There was a lot of hoopla recently when Children’s Rights Inc. and the Wisconsin Civil Liberties Union settled their decade-old suit alleging that the state “failed to protect the health and safety of the abused, neglected and abandoned children in its care.” Not that things had improved. In fact, days earlier, lead attorney Eric E. Thompson called Milwaukee’s child welfare system “one of the worst” in the country. “In more than half the cases, federal law is being violated,” he said.
Now there’s a court agreement requiring the Milwaukee Bureau of Child Welfare to get closer to following the federal law it ignored. If the state now fails to approach compliance, it will face an arbitrator and have to think up other ways to meet the requirements. If this were a football game, the state would have had to give up the ball long ago, but there’s no end of chances when you’re a government bureaucracy.
Worse, the settlement has the state’s own employees – not independent observers monitoring the bureau’s progress. “The fox is going to be watching the hen house,” laments Jim Rice, president of the Milwaukee County Foster Parent Association. “This case was our one big hope that things would improve.”
Can we trust the bureau to report on itself? Earlier this year, it bragged that the number of kids in protective custody was down. Presumably, more kids were safe in their homes. The bureau never explained that the number really went down because it stopped counting nearly 1,000 kids who turned 18. Never mind that they didn’t have a permanent family or an independent living plan. Or that 37 percent report being seriously physically victimized, sexually assaulted, incarcerated or homeless within 18 months after leaving foster care.
The bureau has never been much for honest public disclosure. In fact, it doesn’t account for kids who just “disappear.” It doesn’t report on child fatalities on its watch (at least three have died at two of the state’s five local sites, according to two workers) or regularly provide quality measures like caseworker and foster parent turnover. Five years since taking over from the county, the state still has no public grievance procedure to allow birth parents, foster parents or child advocates who detect problems to raise them.
Agencies and workers who once served as whistle-blowers have either been forced out of the system or hired by it, there-by silencing them. Meanwhile, some bureau subcontractors give workers a physical description of Milwaukee Journal Sentinel child welfare beat reporter Jamaal Abdul-Alim and order them never to speak to him, say two insiders.
The bureau’s supposed public oversight body, “The Partnership Council,” couldn’t even muster a quorum for the big settlement announcement, but that’s par for the course. The state’s Child Fatality Review Task Force lacks the statutory teeth neighboring states have to really look into child welfare fatalities. A $3 million academic report on the bureau’s effectiveness, discussed since 1998 and delayed by the 80 percent turnover of bureau service providers, won’t be completed until December 2003. But then, one of two professors doing the report is married to the woman paid to run the bureau’s training!
“The public knows more about the Lost Boys of Sudan than it does about the thousands of lost children of Milwaukee County,” says Susan Conwell, co-chair of In Their Best Interests Inc., a nonprofit advocate for kids in out-of-home care. “There’s no one following them as they move from one temporary, unstable living arrangement to another.”
Spotting signs of bureau malfeasance is easier. Take the caseworker who called foster parent Jim Rice trying to find the
9-year-old boy who had been placed in his home, then removed 10 months earlier. The boy had gone to two subsequent foster homes but, says Rice, the bureau “lost track” of him because its records weren’t up to date. Or the social worker who reported two boys being starved and physically abused in foster care, says the boys’ former stepfather. The bureau investigated, said everything was fine and ordered the worker to leave the kids there. Later, a Children’s Hospital doctor who’d seen the boys before discovered new scars covering their bodies. One had lost six pounds. The other’s wrists had been bound. The caseworker was ordered never again to provide such detail in a case file.
In another case, the bureau dropped 13 kids at the home of their poor and ill-equipped grandmother – all in a single day, says Conwell. It was a relative placement, so the bureau didn’t even have to do the paperwork. Then it licensed a manic-depressive woman, unable to care for her own 4-year-old without assistance, as a foster parent for a mentally ill juvenile. When the Mental Health Association of Milwaukee begged the bureau’s caseworker and supervisor to remove the girl, both ignored the warnings, says Martha S. Rasmus, Mental Health Association chief executive officer. Fearing violence, the association called police, who took the child away. Would the internal overseers even know?
The State Audit Bureau indicted the bureau for its sloppy bookkeeping in a 2000-’01 federal funds audit, saying its failure to document whether it had done criminal background checks before licensing foster parents cost taxpayers tens of thousands in lost federal reimbursement. The Audit Bureau had legislative approval to do a performance audit as well, but it wasn’t allowed to dig further for fear of turning up more damning evidence for the lawsuit, says an insider.
Now that the suit is settled, it’s time to lift the curtain and really look inside.
