Our foster-care system fails kids and the city

Daniel Leddy on Law > Dan Leddy
Our foster-care system fails kids and the city
Published: Tuesday, July 27, 2010, 6:10 AM
Daniel Leddy

Cover your backside! It’s standard operating procedure for Family Court judges who want to stay in the good graces of the powers that be, the institutional honchos and other bigwigs who flex their muscles at reappointment time to make or break judicial careers.

It’s also an unconscionable betrayal of the public trust, particularly for defenseless children who bear the brunt of judicial cowardice.


In last Monday’s Advance, reporter and columnist Jeff Harrell commented on the tragic case of Patrick Alford, the 8-year-old West Brighton boy who disappeared from a Brooklyn foster home on Jan. 22.

The placement followed the arrest of his mother on a shoplifting charge, and the ensuing conclusion by the Administration for Children’s Services that she had neglected the youngster. Poignant and hard-hitting, Harrell’s piece asserted that “most adults who work off the public for the so-called good of the child could screw up a glass of water.”

Cumulatively, I served more than three years as the sole judge of the Foster Care Review Term, a citywide forum charged with reviewing the status of children voluntarily placed in foster care. Calendars typically averaged over 100 cases a day. During the remainder of my judicial career, I presided over countless child abuse and neglect cases, many of which resulted in judicially ordered foster care placements.

Not being privy to the Family Court proceedings involving Patrick, I cannot comment on the appropriateness of his foster-care placement. I do, however, second Jeff Harrell’s blunt assessment of the system.

My first day in Foster Care Review brought me face to face with what accommodating judges had allowed agencies to get away with. In the very first case, the caseworker told me why she wanted the child, an 8-year-old boy, to remain in foster care.

When I asked if the youngster was in court, she replied that agencies didn’t bring children to review proceedings. Her oral report, sans the case file, was all that any other judge had ever required, she insisted.

Thus I began the arduous task of putting an end to that imbedded nonsense. An 8-year-old child was perfectly capable of telling me how things were really going in his foster home, I told her, and I wanted to hear from him. And when she returned with the child, I also wanted to see her file — all of it. I handled case after case that day the same way.
ABSENT CASEWORKERS



When there were over 40 court files left and no more caseworkers, I encountered shocking reality number two: Caseworkers only showed up in court when they felt like it. So I started keeping a diary, noting the agencies that failed to appear and the docket numbers of the kids they had left hanging.

And I warned the agencies that failure to appear without a very good excuse would henceforth be dealt with as contempt of court. Slowly, the word got out that I meant business.

A month or so later, I ran into an acquaintance who told me that her sister, an agency caseworker, had appeared in my court.

“She doesn’t think very much of you” he said.

“That’s fine,” I replied. “But she’s going to do things my way.”

There are specific time frames in which children must be brought to court for foster-care proceedings. Do you know how many cases were actually brought on time? Virtually none. Do you know how many were late by several months? Most.

One Staten Island kid was in foster care for an incredible seven years and had never had his case reviewed by a judge, a truly shocking violation of law.

Ultimately, however, judges were the real culprits for having allowed the court to be reduced to the status of a rubber stamp for whatever the agencies wanted. Abdicating their judicial responsibility to children, they worried more about offending agencies, including the city’s child protective service, the umbrella agency. That, of course, is the mayor’s agency, the same mayor who makes Family Court appointments and reappointments.

Family Court judges cover their backsides other ways too. Juvenile delinquency proceedings? Convict the kid. Neglect or abuse cases? Put the child in foster care.

If he’s harmed there, the city is a convenient scapegoat. Agencies’ disregard for judicial orders? Let them slide. Children languishing in foster care pose no threat; lawyers representing these agencies, including the mayor’s own attorneys, can sabotage a judge’s reappointment.

Sure there were some phenomenally good caseworkers. The only problem was that they get so burned out by the malaise around them that they rarely lasted very long. And there were some courageous Family Court judges too, exemplary jurists who never forgot that every foster care file represented a young life in crisis. Those were the judges with bulls eyes on their backs.

So, could many, if not most adults who work off the public for the so-called good of the child really screw up a glass of water? Yeah, that’s about right. Ironically, that’s also how they keep their jobs.

[Daniel Leddy’s column appears each Tuesday on the Advance Editorial Page.
His e-mail address is JudgeLeddy@si.rr.com.]

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