DSHS to pay $2.85M settlement in child starvation case | KING 5 TV | Seattle News, Local News, Breaking News, Weather | Investigators
SEATTLE – Washington state will pay $2.85 million to a boy who was nearly starved-to-death by his father. He's the second sibling to get millions from the state.
The settlement for Joey Abegg from the Department of Social and Health Services comes about 17 months after his younger brother, Shayne, received $5 million from the state in a near-death starvation case. It also comes three days before Joey's case was set to go to trial.
Their father, Danny Abegg, is suspected of starving them as a form of punishment.
Until age 3, Joey was a healthy boy. But when DSHS placed him in the home of his father, doctors' records show he began losing weight.
"As soon as DSHS placed Joey in the home of a known meth addict, his weight dropped off a cliff. In the first six months, he was down to the 50th weight percentile. Within 3 months after that, he was in the 25th weight percentile," said David P. Moody, Joey's attorney.
Moody says a neighbor called CPS four times over the next two years to report Joey and Shayne were starving, but she was never called back.
Joey's principal at Odyssey Elementary School in Mukilteo suspected Joey was a victim of neglect and abuse and called Child Protective Services with her concerns. Cheryl Boze says Joey was "unusually skinny" yet "ate voraciously" -anything he could get his hands on-at school. He was even caught fishing food out of the garbage.
Three days after that call, Joey’s dad yanked him out of school and moved him to another state. After that, no one from the DSHS checked on Joey again.
"Simply checked the box and said Joey's no longer in our jurisdiction, shrugged their shoulders and that was it," said Moody. "Out of sight, out of mind."
In November 2007, DSHS conducted an internal review of its role in Joey's case, concluding its caseworkers failed to take warnings seriously.
"DSHS takes in more than $9 billion in taxpayer money each year, and it's through lawsuits like this that we can hold DSHS accountable," said Moody.
Joey and Shayne have now been adopted together by a couple in Clarkston, Wash.
Danny Abegg and his girlfriend, Marilea Mitchell, are serving 8 year sentences for mistreatment in the case.
KING 5's Lori Matsukawa contributed to this report.
Isabella Brooke Knightly and Austin Gamez-Knightly
In Memory of my Loving Husband, William F. Knightly Jr. Murdered by ILLEGAL Palliative Care at a Nashua, NH Hospital
Saturday, January 8, 2011
Friday, January 7, 2011
Foster care fraught with private abuses, public excuses « How Child Protection Services Buys and Sells Our Children
Foster care fraught with private abuses, public excuses « How Child Protection Services Buys and Sells Our Children
The thing is this: Children are stolen every day by DFCS- they are stolen for profit. When they are abused in the system the paper makes a big deal of it. When they are stolen by DFCS from loving parents, the paper ignores they cries of the parents and refuses to even respond to phone calls, email, or letters. What is wrong with this picture? Parents have the same right to be heard when their children are stolen as those children who are already in the system being abused. DFCS/CPS is corrupt. They steal children for profit, place them in dangerous enviorments, make money off their backs (a direct violation of the 13th Amendment) and no one cares but the parents and their families – Family history is destroy, children lose the bonding of a natural family, lives are destroyed and the only winners are the foster care providers, the adoptive parents, Child Protective Services and The Courts. All of these people make a killng under Title IV Funding. When will the papers talk to the parenst whose children have been stolen? When will they return phone calls – and emails? When will the parents become newsworthy? The answer when they lose their child to murder in the system. Then they become important. I have sent this particular paper several emails never received a response of any kind regarding Samantha and her children. I have contacted the local news stations same thing. But let my grandchildren die in foster care and they will be all over it. Why? Because it sells papers.
*****************************
AJC investigation: Children needing homes get placed in harm’s way with few repercussionsShareThisPrint E-mail
By Alan Judd
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Georgia officials decided last year that a rules violation by a private foster care agency was so egregious it warranted one of the toughest possible penalties.
The agency, state records show, had inappropriately placed two children in the same foster home. One was a 17-year-old who had engaged in incest and other sexual activity. The other was 8, autistic and mute, with a history of being abused and an IQ of 16. The boys at first shared a bedroom; ultimately, they shared a bed.
The foster agency’s punishment: a $300 fine.
What happened at the Trek Program, a foster agency based in Fort Oglethorpe, and how the state responded illustrate the scope of problems in Georgia’s growing system of publicly funded but privately operated foster care, according to an investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The newspaper reviewed more than 1,500 reports of state inspections and investigations, which provide an astonishing narrative of stark conditions and inadequate oversight in small foster homes and large group facilities alike.
Fights. Sexual assaults. Consensual sex between young teens. Abuse by foster parents and group home employees. Escapes. Suicide attempts. All occur with regularity at many of Georgia’s 336 private foster care agencies, the Journal-Constitution’s examination found.
One agency, for example, repeatedly used anti-psychotic drugs to subdue misbehaving children. Another tried to rid residents of “demons” through forced exorcism.
Yet the state office that oversees foster care consistently excuses serious, repeated rules violations that jeopardize children’s health and safety.
Since 2008, officials have issued 1,107 citations to 300 of the 336 private agencies. Most cases involved multiple violations of foster care rules. But the state imposed fines or other penalties — what it calls “adverse actions” — in just 83, or 7 percent, of those citations. The median fine: $500.
Of the 336 private foster care agencies, 100 receive direct state funding; last year’s total exceeded $55 million. Even among those agencies, violations are common. In the past two years, the state has cited 91 of the 100 agencies — while continuing to pay them for housing foster children.
Like many other states, Georgia increasingly relies on private agencies — not-for-profit organizations, for the most part — to place children in foster homes or group homes and to oversee much of their care. Many of the children have been diagnosed with mental illnesses, behavioral disorders, or both. Some enter foster care through the state’s social services system to protect them from abusive or neglectful parents. Others come through juvenile courts after getting in trouble with the law.
About 4,000 children, roughly half those in state care, reside in privately owned facilities. A decade ago, private agencies cared for no more than 10 percent of Georgia’s foster children.
State oversight, however, has not kept pace with the growth in private care.
In Fulton and DeKalb counties, Georgia’s most populous, half the children in foster care did not receive the required two visits a month from state workers in 2009, court-appointed monitors said in a recent report. In addition, the monitors said, state officials inspected the operations of one-third as many private foster agencies last year as in 2008.
And while half the foster children in the two counties live in private facilities, the monitors told a judge, they account for three-fourths of substantiated maltreatment cases in foster homes. (The state recently countered that 37 percent of the maltreatment occurred outside foster homes.)
“These are just the cases that actually get identified, investigated and substantiated as abuse,” said Ira Lustbader, associate director of Children’s Rights Inc., a New York-based advocacy group involved in the federal lawsuit that led to the monitors’ appointment.
“If the state is going to utilize the private sector, they have to have mechanisms in place” to ensure children’s safety, Lustbader said. “In the end, it’s all about the quality of the state’s oversight.”
State officials, however, say regulating foster care agencies is a complicated undertaking, one that involves using both persuasion and the specter of serious penalties to combat substandard treatment.
“It is not the goal to put people out of business,” said Keith Bostick, director of the state Office of Residential Child Care. “We want to do as much as we can to try to keep kids safe. But it is a balancing act.”
Dena Smith, spokeswoman for the Department of Human Services, which oversees the regulatory office, added: “Many times there are agencies or providers that, with a soft nudge, they can get back into compliance.”
But many foster care providers complain that enforcement is too aggressive, too focused on administrative requirements that don’t directly affect how children are treated.
“The regulations are good regulations,” said Normer Adams, executive director of the Georgia Association of Homes and Services for Children, an industry lobbying group. “But sometimes the citations are really tedious. Most of the violations don’t threaten the health or safety of a child.”
Regardless, in most instances, the state merely tells private agencies to correct deficiencies. Sometimes it also threatens an “adverse action.” But many agencies continue to violate the rules, with little or no consequence.
Drugs and demons
One day last April, an employee of the Mercy’s Door group home near Dalton approached a resident with a plan for his redemption: exorcism.
The employee took the boy to an office, where four other staff members were waiting, the boy later told a state inspector. They sat the boy in a chair and encircled him, hands joined, saying they would “exorcise the demons out” of him, he told the inspector.
“In Jesus’ name,” the boy quoted a staff member as saying, “remove the demons.”
Employees at Mercy’s Door required residents to attend daily “devotionals,” where they claimed to “rebuke demons of depression” and spoke in tongues, according to a second boy, who witnessed part of the exorcism rite. When another resident, an atheist, left his room, the boy said, staff members prayed over his bed. The staff, according to one resident, believed that “everyone has demons inside of them.”
The boy targeted by the exorcism said two staff members rubbed olive oil on his forehead and spoke about “four angels and rings of fire” — an apparent reference to Revelation’s prophesy that 144,000 people will be “sealed” and spared in Earth’s inevitable destruction. The boy said he was told he had been “bought for a price and adopted by Jesus.”
At one point, two of the facility’s employees later said, the boy became distraught. “Why,” he asked, jumping out of his chair, “can’t you be Baptist?”
In a brief telephone interview, the facility’s director, Veronica Alcerro, declined to comment.
A state investigation confirmed the boy’s story about the exorcism — and found that an employee of the group home, which received $62,416 in state money last year, had lied to an inspector.
But while the state cited Mercy’s Door for rules violations, it assessed no penalty.
In May 2008, the state cited Morningstar Treatment Services, which operates the Youth Estate group home outside Brunswick, for repeatedly using anti-psychotic drugs to control residents who would “act up.” A similar citation had been issued the previous October.
Regulators described the shots as an improper form of chemical restraint, used “as a means of convenience” for the facility’s staff.
One resident, for instance, was drugged for “non-compliance,” according to an incident report prepared by Morningstar. The resident had argued over serving an in-school suspension, so a nurse gave the child Ativan, an anti-psychotic, and Benadryl, an over-the-counter antihistamine also used as a sedative. After “lying on the bench for a little while,” the incident report said, the child completed the suspension “without fighting it.”
The state ordered Morningstar to revise its medication policy, and the agency said it would.
Ten months later, however, state inspectors learned that Morningstar was still using medication to discipline or control residents.
A nurse sedated one child for “being out of area.” Another resident was given a blend of Benadryl, Ativan and Haldol, another anti-psychotic, for “agitation, destruction and self-abuse.” Yet another received Valium for “agitation and aggression”; when the child still didn’t calm down, a nurse gave him the powerful anti-psychotic drug Thorazine.
In those instances, as in others, inspectors noted, “there was no valid prescription for the medications given.”
Staff members told inspectors that without the shots, “they would not be able to handle some of the residents,” according to a state report.
The four dozen or so residents at Morningstar typically have IQs between 40 and 70 and emotional and behavioral disorders, said Barry Kerr, the agency’s chief executive.
Morningstar has been “very aggressive” in reducing the use of drugs to manage residents’ behavior, Kerr said. The medicines, he said, have been used only “when we did not have another alternative.”
After Morningstar’s second citation, the state gave the agency a stern warning: “Based on repeat rule violations and failure to comply with an accepted plan of correction, adverse action may be initiated.”
About a week later, the state did act against Morningstar.
It imposed a $450 fine.
‘Eyes on the situation’
At least once a year, Rachel Neal shows up unannounced at each of the 80 or so foster care facilities that comprise her portfolio as a state inspector.
She carries a lengthy list of rules that each must follow: a minimum number of training hours for employees, up-to-date inspections for vehicles that transport foster children, and on and on.
Most violations get a written citation and are corrected within weeks. But when she discovers dangerous situations, such as toxic materials left within the reach of children, Neal expects instant remedies.
“Usually, they’ll be like, ‘OK, Ms. Neal, that will be dealt with immediately,’ ” she said during a tour of The Bridge, a group home in northwest Atlanta. “We make sure before I leave that that hazard will be fixed.”
Even during standard inspections, Neal said, “a lot of times you may come across something else” that endangers children or otherwise violates state rules. She said she may deviate from the routine “if I hear something, or see something, or read something in a file.”
But Neal and other inspectors spend relatively little time at each foster care facility. State case workers — assigned to a different division of the Department of Human Services — are supposed to visit each child they oversee twice a month. But they may not always look for problems affecting children supervised by other case workers, said Melissa Carter, the state’s child advocate.
“They are our eyes on the situation,” Carter said. “If I’m a case manager and I’m responsible for little Susie, I just go in and take a look at little Susie. It could be that other children were seen and other problems could have been detected.”
‘Minimal information’
In early 2007, the state took custody of an autistic child who had been neglected and abused in his home. The boy was “greatly at risk” of more maltreatment, case workers wrote, and would have to be “safeguarded from abuse.”
The state then delegated the boy’s protection to a private agency: Trek, a nonprofit program operated by the Lookout Mountain Community Services Board in North Georgia. Trek, in turn, placed the child in a foster home with which it contracted.
In March 2009, the state asked Trek to handle another child with profound troubles: a 17-year-old with a long, repulsive sexual history. The agency chose the same home where it had put the autistic child.
No one, however, told the foster parents about the 17-year-old’s experiences with incest and pornography. Or about his “sexual inappropriateness” with a stepparent. Or about what a therapist described as his “distorted sexual beliefs”: that children aren’t hurt if adults molest them, for example, and it’s OK for an older child to initiate sex with a younger one.
Trek provided “very minimal information,” the foster parents would later tell a state inspector. When they asked to see the 17-year-old’s psychological evaluations, the foster parents said, a Trek case worker demurred, saying only that the child had “never sexually acted out in previous placements.”
The foster parents moved the 17-year-old into a bedroom with the 8-year-old autistic boy. About a month later, the night of April 7, a cry transmitted by a baby monitor awoke one of the foster parents. He went to the boys’ bedroom, where he found the 17-year-old in bed with the younger child. The older boy was masturbating and had one hand in the 8-year-old’s pants.
The state cited Trek for failing to “prepare the foster family for the placement … by anticipating adjustments and problems that may arise.” The previous month, the agency had received two similar citations. And a month later, the state assessed the $300 fine.
John Brewer, Trek’s program director, declined to comment on the case. But he said Trek tries to comply with state rules.
“They’ve always looked for specific things and make sure we follow through,” Brewer said. “We do get cited occasionally, and we try to correct those things.”
No one told
The state has cited numerous agencies that withheld critical information from foster parents.
For instance, state officials found that Benchmark Family Services of Jonesboro knew a child it placed in a foster home was supposed to receive therapy for sexual misbehavior. But no one, records show, told the foster family.
Soon, the child “inappropriately touched” another student at school, according to state reports. At the foster home, he groped another child.
The state cited the agency, but imposed no penalty.
A child placed in 2008 by another agency, Choices for Life of Georgia, based in Valdosta, had entered foster care after having sex with a cousin. He was not supposed to sleep, bathe, undress or be alone with younger children.
Again, no one told the foster family. Within weeks, the boy had molested at least one of the younger children in the home.
The state cited the agency, but imposed no penalty.
Foster parents need information about children in their care, said Beth Locker, policy director for Voices for Georgia’s Children, an Atlanta-based advocacy group.
“When that doesn’t happen,” Locker said, “it’s hard to know whether it’s a breakdown in communication, or a genuine concern about the privacy of a child’s family, or a concern about the cost of providing needed services.”
Sometimes, however, foster parents exacerbate harm already done to the children they supervise.
Choices for Life is one of several agencies cited for not preventing foster parents from using corporal punishment or other prohibited disciplinary methods. Last year, regulators said, the agency “failed to take appropriate corrective action” after learning a child had been spanked, and injured, by her foster parent. The child reported the spanking in December 2008, but Choices for Life left her in the foster home for 42 days.
The state imposed no penalty. It rarely does unless it finds a series of serious violations.
Inspectors documented numerous deficiencies in oversight by Bethany Christian Services of Atlanta, for instance. One of the agency’s foster parents left a child who uses a wheelchair home alone several times. Once, a social worker came by and found the wheelchair upstairs and the child on the basement floor, unable to get up and lying in his own waste.
Two other foster parents with Bethany forced a child to swallow a Benadryl tablet. The foster parents, the child said, called it a “sleep vitamin.”
From 20 investigations and four other inspections since May 2008, the state has cited Bethany Christian eight times for a total of 27 rules violations.
Just once, however, did the state impose a penalty: a $500 fine this January.
The thing is this: Children are stolen every day by DFCS- they are stolen for profit. When they are abused in the system the paper makes a big deal of it. When they are stolen by DFCS from loving parents, the paper ignores they cries of the parents and refuses to even respond to phone calls, email, or letters. What is wrong with this picture? Parents have the same right to be heard when their children are stolen as those children who are already in the system being abused. DFCS/CPS is corrupt. They steal children for profit, place them in dangerous enviorments, make money off their backs (a direct violation of the 13th Amendment) and no one cares but the parents and their families – Family history is destroy, children lose the bonding of a natural family, lives are destroyed and the only winners are the foster care providers, the adoptive parents, Child Protective Services and The Courts. All of these people make a killng under Title IV Funding. When will the papers talk to the parenst whose children have been stolen? When will they return phone calls – and emails? When will the parents become newsworthy? The answer when they lose their child to murder in the system. Then they become important. I have sent this particular paper several emails never received a response of any kind regarding Samantha and her children. I have contacted the local news stations same thing. But let my grandchildren die in foster care and they will be all over it. Why? Because it sells papers.
*****************************
AJC investigation: Children needing homes get placed in harm’s way with few repercussionsShareThisPrint E-mail
By Alan Judd
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Georgia officials decided last year that a rules violation by a private foster care agency was so egregious it warranted one of the toughest possible penalties.
The agency, state records show, had inappropriately placed two children in the same foster home. One was a 17-year-old who had engaged in incest and other sexual activity. The other was 8, autistic and mute, with a history of being abused and an IQ of 16. The boys at first shared a bedroom; ultimately, they shared a bed.
The foster agency’s punishment: a $300 fine.
What happened at the Trek Program, a foster agency based in Fort Oglethorpe, and how the state responded illustrate the scope of problems in Georgia’s growing system of publicly funded but privately operated foster care, according to an investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The newspaper reviewed more than 1,500 reports of state inspections and investigations, which provide an astonishing narrative of stark conditions and inadequate oversight in small foster homes and large group facilities alike.
Fights. Sexual assaults. Consensual sex between young teens. Abuse by foster parents and group home employees. Escapes. Suicide attempts. All occur with regularity at many of Georgia’s 336 private foster care agencies, the Journal-Constitution’s examination found.
One agency, for example, repeatedly used anti-psychotic drugs to subdue misbehaving children. Another tried to rid residents of “demons” through forced exorcism.
Yet the state office that oversees foster care consistently excuses serious, repeated rules violations that jeopardize children’s health and safety.
Since 2008, officials have issued 1,107 citations to 300 of the 336 private agencies. Most cases involved multiple violations of foster care rules. But the state imposed fines or other penalties — what it calls “adverse actions” — in just 83, or 7 percent, of those citations. The median fine: $500.
Of the 336 private foster care agencies, 100 receive direct state funding; last year’s total exceeded $55 million. Even among those agencies, violations are common. In the past two years, the state has cited 91 of the 100 agencies — while continuing to pay them for housing foster children.
Like many other states, Georgia increasingly relies on private agencies — not-for-profit organizations, for the most part — to place children in foster homes or group homes and to oversee much of their care. Many of the children have been diagnosed with mental illnesses, behavioral disorders, or both. Some enter foster care through the state’s social services system to protect them from abusive or neglectful parents. Others come through juvenile courts after getting in trouble with the law.
About 4,000 children, roughly half those in state care, reside in privately owned facilities. A decade ago, private agencies cared for no more than 10 percent of Georgia’s foster children.
State oversight, however, has not kept pace with the growth in private care.
In Fulton and DeKalb counties, Georgia’s most populous, half the children in foster care did not receive the required two visits a month from state workers in 2009, court-appointed monitors said in a recent report. In addition, the monitors said, state officials inspected the operations of one-third as many private foster agencies last year as in 2008.
And while half the foster children in the two counties live in private facilities, the monitors told a judge, they account for three-fourths of substantiated maltreatment cases in foster homes. (The state recently countered that 37 percent of the maltreatment occurred outside foster homes.)
“These are just the cases that actually get identified, investigated and substantiated as abuse,” said Ira Lustbader, associate director of Children’s Rights Inc., a New York-based advocacy group involved in the federal lawsuit that led to the monitors’ appointment.
“If the state is going to utilize the private sector, they have to have mechanisms in place” to ensure children’s safety, Lustbader said. “In the end, it’s all about the quality of the state’s oversight.”
State officials, however, say regulating foster care agencies is a complicated undertaking, one that involves using both persuasion and the specter of serious penalties to combat substandard treatment.
“It is not the goal to put people out of business,” said Keith Bostick, director of the state Office of Residential Child Care. “We want to do as much as we can to try to keep kids safe. But it is a balancing act.”
Dena Smith, spokeswoman for the Department of Human Services, which oversees the regulatory office, added: “Many times there are agencies or providers that, with a soft nudge, they can get back into compliance.”
But many foster care providers complain that enforcement is too aggressive, too focused on administrative requirements that don’t directly affect how children are treated.
“The regulations are good regulations,” said Normer Adams, executive director of the Georgia Association of Homes and Services for Children, an industry lobbying group. “But sometimes the citations are really tedious. Most of the violations don’t threaten the health or safety of a child.”
Regardless, in most instances, the state merely tells private agencies to correct deficiencies. Sometimes it also threatens an “adverse action.” But many agencies continue to violate the rules, with little or no consequence.
Drugs and demons
One day last April, an employee of the Mercy’s Door group home near Dalton approached a resident with a plan for his redemption: exorcism.
The employee took the boy to an office, where four other staff members were waiting, the boy later told a state inspector. They sat the boy in a chair and encircled him, hands joined, saying they would “exorcise the demons out” of him, he told the inspector.
“In Jesus’ name,” the boy quoted a staff member as saying, “remove the demons.”
Employees at Mercy’s Door required residents to attend daily “devotionals,” where they claimed to “rebuke demons of depression” and spoke in tongues, according to a second boy, who witnessed part of the exorcism rite. When another resident, an atheist, left his room, the boy said, staff members prayed over his bed. The staff, according to one resident, believed that “everyone has demons inside of them.”
The boy targeted by the exorcism said two staff members rubbed olive oil on his forehead and spoke about “four angels and rings of fire” — an apparent reference to Revelation’s prophesy that 144,000 people will be “sealed” and spared in Earth’s inevitable destruction. The boy said he was told he had been “bought for a price and adopted by Jesus.”
At one point, two of the facility’s employees later said, the boy became distraught. “Why,” he asked, jumping out of his chair, “can’t you be Baptist?”
In a brief telephone interview, the facility’s director, Veronica Alcerro, declined to comment.
A state investigation confirmed the boy’s story about the exorcism — and found that an employee of the group home, which received $62,416 in state money last year, had lied to an inspector.
But while the state cited Mercy’s Door for rules violations, it assessed no penalty.
In May 2008, the state cited Morningstar Treatment Services, which operates the Youth Estate group home outside Brunswick, for repeatedly using anti-psychotic drugs to control residents who would “act up.” A similar citation had been issued the previous October.
Regulators described the shots as an improper form of chemical restraint, used “as a means of convenience” for the facility’s staff.
One resident, for instance, was drugged for “non-compliance,” according to an incident report prepared by Morningstar. The resident had argued over serving an in-school suspension, so a nurse gave the child Ativan, an anti-psychotic, and Benadryl, an over-the-counter antihistamine also used as a sedative. After “lying on the bench for a little while,” the incident report said, the child completed the suspension “without fighting it.”
The state ordered Morningstar to revise its medication policy, and the agency said it would.
Ten months later, however, state inspectors learned that Morningstar was still using medication to discipline or control residents.
A nurse sedated one child for “being out of area.” Another resident was given a blend of Benadryl, Ativan and Haldol, another anti-psychotic, for “agitation, destruction and self-abuse.” Yet another received Valium for “agitation and aggression”; when the child still didn’t calm down, a nurse gave him the powerful anti-psychotic drug Thorazine.
In those instances, as in others, inspectors noted, “there was no valid prescription for the medications given.”
Staff members told inspectors that without the shots, “they would not be able to handle some of the residents,” according to a state report.
The four dozen or so residents at Morningstar typically have IQs between 40 and 70 and emotional and behavioral disorders, said Barry Kerr, the agency’s chief executive.
Morningstar has been “very aggressive” in reducing the use of drugs to manage residents’ behavior, Kerr said. The medicines, he said, have been used only “when we did not have another alternative.”
After Morningstar’s second citation, the state gave the agency a stern warning: “Based on repeat rule violations and failure to comply with an accepted plan of correction, adverse action may be initiated.”
About a week later, the state did act against Morningstar.
It imposed a $450 fine.
‘Eyes on the situation’
At least once a year, Rachel Neal shows up unannounced at each of the 80 or so foster care facilities that comprise her portfolio as a state inspector.
She carries a lengthy list of rules that each must follow: a minimum number of training hours for employees, up-to-date inspections for vehicles that transport foster children, and on and on.
Most violations get a written citation and are corrected within weeks. But when she discovers dangerous situations, such as toxic materials left within the reach of children, Neal expects instant remedies.
“Usually, they’ll be like, ‘OK, Ms. Neal, that will be dealt with immediately,’ ” she said during a tour of The Bridge, a group home in northwest Atlanta. “We make sure before I leave that that hazard will be fixed.”
Even during standard inspections, Neal said, “a lot of times you may come across something else” that endangers children or otherwise violates state rules. She said she may deviate from the routine “if I hear something, or see something, or read something in a file.”
But Neal and other inspectors spend relatively little time at each foster care facility. State case workers — assigned to a different division of the Department of Human Services — are supposed to visit each child they oversee twice a month. But they may not always look for problems affecting children supervised by other case workers, said Melissa Carter, the state’s child advocate.
“They are our eyes on the situation,” Carter said. “If I’m a case manager and I’m responsible for little Susie, I just go in and take a look at little Susie. It could be that other children were seen and other problems could have been detected.”
‘Minimal information’
In early 2007, the state took custody of an autistic child who had been neglected and abused in his home. The boy was “greatly at risk” of more maltreatment, case workers wrote, and would have to be “safeguarded from abuse.”
The state then delegated the boy’s protection to a private agency: Trek, a nonprofit program operated by the Lookout Mountain Community Services Board in North Georgia. Trek, in turn, placed the child in a foster home with which it contracted.
In March 2009, the state asked Trek to handle another child with profound troubles: a 17-year-old with a long, repulsive sexual history. The agency chose the same home where it had put the autistic child.
No one, however, told the foster parents about the 17-year-old’s experiences with incest and pornography. Or about his “sexual inappropriateness” with a stepparent. Or about what a therapist described as his “distorted sexual beliefs”: that children aren’t hurt if adults molest them, for example, and it’s OK for an older child to initiate sex with a younger one.
Trek provided “very minimal information,” the foster parents would later tell a state inspector. When they asked to see the 17-year-old’s psychological evaluations, the foster parents said, a Trek case worker demurred, saying only that the child had “never sexually acted out in previous placements.”
The foster parents moved the 17-year-old into a bedroom with the 8-year-old autistic boy. About a month later, the night of April 7, a cry transmitted by a baby monitor awoke one of the foster parents. He went to the boys’ bedroom, where he found the 17-year-old in bed with the younger child. The older boy was masturbating and had one hand in the 8-year-old’s pants.
The state cited Trek for failing to “prepare the foster family for the placement … by anticipating adjustments and problems that may arise.” The previous month, the agency had received two similar citations. And a month later, the state assessed the $300 fine.
John Brewer, Trek’s program director, declined to comment on the case. But he said Trek tries to comply with state rules.
“They’ve always looked for specific things and make sure we follow through,” Brewer said. “We do get cited occasionally, and we try to correct those things.”
No one told
The state has cited numerous agencies that withheld critical information from foster parents.
For instance, state officials found that Benchmark Family Services of Jonesboro knew a child it placed in a foster home was supposed to receive therapy for sexual misbehavior. But no one, records show, told the foster family.
Soon, the child “inappropriately touched” another student at school, according to state reports. At the foster home, he groped another child.
The state cited the agency, but imposed no penalty.
A child placed in 2008 by another agency, Choices for Life of Georgia, based in Valdosta, had entered foster care after having sex with a cousin. He was not supposed to sleep, bathe, undress or be alone with younger children.
Again, no one told the foster family. Within weeks, the boy had molested at least one of the younger children in the home.
The state cited the agency, but imposed no penalty.
Foster parents need information about children in their care, said Beth Locker, policy director for Voices for Georgia’s Children, an Atlanta-based advocacy group.
“When that doesn’t happen,” Locker said, “it’s hard to know whether it’s a breakdown in communication, or a genuine concern about the privacy of a child’s family, or a concern about the cost of providing needed services.”
Sometimes, however, foster parents exacerbate harm already done to the children they supervise.
Choices for Life is one of several agencies cited for not preventing foster parents from using corporal punishment or other prohibited disciplinary methods. Last year, regulators said, the agency “failed to take appropriate corrective action” after learning a child had been spanked, and injured, by her foster parent. The child reported the spanking in December 2008, but Choices for Life left her in the foster home for 42 days.
The state imposed no penalty. It rarely does unless it finds a series of serious violations.
Inspectors documented numerous deficiencies in oversight by Bethany Christian Services of Atlanta, for instance. One of the agency’s foster parents left a child who uses a wheelchair home alone several times. Once, a social worker came by and found the wheelchair upstairs and the child on the basement floor, unable to get up and lying in his own waste.
Two other foster parents with Bethany forced a child to swallow a Benadryl tablet. The foster parents, the child said, called it a “sleep vitamin.”
From 20 investigations and four other inspections since May 2008, the state has cited Bethany Christian eight times for a total of 27 rules violations.
Just once, however, did the state impose a penalty: a $500 fine this January.
NCCPR Child Welfare Blog: Foster care in DC: The perils of paying foster parents too much
NCCPR Child Welfare Blog: Foster care in DC: The perils of paying foster parents too much
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 5, 2011
Foster care in DC: The perils of paying foster parents too much
As the new year begins, let us pause to consider the plight of a former foster parent in Washington, who wrote a searing account of what it was like to scrape by on nothing more than a six-figure income, her husband’s salary and about $45,000 per year – tax free – in payments for taking in four foster children.
The first thing I want you to know is, I did not write the comment I reprint below from the website of The Washington Post. I did not make up some fictitious foster parent in an effort to make foster parents look bad. As far as I know the post is genuine and the person who wrote it is real.
I reprint her comment below because it’s hard to imagine anything that better illustrates the perils of paying foster parents too much, as Washington D.C. does, or giving foster parents in much of the rest of the country giant pay raises, as is proposed by the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children’s Rights (CR). I certainly don't believe that this foster parent is typical. But this is the kind of foster parent you are more likely to attract when you pay them the way CR proposes to do.
First, a little background: The effort to close a budget gap in D.C. wound up pitting programs to help children stay out of foster care against programs to help children already in foster care.
In particular, Roque Gerald, who runs the D.C. Child and Family Services Agency, tried to slash a program to help grandparents keep their children out of foster care. He argued that since the children were not, in fact, in the system and the grandparents had not been accused of child abuse, this wasn’t really a child abuse prevention program.
Yes, that really was his reasoning. As I pointed out in an op ed column for the Post:
If torturing logic were a war crime, that statement would get Gerald hauled before an international tribunal.
Every prevention program serves children who have not been maltreated. Maltreatment is what the prevention programs are created to prevent. That’s why they’re called prevention programs. Gerald’s logic is like saying a rent subsidy program doesn’t prevent homelessness because all of the people getting the subsidies are living in apartments.
The DC Council restored some of the cut – but at the expense of deeper cuts in help for children already in foster care.
Neither cut was necessary. According to an independent monitor of a longstanding consent decree, CFSA warehouses far too many children in group homes and institutions, both the worst form of care and the most expensive.
And DC throws amazing amounts of money at foster parents, paying them at, by far, the highest rate in the country. In fact, the rate is so high even CR couldn’t claim that DC foster parents weren’t getting enough.
Keep in mind, CR wants foster parents paid not only for the basics but also for every toy, game, movie ticket and amusement park ride they buy for a foster child. CR admits that the $940 per month – tax free - it estimates DC pays for a teenage foster child is enough to cover all of this and more.
But it wasn’t enough for “Bodymagicbykim.” That’s the name a former DC foster parent used in a comment on the Post website under my op ed column. Below you’ll find her comment, followed by my own response.
As you read Ms. Bodymagic’s comment I would ask you to ponder just one question: If something happened to you and your child had to be placed in foster care, would you want that child placed with this foster parent?
THE COMMENT FROM “BODYMAGICBYKIM”:
For those who commented on DC foster/kinship care parents receiving too much for the monthly costs of these children. I wholeheartedly disagree. I myself was a foster parent of four teenage female siblings. That was not enough money.
Please consider all of the projects these children are required to complete daily that require costly materials (i.e. assigned novels for book reports, magazines for collages, science projects, models of cells, one was even required to model a futuristic community). Please consider the number of leave requests the parents have to put in to get these children to doctor appointments, court hearings, CFSA family meetings, therapy, dentist appointments and include gas, car-maintenance and parking costs- the list goes on along with the hourly cost of leave at an over 6-figure salary.
These children also needed clothing, shoes, coats (replacements for the aforementioned), hair appointments (minimum $40 per head, per bi-weekly appointment - can range up to $180 per appointment for braids), bedding, linens, necessities (sanitary napkins cost us loads of money), etc.
Now, the food? If you have children, you are clear they're always feeding friends. Try feeding four teenagers and one friend each daily - that's about $1,200 per month right there. In raising productive citizens, you want to teach them how to budget and save - factor in allowance. Also, because these children had drivers' licenses, factor in the increased cost of auto insurance on TEENAGERS.
This doesn't take into account high increases to utilities, property damage, birthdays, Christmas, graduations, back-to-school shopping, gifts for their friends' birthdays, prom, summer camps at $150 minimum per week for the two too young to work, transportation and work-clothing costs for the two that could work, tutors, computer and related equipment, SAT prep class & test costs, drivers' education class, college applications, college visits, extracurricular activity costs and supplies, vacations (or should I have left them at home while I traveled the world?? That would certainly be fair).
I could go on for days. The point of the matter is that I (thankfully) wasn't in it for the money, but I can assure you that I invested quite a bit out of my own pocket. The monthly cost was not enough, honestly, if I didn't have a good salary of my own and factor in that of my husband's.
If I were a poor/middle-class fixed-income grandmother, we wouldn't have survived. So, PLEASE before you make some farfetched statements like you have that effect our livelihoods, do your research by talking to the masses who have lived it. Leave the textbook, projections, forecasts based upon bad data alone. A PhD means little if you haven't lived it! Speak to those with their MRS or MOM first - those are the letters that count most when talking about our children. I'm offended, but willing to share more.
MY RESPONSE:
OK, so let me get this straight Ms. bodymagic. You make a six-figure income, you “travel the world” on vacation, and you’re whining because the taxpayers of Washington D.C. supposedly did not pay you enough to cover the cost of your own foster children’s Christmas gifts and school assignments? You demand this money even if it means cutting help to impoverished grandparents raising their own grandchildren?
At least I hope you never also ran around claiming that you treated your foster children “like my own.” And I hope the young people never found out that the thought of doing for them what any loving parent with a six-figure income does for her own children caused so much resentment on your part.
The good news for you, Ms. bodymagic, is that the group that calls itself Children’s Rights completely agrees with you. They think you shouldn’t be expected to do any of this out of caring or, God forbid, love, but rather you should be reimbursed for every penny. The bad news is that they’ve calculated that DC already pays you more than enough for this – even for teenagers, for whom foster parents are paid even more than for younger children.
It’s just that you wanted even more.
And lest anyone think that all foster parents are like Ms. bodymagic, take a look at this op ed, from the kind of foster parent I think we’d all rather see in the system, someone who has indeed “lived it” and who got her MOM degree by majoring in compassion.
__________________
There’s much more at the Post website, including my exchange with Richard Barth, the Dean of the School of Social Work at the University of Maryland who was an advisor for CR’s foster parent pay report.
Posted by NATIONAL COALITION FOR CHILD PROTECTION REFORM
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 5, 2011
Foster care in DC: The perils of paying foster parents too much
As the new year begins, let us pause to consider the plight of a former foster parent in Washington, who wrote a searing account of what it was like to scrape by on nothing more than a six-figure income, her husband’s salary and about $45,000 per year – tax free – in payments for taking in four foster children.
The first thing I want you to know is, I did not write the comment I reprint below from the website of The Washington Post. I did not make up some fictitious foster parent in an effort to make foster parents look bad. As far as I know the post is genuine and the person who wrote it is real.
I reprint her comment below because it’s hard to imagine anything that better illustrates the perils of paying foster parents too much, as Washington D.C. does, or giving foster parents in much of the rest of the country giant pay raises, as is proposed by the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children’s Rights (CR). I certainly don't believe that this foster parent is typical. But this is the kind of foster parent you are more likely to attract when you pay them the way CR proposes to do.
First, a little background: The effort to close a budget gap in D.C. wound up pitting programs to help children stay out of foster care against programs to help children already in foster care.
In particular, Roque Gerald, who runs the D.C. Child and Family Services Agency, tried to slash a program to help grandparents keep their children out of foster care. He argued that since the children were not, in fact, in the system and the grandparents had not been accused of child abuse, this wasn’t really a child abuse prevention program.
Yes, that really was his reasoning. As I pointed out in an op ed column for the Post:
If torturing logic were a war crime, that statement would get Gerald hauled before an international tribunal.
Every prevention program serves children who have not been maltreated. Maltreatment is what the prevention programs are created to prevent. That’s why they’re called prevention programs. Gerald’s logic is like saying a rent subsidy program doesn’t prevent homelessness because all of the people getting the subsidies are living in apartments.
The DC Council restored some of the cut – but at the expense of deeper cuts in help for children already in foster care.
Neither cut was necessary. According to an independent monitor of a longstanding consent decree, CFSA warehouses far too many children in group homes and institutions, both the worst form of care and the most expensive.
And DC throws amazing amounts of money at foster parents, paying them at, by far, the highest rate in the country. In fact, the rate is so high even CR couldn’t claim that DC foster parents weren’t getting enough.
Keep in mind, CR wants foster parents paid not only for the basics but also for every toy, game, movie ticket and amusement park ride they buy for a foster child. CR admits that the $940 per month – tax free - it estimates DC pays for a teenage foster child is enough to cover all of this and more.
But it wasn’t enough for “Bodymagicbykim.” That’s the name a former DC foster parent used in a comment on the Post website under my op ed column. Below you’ll find her comment, followed by my own response.
As you read Ms. Bodymagic’s comment I would ask you to ponder just one question: If something happened to you and your child had to be placed in foster care, would you want that child placed with this foster parent?
THE COMMENT FROM “BODYMAGICBYKIM”:
For those who commented on DC foster/kinship care parents receiving too much for the monthly costs of these children. I wholeheartedly disagree. I myself was a foster parent of four teenage female siblings. That was not enough money.
Please consider all of the projects these children are required to complete daily that require costly materials (i.e. assigned novels for book reports, magazines for collages, science projects, models of cells, one was even required to model a futuristic community). Please consider the number of leave requests the parents have to put in to get these children to doctor appointments, court hearings, CFSA family meetings, therapy, dentist appointments and include gas, car-maintenance and parking costs- the list goes on along with the hourly cost of leave at an over 6-figure salary.
These children also needed clothing, shoes, coats (replacements for the aforementioned), hair appointments (minimum $40 per head, per bi-weekly appointment - can range up to $180 per appointment for braids), bedding, linens, necessities (sanitary napkins cost us loads of money), etc.
Now, the food? If you have children, you are clear they're always feeding friends. Try feeding four teenagers and one friend each daily - that's about $1,200 per month right there. In raising productive citizens, you want to teach them how to budget and save - factor in allowance. Also, because these children had drivers' licenses, factor in the increased cost of auto insurance on TEENAGERS.
This doesn't take into account high increases to utilities, property damage, birthdays, Christmas, graduations, back-to-school shopping, gifts for their friends' birthdays, prom, summer camps at $150 minimum per week for the two too young to work, transportation and work-clothing costs for the two that could work, tutors, computer and related equipment, SAT prep class & test costs, drivers' education class, college applications, college visits, extracurricular activity costs and supplies, vacations (or should I have left them at home while I traveled the world?? That would certainly be fair).
I could go on for days. The point of the matter is that I (thankfully) wasn't in it for the money, but I can assure you that I invested quite a bit out of my own pocket. The monthly cost was not enough, honestly, if I didn't have a good salary of my own and factor in that of my husband's.
If I were a poor/middle-class fixed-income grandmother, we wouldn't have survived. So, PLEASE before you make some farfetched statements like you have that effect our livelihoods, do your research by talking to the masses who have lived it. Leave the textbook, projections, forecasts based upon bad data alone. A PhD means little if you haven't lived it! Speak to those with their MRS or MOM first - those are the letters that count most when talking about our children. I'm offended, but willing to share more.
MY RESPONSE:
OK, so let me get this straight Ms. bodymagic. You make a six-figure income, you “travel the world” on vacation, and you’re whining because the taxpayers of Washington D.C. supposedly did not pay you enough to cover the cost of your own foster children’s Christmas gifts and school assignments? You demand this money even if it means cutting help to impoverished grandparents raising their own grandchildren?
At least I hope you never also ran around claiming that you treated your foster children “like my own.” And I hope the young people never found out that the thought of doing for them what any loving parent with a six-figure income does for her own children caused so much resentment on your part.
The good news for you, Ms. bodymagic, is that the group that calls itself Children’s Rights completely agrees with you. They think you shouldn’t be expected to do any of this out of caring or, God forbid, love, but rather you should be reimbursed for every penny. The bad news is that they’ve calculated that DC already pays you more than enough for this – even for teenagers, for whom foster parents are paid even more than for younger children.
It’s just that you wanted even more.
And lest anyone think that all foster parents are like Ms. bodymagic, take a look at this op ed, from the kind of foster parent I think we’d all rather see in the system, someone who has indeed “lived it” and who got her MOM degree by majoring in compassion.
__________________
There’s much more at the Post website, including my exchange with Richard Barth, the Dean of the School of Social Work at the University of Maryland who was an advisor for CR’s foster parent pay report.
Posted by NATIONAL COALITION FOR CHILD PROTECTION REFORM
Video: The Watch List: The medication of foster children | Need to Know
Video: The Watch List: The medication of foster children | Need to Know
The Watch List: The medication of foster children
January 7, 2011
Nearly one in every 10 American children is diagnosed with a mental health disorder. Often the treatment prescribed is medication, and often the medication is heavy-duty — so-called antipsychotic drugs.
In this report, you’ll see that foster care children are prescribed drugs at a rate much greater than that of other kids. Concern over their well-being — not to mention the amount it costs to treat them — has prompted the Government Accountability Office to investigate potentially abusive prescribing practices in America’s state foster care systems. The GAO findings are expected to come out later this year.
Need to Know correspondent Shoshana Guy went to Texas to investigate overuse of psychotropic drugs in foster children, as well as that state’s efforts at reform.
The Watch List: The medication of foster children
January 7, 2011
Nearly one in every 10 American children is diagnosed with a mental health disorder. Often the treatment prescribed is medication, and often the medication is heavy-duty — so-called antipsychotic drugs.
In this report, you’ll see that foster care children are prescribed drugs at a rate much greater than that of other kids. Concern over their well-being — not to mention the amount it costs to treat them — has prompted the Government Accountability Office to investigate potentially abusive prescribing practices in America’s state foster care systems. The GAO findings are expected to come out later this year.
Need to Know correspondent Shoshana Guy went to Texas to investigate overuse of psychotropic drugs in foster children, as well as that state’s efforts at reform.
Watch the full episode. See more Need To Know.
AFRA Front Page News-Wexler- Two notable works of journalism
AFRA Front Page News
Wexler- Two notable works of journalism
Richard Wexler
Friday, January 7, 2011
Two notable works of journalism
…one to read, one to see.
The cover story in the current issue of the D.C. alternative weekly CityPaper gives hope that the reports of the death of great investigative journalism have been at least slightly exaggerated. The story is all about the ugly, expensive, soul-destroying world of “residential treatment.”
And tonight, the PBS series Need to Know airs a segment on the misuse and overuse of psychiatric medications on foster children. Since PBS fiefdoms – I mean stations – consider it a violation of their God-given rights to cooperate and air programs at the same time more than a few days a week, you’ll have to check your local listings for the time. But it’s on at 8:30pm in New York and 10:30pm in D.C.
Wexler- Two notable works of journalism
Richard Wexler
Friday, January 7, 2011
Two notable works of journalism
…one to read, one to see.
The cover story in the current issue of the D.C. alternative weekly CityPaper gives hope that the reports of the death of great investigative journalism have been at least slightly exaggerated. The story is all about the ugly, expensive, soul-destroying world of “residential treatment.”
And tonight, the PBS series Need to Know airs a segment on the misuse and overuse of psychiatric medications on foster children. Since PBS fiefdoms – I mean stations – consider it a violation of their God-given rights to cooperate and air programs at the same time more than a few days a week, you’ll have to check your local listings for the time. But it’s on at 8:30pm in New York and 10:30pm in D.C.
The Truth Bites "NH": Initial Appeal/Void/Jury Demand Civil Suit & Amendment as needed for Interested Parties
The Truth Bites "NH": Initial Appeal/Void/Jury Demand Civil Suit & Amendment as needed for Interested Parties
More Information for those who wish to attach to Civil Suit 226-2010-CV-00612 Department of NH DHHS/DCYF and others. Links to orginal documents below.
New Hampshire Superior Court Rule 15. Intervention:
Any person shown to be interested may become a party to any civil action upon filing and service of an Appearance and pleading briefly setting forth his relation to the cause; or, upon motion of any party, such person may be made a party by order of court notifying him to appear therein. If a party so notified neglects to file an Appearance and Answer on or before the date established by the court, that party shall be defaulted. No such default shall be set aside, except by agreement or by order of the court upon such terms as justice may require.
Superior court rule 139
With the above stated that would mean all civil suits must be public prior to the date established by the court or it would be a denial of due process to interested persons.
The date established and expedited by the court is: 1/20/10 with a hearing at 9:00 am at Nashua Superior Court, 30 Spring Street, Nashua, NH 03060.
Below are the full links to each document or simply click on the Title for intital document the amendment is the 2nd doc.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Yih90JZEN02RLLaGMOzIhgITlVMhNhBuVOC7-NeVKQ0/edit?hl=en&authkey=CP7NmuwO
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SjsDTF6HIx_gRTisrjepzHtMmsc732N9WoHmgjnHiIg/edit?hl=en&authkey=CKX7wooD
More Information for those who wish to attach to Civil Suit 226-2010-CV-00612 Department of NH DHHS/DCYF and others. Links to orginal documents below.
New Hampshire Superior Court Rule 15. Intervention:
Any person shown to be interested may become a party to any civil action upon filing and service of an Appearance and pleading briefly setting forth his relation to the cause; or, upon motion of any party, such person may be made a party by order of court notifying him to appear therein. If a party so notified neglects to file an Appearance and Answer on or before the date established by the court, that party shall be defaulted. No such default shall be set aside, except by agreement or by order of the court upon such terms as justice may require.
Superior court rule 139
With the above stated that would mean all civil suits must be public prior to the date established by the court or it would be a denial of due process to interested persons.
The date established and expedited by the court is: 1/20/10 with a hearing at 9:00 am at Nashua Superior Court, 30 Spring Street, Nashua, NH 03060.
Below are the full links to each document or simply click on the Title for intital document the amendment is the 2nd doc.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Yih90JZEN02RLLaGMOzIhgITlVMhNhBuVOC7-NeVKQ0/edit?hl=en&authkey=CP7NmuwO
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SjsDTF6HIx_gRTisrjepzHtMmsc732N9WoHmgjnHiIg/edit?hl=en&authkey=CKX7wooD
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)