Policy violations in Colorado social-services system found amid deaths of 43 children

By Jordan Steffen

In the past five years, 43 Colorado children died from abuse or neglect after entering the child welfare program. Every one of those deaths was marked by a policy violation or sparked concern in the way the case was handled by county social workers.

Investigations completed by the Colorado Department of Human Services since 2007 indicate that social workers in 18 counties repeatedly failed to complete basic functions — such as interviews or follow-ups on assessments — in 43 cases where a child later died from abuse or neglect.

In 40 percent of those deaths — 17 children — county social workers failed to start or did not accept an assessment after a referral warranted an investigation for abuse or neglect.

The state department opens an investigation whenever a child's death is a result of abuse or neglect and there was contact with the county child welfare system during the two years before the child's death, said spokeswoman Liz McDonough.

Before 2011, an investigation was opened if a child entered the system five years before the death.

Human Services' latest investigation will be into the death of 3-year-old Caleb Pacheco, whose body was found tucked underneath a Sterling mobile home last week. His mother, Juanita Kinzie, 24, is in custody and faces one count of first-degree murder in her son's death.

In 2011, 21 child-fatality reports were launched in Colorado. Two have been completed. Reports become public after they are finished and if they show policy violations or concerns. The Denver Post obtained all 43 public reports completed in the past five years.

Most of the reports included multiple referrals and assessments.

According to The Post's findings:

There were 27 instances in which county social workers failed to contact, interview or follow up with victims, caregivers, reporting parties or other adults involved in an referral.

There were 32 instances in which social workers did not document unsafe conditions, prior incidents or other concerns in their assessments.

There were 33 occasions during which assessments were not started in a timely manner, were completed incorrectly or left open beyond the allotted time frame.

In five cases, social workers failed to account for other children or caregivers living in the home, and communication difficulties across county departments and other systems — such as law enforcement — hindered an investigation in five cases.

One of the reports was on 7-year-old Chandler Grafner, who was starved by his foster parents, Jon Phillips and Sarah Berry, in 2007.

In December, a federal judge ruled that the Denver social workers who were involved with his case were not immune from a lawsuit filed by the boy's relatives. Phillips was sentenced to life in Chandler's death and Berry to 48 years.

Caleb's family members say they last saw the boy in January 2011. During the year he was missing, the boy's family said they called social services in three counties more than 70 times.

Human Services cannot release details about Caleb's case or confirm whether his family contacted county departments because the investigation into the boy's death is ongoing, and a Logan County judge issued a gag order in the case, McDonough said.

Dr. Kim Bundy-Fazioli, an associate professor at Colorado State University's School of Social Work, said the family's claims about unanswered calls for help are a concern.

"When families aren't making progress, there is a lot of chaos, and it can be overwhelming for case workers and service providers," Bundy-Fazioli said.

"You never know who to interview or who to trust, but it's not an excuse not to intervene."

Bundy-Fazioli also was concerned about decreased funding for county programs and increased caseloads for overwhelmed social workers, who often have to make judgment calls on high-priority cases and investigations.

Each of Colorado's 64 county departments are being asked to do more with less, said Becky Miller Updike, ombudsman with the Office of Colorado's Child Protection. Often, families in the most dire situations are also more transient, making it harder to track children through school systems and other county departments.

"We have to cut back dollars from our counties every year, causing us to ask them to do more with less," Miller Updike said.

Source http://www.denverpost.com/frontpage/ci_19844865

Budget Cuts Threaten Parental Rights - New Hampshire

By Dan Gorenstein

Until last July, when the state charged low-income parents with abuse or neglect of their children, the state provided them with a lawyer.

But to help balance the budget, that funding was eliminated.

New Hampshire is believed to be the only state in the country that’s ever taken such a step.

The people charged with enforcing the new policy are worried that it doesn’t serve parents or their children very well.

When Governor John Lynch and his staff were preparing his budget proposal last year, the governor made a decision.

He recommended the state cut the money to pay lawyers to represent parents in abuse and neglect cases.

The savings...$1.2 million dollars a year.

And with the Legislature in a race to balance the budget, lawmakers quickly accepted that plan along with millions of dollars worth of other cuts proposed by the governor.

That decision by Governor Lynch - made in some meeting at the statehouse in early 2011- is now playing out in court rooms like this.

“So Mr. ____ one of the topics that we are going to go through today is making sure you have an understanding of what the potential consequences of this type of case are to your parental rights and responsibilities.”

We’re in a preliminary hearing with Judge Susan Ashley in the Rochester Family Division Courthouse.

We masked any names to protect the identity of the father and his child.

Speaking to the father, a man we’ll call ‘Donald,’ the judge stressed just what’s at stake.

“Ultimately if the court made a decision that your parental rights should be terminated, it would be at that point, you would no longer have any legal rights, duties, or obligations with regard to ____. Do you understand that’s a potential consequence to this type of a cases?”

After the hearing Donald says he completely gets there’s a chance he could lose his 4-year old forever.

But what he needs to do to prevent that, he not sure at all.

“It’s all happening it pretty quick. And I having a hard time kind of processing everything that’s going on and knowing what’s going to go on.”

This is not a case of abuse...it’s neglect.

The 34-year-old father explains he doesn’t have any place for his child to live right now.

So, she’s headed to foster care.

Donald cuts trees for a living.

He has a thick bush of black beard.

A tattoo stretches across his collarbone, an ink necklace.

“What’s the highest level of education you have...10thgrade...you dropped out...yes. I have dyslexia, I have a hard time reading and writing.”

How hard?

Donald’s fiancé Megan points to the an ‘Emergency Exit’ sign

Donald can’t read it.

Megan says her fiancé is counting on her to help him through this process....help him go through all the paperwork.

The 21-year-old says she’s out of her league.

“I can read what’s on the paper...but I can’t explain what it means in layman’s terms. Just b/c I can read it, doesn’t mean I get it. B/c half the time, I don’t.”

Judges and lawyers know the 900-some cases they’ll likely see this year will have parents who are unfit to represent themselves.

And they don’t like it...it doesn’t fit their idea of justice.

“It’s like shooting fish in a barrel sometimes. And it’s not fun. It doesn’t make me feel good about doing my job.”

Peter Brunette is an attorney for the state.

His job is to argue against the parents.

“Without a lawyer, there’s no way they can navigate this system to ensure that their rights are being adequately protected. That’s the problem we are all struggling with right now.”

Lawyers and judges are bending over backwards, taking extra time with these cases.

A routine 10 minute hearings 8 months ago, now can take an hour.

It’s because people like Judge Ashley try to explain things simply, and answer question after question.

But Ashley says that may not be enough.

“It concerns me there are too many parents feeling isolated against a group of people who appear to be expert in these types of cases, who parents see as ‘on the other side.’”

Essentially, parents have 12 months to shape up and address the source of the neglect.

Sometimes that’s counseling for substance abuse, or mental illness, or getting out of a violent relationship.

But without a lawyer to navigate the process, Ashley thinks parents are more likely to get overwhelmed and give up.

“Suddenly those 12 months have slipped away. And we find ourselves at a permanency hearing where the parent hasn’t done what they needed to do to correct the conditions of neglect. So I worry that there are parents who may face petitions to terminate their parental rights when they may have had the ability to fix the situation.”

University of Michigan Law Professor Vivek Sankaran worries the state may get exactly what it would normally try to avoid – a generation of kids who grow up without their parents.

Sankaran is a leading expert on child advocacy in the courts.

“It just flies in the face of everything we know about child welfare practice and policy and how to make good decisions. What makes what happens in New Hampshire so striking, is that over the past 30 years the practice of child welfare has become much more sophisticated...and then you get this, where we’ve just reverted back to where we were in the 1960’s or the 1950’s.”

“You do the best you can with budgets. And budgets is about setting priorities.”

That’s Governor Lynch.

Lynch says New Hampshire continues to fund lawyers for parents if the state files a termination of parental rights case.

That’s that step after parents were given the 12 months to correct their problems.

It’s widely believed that by the time the state files a termination of parental rights, it’s too late to reunite parent with child.

But the governor says he stands by his decision.

“A budget is about making tough choices. And that’s what we had to do with the budget we proposed.”

Donald and Megan feel they’re not going to get much sympathy from people like Governor Lynch and lawmakers in Concord.

“I think people just look at people who are losing their kids, people just look at them like they are scumbags....I don’t think people understand it ain’t always due to abuse or anything like that. Sometimes it’s over financial problems why they need help.”

“The people in Concord don’t care...They go home every night to their kids and wife and their husband and live the life that they want. But they have people like us sitting here, not knowing what’s going to happen tomorrow. Ever. They don’t have that. I wish they would just live in people’s shoes who don’t have everything and that can’t figure it out as easily as they can.”

Lawyers representing parents are taking this to the state Supreme Court.

Oral arguments on the constitutionality of this budget cut are expected sometime this spring.

By the time the case is settled, the window for Donald to reunite with his 4-year-old could be closed.

Source http://www.nhpr.org/post/budget-cuts-threaten-parental-rights

DSS finds disproportionate contact with blacks - North Carolina

By Melody Guyton Butts

DURHAM – African-American children are nearly four times more likely than the general population to be the subjects of child abuse or neglect reports in Durham County and more than seven times more likely to be placed in foster care, county Department of Social Services officials reported this week at a DSS board meeting.

“Our system is overloaded with contact with African-American families as opposed to any other family in Durham,” said Toina Coley, an in-home services social worker who serves on a committee looking to tackle the issue of disproportionate minority contact (DMC) in agencies across the county.

DSS decided to look at its DMC numbers after the N.C. Central University Juvenile Justice Institute, through a grant from the Governor’s Crime Commission, issued a report on disproportionality within Durham County’s juvenile justice system.

That report found that in fiscal year 2006, African-American youths were 3.2 times more likely than the general population to have a court petition filed. In 2010, that number skyrocketed to 7.22 times more likely.

Coley dissected local DSS numbers from fiscal year 2011, finding that African-American children were the subjects of child abuse or neglect reports at a 3.78 higher rate than the general population. Disproportionality in the child welfare system hovers around 4.0 through investigations, case substantiations and in-home services – until spiking to 7.54 with initial entries into foster care.

That’s something DSS officials want to address, and the solution starts with awareness of the problem, said Catherine Williamson-Hardy, assistant director of customer accountability with the agency. From individuals reporting abuse or neglect to the social workers investigating it, everyone has cultural biases, she said.

“It’s not about sugarcoating it and pretending we don’t have them – it’s about being aware of them so that we can manage them,” she said.

Just as with race playing a role in which new mothers are drug-tested at the hospital, a school teacher might be more apt to make a report about a black child not dressed for cold weather than a white child, Williamson-Hardy gave as an example.

Awareness is beginning to take hold within DSS, suggested John Holtkamp, the agency’s assistant director for family safety and permanency. “There was just kind of a murmur that went through our people” when the DMC numbers were presented at a division meeting last week, he said.

“Most of them don’t know. You work day by day,” he said. “No one’s intentionally doing this.”

Coley’s data collection suggests that disproportionality isn’t a currently significant concern for the Latino community, as the reports rate was 1.39, and the initial entry into foster care rate was 0.0. But Holtkamp worries that it might become an issue in the future, as juvenile justice system officials recently reported a growing DMC for that population in their system.

Dean. F. Duncan, a professor at the UNC School of Social Work, examined DMC data from across the nation and across North Carolina in a 2009 report, looking at 2007-08 data. He found that North Carolina’s DMC with regard to African-American youths in foster care (2.07) was below the U.S. as a whole (3.32). However, in that same report, he noted that Durham was one of just two counties in North Carolina – the other was Mecklenberg – with DMCs with regard to child protective investigations of black children greater than 4.0, and among 11 counties with DMCs with regard to black youths in foster care greater than 4.0.

Reached this week, Duncan said he no longer had access to the exact figures for counties and that he hasn’t revisited the data since the 2009 study. His analysis then led him to believe that factors of poverty played a large part in African-Americans’ DMC, and he cautioned against assuming that it’s only a race issue.

Holtkamp noted that Arnold Dennis, executive director of N.C. Central’s Juvenile Justice Institute, has also suggested that poverty contributes to DMC. He cited Dennis as having suggested that family-of-origin issues, like child-rearing practices and family support, and policies and practices of systems of intervention, like DSS and law enforcement, play a part.

The DMC committee of which Coley is a member was launched early this year, and its focus is now on spreading awareness of the issue, she said. The committee is looking to reach out to other parts of the community, like faith-based organizations. Committee members are also looking at hosting some sort of community meeting to help spread the word.

Stan Holt, chairman of the DSS board, asked that the board be briefed on possible solutions to the disproportionality problem at its February meeting.

It must be understood that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to addressing disproportionality, Duncan said.

One method might be prevention programs, although there’s not a “major funding stream” for that, he said. Preventing abuse and neglect isn’t the work of DSS alone – it requires the partnership of the whole community, from schools to faith-based organizations to mental health agencies, he continued.

He’s pleased that Durham is looking to address the issue.

“There’s a need to come up with very tailored solutions,” he said, “and be able to track it over time to see if we get the outcomes we want to achieve.”

Source http://www.heraldsun.com/view/full_story/16821376/article-DSS-finds-disproportionate-contact-with-blacks-