Openness, accountability, child protection

That was quite a catalog of horror stories Karen Westburg of the Maine Department of Human Services presented to legislators investigating the agency; horror stories summarized in this newspaper’s Dec. 27 editorial about DHS and the Legislature. There’s just one problem: It’s only one side of the story. The accounts, accepted as fact in the editorial, are simply a DHS summary of a DHS case record. That’s like deciding a criminal defendant is guilty based solely on a district attorney’s summary of the indictment.

In a criminal case, however, there is a public trial. Ultimately, the general public can hear all sides. When DHS takes away a child, the trial is secret. And in another editorial the Bangor Daily News declared it wants to keep it that way.

The newspaper’s position boils down to: DHS is generally doing the right thing, we know it because DHS says so and we don’t even want to see evidence to the contrary.

No agency, no matter how well-intentioned, can safely handle so much power and so little accountability. Even if they’re true, the case summaries the BDN relies on raise more questions than they answer. In one case, a premature infant is taken away “because the parents failed to follow through on needed medical care for the baby; the couple had lost three children to the state previously because of physical neglect.” But is that because the parents didn’t want to care for their children, or because they didn’t know how, or because they didn’t have the resources? The right way to handle the case depends on the answer to that question.

The cases cited by Westburg, in the form she presented them, do nothing to refute the contention by critics that DHS is needlessly taking away children who could safely have remained in their own homes had proper services been provided. But given that so much is, in fact, secret, it’s fair to ask how critics know that DHS is abusing its vast power. Here’s how:

. Maine has proportionately more children in foster care than all but four other states. And at least three of those other states have better records than Maine for placing foster children with relatives. When it comes to putting a relatively large percentage of its children in the hands of strangers, Maine has one of the worst records in the country.

. There is no evidence that Maine has more child abuse than most other states, or more of the conditions that lead to child abuse. The federal government’s National Household Survey on Drug Abuse found that the rate of alcohol abuse in Maine is below the national average. The rate of abuse of illegal drugs is about average. And former Maine DHS Commissioner Michael Petit told the Kennebec Journal that, in the words of the newspaper, “children in Maine generally experience fewer problems because the state has less crime, poverty and drug abuse.”

. There is no evidence that Maine’s high rate of placement has made children safer. And data from around the country show that placing huge numbers of children in foster care tends to backfire. Workers become overwhelmed with cases of needless removal, so they make more mistakes in both directions. Even as more children are taken needlessly from their homes, other children in real danger are missed. Massive removal of children actually makes children less safe.

. In contrast, communities that adopt safe, proven programs to keep more families together not only lower their placement rates, they also improve child safety. For example, in the mid-1990s, the child welfare system in Pittsburgh and surrounding Allegheny County, Pa. (a county with roughly the same total population as the state of Maine) was typically mediocre, or worse. Foster care placements were soaring and those in charge insisted every one of those placements was necessary.

New leadership changed all that. Since 1997, the foster care population has been cut by 20 percent. When children must be placed, half stay with relatives and siblings are kept together 82 percent of the time. They’ve done it by emphasizing family preservation, embracing innovative national models for child welfare reform and adding elements of their own, such as housing counselors in every child welfare office so families aren’t destroyed because of housing problems. And children are safer. Reabuse of children left in their own homes has declined. And since January 1997, there has been only one child abuse fatality in a family previously known to the agency.

There also is evidence from Maine officials themselves. In September, the Attorney General’s Office shared with legislators a detailed account of a hypothetical case they described as “typical.” In this typical case, the child was taken and, ultimately, parental rights were terminated. I sent the same information to the former head of the nation’s largest Intensive Family Preservation Services program. She now works for the nation’s foremost child welfare “think tank,” the Center for the Study of Social Policy. She produced a detailed analysis showing that not only was termination of parental rights probably unnecessary, the child probably never needed to be taken from the home at all. How many of those other cases cited by the BDN editorial also could have been resolved without removing the child, if only all the facts were known?

It’s almost certainly true that, as the editorial points out, “in virtually every case” at least one parent thinks the child should not have been taken away. But this, too, is almost certainly true: Some of those parents are right.

In many areas of social welfare, Maine is a national leader. It can be a leader in child welfare as well. But that will require a willingness to reconsider cherished notions about who is in the system and why, and a willingness to look at other places around the country that are succeeding where Maine is not. The states, it is said, are laboratories of democracy. Why won’t DHS read the lab results?

Richard Wexler is executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, based in Alexandria Va.