Advocacy group urges R.I. to reduce institutional custody in child-welfare system

Advocacy group urges R.I. to reduce institutional custody in child-welfare system

Wexler said that Rhode Island should look to Maine as a model for how a state can transform its child-welfare system to keep more children in their homes and improve home-based services. NH should take lesson's from Maine also. They're no better than Rhode Island. Services are NOT given to at-risk families. Every child is supposedly in imminent danger and kidnapped from their homes immediately. I believe NH is worse than Rhode Island. They both need to get their act together. Traumatizing our next generation is NOT the answer! unhappygrammy


01:00 AM EDT on Wednesday, July 21, 2010
By Lynn Arditi

Journal Staff Writer
PROVIDENCE — Rhode Island must dramatically reduce its reliance on group homes and other institutional care for children and improve its home-based services to prevent traumatizing children by removing them from their homes, the leader of a national advocacy group said at a State House news conference Tuesday.

Removing children from their homes is an “extremely toxic intervention that needs to be used sparingly and in small doses,” the group’s executive director, Richard Wexler, said. “Rhode Island has been using it in mega-doses.”

Rhode Island removes children from their homes at a rate nearly 80 percent above the national average and places a higher share of its children in state care — nearly 40 percent — in group homes and residential-care facilities, according to a report released Tuesday by the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform. The national average was 16.7 percent in 2006, according to the latest available data.

State welfare officials responded that the Department of Children, Youth and Families has “undertaken major system changes” to reduce the number of children removed from their homes and placed in residential facilities. The DCYF is “helping them address their needs in their own homes and community, keeping children with parents whenever possible,” the agency’s deputy director, Jorge Garcia, said in an e-mail Tuesday evening that summarized remarks from DCYF Director Patricia Martinez.

Though agency officials did not contradict the report’s data, the DCYF deputy director said that the numbers show that the state welfare agency is heading in the right direction. The DCYF has reduced the population of juveniles in group homes, residential facilities and independent-living arrangements in fiscal 2010 to 743, down from 1,012 in fiscal 2007. (The numbers do not include children in foster homes.) Out-of-state placements, he said, have fallen to 65, compared with 178 in fiscal 2006.

In the report, “State of Denial: Why Rhode Island’s child welfare system is so dismal and how to make it better,” Wexler compares Rhode Island with other states and national averages which offer a dimmer view of the system and provides recommendations for reforms.

Wexler, a former news reporter and author of “Wounded Innocents: The Real Victims of the War Against Child Abuse,” helped found the Alexandria, Va.-based advocacy group. He has been widely quoted about child-welfare policy by national media outlets, including The New York Times and PBS “Frontline.”

Wexler said that Rhode Island should look to Maine as a model for how a state can transform its child-welfare system to keep more children in their homes and improve home-based services. Wexler was joined by Mary Callahan, of Maine, who became a foster parent after her own children went off to college. She helped lead a drive over the last 10 years to reform Maine’s child-welfare system.

Callahan said that one of the surprising things she learned being a foster parent was that many of the children were removed from their homes unnecessarily. Her first foster child had been removed from her home “over a spanking,” she said. She was then sent to live with a foster mother who “molested, starved and emotionally abused” her.

Poverty is the main reason, Callahan said, why her foster children had been removed from their homes and placed in her care. And most birth parents are so “terrified of retaliation” from child-welfare officials that they don’t speak out, she said.

Wexler said he decided to focus on Rhode Island because the state is likely heading toward a negotiated settlement of a class-action civil rights lawsuit filed in 2007 by the New York-based nonprofit Children’s Rights and Rhode Island Child Advocate Jametta O. Alston. Although Wexler has criticized the Children’s Rights group for its approach, the possibility of a negotiated settlement, he said, would provide an opportunity for the state to tackle some longstanding problems.

The NCCPR’s recommendations for improving Rhode Island’s system include:

•Reduce the overall rate of institutionalization of children to no more than the national average within three years; in six years, reduce it to 10 percent of all the children in state care by building a comprehensive system of home-based services.

•Change the financial incentives for residential programs to discourage providers from keeping children in programs to fill beds and maintain per diem payments.

•Move children placed in out-of-state residential programs back to Rhode Island so that they can be more closely monitored.

•Seek assistance from groups such as the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Child Welfare Strategy Group, which has helped reform systems in other states.

larditi@projo.com


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