Foster care Aug & Sept 1988

By NINA BURLEIGH

Foster care: the quiet crisis

Courtesy of the Department of Children and Family Services

Everybody's so busy putting out fires, there's no time for long-term plans.
— Millie Juskevice, director,
Cook County Court-Appointed Special Advocates (CASA)

There's a sense that foster care doesn 't work because it's not permanent. People need to know that foster care is the backbone of the system. It's a service we provide when the kid is most in danger, most neglected.
— Donna Petras, director of foster care,
Illinois Department of Children and Family Services

Families are often revered as sacred and inviolable units. When disfigured and perverted by poverty, mental illness or substance abuse, they become units to be remolded by the powerful and — it is hoped — benevolent state. With the toll-free child abuse hotline, Illinois lawmakers have opted to inject state interests far into family life in the hopes of protecting endangered children. Illinois citizens have responded with unbelievable numbers of child abuse reports. Thus the most private of all the state's duties and certainly the most intrusive — that of taking away people's children and playing parent — is being performed more often.

How the second half of that duty is carried out has become the subject of criticism, lawsuits, policy proposals, budget crunching and, in the saddest of the cases, media attention.

This year, according to the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS), more than 14,000 Illinois children are in foster homes. The number of children in foster care has increased drastically: 10 years ago, 9,830 children were in foster homes.

This year DCFS expects to receive hot line and other reports of more than 90,000 alleged child abuse victims. In each report, a caseworker, whose caseload approaches between 60 and 90 children, must investigate. If the report is found justified, which last year happened in about a third of the cases, the caseworker must take immediate action.

In other words, the state Department of Children and Family Services has been mandated to deal rapidly and forcefully on the front line of each and every report of child abuse. But that hard line turns fuzzy when it comes to planning and funding for longer term issues. For instance, what happens to a child abuse victim once he or she is safely out of harm's way? As caseloads grow, DCFS caseworkers, policymakers and child welfare advocates alike freely admit there is a quiet crisis going on inside the system that arranges foster care.

The relatively new (1980) child abuse hot line and the increased interest by the media in child sex abuse cases have been both a blessing and a curse for policymakers trying to run the state's foster care program. On the one hand, more children may be saved before being seriously harmed; on the other hand, they may be " saved" only in the immediate sense but then become traumatized later as their case files gather dust and they drift from foster home to foster home, monitored only occasionally by a harried caseworker whose attention is shifted almost immediately to more pressing cases.

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DCFS officials like Donna Petras, director of the foster care program, will tell you that "drift" — the term used to describe the phenomenon of foster children moving through large numbers of families — is not "as profound" a problem as it once was before a federal statute in 1980 mandated permanency planning for foster children. Others disagree and say the problem of drift is serious, real and damaging thousands of children every year. To be sure, there are horrendous cases that become media events which belie the idea that DCFS — or anyone —is monitoring each and every kid removed from an abusive family.

Drift is damaging and frequent. It is estimated that between 30 and 40 percent of children in foster care get multiple placements, going through three to six families in a few years. Why? The reasons vary, depending on who is talking. Sometimes it's the fault of the caseworker, sometimes the department for transferring cases from caseworker to caseworker. Sometimes it is the fault of the courts for failing to decisively terminate parental rights and free the child for adoption. And sometimes, in the words of one DCFS official, it happens because children themselves are "unable to bond" with their foster parents. This last reason draws the ire of Dr. Neil Hochstadt, director of the Child Abuse and Neglect Program at Chicago's LaRabida Children's Hospital.

"I am very concerned about the way society blames the victim. . . . children, especially," Hochstadt said. "With multiple placements, the child is taken out of a home — and thus already facing trauma. It is devastating psychologically to be taken from one's parents. We know that these children will have behavioral problems. The foster parents are not equipped to deal with these, so the child gets labelled as disturbed, even though it's natural. The child then gets moved again, and by the fourth or fifth or sixth time, the child is an emotional wreck."

Ron and Debi Kacena are foster parents in Lockport with three foster children now sharing their home. Eight-year-old Heidi has been a ward of the state since she was 10 months old and has lived in 23 different foster homes. Her brother, a year older, has moved through nearly the same number of homes since he was three. The Kacenas are outraged and say they don't understand how such drift occurred, but they lay blame with the state for failing to force the children's parents, who saw their children less than annually, to give up parental rights.

A circus of modern-day poverty

There's an ice cream truck parked all day out in front of the brown, modern box — a small-scale Daley Center — that serves as Cook County's juvenile courthouse. Inside, on any given afternoon, child abuse and neglect cases are called at a rate of about 10 cases per hour. Welcome to a circus of modern poverty and the bureaucracy set up to organize it via harried, form-writing social workers and judges.

First there are the parents. It's a shirt-tails-out kind of place, and they saunter in casually, clutching packs of cigarettes. Often, they tell the judge they couldn't find the person they were told to visit during their last appearance. Then there are the children. The judges sitting above them on the other side of the bench peer out over their heads every day. The children trail after mom or dad, looking around confusedly or romping playfully, or they sit slumped holding their small heads in their hands, as did one frail, 11-year-old boy involved in what the judge — talking in the shorthand of the business — described as "a case of violent injury."

In one afternoon of courtwatching, I saw a partially paralyzed infant — progeny of a drug addict — whose mother was nowhere to be found; four mothers who'd given up their children due to acknowledged substance abuse or economic problems; six children who had been victims of neglect whose mothers were pleading rehabilitation; two allegedly mentally ill mothers arguing with caseworkers from the state Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS); two groups of children alleged to have been victims of sexual abuse; and miscellaneous cases of confused family situations involving past abuse, neglect or both. Each episode lasted about 10 minutes. The bailiff called their names loudly; the judge, state's attorney, public defender and often advocates or public guardians received the small troop or individual at the bench; and it was over after a few words. Most of the business had to do with "progress reports," temporary removals and guardianship assignments.

Illinois' juvenile courts come under attack from people like foster parents Ron and Debi Kacena, who can't understand why a judge would let their eight-year-old foster child go through 23 homes. They want to know why judges won't act to sever parental rights.

Terminating parental rights is one of the juvenile court's most serious duties. The courts are staffed by associate judges, and in termination proceedings, the state's attorney's office must bring the evidence and petition. But the evidence for termination must be carefully documented by DCFS caseworkers, and if caseworkers miss a step in dealing with a case, the state will lose. According to Chicago juvenile court attorney Sister Catherine Ryan — formerly with the state's attorney's office — in the late 1970s the laws were changed to make it easier to terminate parental rights. The Illinois legislature injected "failure to make reasonable progress" and "failure to correct neglect conditions" to the list of 15 grounds upon which termination can be based. Today, those two criteria are used most often in termination cases, which must be proved by "clear and convincing evidence" — a middle ground in evidence requirements between civil and criminal proof standards. Still, terminations are not routine, even though the longer a child is a ward of the state, the less likely he or she is to be sent home again.

"The main thing we tell defendants is, do anything to keep your kids out of foster care," says Ryan, who defends families as part of her practice. "Because of the potential for negative publicity and personal liability, the system is very wary of sending kids home once they are in foster care."

The overload on DCFS caseworkers affects the courtroom. Certainly — at a rate of 10 cases an hour — the judge and others in the courtroom begin to see the little faces before them in a blur. It is not surprising, given this milieu, that children who are considered safely away from their abusive parents can drift from home to home.

Nina Burleigh

August & September 1988 | Illinois Issues | 23

"The parents pop in once every five years," says Ron. "I think the court system wrecks the kids. Seeing their parents that infrequently really tears these kids up. Kids have rights too." He pauses, agitated. "Goddamn if I'd walk away from my kid and come back two years later." Now Ron and Debi want to adopt two of their foster children.

Foster mother Lucy Kochanny is more circumspect. Since she became a foster parent four years ago, she's seen about 40 children — mostly hard-to-place teenagers — come and go through her Darien home. "A lot of foster parents want the cute little kids. They don't want to deal with drugs, pregnancy, alcohol." Kochanny, with four children of her own under the age of 14, has seen it all. She even had a 16-year-old overdose on her living room floor.

In some ways, Kochanny is the ideal foster parent for DCFS, even better than model parents Ron and Debi Kacena, because she is not about to adopt children and thus diminish the number of available foster home slots. She is also complacent about the fact that the children who come to her home may move on to other foster homes throughout their teen years.

DCFS policymakers and regional supervisors often say they will bend over backward to keep good foster parents like the Kacenas and Kochannys working for DCFS. First, they are hampered by too little money. DCFS foster parents are paid a monthly sum per child within the range of $200 to $300, depending on the child's age. The sum is not a salary. It is not even a full reimbursement of costs. It is based on a several-years-old U.S. Department of Agriculture determination of what it costs to feed and clothe a child. That low payment, some say, diminishes the potential for "professionalism" in foster care.

A second, more amorphous problem with retaining good foster parents is at least as troublesome as the monetary issue. No one has come up with a sure way to predict how well a foster parent will get along with any particular kid. One of the problems with having overloaded caseworkers is that no one has time to match parents to kids. Even if they did, despite DCFS foster parent training programs, caseworkers report that foster parents often have unexpected difficulties dealing with even the specific behavior problems about which they have been warned. Experts say any child removed from a biological family can be defined as psychologically problematic. The results are that foster parents decide either to "send back" troubled children or drop out of the business. The dearth of foster parents is serious and continuing. One "resource development specialist" in the Cook collar county region who recruits foster parents described licensing and training 128 foster homes in a year, only to lose 87 the same year.

Professionalizing foster parents is a goal for many child advocate groups. In order to attract and retain professional foster parents, DCFS devised a Foster Care Initiative in 1987, which is chock-full of marvelous plans, but no money. The initiative would take $25 million to develop, according to DCFS officials, but would provide many of the things foster parents need: periods of respite, day care and higher reimbursement.

Because child psychologists like Hochstadt generally agree that removing a child from its biological home is seriously damaging, DCFS is now putting in place a Family Preservation Act, passed in 1987. The act, funded at $3 million in its first year, is supposed to provide more counseling and social services to families in order to keep the child at home, rather than in foster care. Child welfare advocates like Malcolm Bush, with Voices for Illinois Children, laud this program but also charge that money for it has been and is being siphoned off to fill another gap in the DCFS budget: emergency protection. "The

'I just saw the system
collapsing around my ears.
These symptoms kept popping
up: abuse in foster care and
six or more placements'

good thing is that intense conversations are going on now about what the best family preservation role is," Bush said. "The bad thing is that the money for family preservation is used for emergency protection."

The specter of an agency fighting off surface problems while other problems burrow in and become more uncontrollable was raised by a number of observers and by DCFS personnel. Because the department is savagely maligned whenever a child dies of abuse in Illinois, and because of an incredibly broad mandate placed upon caseworkers, priorities are always focused on the potential for physical danger and media notoriety and away from cases where the harm is more likely to be out of sight, inside children's psyches. Thus, "better safe than sorry is not safer" when dealing with the wards of the state, says Bush, who in 1984 interviewed 400 Illinois foster children for a study. "But the politics of child abuse are such that we refuse to recognize that we cannot stop it all."

Actually, DCFS does recognize that its duties are beyond its capabilities. There is discussion within the department now of asking the legislature to diminish the DCFS mandate to exclude cases such as children over 12 where physical or sexual abuse is not indicated or in certain classes of medical neglect, said DCFS spokeswoman Jo Warfield. But in the meantime, caseworkers are too busy "pissing out brushfires," as one DCFS official put it, to really focus on what happens to kids once they're out of harm's way.

A number of guardianship and advocacy groups exist to help DCFS workers monitor children. One of these is the Court-Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) program. CASA assigns one volunteer to follow one child. In Cook County, CASA in July had 100 cases and 80 workers. CASA director Millie Juskevice said CASA organizations are being developed in five regions of the state to work with juvenile courts. CASA makes use of people with a little extra time who want to do something for children. "What I love," said Juskevice, "is when someone

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says to me, 'What can I do? All I can do is report child abuse.' And I say, 'No, you can help out an overworked caseworker.' Sometimes six phone calls make a huge difference in a child's life."

Courtesy of the Department of Children and Family Services

Private organizations around the state also offer services — for money. Child welfare is a big business. Projected DCFS expenditures for 1989 are $293.7 million. Last year, the department spent $105.3 million on substitute care alone, and the bulk of that went to DCFS foster parents and private agencies. How the private agencies get selected and how much money they get is often a matter of politics, which has resulted in scandals in the past. But child welfare workers also say that private agencies can provide more professional care than the agency itself.

DCFS, like its young charges, is vulnerable from all sides. Even private workers who get business from the state are critical of DCFS. Claudine Robinson, director of Ada S. McKinley Foster Care Services in Chicago, lambasted DCFS as "racist" and said that the fact that DCFS director Gordon Johnson is black is just "window dressing." It is true that 54 percent of the DCFS clients are black and only 38 percent are white. Robinson sees between 400 and 600 children in her agency annually from all over the state. "The problem isn't money. It's that the people who make the rules have no understanding of what we are dealing with. The policymakers are white. They tell functionally illiterate people to fill out forms or go through psychoanalysis. We tell our clients [families] if they don't do what we say with their children, we'll turn them in to the police."

While policymakers bicker and wrack their brains for ways to more creatively allocate what resources are available, the DCFS foster care system is faced with a rash of lawsuits filed by the Cook County Office of the Public Guardian and, most recently, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). In late June — shortly after Gov. James R. Thompson announced that his tax increase proposal was dead the ACLU filed a federal class action suit on behalf of the 14,000 foster children of the state of Illinois. The ACLU described its plaintiffs as "typically shuffled among six or more temporary living arrangements for two or more years, and during that time, experiencing neglect or abuse at a rate twice that experienced by children in the Illinois population at large."

According to the ACLU attorney Benjamin Wolf who filed the suit, "three years of frustration" led up to the suit. "I just saw the system collapsing around my ears. These symptoms kept popping up: abuse in foster care and six or more placements. After a bill to limit caseloads went nowhere, I felt it [filing suit] was the only option left." Wolf is asking the court to appoint a federal overseer to clean up DCFS' house. Said DCFS Director Gordon Johnson of the suit: ' 'Is the federal overseer going to bring federal dollars?" Johnson, appointed to head the agency in 1985, contends that he has simply not got enough money to work with. He and other DCFS workers freely acknowledge that the department's maximum caseload goal of 20 cases per worker is not being followed and may never be under present fiscal conditions.

Although money woes can be blamed for almost every error or oversight the agency makes, that reason does not absolve the state for some of the more horrendous results of its wardsmanship. The Cook County public guardian, who is suing the agency on a number of fronts, charged in one case that a four-year-old girl went through eight caseworkers and 10 foster homes after being brought into the system sexually abused at age one and a half. At four, the girl is attempting suicide, according to the suit. In another celebrated case, the public guardian is suing the agency for $2 million on behalf of the estates of two children placed in a foster home where one of the siblings was tortured to death.

Given the knee-jerk, unfounded reactions it generates, media attention to horror stories of abuse might not be the antidote to what's going on in the DCFS foster care system. In fact, it might be the very bane that's transformed a state agency into an absurd, crashing-and-burning mockery of a child welfare department to the detriment of the emotional lives and educations of thousands of children whose only crime is that their parents can't or won't care for them properly. Unless the legislature is prepared to fund its mandate and to plan for the kids it's already "saved" by making them wards of the state, increased child abuse reports only mean that the quiet horror stories of kids lost in the foster care system will become more common. □

Nina Burleigh is a Chicago free-lance writer.

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