CUF in the News
is a New York City-based think tank that fuses journalistic reporting techniques with traditional policy analysis to produce in-depth reports and workable policy solutions on the critical issues facing our cities.
New York by the Numbers
Economic snapshots of the 5 boroughs
|
||||||||
Introduction: Reforming the Reforms
Is the New York City child welfare system better off today than it was four years ago?
We share the assessment of the federal courts Special Child Welfare Advisory Panel, which concluded in its final report last month that the answer to that question is a qualified yes. The qualification, of course, is that there is a great deal of work left to be done before the system is something that New Yorkers should feel proud of.
Since 1996, the citys Administration for Childrens Services, under Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta, has embarked on the most ambitious overhaul of the system in decades. Such far-reaching reform initiatives are nothing new in New York. This is, after all, a system famous for lofty promises-and infamous for its fatal failures. But this time seems to be different. Scoppetta, under pressure from several high-profile lawsuits, has moved forward with an impressive slate of reforms.
The city has begun to try to hold local contract foster care agencies more accountable for their performanceby measuring their scores in a system that grades success in reunifying families, delivering services and cutting the amount of time kids spend in care. Scoppetta has taken the important step of funding additional training for ACS staffers, thus tacitly recognizing that many city caseworkers dont possess the skills needed to help their clients. ACS is also instituting faster, more efficient case planning procedures, an initiative thats still in its infancy.
Scoppettas most significant-and most popular-reform is his neighborhood-based child welfare plan. The initiative, first implemented in the Bronx and taken citywide in mid-2000, establishes a new paradigm for the provision of foster care and services for troubled families. The city is moving to consolidate all aspects of a childs care in his or her neighborhood. The idea is to reduce the trauma on kids and create a network of support in the childs home neighborhood that leads to quicker and fairer permanent placements.
Its an impressive menu. The question is whether it will wind up being half-cooked.
There is no doubt that all of these reforms have had an impact on caseworkers and the systems bureaucrats. But will they actually have a positive impact on the lives of families and children? Thats not so easy to answer.
The purpose of this report is not to dissect all of Scoppettas record. That would take a dozen reports. Instead we want to highlight the unfinished business-significant gaps in the planning and implementation of the Scoppetta reforms.
Since the neighborhood-based plan is the centerpiece of the Scoppetta plan, we believe that its absolutely vital for the city to recognize and address a fundamental flaw in its approach.
So far, ACS has focused almost exclusively on recruiting foster care parents in the neighborhoods from which kids are most commonly removed. But the city has not devoted the necessary resources to keep the second half of its promiseimproving the quality and quantity of services available to parents who are struggling to keep their families together.
Almost every front-line worker we interviewed told us that more needs to be done to help families keep their children. But the Giuliani administration has failed to increase funding for preventive services to the levels needed to make a real difference in the lives of the many impoverished families this system serves. We believe the availability of these services will play an enormous role in the success or failure of the neighborhood-based initiative.
This shortcoming seems to indicate that the city hasnt kept a larger promise: to make the needs of families a greater priority in the planning and implementation of new programs. Throughout his four years in office, Scoppetta has made sweeping moves without consulting parents and their advocatesthe people who stand to lose the children forever if the system fails. The commissioner recently stepped up efforts to bring birth parents into the ACS planning process, but he is currently engaged in an unproductive battle with one of the citys major parent groups.
We also point out that the state and the federal government has an important role to play in ensuring a better future for our children. Money remains a huge issuemoney that the state and feds control. As a result, the city is still struggling with an outdated per diem child welfare payment system that provides an incentive for private foster care agencies to keep children in care for as long as possible.
It is also a system that pays frontline caseworkers so little most of them cant afford to work in their jobs for more than couple of years. The results are disastrous: turnover rates are needlessly high and families are often shuffled from worker to worker at the time they most need consistency, care and compassion.
As this report shows, these are the day-to-day realities of children, parents and caseworkers on the bottom rungs of the system. Police still barge into parents apartments at all hours of the day and night to take their kids away. Parents are still denied the services they need because someone misfiled a slip of paper. Caseworkers still sit bleary-eyed in front of outdated computers, searching in vain for basic information about the children they are responsible for protecting.
And children are still frightened, confused and damaged by the whole process.
Recommendations & Solutions
proposed by Child Welfare Watch
We recognize that ACS Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta has begun implementing broad and significant reform of the citys child welfare system. We applaud this. But these initiatives, important as they are, still fail to address fundamental flaws in the systemand too little energy has been directed at changes that improve the lot of kids and families dealing with ACS at street level.
The most significant omission is an ironclad commitment to making sure kids arent arbitrarily and unreasonably plucked out of their homes in the first place-and assuring that they are reunited as quickly as possible with their families, if this can be safely done, once theyve been removed. In its final report gauging reform efforts to this point, the court-appointed Special Child Welfare Advisory Panel stated, We believe that the most significant challenge facing this system is to make further, critically needed improvements with regard to permanency. Child Welfare Watch echoes this assertion.
Recent statistics show that the citys policy of aggressively removing kids from their parents homes is slackening, and the sustained decline in the overall foster care population is an encouraging trend. Nonetheless, removals remain near all-time highs, and too few resources are being devoted to keeping families together. The safety of children should be a paramount concern, but most of the children the city pulls from parental care are not in imminent physical danger.
For years, Child Welfare Watch has reported that parents often lose their children for a variety of neglect offenses, some serious, some relatively minor. Common causes for removals include marijuana smoking, failing to assure kids attend school, yelling, even sloppiness in housekeeping. We are not suggesting that these problems are trivialmany seriously threaten the well-being of children and may indicate more serious abuse or neglect-but we also believe that in many cases, these problems can be addressed through measures short of removing children from the home.
While ACS has improved its oversight and operations, the city is largely failing to provide adequate help to troubled families. During the Giuliani administration, reform at ACS has been focused too much on casting the agency as an increasingly efficient law enforcement agency intent on punishing parents for infractions. As a result, the machinery of removal moves with breathtaking speed. Meaningful assistance for families, on the other hand, remains hard to secure and is agonizingly slow to reach children and their parents.
Poor families need real help to deal with their difficultiesnot just a menacing knock on the door from a child protective worker. The time has come for ACS to recognize these realities. When it comes to removals, city officials need to show more self-restraint. When it comes to families, they need to back up their broad promises of help with material assistance.
The greatest challenge facing Scoppetta and, ultimately, his successor is this: How to sustain the current wave of reform while making the city more responsive to the needs of at-risk families. With this in mind, we propose the following solutions:
ACS Must Keep its Commitment to Making Family Services a Cornerstone of the Neighborhood-Based Foster Care System.
We are pleased that the city has begun implementation of its neighborhood-based foster care system, arguably the most important reform undertaken by the system in years. But parents and agency workers still say that the improvement of locally-based preventive services for families is proceeding too slowlyand without a commitment of sufficient resources.
By this, we mean not only money and manpower, but clear signals, from Scoppetta down to the line workers, that programs relating to community care-such as the Family-to-Family program, designed to build closer ties between the foster parents and the biological parents-are top priorities. Without consistent backing from the powers that be at ACS, the neighborhood-based plan is likely to become just another reshuffling of the child welfare bureaucracy.
Parents Voices Must Be Heard in Reform Efforts.
Along with their children, parents have the most to lose in the foster care system. Still, ACS has given parents little or no say in the crafting of major reform efforts that have a direct impact on their families. The city should give parents a real role in shaping and refining these reforms - an opportunity ACS has routinely extended to other groups, including foster care agency executives, academics and law enforcement officials.
The State Must Reform its Foster Care Payment System.
Under the current state system for financing foster care, contract agencies have a financial incentive to keep children in their foster homes. The state needs to explore and implement alternative financing systems that provide incentives for faster reunification or adoption.
At Both the State and City Level, There Must Be A New Commitment to Supporting Foster Parents.
Government must raise the financial support offered to foster parents. Poor families do not have the resources to properly care for foster children and working families dont have enough money for day care. Community-based foster care will be nearly impossible to implement without this added support for foster and kinship families.
Replace Connections With An Efficient Data Collection System.
The state has badly bungled its development of the Connections child welfare case tracking system, which was supposed to provide caseworkers and managers with fingertip access to vital data about the children in their care. Most contract agencies in New York City now rely on a privately-produced database system to keep their files up to date. Caseworkers are forced to spend substantial amounts of time tracking down basic data, time they could be using to provide direct service for their clients. The state should consider scrapping Connections and working more closely with frontline workers to design a system that will be more useful.
Tough Neighborhood
Finding: After a sweeping start, the citys neighborhood-based foster care plan faces an uncertain future.
Of all the reforms proposed by ACS Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta, none is more ambitious, more popular, or more difficult to assess than the effort to place city children in foster homes located in their own neighborhoods.
The neighborhood-based initiative, which began in the Bronx in 1999 and was implemented citywide last year, is intended to reduce the trauma that comes with removing children from their homes. Scoppetta announced the plan in 1997 and assigned one his top lieutenants, Linda Gibbs, to create a series of contracts with neighborhood-based foster care providers. A second and equally crucial component was to use the community-based approach to create a more effective system for delivering services to help birth parents retain or regain their children.
Child welfare experts nationwide have long advocated for this kind of neighborhood-based approach. For many foster children, the pain of being wrenched out of familiar surroundings can be almost as agonizing as being taken away from their families. The hope is that keeping children in their communities allows them to maintain ties to their friends, relatives and teachersnot to mention their parents-reducing the trauma of being put into foster care and, ideally, allowing for quicker reunification or adoption.
Agency staff and experts interviewed were almost unanimous in their praise of Scoppettas commitment to the plan. A typical comment comes from Luis Medina, executive director of St. Christopher, Inc., in the past a vocal critic of the system: ACS is improving its community-based services, he says. And theyre getting better and better.
Nonetheless, observers note that there are problems. The first, and one of the most serious, is the citys failure to provide adequate resources for families in danger of being split apart. While the trend has been improving in recent years, there is much more the agency could be doing to ensure that children are not needlessly placed in foster care (see Hauling In, below).
Experts also note the community-based program is so far-ranging-and the challenges of implementing it so great-that it will be years before anyone can rate its success or failure. This is just getting under way, says John Mattingly, a member of the Special Child Welfare Advisory Panel, a court-ordered body that has been monitoring ACSs progress over the last three years. ACS is committed to implementing these programs. Its usually a five to ten year effort.
The first statistics have started to trickle in, and they appear to be encouraging.
According to the Special Child Welfare Advisory Panels final report published in December, just over half of all children citywide were being placed in their borough of origin during the six-month period from January to June 2000, a dramatic improvement over the 31 percent placed within their home borough during the previous fiscal year. Still, only about ten percent of foster kids citywide are being placed in their community district of origini.e. their actual neighborhood-though again this represents notable improvement over the 4.8 percent logged from July 1999 to June 2000.
Early indications also suggest that success has been uneven. In the last fiscal year, the numbers fluctuated widely from borough to borough: Brooklyn lead the way with an in-borough placement rate of nearly 45 percent; Manhattan brought up the rear with 12.5 percent. The borough with the highest percentage of children placed in its community district was Staten Island with 14.4 percent; Manhattan again lagged with a paltry 3.3 in-district placement rate. Importantly, state officials report that 12.4 percent of the citys foster care children were being placed outside the city as of this time last year.
While the numbers have been slow to accumulate, the complications of implementing the system on the ground have been apparent since the outset.
Foster care agency officials tell Child Welfare Watch that one of the big problems is creating a neighborhood-based network of foster care parents. These neighborhoods tend to be home to high levels of poverty. Many potential foster care parents do not have the room or the time to take on this major responsibilityparticularly for the amount of money ACS pays for this work (see Foster Frustrations, below).
Theres also the problem of sheer logistics. Over the years, individual contract agencies have forged relationships with whomever they deemed to be suitable foster care parents, regardless of where those parents happened to live. Thats why kids were often shipped across the city, and even as far afield as Long Island and Westchester, to new homes. And thats why it was entirely possible for, say, a Bronx-based agency to be dealing with dozens of foster parents in Brooklyn.
For the new system to work, those Brooklyn foster parents need to cycle through their current set of foster children, then switch organizational affiliation over to an agency in their own neighborhood. Its not an impossible task, but its complicated. It often involves agencies trading cases, a process those in the system informally call swapping.
ACS has been strongly encouraging agencies to swap vacant homes, says Jim Purcell, executive director of the Council of Family and Child Caring Agencies, a group representing local foster care agencies. Lets say Ive got a vacant foster home in a different borough, I now need to be seeking out an agency in that borough and try to trade them for a vacant home located in my own district. Some agencies have been great, some havent. I think ACS has been a little frustrated with the speed of this process.
As a result, Purcell says ACS is looking into the possibility of establishing a central clearance center to better handle this complicated matchmaking process. But the impediments are more human than bureaucratic, he adds: These are people issues. Youre not trading vacant file cabinets, youre trading families. These are agencies that have a long allegiance to a family. They feel attached to them, and vice-versa.
The good news is that almost every agency in the system buys into the community-based idea. St. Christophers, Inc. has already moved four foster care sites, serving 1,190 kids, into the Bronx and Harlem neighborhoods it is responsible for serving. These revamped offices offer services including drug abuse counseling, assistance finding low-income housing and casework counseling.
Many other contract agencies, such as Cardinal McCloskey Childrens and Family Services, are going local in a variety of ways-reaching out to churches within the community or holding coffee-klatches with neighborhood residents to recruit adoptive families in their communities-so they can get out of the swapping game.
But other problems that pre-dated the community-based approach-high caseworker turnover in contract agencies, poor coordination between caseworkers and service providers, and a per-diem system that encourages agencies to keep children in care as long as possible, among others-remain obstacles to providing the essential services to parents and children.
New issues have emerged as well. Megan McLaughlin, chief executive officer and executive director at the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies says the city hasnt committed enough to preventive services to assure that contract agencies can fulfill their obligation to preserve families. I havent seen any data telling me that there are more services in the community, she tells Child Welfare Watch.
ACS officials dispute this, saying the city has been moving ahead with preventive service improvements. The Special Child Welfare Advisory Panel agrees that progress is being made, accepting ACSs explanation that the drop in families receiving preventive services in fiscal 2000 was an anomalous result of a lag caused by the switch in contracts to the community-based model. Both ACS and the panel forecast a dramatic rise in families served in fiscal 2001.
And the panel echoed the views of experts on the importanceand the difficultyof these two related initiatives. It is no exaggeration, the panel wrote in its final report, to say that the success of New York Citys efforts to build a neighborhood-based service system depends on this work.
Foster Care Frustrations
ACSs ambitious plan to keep foster kids closer to home depends on finding new foster parents in the same communities where removal rates are highestsomething thats easier said than done.
At this time last year, just 12 percent of children in foster care citywide had been placed in the neighborhood they came from. Disproportionately African-American and Latino, these children have long been dispersed to foster homes throughout the five boroughs, and sometimes beyond, as ACS and its contract agencies sought to provide them safe and stable homes wherever they could find them.
But thats all about to change. This past June, ACS began to implement reforms to allow New Yorks 34,000 foster children to be able to leave their families without leaving home. ACS has contracted with 129 agencies citywide, at a total annual cost of nearly $800 million, to offer programs from preventive services to foster boarding homes and homemaking-all available close to home for families that need them.
This plan is that rare thing in the child welfare world: something almost everyone, from childrens rights advocates to parents rights advocates to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, agrees is a good idea. But for the plan to succeed, children will need foster homes nearby.
That wont be easy. Theres a lack of both willing foster parents and affordable housing-and there are the same conditions of poverty that seem closely correlated with the troubled homes from which foster children have been removed.
The financial compensation of being a foster parent seems almost comically small compared to the enormous responsibility it entails: Foster parents are compensated by a complicated system that takes each childs age and special difficulties (such as a medical condition or developmental issue) into account, but the payment levels are barely adequate, if that. We get less than babysitters! marvels Julia Boyd, a Crown Heights grandmother who has been a foster parent to 18 children over the last 15 or so years; she has adopted three of them.
Poverty also factors into another key shortage-a lack of places for foster children to live. Far from having suitable bedrooms to spare, many residents in neighborhoods with the highest removal rates-where the new reform will succeed or fail based on the number of local placements-live in overcrowded apartments. In the Bronxs University Heights, where there are hundreds more foster children than foster homes, about 30 percent of households are already overcrowded, according to U.S. Census figures.
If the poorest residents of these neighborhoods dont have the space, those with more resources dont always have the time. Last April, ACS finally restored guaranteed child care funding for foster parents, a move that will hopefully make it easier for 9-to-5ers to sign up. But state-sponsored babysitting money, once a lifeline, was eliminated in 1995.
As serious as the physical obstacles are to finding new foster parents, the psychic ones may be more stubborn. Qualified and caring foster parents who arent already frustrated with the child welfare system are becoming harder to findand in neighborhoods where the child welfare system is most aggressive, word gets around fast.
In the nearly nine years that Greta Day, of East New York, spent as a foster parent, she cared for 32 children in the large house she shared with her husband. Like a lot of foster parents, Day is matter-of-fact about why she took on such a saintly obligation. I have a big love for kids, she shrugs, especially those who are not so fortunate to have a mommy.
But one day in 1989, her older childrenseven foster children and three kids she had already adopteddidnt come back from school. That afternoon, an agency caseworker who showed up at her house told her why: They had been pulled out of school because one of them reported that Day had hit her.
A Family Court judge eventually cleared Day of any wrongdoing, and Day insists that the child was looking for revenge after Day forbade her from sleeping over at a friends. (False claims are not uncommon: In 1999, only 14 percent of nearly 2,000 reports against foster parents were found to have possible basis.) Her three adopted children were brought home, but the victory did little to restore Days lost satisfaction in being a foster mother.
Days feelings of alienation are common. Few people whove met a foster parent have illusions of what it takes, even under the best of circumstances. A national survey found that 40 percent of all foster parents quit in their first year, most of them complaining of lousy pay and bad treatment.
Those frustrations vie with the intense pride and satisfaction that keep foster parents committed to the lives of their charges. Im an advocate, a fighter, Julia Boyd says; for her, taking care of disadvantaged African-American children has become a kind of personal crusade. But the political implications are only half the story. Theyre my inspiration, Boyd explains. Theyre my joy.
Adapted and updated from Alyssa Katzs award-winning article Mommy Nearest in the June 2000 issue of City Limits. For the full text, check out City Limits website at: www.citylimits.org/archives/0006katz.htm.
The Enforcer
Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta is credited for reducing caseloads and improving training. But to what end?
When Nicholas Scoppetta became Commissioner of the newly renamed Administration for Childrens Services in early 1996, he wasted no time in sending the message, to his agency and to the world, that the single most important mission of ACS was to protect children.
The core function of the Administration for Childrens Services, the foundation of its reason for being, is protecting the children of New York from danger and harm, Scoppetta wrote in his reform plan published later that year.
The new commissioner, himself a foster child in the Bronx during the 1940s, brought to the job a prosecutorial zeal garnered from years in the U.S. attorneys office. Within his first year at ACS, Scoppetta began to reorganize the agencys child-protective division based on a law enforcement model. His guiding philosophy was the following: Any ambiguity regarding the safety of the child will be resolved in favor of removing the child from harms way.
Very few people would dispute that hes been true to his word. But there are significant questions about the effectiveness of his child-protection campaign, and the potentially devastating impact ACSs aggressive policy of removing children from their homes has had on families in low-income neighborhoods.
The first and potentially most significant of the changes Scoppetta brought to ACS was hiring new caseworkers to dramatically reduce protective caseloads. The agency has added 1,590 new child protective worker positions since 1996and the effort has yielded results. Between June 1996 and June 1999, the average caseload for an ACS Protective/Diagnostic Caseworker dropped from 27 to 14. The agency has also cut by half the number of children each child protective manager must monitor.
The Special Child Welfare Advisory Panel, set up under the Marisol v. Giuliani settlement to monitor ACS over the last two years, noted in a recent report that ACSs caseload ratios are now superior to those in many large urban child welfare systems.
But some agency caseworkers interviewed by Child Welfare Watch suggest that the numbers may paint a rosier picture than the reality at street level. Caseworkers working for the citys more than sixty nonprofit foster care agencies do the day-to-day work on about eighty percent of these cases, according to the Special Child Welfare Advisory Panel. In many contract agencies, caseworker turnover remains a constant problem, and child welfare workers find themselves pinch-hitting for their erstwhile colleagues while replacements are recruited and trained. ACS estimates its own annual turnover rate at between seven and nine percent, but the contract agencies, where caseloads can be twice as high, face annual turnover running between 35 and 40 percent.
Another major reform ACS has undertaken is an effort to improve caseworker training. ACS extended the training program for new caseworkers from four weeks to ten months and created a $3 million scholarship program allowing up to 200 ACS employees to attend schools to pursue a masters degree in social work. ACS has also introduced its first agency-wide supervisory training program and, beginning in February 2001, expects to offer ten days of training to all new supervisors. Additionally, the agency has created two new training programs, one targeted at child abuse and neglect investigative procedures and the other on the selection and preparation of prospective foster adoptive parents.
Finally, ACS has adopted the states common core approach to training child welfare staff, ensuring that personnel in protective services, foster care, preventive services and adoption all have some skills-based training in common as a foundation for their more specialized skills. The common core model also presents opportunities for ACS and contract agency personnel to receive training together, a change that the Marisol panel characterizes as having extraordinary potential in helping to break down barriers and build teamwork across the different parts of the child welfare system.
Even longtime critics of the system acknowledge that the training is improving caseworker quality. The training today is much better than it was eight or nine years ago, says Luis Medina, executive director of St. Christophers, Inc., a private foster care agency that operates citywide.
Still, many workers in the field question the focus of the training-which continues to emphasize Scoppettas stated aim of removing children on any suspicion of neglect or abuse. We also need to train workers to think about families, says Carol Shapiro, director of La Bodega de la Familia, a social service agency located on Manhattans Lower East Side.
Shapiros point is typical of the most persistent criticism of Scoppettas tenure. Since Scoppetta took the helm four years ago, ACS case managers have accelerated their efforts to remove children from their parents. Between 1996 and 1998, the number of admissions into foster care, based on reports of abuse or neglect, rose from 9,996 to 12,000. Only in 1999 did removals from the home drop back to 10,418. The decline continued in fiscal 2000, with 9,390 children removed.
Removals have dropped due to a combination of things, says ACS spokesperson Jennifer Falk. The emphasis is on better risk assessment, and training is now longer. Falk also credits increases in preventive services spending over the last five years, and the increased use of preventive services as a result. But better-trained, more discerning caseworkers, she says, are making the biggest difference. Theres not only the opportunity for continuing education for frontline staff, but agency-wide supervisory training modules for supervisors and managers as well.
In its final report, the Special Child Welfare Advisory Panel joined critics of ACS in noting that the agency had a lot work left to do on the issues of permanency, preventive services and placementsthose missions that seem to lie farthest from Scoppettas stated priority of protecting children.
The panels goals for the future can be read as a subtle indictment of ACS in those areas where progress has been scant. With regard to permanency, the panel writes: We believe that the heart of a new system-wide approach to permanency is a re-thinking of the role of parents, around the primary themes of enhanced respect, engagement, and partnership. Though ACS has made progress on the administrative and procedural fronts, they add, on the front line...not enough has changed with regard to permanency.
In an ACS press release after the report came out, Scoppetta himself seemed to tacitly acknowledge the criticism sprinkled in among the panels praise, stating, ...we need to build upon [the original reform] plan, working with parents, families, neighborhood institutions and our contract agency partners to ensure that reform continues.
Christophers Story
by Akka Gordon
Reforms are great. But for many kids, the system is still a nightmare. A former caseworker tells the tale of one unforgettable three-year-old.
Until recently, Emergency Childrens Services was located in an inconspicuous, dingy building at the southern edge of Manhattans otherwise trendy SoHo neighborhood. Its in the process of moving to Bellevue Campus, but what goes on inside hasnt changed. About 30 to 40 kids come to ECS each night, after they are taken away from their parents and while theyre waiting for a foster home.
When they get there, they cry, fight, or sit silently on a stained couch, eyes glazed over. As an investigator for the New York City Administration for Childrens Services for a year between October 1998 and October 1999 I spent many nights with these children.
When I first started coming to ECS, I tried to reach out to all the children who were crying or sitting alone, shocked and terrified. It was easier with the little ones, because I could hug them and they would immediately respond. But the older ones were different.
I asked them, Do you know why you are here? Chances were that they had only a vague idea; ACS investigators often do not tell the children they are removing exactly what is going on. Most of the time the kids shrugged and said, I dont know. Or they knew pieces, like, Because mommy didnt clean the house. Often it was, Because mommy got arrested.
The more time I spent at ECS, the harder it became to comfort these children. When you had no idea where a child was going to end up that night, it was impossible to assure them of anything. When a child asks, Am I going to get split up from my little brother? you cant say no. Although all efforts are supposed to be made to place siblings together, there are countless exceptions. Instead you have to say, Lets hope not, okay?
One night I was at ECS with a 3-year-old named Christopher, whom I had picked up from a precinct in East Harlem. His mother was arrested that day on drug charges. He had been living in a crack house, according to the police who took him, and his arms and legs were caked with dirt. All he had with him was a pacifier and a scarf. I pulled the pacifier out of his mouth and asked him, Are you going to talk to me?
He looked at me and said, Fuck off.
Other than this, he didnt speak. In the waiting room he pulled a chair out from under a girl his age as she went to sit down. After she fell, crying, he jumped up and down, pointing and laughing at her. Then another caseworker came in. He lifted him by one arm and shouted in his face, Listen, you brat. You better sit down and SHUT UP. He tossed Christopher onto the couch and he bounced, landing on his head on the couch. The caseworker warned, Dont even think about moving. Im watching you. Christopher did not move or even cry. He looked at me for help.
The caseworker explained to me defensively, Thats the only way these kids listen. Thats how they are treated at home, so thats the only way to get through to them.
Getting through to the kids is very hard, considering what they have just been through. Almost all removals take place at night. Caseworkers are too busy during the day, and a family is also more likely to be home after dark. But some workers deliberately wait until after hours, for the time-and-a-half overtime. Doing a removal, staying out all night at ECS, and then taking the child to a foster home can mean more than doubling a days pay. With caseworkers low salaries, starting at $32,000 a year, overtime makes a big difference.
In my year at ACS, I was lucky to see only a few children who were severely abused and neglected. I did see bruises, belt marks and burns on kids. I saw dirty and hungry children. I saw a baby with cockroaches crawling in her crib. There were kids who had never been to school. I had to ask a kindergartener if her father put his penis in her mouth. I sat in the back of an ambulance with a 9-year-old boy lying on a stretcher who had been beaten up by his mother with a baseball bat. He clutched his HIP card, his only possession now, in his swollen hand.
I had a 3-year-old child whose mother forced him to stay awake for four days and three nights because she thought he was possessed by a ghost and would die if he fell asleep.
In a strange way, these really horrible cases turned out to be the easy ones. It was the cases that werent so clear-cut that kept me up at night. I saw removals occur when parents were accused of failing to follow up with a preventive service program or counseling. Breaking rules at shelters. Using or selling marijuana, or not sending their children to school. The number of removals has leveled off over the last year, but the number of kids removed from their parents homes is still near an historic high. Christopher was one of them.
Usually, the kids fell asleep in my lap during the car rides to their new foster homes. But Christopher stayed awake all the way to his new home in Staten Island, until 3 a.m. He stared out the car window and watched Manhattan recede in the distance. He seemed to know exactly what was happening, like an adult trapped in a little body that couldnt speak.
But when I finally had to leave him, he did what any 3-year-old would do in the face of abandonment. He clung for his life to my leg.
The names of the author and the child have been changed. The story was adapted from a feature in the December 2000 edition of City Limits magazine.
RELATED PUBLICATIONS
Against the Clock: The Struggle to Move Kids Into Permanent Homes, January 10, 2008
Pressures and Possibilities: Supporting Families and Children At Home, July 24, 2007
Half Full, Half Empty: Children and Families With Special Needs, February 22, 2007
A Matter of Judgment: Deciding the Future of Family Court in NYC, March 16, 2006
Child Welfare Watch: the Innovation Issue, August 31, 2005
Pivot Point: Managing the Transformation of Child Welfare in NYC, December 14, 2004
Child Welfare Watch: Tough Decisions, October 15, 2003
Uninvited Guests: Teens in New York City Foster Care , October 17, 2002
Unfinished Business: Analyzing NYCs Foster Care Reforms, January 12, 2001
Unfinished Business: Analyzing NYCs Foster Care Reforms, January 12, 2001
Too Fast for Families, January 20, 2000
Accountability in Foster Care, July 15, 1999
The Marisol Settlement: What it Means Behind the Scenes, April 20, 1999
Family Court, February 1, 1999
The Race Factor In Child Welfare, June 1, 1998
©2008 Center for an Urban Future. All Rights Reserved.
120 Wall Street, 20th Floor, NY, NY 10005 Phone (212) 479-3341 Fax (212) 479-3338 E-mail cuf@nycfuture.org