to the shutting down of various state facilities across the country. And, despite protestations to the contrary, the vast majority of the homeless are either mentally ill, drug addicted, or both. Ask any cop. Ask any honest social worker. Today, people who once would have been in protective custody are wandering the streets and, in some jurisdictions, police officers are ordered not to arrest them, but to move them along to some other jurisdiction.
Community-based services can’t match either the quantity or the quality of the services provided by well-run state programs. There are prisons with better libraries and recreational facilities than you will ever find in a community-based program. Many community-based programs are actually more crowded than a modern prison facility.
Now, we’re doing the same thing to foster children that we have done to mentally-ill, developmentally disabled and drug or alcohol addicted adults. Does it make sense to house criminals in better circumstances than we’re putting innocent children into?
Whether it’s called deinstitutionalization or privatization, it remains a colossal blunder.
Many of the parents of these children are people who once would have been residents in the state institutions that the “privitizers" decided to shut down in the 1970s.
More than anything else, however, the homeless population becomes the matrix in which foster children get lost, often when they run away from foster home placements. If the cities didn’t have large homeless populations, it would be much easier to keep foster kids in their placements, and to find them when they run away.
Coming back to the present moment, we find ourselves in a strange situation. The cost of foster care services has increased by more than 40% since the privatization movement began, so it’s no bargain.
Recent reports document that the incidence of abuse within foster care facilities is going up, not down. The incidence of abuse is a denominator that indicates insufficient supervision. The most recent class action lawsuit filed against Florida ’s DCF charges that the DCF and a private contractor forced an undisclosed number of disabled foster children to sleep in a conference room in a DCF building in Tallahassee . Some of these foster children were Special Needs children, who ordinarily need more, rather than less, support and supervision were left to sleep on tables and floors in an unsupervised situation for days at a time.
We’re moving in the wrong direction.
Florida is not alone. Since 2000, more than 25 class action suits have been filed against state foster care agencies across the country, while there are some other cases that have been in process for more than 25 years.
There is, in fact, a constant tension between state agencies trying to provide care to foster children, and advocacy groups who are challenging what they believe to be inadequate services.
How have these law suits affected the delivery of services?
In 1986, the first year for which national statistics could be found, 280,000 children passed through foster care facilities. In 2003, the most recent year for which the federal government has national statistics, there were 523,000 children in foster care. That’s a 69% increase over a 17 year period during which the official population of the United States increased by just 16%, from 244 million to 291 million
This indicates that the number of foster children is increasing more than four times faster than the total population over the past 17 years.
If you only look at the past five years, however, a different picture emerges. From 1999 to 2003, the number of children in foster care nationally fell from a high of 565,000 to 523,000, 7.5% decrease in the number of children in foster care.
Florida , with 30,000 children in foster care, ranks third in the nation, behind California with more than 97,000 and New York with more than 37,000 in their foster care systems, but the number of children in Florida ’s foster care system has been declining steadily since 2000, when the number stood at 36,608. That’s a 16.2% decrease at a time when the population of the state increased by 29.4% from 11 million to 17 million.
When taken together, these statistics seem to indicate that the number of foster children in Florida is decreasing steadily at more than twice the national average, but it is unclear why the population Florida ’s foster care system is going down when the population of the state is going up.
What’s going on here? Is the system getting better, or do these declining numbers indicate that the system is failing?
Statistics are dangerous things.
Here’s an illustration that makes the point.
Take a gallon container. Fill it with water. Then fill a quart size container. Keep pouring until the gallon container is empty. How much water did you save? One quart, right?
That’s precisely the same situation we’re in with foster care services. The existing services have a specific capacity and, once you exceed that capacity, potential clients get shunted away from the foster care networks.
In this case, the statistics depend upon the capacity of the system to deliver services. In the business world, that equates to same store statistics. Financial analysts determine how well a given company is doing by comparing sales numbers from the same stores over a period of time, which negates the effects of opening new stores, or closing old ones, on the statistics. So, we may not be looking at a decrease in the number of foster children. We may be looking at an increase in the number of foster children who are not receiving the services they should be getting.
Want proof?
In 2002, the Department of Justice released its “National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway, and Thrownaway Children" (NISMART) report that suggests that there were anywhere between 798,000 to two million runaways or “missing children" in between 1997 and 1999, but the government believes these numbers are accurate for 1999 since that’s when most of the data was collected.
If those numbers seem improbable to you, that’s because they probably are. The study is fundamentally flawed for two reasons, one positive and one negative. The positive reason is that many missing children may have been reported missing several different times by different parties, and each of these reports has the effect of inflating the total because it is virtually impossible to cross-reference the reports. In addition, many children ran away several times during the course of the year. Each of these incidents generated separate reports, but these recurrences should be considered as legitimate members of the class of missing children.
The negative reason is that these numbers only reflect those children who have beeen identified as missing, or reported as missing. It doesn’t take into account the thousands upon thousands of children who were never reported missing by anyone at all.
So, who are these abducted, runaway and thrownaway children?
41% have been abandoned by their parents or caretakers , 46% have been physically abused , 32% have been forced to participate in sexual activity against
their will, 41% of the females were pregnant, 75% have dropped out or will drop out of school, and 32% have attempted suicide at some point in their lives . (Source: The Florida Network of Youth and Family Services.)
In other words, they are exactly the same children that are being put into the foster care. The only difference is that they aren’t in the foster care system.
Or are they?
By now, you may have gotten the impression that nothing is the way it seems in the foster care debate. If you have, you’re right.
Some of the children in these categories (abducted, runaways, and throwaways) pass through the foster care system, but some are running away from that very same system.
In the final analysis, no one really knows how many runaways there are, or how many kids who should be in foster care aren’t.
All we know for sure is that there are way too many of them.
How does a two year-old “run away" from a foster home? She doesn’t. She can’t. If she disappears from a foster home, someone took her somewhere else.
How is it possible for a steady stream of children to disappear from various foster care facilities without their absence being noted?
The answer is simple. The only way these things can happen is if the supervisory systems within the DCF are inadequate. One or two cases might be explained as personnel issues such as an incompetent case worker or a negligent supervisor. The only way 652 children can disappear from the system is that there are basic flaws in the system itself.
There are several.
Fixing the foster care system isn’t impossible. It isn’t even very difficult, but it requires a different paradigm from the ones that have been used thus far. Having spent twenty-five years in human services, providing exactly these kinds of services, I would be remiss if I didn’t make a few recommendations of my own. Why not? Everyone else has.
A Few Modest Proposals
There are at least nine different “stake holders" in any foster care placement, in addition to the child in question. These include the mother, the father, other relatives (aunts, uncles, grandparents), the foster parents, DCF case workers, DCF supervisors, court appointed attorneys representing the minor children, attorneys representing the parents, guardians ad litem appointed by the court to supervise the care of each foster child, counselors and directors of foster care facilities, but there is no one person within the system who is ultimately responsible for supervising the child’s long-term care.
What the foster system needs more than anything else is a single, consistent, unchanging observer who has taken responsibility for their welfare, but the people who meet this job description are difficult to come by. They’re called surrogate parents, and they are in short supply.
A surrogate parent isn’t the same thing as a foster parent. A surrogate parent is rather like a guardian ad litem, those court-appointed guardians who are supposed to guide foster children through the system. The difference is that the guardian ad litem’s involvement with the child usually ends at the point where the child is placed in a foster home, and that’s precisely when the guardians are needed most. (Guardians Ad Litem were supposed to continue following children into their placements, but there aren’t enough Guardians to go around, forcing the courts to recycle them more quickly.)
What is needed is a separate team of volunteers whose sole function is to drop in on foster families on an irregular but frequent basis, spend a few minutes with the foster child, and file a simple report with the case workers assigned to that child, documenting the child’s presence and condition.
With such a system in place, foster parents, case workers and supervisors would KNOW that there was someone else, someone outside the system, looking over their shoulders. This system might not prevent children from running away or being abducted from foster care placements, but it would prevent their absence from going unnoticed, and it would protect them from most, if not all, of the physical and sexual abuse going on within the system.
Who would these people be? Retirees. We have plenty of them to go around. I’m one of them. High school and college students. Anyone who gives a damn about children. The commitment with respect to time and effort would be minimal, as would the recruitment, training and supervisory systems required to make this work.
Sounds like a great idea, right?
It’s not going to happen.
This is the central dilemma of foster care systems all over the country. The impetus behind the privatization movement is to get foster children out of centralized facilities and into family based foster care settings. We don’t have enough foster care homes to go around, so the foster care system is focused on getting more people to provide foster care, rather than on protective systems to prevent kids from being abused within that very same system.
Even with such a system of surrogates in place, we would still need better information management. DCF spent twelve years and $230 million to develop Homesafenet, which was supposed to be a comprehensive, web-based client tracking and documentation system. $230 million is at least a ten times more than this system should have cost. Moreover, the world wide web wasn’t even a functioning reality until 1993, and it has undergone several dramatic changes in the years since. Any product based on a protocol originally written in 1993 is already out of date.
There’s no doubt that DCF needed to replace its older systems with a single integrated system that’s up to the task. Homesafenet isn’t.
The evidence for this comes from Florida Auditor General’s William O. Monroe’s own 2002 Information Technology Audit for the Homesafenet system. In the summary that precedes the report there is a statement that “Homesafenet users did not always input data timely" (sic).
Any system that doesn’t force users to enter data in a timely fashion is an incompetent system. There are well-established protocols for programming accountability into management systems. the least of which is a red flag system that issues a report if a given client file isn’t accessed by a responsible party within a certain number of days.
Another hint that indicates the incompetence of the Homesafenet system is that two community-based providers have been working on the development of a second software product, called Unity One, to augment the Homesafenet system. There’s a name for brand new software products that can’t perform functions required by the system’s users: a disaster.
Keeping Track of A Highly Mobile Population
Liberals are going to jump all over this one. Just remember, I used to be one of you, so I have already taken all of the libertarian issues into account.
We put radio beacon bracelets on criminals under house arrest. Parents are quietly buying GPS devices that can be secreted in their children’s clothing. An increasing number of people in this country are walking around with miniaturized global positioning devices injected under their skin so they can be found if they are kidnapped. Some dog owners have equipped their pets with similar devices.
So, if, white collar criminals, paranoid parents, rich people, and pets have these systems, why not use them to keep track of foster children?
Had Rilya Wilson been provided with such a device, and the appropriate tracking system was in place, the state would have known within hours if Rilya was missing from her home or dead and, if she had been murdered, they would have been able to find her body and give her a proper burial.
More importantly, the knowledge that foster children have been equipped with such devices would go a long way toward discouraging the monsters among us from attacking children who were relying upon them for protection.
Sadly, there are many people out there who are so crazy that even such devices as these wouldn’t dissuade them.
In one of the most recent cases to grab the media’s attention, nine month old Charles Tyson Jr was brutally murdered by his own father six month’s after the child’s maternal grandmother, Joanne Mosley, called DCF to complain that Tyson’s father, Charles Edward Tyson, was violent, abusive, and lived in a home where other adults sold drugs.
Charles Tyson Sr reportedly threw his infant son through a car window, picked the child up, slammed his head on the hood of the car, and threw the child into a canal
I don’t know of any system that could have prevented this kind of atrocity.
That’s one of the things you have to live with in human services. Sometimes, nothing works.
Automated Daily Check-In Systems
Less extreme, and nearly as effective, are telephone check-in systems that have been used for years to keep track of at-risk clients. I implemented the first one of these in the Project Checkpoint Youth Program in 1978, using pagers to remind clients to make their check-in calls.
It works like this. Once a day, every day, children in foster care (age four or more) call a phone number and simply say their names. Computerized systems exist today that can match the voice to the name and the name to the phone number, verifying both the status and the location of the child….and they cost less than one percent of $230 million the state spent on the Homesafenet system. (We didn’t have computers like these in 1978, so we made do with human ears instead.)
There are perhaps a dozen other inexpensive and highly effective steps that could be taken to increase the safety of the children in foster care, but foster care systems are under such enormous economic and political pressure that it’s practically impossible to implement real change.
The sad truth is that the single most vulnerable population in our country have become political footballs, being tossed back and forth by people who are tinkering with a system they don’t really understand.
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