Let it be Christmas … again

One year ago I stood in the Hall of Flags at the State House and gave a speech to the governor that I called “Let It Be Christmas.” It was the end of the Walk for DHS Accountability and when I said “Let it be Christmas,” I was referring to the crowd of parents and grandparents who had walked with Rep. Edward Dugay and me from Ellsworth to Augusta. I was asking the governor to give them back their children, to stop the tyranny of the Department of Human Services.

Well, guess what. It is beginning to look a lot like Christmas.

The past year has brought many changes. The “merger” bill was passed and a new commissioner was named. Some suspected it would be business as usual, just with different names on the doors. We were wrong.

It turns out Gov. John Baldacci knew exactly what he was doing. The merger has allowed a complete restructuring with an emphasis on customer service and an end to the secrecy. I know because I was invited on the committees both for the planning of the merger as well as the implementation.

Just the fact that an outspoken critic like myself was invited demonstrated that they were not hiding any more.

And Jack Nicholas, Baldacci’s choice for commissioner, has turned out to be a man with a heart as well as having a head for numbers. He brought in experts from other states for the top positions at DHS, most notably Jim Beougher from Michigan. These experts were chosen for their experience with real child protective reform.

Real reform means keeping children safe with their own families.

They have plans to reduce the number of kids in state custody dramatically, to increase the number of families caring for their own by providing better support to relatives as an alternative to state custody, and to reduce the department’s reliance on parental capacity evaluations in favor of strength-based family assessments.

Those parental capacity evaluations are what I used to call the “kiss of death” parenting tests. Being sent for one of them meant the department had plans for your kids and they didn’t include you.

Baldacci, Nicholas and all the others involved in the merger and the reform want to establish a department that people can trust, because they are really there to help. This is huge. This would have kept Logan Marr with her mother, and alive.

Pleased as I am with the changes, I still have two small concerns and those are the past and the future.

I am afraid for the future because the pubic has very high expectations of these reforms. In other states they have been considered failures with even one child abuse tragedy. Unfortunately, there is no system that can eliminate all child abuse, just as there is no criminal justice system that can eliminate violent crime. With reform, the goal is for less child abuse at the hands of parents, but far less child abuse at the hands of the state.

The lesson I learned as a foster parent is that for most kids, the worst thing that ever happened to them was the removal itself, not the incident that led to it. There will be a lot less of that.

And when I say I am concerned for the past, I mean those parents and grandparents who marched in the snowstorm with us last year, the ones who were already caught up in a system that confused poverty with neglect and spankings with child abuse. Has anything happened in the last year to help them? Not so much, to be honest.

I know of three families already involved who have benefited from the reform efforts. I know of dozens, maybe a hundred more still hurting.

If these were widgets instead of children, it would be OK to say we would do better from now on. With children this is not OK. As difficult as it is to undo the past, I think we have to at least re-look at the past cases with the eyes of reformers, and find ways to give those children the safety they deserve, without sacrificing the unconditional love of their own families.

Now that would really be Christmas.

Mary Callahan, a resident of Lisbon, is a registered nurse, foster parent, author of “Memoirs of a Babystealer” and organizer of MADAR (Maine Alliance for DHS Accountability and Reform).