Associated Press
Iowa will pay $275,000 to settle a lawsuit brought against two state employees on behalf of a toddler who suffered brain damage from severe head injuries while in the state foster care system, according to records released this week.
The payment settles a lawsuit that alleged that an Iowa Department of Human Services worker and a supervisor were warned that Jayden Clark was suffering neglect and abuse while under the care of foster parents in Albia but failed to take action. Half of the money will be invested for the 4-year-old boy, who will get access when he turns 18, while his parents will get $15,000 apiece and his attorney will get $101,000 in fees.
The lawsuit in federal court continues against foster parents Jason and Christen Morgan, who have denied wrongdoing.
"We are satisfied with the way it came out. But because there is ongoing litigation against the foster parents, I really can't comment beyond that," said the boy's attorney, Jeffrey Lipman of Clive.
Authorities responded to the Morgans' home in February 2010 when Clark, then 2, was found unresponsive with extensive injuries to the head and were told he had fallen out of a bunk bed. Fighting for his life, the boy was treated for head trauma and a lacerated liver and was hospitalized and forced to undergo rehabilitation for months.
Local and state investigators conducted an extensive look into whether he was abused, but they filed no criminal charges. The lawsuit blames the foster parents' "abuse or neglect" for the injuries, without elaborating on how they occurred.
A DHS investigation resulted in a finding of confirmed child abuse that was not serious enough to be placed on the Child Abuse Registry, a designation used for cases involving a lack of proper supervision or physical abuse that was minor. In court documents, state lawyers said the finding was not for physical abuse and denied that "findings of neglect, as such, were made."
After the boy's hospitalization, child welfare officials removed his siblings from the home while then-Gov. Chet Culver expressed outrage and ordered an investigation.
The lawsuit alleges Clark's parents, Travis and April Clark, and a social worker started noticing significant black bruises across his forehead "from ear to ear" in January 2010 after he and three siblings were placed with the Morgans the prior month. The foster parents blamed his siblings for causing the bruises, but his parents and the social worker suspected abuse and reported it to the DHS worker and his supervisor, who failed to visit the home or conduct an investigation, the suit claims.
As the bruising got worse in following weeks, the social worker warned DHS about the "increased level of abuse and injury" and said the agency needed to consider removing him from the home, but no action was taken, the suit said. Clark's parents took photographs to document the bruising and also warned DHS, the lawsuit said.
Ultimately, Clark "suffered a closed head injury as a result of the abuse or neglect and has permanent brain damage," the lawsuit said. Lipman said the boy was now living with his parents, who are originally from Centerville, but he would not say where.
"He's always going to have some impairment from this," Lipman said.
In a memo made public with the details of the settlement, Assistant Attorney General Diane Stahle said the state decided on the cash payment after investigating the case and "balancing the likelihood of an adverse verdict against the likelihood of a defense verdict." The details were worked out during mediation, she wrote.
In court documents, state lawyers acknowledged DHS employees were twice told about the bruising to the boy but said that it was attributed to his siblings. The foster parents have denied they breached their duty to provide a safe environment for Jayden and also blamed his siblings for the bruises. Their attorney didn't return a phone message.
DHS spokesman Roger Munns declined comment on the case but said both employees named in the lawsuit remain in state employment, one by his agency and one by Iowa Workforce Development.
Source http://muscatinejournal.com/news/state-and-regional/iowa/iowa-settles-suit-over-boy-s-foster-care-injuries/article_9dba63e2-acd1-5f09-bed1-c08ea86c42ef.html
CPS corruption hurts and destroys families worldwide. Please use caution posting about CPS here or anyplace on the internet. For your protection, using your full, real name and precise location is not advised. CPS has eyes everywhere and CPS is notorious for taking what people say, twisting it, embellishing on it and then using it against them in CPS "investigations" and at court proceedings.
Showing posts with label iowa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label iowa. Show all posts
Monday, March 5, 2012
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Advocate Frank LaMere Talks About Battles Shaping Indian Child Welfare
By Stephanie Woodard
The Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) has been in the news lately. A National Public Radio (NPR) series exposed horrific child-welfare injustices in South Dakota, while two CNN stories—one on the return of an infant boy to the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe and another on the return of a baby girl to her Cherokee father—criticized the law, and then-CNN anchor Campbell Brown added some scathing commentary. We went to Frank LaMere, member of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska and executive director of the Four Directions Community Center, in Sioux City, Iowa, for a reading on how perceptions of ICWA are changing and what still needs to happen to ensure state social-services departments and courts nationwide understand and fulfill its requirements. LaMere is a longtime advocate for Indian child welfare who works on a daily basis with Native families.
Has recent coverage of ICWA adversely affected the attitude toward Indian child welfare?
LaMere: The exposure brought attention to the plight of our children, and I am glad of that. As a result of the NPR coverage, members of Congress were inspired to ask for an investigation of South Dakota. I wrote to the legislators involved and told them, “Don’t stop there.” South Dakota has problems, but so does the rest of the country. They should investigate every jurisdiction in every state. Here in Iowa, the social services department of Woodbury County [surrounding Sioux City] has made progress, but it’s just one of our 99 counties. Many in Iowa would still do an end run around ICWA.
What did you think of CNN’s take on ICWA?
CNN and Campbell Brown need a reality check! Brown, as a mother, said she could not imagine the hurt a white family felt when their Indian child was returned to his people. Why could she not also imagine the hurt thousands of Native families feel right now, knowing their children will cry themselves to sleep tonight because someone did an end run of ICWA and stole their children under the “color of law”? Over the generations, hundreds of thousands of Indian families have endured this pain. That’s the grim reality. We must engage and educate ICWA detractors, and we must remind them that the Indian Child Welfare Act is the law of the land—whether they like it or not. And we must applaud the tribes and parents in these recent cases for persevering and those in the courts for reuniting them with the children.
Why do even states that seem to comply with ICWA—or at least seem to try—still have relatively high numbers of Native children in foster care?
We in Iowa are trying to better understand those numbers. Native families were not identified as such in the past, and perhaps now that we’ve drawn attention to them and are identifying them as such, the numbers are rising for that reason. Additional data I want is tracking of individual social workers’ records of pulling our families apart—or keeping them together. Once we have these numbers, we need to ask what their agencies are going to do about it. This needs to happen everywhere, and it needs to happen now.
How does a Native parent fare in child-custody matters when facing a non-Native parent?
Generally, not well. Right now, I’m dealing with the worst case I’ve ever seen and the best example of how the system can fail our families. Two severely disabled Native children were taken from their white father, a founded—that is, proven—child-abuser. After a crisis, during which one child ended up in the hospital, the court gave the youngsters temporarily to their Native mother. Now the state of Iowa has decided to reunite the children with the father, and the mother fears for her children’s lives. This is about old attitudes that make it tough for our Native families to get justice and to convince courts that ICWA, a federal statute, must be heeded.
Can you give some examples of what Native parents face?
I sit in on many meetings to determine the fate of Native families—along with the judges, lawyers, social workers and others involved—and I observe that they do not apply objective standards. If one standard were applied to all, Native children would go home more often than not. Time after time in these meetings, the Native parent has solved the issue—typically alcohol or drugs—that caused the children to be taken away. The parent proudly announces, “I’ve been sober for 22 months,” or what have you. We all congratulate them on their new wellness, then when that conversation dies down, a social worker inevitably says, “Well, yes, but… ” and raises a new issue. He or she may bring up a long-resolved problem from 20 years before, or something new. At a recent meeting, a social worker announced she’d found dirty dishes in the sink during her last visit to the mother’s home, so the mother shouldn’t get her kids back. I became unglued. I stressed that the mother didn’t lose her children over dirty dishes, and they couldn’t be kept from her for this reason. I deal with this kind of thing every week.
Do states have a financial incentive to ignore ICWA?
It’s a conspiracy of silence. Everyone knows our children feed the child-welfare system. They have for a long time and will continue to do so, because the funding is set up that way [with more children generating greater funding]. But those who work for the system won’t speak up. Beyond that, many social workers and courts nationwide feel they know better than we do about what’s good for our children. It remains for Native people to speak up. We must keep blowing the whistle on the child-welfare system, to local, state and national lawmakers. Only then will we have a chance to keep our families intact.
Is this what Four Directions does?
We at Four Directions Community Center routinely make people in the child-welfare system uncomfortable. Nothing changes until someone feels uncomfortable. That includes us. It is hard to confront those who control the systems that control our lives, but we must. Our children and their futures are in jeopardy. We have a long way to go, but we will prevail.
Click here to read our Q&A with Diane Garreau, ICWA director for South Dakota’s Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe.
Funding for this story was provided by the George Polk Program for Investigative Reporting.
Source http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/02/14/advocate-frank-lamere-talks-about-battles-shaping-indican-child-welfare-95537
The Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) has been in the news lately. A National Public Radio (NPR) series exposed horrific child-welfare injustices in South Dakota, while two CNN stories—one on the return of an infant boy to the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe and another on the return of a baby girl to her Cherokee father—criticized the law, and then-CNN anchor Campbell Brown added some scathing commentary. We went to Frank LaMere, member of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska and executive director of the Four Directions Community Center, in Sioux City, Iowa, for a reading on how perceptions of ICWA are changing and what still needs to happen to ensure state social-services departments and courts nationwide understand and fulfill its requirements. LaMere is a longtime advocate for Indian child welfare who works on a daily basis with Native families.
Has recent coverage of ICWA adversely affected the attitude toward Indian child welfare?
LaMere: The exposure brought attention to the plight of our children, and I am glad of that. As a result of the NPR coverage, members of Congress were inspired to ask for an investigation of South Dakota. I wrote to the legislators involved and told them, “Don’t stop there.” South Dakota has problems, but so does the rest of the country. They should investigate every jurisdiction in every state. Here in Iowa, the social services department of Woodbury County [surrounding Sioux City] has made progress, but it’s just one of our 99 counties. Many in Iowa would still do an end run around ICWA.
What did you think of CNN’s take on ICWA?
CNN and Campbell Brown need a reality check! Brown, as a mother, said she could not imagine the hurt a white family felt when their Indian child was returned to his people. Why could she not also imagine the hurt thousands of Native families feel right now, knowing their children will cry themselves to sleep tonight because someone did an end run of ICWA and stole their children under the “color of law”? Over the generations, hundreds of thousands of Indian families have endured this pain. That’s the grim reality. We must engage and educate ICWA detractors, and we must remind them that the Indian Child Welfare Act is the law of the land—whether they like it or not. And we must applaud the tribes and parents in these recent cases for persevering and those in the courts for reuniting them with the children.
Why do even states that seem to comply with ICWA—or at least seem to try—still have relatively high numbers of Native children in foster care?
We in Iowa are trying to better understand those numbers. Native families were not identified as such in the past, and perhaps now that we’ve drawn attention to them and are identifying them as such, the numbers are rising for that reason. Additional data I want is tracking of individual social workers’ records of pulling our families apart—or keeping them together. Once we have these numbers, we need to ask what their agencies are going to do about it. This needs to happen everywhere, and it needs to happen now.
How does a Native parent fare in child-custody matters when facing a non-Native parent?
Generally, not well. Right now, I’m dealing with the worst case I’ve ever seen and the best example of how the system can fail our families. Two severely disabled Native children were taken from their white father, a founded—that is, proven—child-abuser. After a crisis, during which one child ended up in the hospital, the court gave the youngsters temporarily to their Native mother. Now the state of Iowa has decided to reunite the children with the father, and the mother fears for her children’s lives. This is about old attitudes that make it tough for our Native families to get justice and to convince courts that ICWA, a federal statute, must be heeded.
Can you give some examples of what Native parents face?
I sit in on many meetings to determine the fate of Native families—along with the judges, lawyers, social workers and others involved—and I observe that they do not apply objective standards. If one standard were applied to all, Native children would go home more often than not. Time after time in these meetings, the Native parent has solved the issue—typically alcohol or drugs—that caused the children to be taken away. The parent proudly announces, “I’ve been sober for 22 months,” or what have you. We all congratulate them on their new wellness, then when that conversation dies down, a social worker inevitably says, “Well, yes, but… ” and raises a new issue. He or she may bring up a long-resolved problem from 20 years before, or something new. At a recent meeting, a social worker announced she’d found dirty dishes in the sink during her last visit to the mother’s home, so the mother shouldn’t get her kids back. I became unglued. I stressed that the mother didn’t lose her children over dirty dishes, and they couldn’t be kept from her for this reason. I deal with this kind of thing every week.
Do states have a financial incentive to ignore ICWA?
It’s a conspiracy of silence. Everyone knows our children feed the child-welfare system. They have for a long time and will continue to do so, because the funding is set up that way [with more children generating greater funding]. But those who work for the system won’t speak up. Beyond that, many social workers and courts nationwide feel they know better than we do about what’s good for our children. It remains for Native people to speak up. We must keep blowing the whistle on the child-welfare system, to local, state and national lawmakers. Only then will we have a chance to keep our families intact.
Is this what Four Directions does?
We at Four Directions Community Center routinely make people in the child-welfare system uncomfortable. Nothing changes until someone feels uncomfortable. That includes us. It is hard to confront those who control the systems that control our lives, but we must. Our children and their futures are in jeopardy. We have a long way to go, but we will prevail.
Click here to read our Q&A with Diane Garreau, ICWA director for South Dakota’s Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe.
Funding for this story was provided by the George Polk Program for Investigative Reporting.
Source http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/02/14/advocate-frank-lamere-talks-about-battles-shaping-indican-child-welfare-95537
Friday, December 16, 2011
Improvements suggested for Iowa's child abuse registry
Written by Lee Rood
A panel charged with making changes to Iowa’s controversial and confidential child abuse registry issued a series of suggested improvements Friday, some of which would require action by the Legislature next year.
In the short term, state officials are taking steps to expedite appeals of abuse findings, especially when people’s jobs are at stake.
“The timeframes and delays in getting hearings and decisions completed was a priority for me,” said Citizens Aide/Ombudsman Ruth Cooperrider, whose office receives several calls each year inquiring how to appeal or dispute abuse findings. “We have had cases that have languished for more than a year, and there are legal issues involved.”
One long-term recommendation from the mix of state officials and child-welfare professionals on the panel would give Iowa’s Department of Human Services more authority to remove people from the 10-year registry and seal abuse findings based on certain criteria.
Others ideas panel members thought should be explored: Allowing DHS to put only certain kinds of abuse on the registry, and varying the length of time names remain on the list based on the severity of the abuse.
Legislators and parents have complained for years that people whose names are placed on the registry have few due-process rights. It takes no conviction in court to end up on the registry - only a finding by DHS staff that it was "more likely than not" that the person neglected a child or, in a much smaller number of cases, abused a child.
The Legislature this year required the agency to work with other agencies and groups to address problems.
Currently, between 50,000 and 60,000 Iowans are on the registry, which is used to screen child-care workers and others who deal with children.
About 8,890 abuse reports were “founded” by social workers last year, meaning the individuals responsible were placed on the registry. Another 3,071 reported resulted in “confirmed” abuse, meaning there was evidence of abuse but not enough to place someone on the registry.
About 1,270 people filed appeals of abuse findings in 2011. Of those, 109 were from a finding of “not confirmed.”
The remaining 75 percent to 80 percent were settled. The most common finding is that the abuse is confirmed, but not placed on the registry. Settlements often involve those accused taking part in recommended services to reduce the risk of future abuse.
Source http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20111216/NEWS/111216023/-1/SPORTS09/Improvements-suggested-Iowa-s-child-abuse-registry
A panel charged with making changes to Iowa’s controversial and confidential child abuse registry issued a series of suggested improvements Friday, some of which would require action by the Legislature next year.
In the short term, state officials are taking steps to expedite appeals of abuse findings, especially when people’s jobs are at stake.
“The timeframes and delays in getting hearings and decisions completed was a priority for me,” said Citizens Aide/Ombudsman Ruth Cooperrider, whose office receives several calls each year inquiring how to appeal or dispute abuse findings. “We have had cases that have languished for more than a year, and there are legal issues involved.”
One long-term recommendation from the mix of state officials and child-welfare professionals on the panel would give Iowa’s Department of Human Services more authority to remove people from the 10-year registry and seal abuse findings based on certain criteria.
Others ideas panel members thought should be explored: Allowing DHS to put only certain kinds of abuse on the registry, and varying the length of time names remain on the list based on the severity of the abuse.
Legislators and parents have complained for years that people whose names are placed on the registry have few due-process rights. It takes no conviction in court to end up on the registry - only a finding by DHS staff that it was "more likely than not" that the person neglected a child or, in a much smaller number of cases, abused a child.
The Legislature this year required the agency to work with other agencies and groups to address problems.
Currently, between 50,000 and 60,000 Iowans are on the registry, which is used to screen child-care workers and others who deal with children.
About 8,890 abuse reports were “founded” by social workers last year, meaning the individuals responsible were placed on the registry. Another 3,071 reported resulted in “confirmed” abuse, meaning there was evidence of abuse but not enough to place someone on the registry.
About 1,270 people filed appeals of abuse findings in 2011. Of those, 109 were from a finding of “not confirmed.”
The remaining 75 percent to 80 percent were settled. The most common finding is that the abuse is confirmed, but not placed on the registry. Settlements often involve those accused taking part in recommended services to reduce the risk of future abuse.
Source http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20111216/NEWS/111216023/-1/SPORTS09/Improvements-suggested-Iowa-s-child-abuse-registry
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